Reading 28 July

Although I have been reading a fair amount, I have also been busy and so not really keeping up with making any sort of record of the books I'm reading. The last book I mentioned is Michael Crummey's Sweetland. Moses is left alone on the island, apart from Loveless's wee dog, who takes a while to make friends with Moses. It is finally revealed how Moses got the scar on his face - it is mentioned a few times in passing, but as with many things, full disclosure is deferred. The same happens with Effie, and the story of why they never married - same cause as the scar, as it happens. Moses makes it through winter with stored supplies, but with no way off the island, it is made pretty clear another winter is in his future. He also goes mad, after a fashion - unable to differentiate between hallucination and reality: as a reader, we get caught up in his hallucinations as well. And yet, it seems there is something revelatory about some of them - particularly his encounter with the Priddle brothers. My only regret about this book is that my reading of it was interrupted: I think total immersion in it would have given me an experience a bit closer to Moses's own immersion in his isolation, his memories and his descent away from sanity.

The book I most recently finished is No Chopsticks Required (Katrina Beikoff) - an odd title in that the lack of need of chopsticks is never mentioned and I suspect they were used more than once. She and her husband work in newspapers on the Gold Coast until they decide to move (along with two very young children) to Shanghai to take up, in effect, sub-editor roles on the English language newspaper there. Ostensibly, they are to take articles written by local journalists and wrangle them into making sense for an English-reading audience. They soon learn that very little actual journalism is done and that there is a lot of political control of what goes in as well as how it is presented.

It is a pretty important year to be there: the poisoned milk, the Sechuan earthquake and the Beijing Olympics all happen. There are some quite journalistic chapters on these (as well as Chinese education) - when it came to the Olympics, the author thought it would be good to publish an article praising a Chinese sports-person and basically talking China up. The powers that be took against this, China was not to big-note, and she was pulled from any Olympic story. The earthquake story was different - the populace took to social media and it forced a new kind of honesty from the mainstream media.

A lot of the chapters were just about the expat experience - landing in a completely different country, learning how to cross the road, find food, parks etc - just as hard as getting somewhere to live and the major change to living arising from having someone in to look after the kids. These chapters were entertaining and at times very funny. One of the funniest chapters involved her husband getting a doctor - he has some sort of recurring stomach bug, and his GP arranges a couple of specialists to look at him, specialists who have nothing to do with stomach bugs. One wants to run an ECG test, but despite the best efforts of about 6 nurses, they cannot clear enough hair from his chest to attach the electrodes. Eventually, the specialist just checks his pulse and says he's fine. The husband has an equally productive encounter with a Traditional Chinese Medicine hospital.

    

C by Tom McCarthy (Part Two)

Last week, I wrote of the first part of Tom McCarthy's novel, C. Now its time to comment on the last three parts. Part 2, Chute, reads as a much more straight-forward, authentic account of a young man at war. It starts with Serge sitting am aeronautics exam - readers are located right in the exam room with him, as he writes his answers. The exam is possibly an academic irrelevance, as his father's mate and his own god-father, Widsun, is high up in the military: there's a mention later on that he is recorded in the paperwork as Serge's protector. He pulls strings and Serge is in the air-force, training in a rumpety-sounding pain (a little joke - the plane noise is rumpiteerumpitee...), but he's in his element, as an observer - taking photos, shooting his Lewis gun, sending back radio messages about what he sees. He and his partner take to landing at a particular spot where the girls prove to be extremely friendly.

His first posting is to Saint Omer, a lethargic place where the rumbling sound might be snoring or guns, he can't tell. There's a kind of grimness to his assignation: he's told there's no space in his Squadron right now, he just has to wait for someone to die: "It shouldn't take long" "What shall I do while I wait?" "Sleep, have an omelette, pick your nose" - it really doesn't take long before there's a death and he's in - within a matter of months, two thirds are dead.

Serge has a charmed existence, and feels no fear, he even pleased by the idea his flesh might merge with that of his machine - maybe its all the cocaine he's taking. He's told to rub it into his eye to improve his vision, or to snort it for a "stronger effect". He certainly sees things with extra clarity, but it also has an impact on his sexuality - the first time he takes it, he gets a sudden erection, takes his trousers off (he's still in the air) and his "seed shoots from him, arcs over the machine's tail and falls in a fine thread towards the slit earth below". Given the title, it is perhaps significant that he accompanies this action by yelling "From all the C!s ... The bird of Heaven."

On morphine, his drug of choice, he seems to get the same state as when Sophie blew up the shed - there's an initial euphoria, then "everything slows down and seems to float" - even the tracers (ie bullets with every potential to be lethal) "rise toward him languidly, like bubbles in a glass", and he likes it best when they come very close:

so that they're almost grazing the machine's side: when this happens he feels like he's a matador being passed by the bull's horn, the two previously antagonistic objects brought together in an arrangement of force and balance so perfectly proportioned that it's been removed from time, gathered up by a pantheon of immortals to adorn their walls.

He also notices that the intersecting lines of ordnance residue and exhaust fumes form a grid in which all past manoeuvres have been recorded and so history itself seems to hang suspended. Its a beautiful image, but he's not much good at his job in this state. So when he's finally attacked by a German aircraft, all he can do is think about how graceful it is, with a special message just for him, an annunciating angel. He wants it to carry him away in a "long, whispered rush of consonants". Even now, its as if he's under special protection: on its way down, his plane collides with a parachute, which breaks his fall. He's behind enemy lines, so he's taken prisoner. The guards get so slack he manages to escape, is captured and to be shot as a spy - and here's the most unbelievable element of the whole novel - just as the fellow is about to pull the trigger, they get the news that the war is over.

The third section, Crash, is an odd one. Serge is in London, ostensibly studying architecture but he's fallen with a crew of party-goers, united in their taste for drugs, and rarely does anything. His friend, Audrey, finally persuades him to go to a seance - there's an extended account of it, but Serge works out its a fraud and is angry - at the frauds, at those who believe them, and himself for busting that belief. I think this is his lost soul period - he's looking for somewhere to be: home doesn't work, these friends don't do it for him (although they promise a special form of communication) and his old friends, like Clair, aren't any use to him. And so he drives off, and the section ends as predicted by its title.

In Call, the final section, things break up. Serge has been rescued by his godfather and given a job, associated with establishing the BBC in Egypt, along with a secret squirrel spy mission to report back to his godfather anything he finds interesting. His time in Alexandra sounds like fun - he's being fed lots of history by a workmate, attending meetings he doesn't need to attend to, writing reports and then enjoying the cinema of an evening - he's sworn off drugs and finds this to be an enjoyable rhythm. Alexandria itself sounds to him of unrequited longing - he hears it in the cries of tradesmen, the wails of beggars, the muezzen's chants "threading meshed balconies" and in the music spilling from cafes, the clang of metal cups, ships' sirens. More than anything he hears it in his workmate's voice:

its exiled, hovering cadences - and what he sees in Petrou's face and body, his perpetual slightly sideways stance: a longing for some kind of world, one either disappeared or yet to come, or perhaps even one that's always been there, although only in some other place, in a dimension Euclid never plotted, which is nonetheless reflecting off him at an asymptotic angle; and reflecting, it increasingly seems, straight towards Serge.

Things in Egypt are rather chaotic for the British, as there has just been a revolution and newly minted independence for Egypt - which rather raises the question of the appropriateness of the Empire Wireless being established. The Egyptian response is to build a network which parallels the British one. Things are even worse for Serge when he finally gets to Cairo, as the Ministry is in the process of relocating. Cairo is a fine mix of British officials and their civil servants, labourers from all over Europe and entrepreneurs and hustlers from the earth's four corners and tourists (Serge picks up a particularly dim example of the latter). These tourists sound a lot like contemporary ones, searching for independence using Lonely Planet and finding themselves in a congregation of Lonely Planet clutching individualists.

There's an interesting wee passage here which picks up on something Sophie said, several years earlier, just before she died. She says that an unnamed "he" is coming soon, tomorrow or the next day. When Serge asks if she means father, she says "Father! He's not your ... It's the other one." Then she says "Didn't use paraphylectic" and later "I'll have kill him in me, or there'll be more bodies: segments on the battlefields." Now in Cairo, Serge's boss says to him "I can see your father in you", then when Serge asks about him knowing his father, the boss says "Of course ... After all, he's the one who sent..." So - I think that his so-called godfather, Widsun, is actually his father and is also the man he saw having sex with his sister - this sent her over the edge.

Now its Serge's turn to do so. He goes up the river to a place called Sedment, an enormous burial site, thousands of tombs, all stacked one on top of the other.There was a pretty major excavation there in 1921 - he's there at roughly that time, with a small crew of archeologists who fill him in with a great deal of detail about the area - its quite the learning experience to read it. Another overt reference to the title comes along - Serge asks one of the archeologists what he's found - he rattles off a list which concludes "Surtout, the C: the C is everywhere ... Carbon: basic element of life". One of his main companions and sources is Laura - I really liked her for the first time when they're in the tomb (and I think this is when Serge first really attended to her as a woman):

She's streaming information again - but the langour's gone, and the excitement's back. It excites Serge as well: not only what she's saying but how she's saying it, its strip-procession from her. He looks at her mouth. Its lips, coated by dust, are brown. Watching them move, he has the strange sensation that he's closing in on something: not just her, or information, but what lies behind these.

In fact, this part of the novel is perhaps my favourite part - not just because of the constant stream of information, but also the descriptions of the tombs they're going through - McCarthy creates the sensation of actually being there, as well as a desire to explore a part of the world I have never even considered going to. Anyway, Serge and Laura go on a bit of a magical mystery tour through previously unexplored tombs, its like an underground city, I'm all worried that they're going to get lost, then there's this ominous "small tickling sensation" on Serge's ankle which has developed to a full blown itch by the time he regains the surface. Back in Cairo, its worse - he's stumbling, disoriented, dazed, feeling something deeper than seasickness. Then his mind goes, he's imagining all sorts of things - first time I read this, I struggled to get through this part but now, now I see I missed out something pretty dramatic: his imagined marriage to his sister. It is no coincidence that he has been addicted to heroin, also called sister in the slang of the time.

There is probably no answer to what the title refers to: I've seen Carrefax, communication, carbon, copper, continental philosophy, code, crypt, cocaine all mentioned in various reviews. Then we have the author's own take, which may or may not be taken seriously. He has been asked what the genesis of the novel is, and responds:

But one of them was thinking about Carter and Carnarvon, who dug up Tutankhamun. And I knew that a kind of hybrid of those two historical figures was going to be part of — I mean, Serge is a composite of several things. But that’s kind of one part or two parts of it. And so as a marker, I just used the letter C. I said, “Well, Carnarvon. Carter. Let’s just call them C for now.” And it was stuck. I liked the single letter title. It made me think of Sesame Street. You know, how every episode is brought to you by the letter.

It really did take the second reading to appreciate this book - the first time through, I was a bit like Serge at times, dimly conscious of something else going on just beyond my ken. I won't say that I've grasped everything by reading it twice, but at least I have become more conscious of the things in the background, the connections between the first part and later parts and more appreciative of the writing itself. Despite its being set nearly 100 years ago, there were parallels: sure, the technological developments accounted for were primitive by today's standards, but they were the origins of what we rely upon today, and the issues and conflicts arising then have their modern counterparts. Serge was out there in cyberspace just as much as we are today.

There are lots of reviews out there, but these three contributed most to me:
New York Times review
Slate review
Surplus Matter review: this one shows the connection between Serge and Sergei Pankeyev, a patient of Freud known as the Wolf Man, something I was completely unaware of. There is something I seriously like from the Wikipedia page about Sergei. In C, Serge sees his sister out his window a couple of times at night, dressed in white. According to Freud, Sergei dreamt of a pack of six white wolves but apparently "the expression "pack of six", a "sixter" = shiestorka: siestorka = sister".

C by Tom Mccarthy (Part One)

I've not yet read McCarthy's first book, Remainder, but I've read enough about it to create expectations: he is said to be a master of literary theory and that book is said to explore a deep philosophical question by having the narrator doubt his own existence. I've seen "experimental" and the phrase avant garde used a fair few times to describe Remainder and so thought C would be something similar. For the most part, it reads like straight-forward historical fiction - although I guess that is a logical progression from Remainder, where it is the narrator who seeks to re-enact the past: now the novel itself purports to be a re-enactment of a past, one which only partly happened.

C is the story of Serge Carrefax, from birth to death, told in four stages: Caul, Chute, Crash and Call. The narrative is firmly located in time (starting in about 1898) and contemporary events. There's no obvious religion, we get no insight into people's motivations, not even Serge's, but there is a huge amount of technological and other scientific detail - something I liked a lot about the novel.

There are at least three types of caul in the first part: Serge is born with the amniotic bag over his head as a silky veil or hood (silk is also significant, as his parents have a silk-making enterprise, from which they make parachutes); his dad puns on the idea of a caul by predicting a web around the world for sailors to send their signals down; and the section ends when Serge finds that the gauzy crepe that has blurred his vision has finally gone (which made me wonder if he spent the entire first 18 years of his life with his eyes behind a caul).

His upbringing is unusual: his parents run a school for deaf mutes, but dad doesn't believe in either condition. He thinks anyone with the right body parts can speak, the body just needs fine-tuning, alignment and the speech must be wring or wrenched out - all it takes is a proper explanation of the correct adjustments of their organs. As part of the process, he forces an annual pageant on both pupils and guests. The pupils admittedly do speak, after a fashion, but take every opportunity to use sign language despite his prohibition. Dad is also fascinated by technology - he spends his entire life hoping to come up with some great invention. A mate brings in a Kinetoscope, an early form of film projector. These obsessions leave no time for parenting - that role is taken up by the maid, who sees the Carrefaxes as arrogant and incapabe, and the tutor, Mr Clair. But they leave their mark: Serge is very obviously his father's son.

There are quite a few creepy scenes from his early childhood: his sister, Sophie, when he is 2.5 years old, using his penis as some form of telegraph key; his beating up of a toy soldier at the same age as an enactment of killing the gardener and the completely mechanical way in which he kills a wasp. Later on, his sister becomes quite the chemist, and creates an explosion which Serge experiences in slow motion - his sister's face "seems to have slowed down" and expanded, instruments rise and hover, "incredibly slowly, as though willing themselves upwards, through excruciating effort". Then a window breaks: he watches each of its glass fragments soundlessly separate.

There is some fun: I loved it when a visitor finds all sorts of coded messages in the personal's column in the Times: he and Sophie decode them and reply. Poor old Serge is not very adept at this sort of thing. There's a wee joke: the cat is buried in the family crypt: does that make it a cat-a-comb? Then there's the Realtor's Game - which sounds a lot like Monopoly (which can be traced to 1924, but Serge and Sophie were playing in about 1905). He transforms the make-believe telephone company into an actual telephone network around his family's estate. This transforms into an interest in radio and communications - something which stays with him for his entire life. We are treated to a detailed account of his set up and of a night he spends going through the radio bands. Early txt speak features- logical, given the reliance on Morse code, and there's a wee joke: Serge notes that one fellow can't be very young as no-one over 20 would tap out the complete word. As he searches the waves (in much the same way we might now surf the web) he's conscious of things just beyond his ken, gets glimpses and half-hears them.

There's one small point which troubled me here: radio enthusiasts are called hams, they use a bug to send morse code but several references are made to the enthusiasts as "bugs". I had to consult an American dictionary on this one: Merriam-Webster does say a bug is an enthusiast. Maybe that was an early usage which has died away - there's nothing in the OED. But there is a kind of pun happening: he's a bug and Sophie becomes obsessed with bugs, of the natural variety. She, too, is said to be tuned in, as if she's a receiver. It doesn't end well for her.

I think that there's yet another form of caul: innocence. I am pretty sure that Serge sees his sister having sex although he doesn't recognise that's what he's seeing. He's heard a noise, a "rhythmic scratching, a rubbing chafe that carries on its back a higher sound". Its coming from behind the sheet (the movie had been projected non to it), and he sees a shadow cast on to it:

It's some kind of moving thing made of articulated parts. One of the parts is horizontal, propped up on four stick legs like a low table, the other end is vertical, slotted into the underside of the table's rear end but rising above it, its spine wobbling as the whole contraption rocks back and forth. The thing pulses like an insect's thorax, and with each pulse comes the rustle, scratch and chafe; with each pulse the horizontal, low part squeaks, and the vertical part now starts emitting a deep grunt, a gruff, hog-like snort. The grunts grow more intense ... the squeaks grow louder... The thing's rocking and wobbling faster and faster, squeaking and grunting more with every pulse.

Later on, he gives a peculiar account of what lovers do: he's seen a photo of a woman kneeling with a man standing beside her, holding his member while she smiles at it. This image seems to stick with him: every account of his sexual activity involves a woman kneeling in front of him. It is when he finally has sex for the first time that his vision clears. This is at Klodebrady, which seems to be a spa in Bavaria, where he is sent for hydrotherapy because he is suffering from, in old fashioned terms, black bile or mela chola. He has good reason to be melancholic: what is more interesting is the reference back, back to classical notions of the humours. The woman he chooses appeals, because he likes the illness within her body, the sulphuric smell of her, the impression she creates of things gurgling up from below. His other female companion, the pretty Lucia, is too light-blooded, and two light-hearted (and probably light-headed) to make much of an impression on him.

Its only in my second reading that I've really got that there's quite a lot lurking in this first part, things which connect outwards with actual history (the impending war is hinted at several times, and there are the numerous references to technological advances, such as the erection of Marconi radio towers) and forwards with the history presented by the novel. So, yes, I'm starting to see why those with more knowledge than me are saying its a novel which deserves a lot of attention. So much so that I want to defer any consideration of the final three movements to another post.

The Nameless, by Joshua Ferris

Ferris made quite a name for himself when Then We Came to the End. Although I snapped up a copy, I haven't actually got round to reading it and he's published The Nameless in the meantime. I noticed it sitting in the library so decided to try it out.

The central premise (it can't be a gimmick, because then this book would have nothing) is that Tim Farnsworth has some sort of condition, it makes him get up and walk for miles, walk until he cannot walk any more: then he falls down and sleeps. The condition has no name, all of medical science has been consulted and can't even work out whether it is a physiological or mental condition. It comes and goes, but when it comes, it stays for quite some time. There doesn't seem to be any correlation between its arrival and his work or relationships - it just is.

So, a lot of the book is just him walking, learning to survive out there in the big bad world, falling asleep, having bad things happen to him while he sleeps, then calling his wife (Jane) to come get him. Its not a good way to live. Every so often, something nice happens to him, he gets looked after while he's vulnerable, but that's the exception, not the norm.

This puts a lot of strain on Jane's ability to work and consequently upon their relationship - the book is pretty good on tracking the times she can't work, and showing what it means for her to love him, the temptation to give up on him, to drink to forget about everything, but never really explains why he can't employ someone to follow him around or come get him - he is, after all, loaded.

It is such a weird condition that his teenage daughter, Becka, is convinced for years that he's faking it. When Jane employs her to babysit Tim, Becka finally gets that its real. They've spent a week bonding over Buffy DVDs and then, finally he walks, with her following

He shed his suit coat and his buttondown in the heat without stopping, without the least concern for how he looked to those he passed: a crazy man possessed. She picked up his discarded clothes and followed him... She trailed behind him, ready to seize on his first false move, at any subtle sign of fakery, but he never halted, he never paused... She watched him slog inside the KFC and collapse.

When he wakes, she's there and crying, apologising for not believing. This was on page 103, and the first time I felt any real connection to the novel. After she becomes a believer, Becka is a stalwart.

His family is all he has, when it comes down to it. He starts out as a partner in a law firm (and a good lawyer) but when they can't count on him (there is a bit of a sub plot involving a client on murder charges, someone Tim could save if he could work), his partnership is revoked. He fights it, even takes a menial lawyering job, thinks he has nothing other than his work to focus on, (hello - your family?). But then he needs to walk again.

He decides - and its not clear whether its because he thinks its better for his family or for himself - not to call to be picked up any more and so is getting further and further away from home. The more he walks, the more body parts (toes and fingers) he loses and the worse his health becomes. At one point he is admitted to hospital as a Richard Doe, with renal failure, enlarged spleen, sepsis-induced hypotension, dysentery and cellular damage to his heart. The final shift is when he seems to have some sort of mind/body split - its his body which demands to walk, to be fed, to sleep, complains of the various hurts and his mind which resists, calling his physical self "the other" and "brute want". There's a fair amount of musing about God, about the mind being captive of the body as he walks: this philosophising is one way in which Tim's mind fights back, along with appreciating the finer things in nature and art. Although Tim seems to win this war, after that his condition never goes into remission.

The end is really quite sweet. He's managed to keep track of what Becka is up to and when she's in Portland (I'm thinking it must be Oregon, which is a hell of a long way from New York), he goes to her. Their reunion was so tender, it brought a tear to my eyes. Its only then that Tim learns Jane is sick, and resolves to go home. His walks take him in all sorts of random directions, but he does have some wakeful periods when he has control, and he uses them to retrace his steps (he had tried buying a car, but was taken by the need to walk and never found the car again). Quite apart from the need to see Jane again, he needs to be "more than the sum of his urges", which is why he won't let Becka collect him.

Ultimately, I don't think that the unnamed in the title refers to his condition at all, but to something all humans have - the primeval wants that live beneath our sophisticated veneer and which do, like it or not, call the shots. What called him back, although he didn't really see it until he got back, was something even stronger: love.

Nick Earls - The Story of Butterfish

It is always a delight reading a Nick Earls novel, because he manages to be so real in the presentation of his characters. Until this one, all of the novels I've read have involved people in the medical profession (presumably because that is his own background). There has always been a fair amount of music in his novels but this time round, the central character (Curtis Holland) IS a musician - he played keyboards for recently broken up band Butterfish (which has made a career out of very popular "over-ripe overblown ballads" and then made the fatal third album which was "pretentious and directionless at the same time") and is back in Brisbane, trying to work out how to live.

Being the keyboard player for a band that has sold 20 million CD's has insulated him from any such need in the past (and even when in the band, he could leave most responsibility to others, particularly front-man Derek). He's very rich but is still working, now with a commission to produce music for a Scandinavian band. One consequence of this is that the novel is full of music talk, both about bands and about the actual making of music.

Curtis makes a surprisingly good fist of this new life, considering his reputation as being a "shit communicator" and what he has to deal with. His father has died, his brother is recently single, his neighbours require careful negotiation and then Derek comes back to town.

The novel starts with Annaliese coming into his life. She's the girl from next door, sixteen, a "confounding mixture" of self-assuredness and fragility looking for her missing not so bright dog, Oscar, although "he's never really got that". Later on, he spots her coming up the street, her hands playing an imaginary keyboard:

she was concentrating, playing precise notes. Not with great feeling, but marking them out neatly as if she might come back later and put more into it. Then she noticed me and her fingers sprung back from the keys and her hands turned into two fists that dropped to her sides. She was holding onto the very slender hope that I had seen none of it.... The air keyboard player can only surrender. There is no other choice.

They come to spend quite a lot of time together - she hangs out in his studio where its air-conditioned, gets involved in his music. I particularly enjoyed their conversations, there's lots of playful teasing between them, although the dialogue is spot on throughout. The blurb makes it plain that something happens between the two of them, but for once we have a muso who acts responsibly. He is very fond of Annaliese, thinks that if she were only 25 it would not be a problem, but she's too young at 16. So, there's a bit of a startled rejection scene, leaving him wanting and needing to "put some kind of patch on the hole it had left in how she felt about herself".

Her brother, Mark, is 14: apparently a stereotypical sullen teenager, playing computer games and dressed in black with inappropriate facial adornments. Curtis's first assessment is that he would have hated Butterfish on principle, too close to pop and insufficiently evil: "fourteen year old boys with nails through their ears had taken it upon themselves to be our natural enemies". But Mark has great commercial instincts - I loved his negotiation of the deal to mow Curtis's lawn - is a talented although disturbing writer, and turns out to have a secret plan which is really quite lovely. He and Curtis turn out to have quite a surprising rapport.

They are both summarised as "complicated people", neither children nor adults with

lives full of negotiations and power shifts and forced trips across town, and hormones and wild ideas. Everything was to be tested - themselves, the inconsistencies the world offered them every day.

Then there's their mum, Kate. She does the neighbourly thing and invites Curtis over to dinner:

"I was just swearing at the meal when you came in."
"As long as it didn't swear back, I think we're okay."
"You'll never hear it with the oven door shut."

Sure, it may not be highbrow literature, but for suburban Brisbane, this seems to me to be perfect in its naturalness. She's a "crap" cook but Curtis is kind, blames her tools - there's an amusing scene when she uses what Curtis says is a comedy knife stolen from a clown to cut (or at least bruise) mushrooms. Somewhere along the line, he has learned to be a great cook, so he helps her out and they go on a shopping expedition to buy a proper knife. This reminds me: there were two aspects I didn't like about the book - he made this absolutely delicious sounding curry that left me salivating and wrote so convincingly about a particular kitchen knife that I have to get one!

Because Curtis has been away so long, and his dad has just died, he needs to get re-acquainted with his brother, Patrick, and with the idea of family, albeit a family of just two. Curtis is no rockstar to Patrick, just the little brother, so Curtis spends a fair while sparring with him, taking pre-emptive (conversational) strikes against him so he won't be bested. Things get better when Curtis learns that Patrick has separated from his partner, asks if this is when he says he never liked him (the partner, Blaine), thought him a narcissist:

"Oh, God. He had so little to be narcissistic about. And yet he managed, against such odds..."
"And you have much more to be narcissistic about than he does."
"I've always thought that."

The coolest thing about their relationship are the revelations - both about how they saw their own and each other's childhoods - and about the secret life of their dad (who had a mad scheme pretty well developed to put on an opera about an early explorer, Sturt). Once they learn he'd been on internet dating sights, they develop a running joke about him having a mail order Russian bride.

Derek is the one character who is closest to being a caricature but even he has his moments. He "has a big mortgage on the whole rockstar cliché" and really has only one layer at most times. But he's back because his dad might die, and that brings the meagre best out of him (after he and Curtis have a ridiculous fight in the street).

Oddly enough, this book shares something with the last book I wrote about: it was also a play. Here is the author talking about the creative process.

David Nobbs - Cupid's Dart

Best known for creating Reggie Perrin, David Nobbs is still producing fiction, with 17 novels under his belt. Cupid's Dart (2007) has a slightly unusual history, as it is a novel based upon a televised play, written way back in 1981.

The central character, Alan Calcutt, shares a little with Reggie: he is deeply out of touch, has trouble relating to his workmates, mainly because he despises them and has trouble with family. His mother is in a rest home and he makes a dutiful weekly visit, desperately trying to work out how to fill in the time but at the same time wishing his mum would get out a bit more, so she'd have some quality of life. Things are so bad that he at one stage plots to kill her, in both their interests, with a poisoned cake.

But the major story here is his meeting of Ange (in the play, she was played by Leslie Ash - the cool chick in Quadrophenia), a much younger but vastly more experienced girl he delights in saying he picked up on a train. She is 24, a darts groupie. He's 56, a philosophy don, a virgin, and has no idea what she's talking about half the time. But he has enough self awareness to work out that he's doomed to an increasingly sad life if he doesn't do something.

He talks like a textbook but somehow they find a way to chat with each other as they share a table in the train and he, for the first time in a couple of decades, finds himself interested or, in his words, "she inspires an affectionate response", particularly her unselfconscious joy at being alive. He is full of ponderous talk of philosophy and how it provides no answers, just questions. Instead of even trying to address his conversation, Ange muses about birds:

I wonder if birds are afraid of heights - it'd be a right old do if one of them was afraid of heights. Fuck up his life a bit, wouldn't it? The old singing and that. Know what I mean?

To their mutual surprise, Alan asks Ange out (to dinner at a very fussy restaurant) and she accepts. Although he has no idea how it will go, he has the wit to "avoid Wittgenstein, concentrate on darts".

And so, a relationship of sorts develops: the opening chapter makes it clear it does not last beyond the year but, surprisingly, good things happen to both of them during the year. He finds her thoughts extraordinary, because they do tend to come out of left field, but that helps shake up his very stale take on life and his work or, in his words, he is screwed up until she "unscrews" him (and they do spend several nights just talking before anything approaching sex happens). He is taken way out of his comfort zone (pubs and international darts tournaments for a start). She gets to be taken seriously - no-one has ever wanted her for her mind before - and escape the Essex girl stigma and a rather concerning lack of esteem when it comes to men.

There are not many laugh out loud moments here (although I did laugh when Alan is very anxious about a declaration of love he wrote under the influence of several pints of Belgian lager and sent to Ange - he is so desperate to retrieve it, convinced that it will be fatal to their relationship but it is so unreadable she thought he'd sent her notes for a lecture) but I enjoyed these two characters. They may have been laid on just a little thick but they were distinctive.

Auckland Writers and Readers Festival 08 – Day Three

An Hour With Anne Enright This was an interesting session, made so because the chair, Kapka Kassabova, seemed not to get things that the author saw as obvious in her work (such as its humour) and was a little pre-occupied with its bleakness and portrayal of women as “broken”. Enright did not see this at all, didn’t really see it as being much about gender politics at all, commenting (a) that men are often in exactly the same sort of place and (b) it was a line of questioning that male authors don’t face, they’re even celebrated for a bleakness of vision.

Enright’s take on her novel is that, yes, Veronica has things tough but at the end, she is re-made and is actually making her own choices – which is a good thing. I haven’t read it yet, but I don’t think Kassabova was buying this.

The novel has a certain reputation for being bleak and depressing, but Enright herself was very funny and the piece she read out from The Gathering itself was very funny, concerning what Veronica would do if she was giving three wishes. Here is my remembered paraphrase of some of what to do: The first thing to wish for is another three wishes, because you always waste your wishes on the wrong things, like Sophia Loren’s boobs, and find you’re burdened with silicone, so you then have to wish for her boobs back whenever they were fresh. So, you can use the second set of three wishes to get you roughly back to where you started.

I must read it, but am currently caught up in the Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

Read to Me

This was a session in which four authors simply read extracts from their books. Mo Hayder and Louise Wareham Leonard (who?) didn’t do anything for me. Sarah Laing, on the other hand, had a wonderful short story from her collection called Freezer Burn in which Rachel gets her first job in a pie factory. Not a promising setting but she does wonders with it. Then we had Duncan Sarkies who read a very funny extract from his novel, Two Little Boys. Nige and Deano have been mates for years, but Deano has a new friend, Gavin, making Nige a bit jealous. He gets some revenge (in the scene we heard) by repeatedly flushing the toilet – a noise Gavin apparently can’t stand to hear at night. So, yes, it is quite literally toilet humour but actually funny.

An Hour With Mo Hayder

I don’t think I’ll be buying her books, but she tells an interesting story. One in particular was about a water hole, Bushman’s Hole, in the Kalahari desert, which is incredibly deep, with just a small hole in the ground, a narrow neck for about 150 feet but then a bulbous body (in which you could put the Eiffel Tower, if you so chose) and a tapering tail. Apparently people drown in this, they dive to the bottom and get stuck in its tail, can’t get back. One fellow, Deon Dreyer, did this 10 years ago. More recently, another fellow, Dave Shaw, was diving, actually found the first guy. Couldn’t bring him up, because diving so deep means a long slow ascent (9 hours!) even by himself, so he organized a rescue party. Problem was, on the return trip, he got snagged on the dead fellow, and that was the end of him. His diving companion, against all the rules, went after him but it was no use. He must have dislodged him, however, as he and the other, long-dead guy – they both burst to the surface. Full story here. This, apparently was what inspired her to have a police diver as a feature character in one of her novels.

I didn’t really get her explanation of what she was doing in her novels – something about showing people to live in circumstances they’re never going to experience.

An Hour With Michael Pollan This was my last session – Michael Pollan is a bit of a food-writing guru for these threatened times, so I thought I’d better go. His message is pretty simple, actually, and he makes no secret of its simplicity, even plays on it: eat food, not too much, mostly plants. Alternatively: never eat anything your grandmother would not recognize as food. His latest book, In Defence of Food, wants us to eat real stuff, not processed crap, not something planned by a nutritionist. Real food, preferably something you grow yourself, hence the focus on plants. He does eat meat, just not much: for the purposes of this book, he learnt how to kill a wild pig (I’m still wondering if the guy who took him out was just being kind when he said Pollan killed it) and turn it into edible products (of course, no pretension is involved in making sure they’re prosciutto). Best quote was from his dad, who couldn’t see any need for hunting once they’d invented the steakhouse.

Some Images From Earlier Sessions
Luke Davies (author of Candy etc):
Sarah Hall (author of The Electric Michelangelo, Carhullan Army and Haweswater)
Heather O'Neill (author of Lullabies for Little Criminals)
So, this was my very first Auckland Writers and Readers Festival: I am sure I will be back. It was a whole lot more fun than the Melbourne one I went to, where despite having a list of events a mile long, I didn’t actually go to anything. In a way, it was a nicer event than the Sydney one I went to last year, a bit more intimate, with all events in one of two rooms. In between, I could lounge around and visit the bookstores set up for the Festival, or wander into town. Coffee was in constant supply and in between events, one coffee girl in particular would entertain the space by singing and whistling.

In the evening I treated myself to something I should have had all along. I’d been in a backpackers in Parnell, but since I had an early start to catch my plane, I wanted to be somewhere on the Airbus route. Wotif came up with a marvelous $99 room, sorry Executive Apartment, at the Elliot Street Apartment Hotel – one block from the Festival, in an interesting old building that has been done up. The room was a great size, bed was huge, it had a full blown kitchen (not that I used it) and it was excellent value.

Auckland Writers and Readers Festival 08 – Day Two

An Hour With JM Coetzee

This was my one “duty” session: he is such a prominent author, and has never been to New Zealand, so I had the sense I should go. I wish I had not: it was a lecture, no questions from the audience, no questions from or discussion with Witi Ihimaera, who was "chairing" the session (in reality, he had to simply sit idly by). And what did we get? A lecture on censorship, primarily the result of his looking at the notes of the censorship committee set up in South Africa to decide if his work could be published. His take? While there one or two inappropriate elements in his books, they were so fantastic that they ought not be censored. He then read two passages from his earlier works, the ones that were so great that the South African government would not interfere with their publication: these readings sent me to sleep.

Reading With A Torch Under the Blankets After Lights-Out

I went because Elizabeth Knox was on the bill, along with Kate di Goldi and Bernard Beckett. Kate (I call her Kate, not because I’ve met her, but it is like I have) is too much a kids and young adults author to be of much interest to me, and I had never heard of Beckett. Unfortunately, Knox decided her visit to France had to take precedence over the festival.

While there was a little discussion of reading under the blankets, it didn’t go very far: Beckett was not that keen on reading as a kid, and Kate didn’t need to read under the blankets, reading at all times was the norm, an important one for her (like me) because it formed much of her social life. She said something that I don’t think I had ever realized about myself – despite reading a lot, as a kid, I didn’t have others to talk books with (I still have vivid memories of talking the previous night’s TV shows with my classmates on the school bus, but not books). They (and I) had a very similar sort of reading trajectory – kids serial books, then books more for teens (Beckett name checked the same authors I would – Helen McInnes, Alistair McLean and co) along with a bunch of randoms that really got them going as readers.

Most of the talk was about writing for the young adult market: I think I am with Beckett, who explains that he goes to various functions involving YA authors but when he is asked who is favourite YA authors are, says he doesn’t actually read YA fiction because “I am not 15”. I think the most interesting aspect of this part of the talk was the inadequacies of definitions of YA, although I did like their notion of it being a matter of perspective. A teen novel will be nostalgic about childhood but completely unaware of adulthood, speculating about it maybe. Even though the same teen and experiences might be in an adult novel, the perspective will have switched to someone who has been there and done that.

“You Know You’re Done With A Story…”

This session was about the short story, and featured three authors who started with short stories and have written, or are writing, a novel: Peter Ho Davies, Anne Enright and Sarah Laing. The last is a completely new name to me, despite the fact she grew up in Palmerston North before moving to New York and back to Auckland. To be honest, I don’t know that a whole lot came out of this session for me: each author read some or all of one story, Kate Camp talked to them about various things, Sarah seemed a little less at ease about participating but her stories actually sounded the most interesting, so much so that I bought her book Coming Up Roses and had her sign it. No conversations this time – I’d say the whole notion of having fans come get her sign things is still quite new to her, which was kind of sweet.

An Hour With Luke Davies

This hour made me so glad that I had snuck away at lunch time and bought Candy at the 30% off sale at Dymocks. He read from it and showed a clip from the movie - it sounds like a fascinating book, one which draws heavily on his own experience while immersed in the world of addiction. Weird shit happened. He was pretty open about this, but I was curious as to the timing: he is not your typical junkie, in that he was an English teacher for at least some of the time he was having his troubles and, four years after escaping the net, was able to process those experiences into what appears to be some fine fiction. He is now in LA, trying to work as a script-writer, with two other novels to his name. While Speed of Sound is of little interest to me, I am interested in his “forgotten second novel, it has had hundreds of readers”, Isabelle the Navigator.

In the evening, I had a sort of continuation of the Festival, in that I went to an Italian restaurant, one in which the tables were very close together, and found myself seated to people who’d been at the Festival – in fact, I rather believe that one of them had been given an hour to talk about himself.

But later on, I was well away from books: up to the Kings Arms for an HDU gig, a band which hardly uses lyrics at all (although more now than in the past). Great stuff.

Auckland Writers and Readers Festival 08 – Day One

This was a five day event, held last week. It would have been wonderful to get to the whole thing but, well, work intervened. I did manage to have a three day weekend in Auckland, and get to see most I would have wanted to see plus a have few nice surprises, attending about a dozen sessions in all.

Innocence and Experience

I didn’t really know anything about the three authors running this session, which was playing with the twinned notions of innocence and love, how love can generate a form of innocence. I had seen Peter Ho Davies’ novel The Welsh Girl in various shops, but Peter Wells and Laurence Fearnley are pretty much completely unknown, surprising given that both have written several novels and both are New Zealanders. Fearnley not only lives up the road, but she had a writing fellowship at my university! I listened to Peter Wells read from his book, Lucky Bastard, and talk generally about it and went and had a look at it in the bookshop, but have no sense that this book will be of any interest to me or, indeed, what it is about. The Festival blurb says it is “an exploration of family relationships and a little known aspect of the Second World War”: I have already forgotten what that might be.

The Welsh Girl sounds much more interesting, again a bit of family exploration happens, which is not necessarily confined to humans: Ho told of his discover of the territoriality and maternal instincts of sheep. I have no idea how he works this into his novel, but apparently he does. The story is of this young barmaid who has some sort of dealings with a German prisoner of war incarcerated in Wales, with a side dish of Anglo-Welsh tensions. Ho’s inspiration was the fact that his grandmother had a collection of small hand-made bronze sculptures made by the local POW’s during the war. The local landscape seems to be an important aspect of the novel.

I liked his story of one of his short stories: he spent a year on it, only to find that there was only one element he really liked, one he was able to salvage as an 8 page story. I also really liked what he was saying about his characters: by the time he had finished, he felt like it was really their story, and he was more in the nature of a reader, one who was sad to see them go when he was done. Very Flann O’Brien. Of course, the writer must be much closer to the characters than any reader, since they have lived together for the duration of the writing process (seven years, in his case).

This talk of missing the characters was inspired by Laurence Fearnley talking about her relationships, both with the physical world and fictional characters. She confessed to not really being into people, and finding lots to entertain her in the random things that she sees around her (such as some rubbish blowing across the street in Invercargill). This leads to her providing a very detailed and real sense of the physical landscape in her novels. She also confessed that she gets enough company from the characters inhabiting her head and finds them much more accessible than real people: I have to applaud her for her bravery in making such statements, because society has a dim view of loners. Curiously, I immediately wanted to meet her (but when I had my chance later on, chickened out). Her novel, Edwin + Matlida, features the title characters finding their way into a relationship, despite a 40 year gap between them (he is 62).

Addicted to the Dark

I went because I wanted to hear Duncan Sarkies; thanks to being fog-bound, he could not make it, so I only had Luke Davies and Heather O’Neill. She looked so much like one of our students that it came as a shock that she has a teenaged daughter. Her novel, Lullabies for Little Children, is pretty brave in the topic it takes on: a twelve year old girl (Baby) whose life is so shit and who is so damaged she takes to the streets and is selling herself. Her dad is a big time drug user, but going straight, so part of the novel explores her getting re-acquainted with this new father. The chair-person, Stephanie Johnson, raved about the freshness of the voice and the lovability and strength of this incredibly resilient kid. She’s possibly paid to say such things but Luke Davies, the other guest, rated it a highly important book and extremely good – at a world-beating level. There was talk of filming it, but of difficulties in getting the right sort of team on the project (if we could ever get Ellen Paige to look 12, I get the sense she’d be fantastic). O’Neill herself seems to have gone through the kind of life I can’t comprehend: at some stage, her mum said to her and her sisters “Your dad is out of jail now, you go live with him”; he was a bad man, but one with enough clout that he could pretty much do what he would want, such as wander down the street in his underpants smoking a cigar to do his shopping and no-one would interfere.

Luke Davies was there for his new book, God of Speed, a fictional biography of Howard Hughes – forgetting about his love of flying, but looking at him as a fellow suffering from OCD (apparently he had a team of Mormons to keep his house clean) and his addictions to drugs and sex. Davies was saying that he pretty much detested his character, which must be an odd place for an author to be in, although felt for him – the fact he went 15 years without ever having a real conversation, that he could neither love nor be loved. Still, I don’t think I’ll be rushing to read this one, but it re-ignited my interest in going back to his earlier work, Candy, where the central character is caught between his twinned needs – for heroin and a girl called Candy.

An Hour With Sarah Hall

It was when I saw Hall’s name on the list that I decided I’d go up to Auckland for this festival. Sure, I might well have done it anyway, but this set my decision in concrete. I loved The Electric Michelangelo, largely on the basis of her talent for description and language. Now I love it even more: the conversation gave it a context that I hadn’t really grasped – Cy ends up at a crossroads, in that he could continue the nasty habits of Riley into the next generation, or he could end that cycle, give his acolyte a better role model than he himself had. I hadn’t fully got what was going on with Grace – of course it is an extremely evocative name, but I get now that despite the truly awful things that happened to her (there was quite an audible gasp in the audience when that was revealed), her spirit remained intact.

It was nice to be told more about Haweswater and how there are various features of Hall’s growing up in the next valley over contained in the text. It is a book I have always intended to read but never quite managed. One thing that really connects these two novels is the sense of strong women – Cy’s mum and Grace (and potentially the newbie) in The Electric Michelangelo and the central character in Haweswater. This focus on the power of women comes to the fore in her latest novel, The Carhullan Army. This is her first contemporary novel (set in a present vaguely parallel to our own) – the army of the title, as far as I could work out, is a secret force of armed women, who are either terrorists or freedom fighters, depending on your perspective. I’m pretty sure that Hall is taking the latter perspective: the world has gone wrong, there’s no food or freedom, women are made to wear contraceptive devices and the Carhullan army is going to do something about it.

It is funny – I have spent quite a bit of time this week with an extremely well known public intellectual (Professor Stanley Fish) and a very short time with Sarah Hall, but she’s the one who seems to be the more relevant and with more of importance to say.

Perhaps I should have told her that. I’m sure that it is not that long ago that I would not have even dared approach someone with such stature in my eyes, let alone engaged her in conversation but that is what I did. I was wanting to have my book signed and since I couldn’t ask a question during the talk (my voice was all but gone), I asked her about the authors she had been talking about, the ones she loves for their descriptive power – she named Michael Ondaatje, Alex Miller and Hilary Mantell. I told her that it seemed a shame that her latest novel is a departure from her own descriptive voice and was reassured that the next one will be a return to it: it suited the characters and story to pare the current one back. I then left her with the suggestion that she might like Catherine Chidgey’s The Transformation.

An Hour With Junot Diaz

This was an unusual session, in that Diaz would not read from The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and, indeed, barely even talked about it. I’m not really sure what he did talk about – his family got mentioned quite a bit, often in the context of fame or money. On being chosen as an Oprah book, his sister has pointed out “There is lots of cursing, you curse a lot, there are perverse sexual acts. This is not for Oprah” or words to that effect. On the Pulitzer, a prize which gave him $10,000, his mum pointed out he lost some to his agent, more to tax, and took him 11 eleven years to write. “As a source of income, you do the math.” So, there was some self-deprecating humour, a few hints about the novel, his hopes for reception in the Dominican Republic once the novel is translated into Spanish and, unlike authors I heard from earlier in the day, he seems to be thoroughly over his characters.

I had hoped that I could go to Poetry Idol, but was greeted at the door with “Sorry, we’re full – there’s a poetry gig on”, given in such a tone as would suggest I should have known better than to get into a poetry gig, because they always sell out. Yeah, right! So, instead, I went back to where I was staying, got into a row with a German fellow and ordered some of the Festival books.

In the Country of Men, by Hisham Matar (2006)

I don't think I have ever read any books set in Libya before. I doubt I would have read this one had it not been shortlisted for the Man Booker in 2006: it was sitting on the shelf in the library, so I picked it up. As it happens, I have now finally read the entire 2006 shortlist.

It is a fairly simple story, nothing flamboyant about the writing style, a little bit lightweight to be honest: nothing really grabbed me about it until very near the end. The narrator is Suleiman, a nine year old boy at the time of the action (which is set ten years into Qaddafi's regime, with no end in site). Much of the tale could have been anywhere - stuff about his relations with his parents (mum is ever present, dad is a far more shadowy figure) and his school friends, with their shifting allegiances.

One significant difference is the story of his mother: married off at the age of 14 after her brother dobbed her in for talking to a boy. Very little is said about relations between her and her husband: all we are really told is that she's drinking an awful lot of "medicine", the kind that comes from the baker and is illegal. The worse things get, the more she drinks and the more she tells Suleiman.

The other major thread to the narrative is the ever present threat of Qaddafi's regime: the neighbour has recently been taken and is seen being interrogated and than hanged on public TV. Who knows whether Suleiman's dad has ever actually done anything: all know it is inevitable his turn will come. The odd thing is that when it does, he actually returns (the only time he and his wife seem to be happy together and she doesn't drink). Is he "innocent" (whatever that might mean in Qaddafi's Libya) or has he done some deal, turned someone in to ensure his release? What nature of man is he? This is left entirely ambiguous. All we know is that at the age of 48, he apparently cracks, reads a forbidden book in public: "Had he come to prefer death over slavery, unlike my Scheherazade, refusing to live under the sword?"

As parents, they had earlier faced difficult choices: too what extent are they to insulate their son from the horrors around them? One problem in doing so is that he might get too friendly with the watching secret police. Although they could not leave, should they take the chance to send their only child abroad, to Egypt? He fits readily in to his new life, and it is only really as an adult that he can say

I suffer an absence, an ever-present absence, like an orphan not entirely certain of what he has missed or gained through his unchosen loss... Egypt has not replaced Libya. Instead, there is this void, this emptiness I am trying to get at like someone frightened of the dark, searching for a match to strike. I see it in others, this emptiness... How readily and thinly we procure these fictional selves, deceiving the world and what we might have become if only we hadn't got in the way, if only we had waited to se what might have become of us.

Gods Behaving Badly, by Marie Phillips (2007)

I've been reading Marie's blog for years: back before she became famous, I think I even linked to her private blog in my blogroll, but when she did become famous, her blog was closed to randoms such as myself and replaced with a less personal one. She is one of my earlier blog crushes (not because she looks good, because we can't normally appreciate such aspects of our fellow bloggers and so it is only recently I have become acquainted with her appearance): funny, smart, warm and "real".

I knew she was writing but didn't really know what, again until recently. Then I started reading bits and pieces about her book on other people's blogs (and a pretty good backstory in the Telegraph) and had to get a copy: luckily, the Waikouaiti Library could oblige. There is a Youtube video of the author telling us herself about her book here.

Funnily enough, a footnote to Alexander Pope's Dunciad is as good a place as any to view this book from. It reminded me that with the fall of man, the ancient Gods (Zeus, Aphrodite, Artemis, Dionysus, Eros, Hermes, Apollo, Athena and the rest) decided that they'd leave earth to the mortals, as being undeserving of the gods. In Gods Behaving Badly, they're all still on earth, living dysfunctionally in a rundown north London house. They're pretty much unknown in modern London - partly because Jesus and the Christian God have displaced them, but mainly because people just aren't into gods these days. This lack of support from mortals is the reason the gods lack power, not that the gods know it, despite the best efforts of Athena (goddess of wisdom) to tell them (she speaks in a particular form of incomprehensible business-speak - I'm surprised there were no "going forwards".)

So they're making a living as best they can: Aphrodite has a phone-sex business, Dionysus is running a seedy pub and is a DJ, Apollo is trying to make it as a TV psychic and Artemis is a dog walker. The novel in facts start with her: she's out walking dogs when she encounters a tree where no tree had previously been:

She reminded herself not to get angry with the tree, that it wasn't the tree's fault. Then she spoke.
"Hello," she said.
There was a long silence.
"Hello," said Artemis again.
"Are you talking to me?" said the tree. It had a faint Australian accent.
"Yes," said Artemis. "I am Artemis." If the tree experienced any recognition, it didn't show it. "I'm the goddess of hunting and chastity."
Another silence.
Then the tree said, "I'm Kate. I work in mergers and acquisitions for Goldman Sachs."
"Do you know what happened to you, Kate?" said Artemis.The longest silence of all.
"I think I've turned into a tree," it said.
"Yes," said Artemis. "You have."
"Thank God for that," said the tree. "I thought I was going mad." Then the tree seemed to reconsider this. "Actually," it said, "I think I would rather be mad." Then, with hope in its voice, "Are you sure I haven't gone mad?"
"I'm sure," said Artemis. "You're a tree. A eucalyptus. Subgenus of mallee. Variegated leaves."

This is Apollo's doing: feeling slighted because Kate wouldn't sleep with him, he turned her into a tree. No anger management and a complete sense of entitlement.

Into this come two mortals, Alice and Neil. They're in love with each other without ever being able to declare it, so have spent years in a kind of relationship limbo, playing scrabble and other innocuous activities. Aphrodites engineers it: she's in a snit with Apollo and so has a spell cast; he is to fall in love with the next person he sees i.e. Alice. Supposedly, she is also supposed to be magicced into hating him, but Eros (who has become a Christian) doesn't have the heart for it. So, Alice is brought into Apollo's house (as a humble cleaner) and he does his best to woo her. But when he can't, his anger gets the better of him: she must die. For reasons I won't go into, he then has to apologise to Neil but, well, to be a genuine apology, he has to make it clear why he's apologising: Neil can't get why he'd be apologising for Alice's death when she was struck by lightning. The fun in all this is that Neil is this weedy wee guy who's never had the balls to tell Alice he loves her, yet he has to call Apollo out on his half-hearted apology. He does so so successfully that Apollo needs to demonstrate his power: he stops the sun.

All of this leads to Artemis and Neil taking off so they can sneak into the underworld (accessed via Angel tube station in Islington and portrayed as endless suburban mock-Tudor mansions) on a mission to retrieve Alice and confront Styx and Hades to see if they can help get the sun put back on. To be successful, Neil has to be a hero, so when he meets Styx and realises he can't lie about not being dead:

"I am a hero," he said eventually, hoping that this was a category that transcended notions of dead or alive.
The river raised an eyebrow. "you are most unlike any hero who has visited me before," she said.
"It was an emergency,"...

But he shows the qualities necessary for a hero on this mission: he might not be able to beat Cerberus in a fight, but his years of playing word games and his niceness ("It is what I am best at") equip him well to deal with Styx and have her agree to help him. The same qualities help out when he has his meeting with Hades. He's the kind of hero I can relate to.

Oh, and here's the author - I said she was good looking:

England All Over, by Joseph Gallivan (2000)

This is one of my more random acquisitions, and just goes to show that you can make some judgment of a book based upon its cover. I found it in the discard bin at the Whangarei Public Library; unlike many such bins, the contents of this one were entirely free, so I spent very little time on the selection process. For this one, I thought "English travel book, free, cool" and picked it up without even looking inside.

It is actually a novel, and quite an interesting one and surprisingly funny (although I don't think any of the jokes are family friendly). Clive Pointing was a geography teacher who had an affair with one of his pupils. As a result, he was fired and has been cast down a bit by the difficulty in finding a job. He's living in a horrible sounding flat (the last occupant killed himself, but not before amassing a bunch of debts to some unsavoury characters) in Streatham, South London which is far from being one of its more salubrious or interesting suburbs. As the novel opens, he is waiting in a pub to be interviewed for a job as tour guide:

The way Clive saw it from his seat in the Shakespeare just outside Victoria it looked like a bit of a row. Thirty people stumbled from a coach which was illegally parked and had its hazards going. They spread across the pavement with shocked looks or scowls on their faces, as though they were emerging from a fart-filled lift. Several made a beeline for the nearest fast food. Six well-dressed women hurried into the pub, brushing past Clive on their way to the Ladies. After everyone was off the coach, a fair-haired, slightly pudgy young man in a red parka emerged with a clipboard. One of the ladies, tall with silver hair, a belted raincoat and a silk scarf, moved into his path and began fiercely asking him questions. At first the man hung his head, then looked away, then wrote on his clipboard. As he went to the luggage compartment he said something to her over his soldier. The lady followed, still talking, still castigating hiom. After thirty seconds he slammed the door shut and turned on her, talking very close to her face, his head bobbing. She shrank back in surprise, but when he paused, she started back at him again. Definitely telling him off.

This is Barry, a fellow born and bred in East London, a man who lives to drink and pull, generally from the female customers off his buses, although he has a circuit of pubs where women tend to congregate. He and Clive are chalk and cheese, really; Clive is off drinking altogether, so he can prove to the court he can be a fit father to his daughter. We see their differences most plainly in the way they do their tour guiding: Barry makes stuff up, both because he doesn't know much but also because he wants to be liked. Clive is far more knowledgeable, but his lectures, at least at first, turn the customers off. It takes him a fair while to get into the swing of using his storehouse of knowledge in a way that makes him a good tour guide, but he gets there.

For me, this was the most fascinating part of the book, reading his lectures cum commentary, as they were very educational, and quite inspired. I can imagine some readers being put off, in the same way that his customers were, both by the level of detail and the oddness of the things Clive saw as important. But the novel is a love story to these odd charms, the kind of England that the normal tourist outfit does not show tourists - they get a whip round "Bath Stone'enge and Windsor Castle ... all in one fucking day". Brittannia Tours is one of these firms, but it goes broke.

Clive has a bit of a revelation: things have got so bad that he throws himself off Blackfriars bridge to put an end to it all. Before he hits the water, he has already changed his mind, and luckily he survives. He spends several days making his way home, walking through London, seeing so much to recommend it, and taking the reader with him on his walking tour. He sleeps rough in Lincoln's Inn Fields. Instead of being robbed, he finds that every hundredth person drops a few coins at his feet and he wakes up to find that someone had given him a sandwich. I think this is my favourite chapter in the whole book - there's a glorification of the humble things about living in London:

The Greek scooped me out a triple hopper of pale golden chips and threw on a huge curling cod. I don't remember what it cost, other than to say it seemed a lot more than it used to, but as soon as I tasted it I knew it was the best meal I had ever tasted. I bit the chips in half, and watched their floury insides steaming, and the cod oozed hot fumes from under its bronze batter coat and warmed my lips. I stood in the street devouring them transported back to Folkestone... By the time I tasted the sticky inside of the batter and felt the vinegar fumes tickle my nostrils, I was ready to kiss the tarmac.

Then he has a pint, the first in more than a year, and is well set up for a comeback. I think the turning point is when he thinks back to the girl with whom he'd had an affair and basically thinks, bugger it, I'm not going to defend myself, I did it, it was wrong, and stupid because I lost everything,but I enjoyed it. Now he has a new plan - tour guiding, but of the real England, places off the map, such as the Fleet River, power stations, shopping malls, housing estates, slaughterhouses, ruined seaside towns (Blackpool gets some stick, but I enjoyed the notion of meta-tourism, taking tourists to see tourists tour), race tracks, old markets, other prehistoric sights, not just Stonehenge...

He gets the old crew together, hires a bus (with the lovely Rose at the wheel) and it is all go, they do well. Sure, they had a bit of a fluke with their first tour, to Princess Diana's home - their tickets are forgeries, they break in the back way, the boss is arrested, the press is all over the story and Albion Tours is on the map - but the customers seem to love the novelty of being taken to the odd places Clive arranges for them, and Albion makes a fortune taking passengers on day trips to a surprisingly dry Glastonbury Festival.

Apart from the development of the business, there are all sorts of side stories going on - such as Barry's dad's attempts to star in a documentary about cab drivers, Clive's ongoing problems with his ex, his relationship with his own family (and his mother's love for traditional English poetry) - and various nights out, most amusing being the night our narrator gets so drunk he can't remember, so over the next few chapters, bits of the night are narrated back to him by his companions. Its just like real life. But the major sub-story is, of course, Clive and Rose - I love the way they ride off into the sunset at the end, just the two of them in a flaming big tour bus. Completely appropriate. She is only in the second half of the novel, and every so often Clive ticks off the things that are one more step towards them being in love. They seem to find joint nirvana in a spare parts catalogue:

Clive explained how he loved all the things people filtered out, things that were just too common to care about, or too confusing to worry about. 'It's like the unspoken language of the landscape.' He felt he had gone a bit too far, so he added: 'Some of the names in there - we used to think they were so funny. Things like vice-jaw tools, banana plugs, caged nut-insertion tools, deep-throated g-cramps..."
'I know! L-shaped ball driver sets, clinchnut riveters, oblique-cut cutting nippers, fire-resistant sheaths...'

Fantastic! I only have one quibble. There is a lot of poetry in this novel, Clive seems to have a certain knowledge of English poetic history (can quote Blake, for example) yet he apparently does not know who Alexander Pope is, despite the fact that at times the novel seems to channel his spirit.

Amnesia Moon, by Jonathan Lethem (1995)

Lethem is known to me as writing fine novels of New York life, such as Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude, which I plan to read one day. It came as something of a surprise to see this book sitting on the library shelf, as the blurb refers to it as being a novel of the future and the cover makes it look like a bad horror movie (it actually has "A Road Movie" as a sub-title).

Something has happened to America (maybe the world, but it never gets a mention). No-one is quite sure what, or even when it happened, although many call it "the break", when "a weirdness came over the USA" so the nation was all broken up, localized, everyone living in someone's dream. Each district has become a Finite Subjective Reality, which is why no-one can really explain what happened: each place has its own FSR and this generates its own myth about what happened. (Not surprising, in that the novel is a group of different pieces Lethem wrote and was then inspired to join together.)

In Hatfork, Wyoming, they say it was bombs which created mutants out of the human race; in Los Angeles, they're under attack from aliens, while in San Francisco, well, that place was so weird to begin with that no-one noticed the appearance of antiGrav cycles and robot televangelists.

Chaos, or Everett, or Moon, or Everett Moon (it all depends where he is) lives in the old cinema in Hatfork, where he seems to live a slothful life, his only activity being to get booze and act as go-between for the local bigwig, Kellogg, and his town. He's lived her for what seems to be a decade, but has no idea what came before. He has these awful dreams, as does everyone in the district. Little does he know that he can generate his own dreams, dreams which have the power to re-shape society. Not really sure why Kellogg doesn't tell him earlier, but when he finally does, Chaos does a runner, along with a very hairy young girl, Melinda.

Their progress seems to be more a result of accident than design although getting to California does appear to have been an objective. They get there via a couple of interesting places - one which is covered in a thick green fog, where the populace has no desire to see what might exist elsewhere. Then there is the Strip, where every shop glares with (solar powered) neon but there's virtually no-one to see it. The one business still functioning is McDonalds: such is the rigour of their rule book and the simplicity of the staff running it, that all they know is how to run their McDonalds. They don't seem to notice they only have one customer - a hippy who rescues Chaos and Melinda.

Then there's Vacaville, where all the residents have to move twice a week, leaving everything behind, and where the only shows on TV are gameshows featuring the local government officials. Here, people are citation mad, a notion Lethem has a lot of fun with. Everything seems to run on a calculus of luck - those who have poor luck get sent to "Bad Luck camp"; presumably, those with the best luck become "government stars". Its a mad sort of place, made worse when someone decides to distort everyone's appearance, as if they're in a funhouse. This gives great power to the government, as they retain the ideal body image: "everyone is in love with the Government".

But, ultimately, all these places are diversions: we get to the heart of the story when Chaos is cajoled into going to San Francisco, where he realises all of his pre-Break friends are. But there are those who want to use his power for their own ends; he can be used to dream a society as servient as that of Vacaville. Ilford Cole has some power to dream; he can change people from one thing to another (which leads to a brilliantly surreal chapter, told from the point of view of a gold clock) but it is not enough. Of course, for Chaos to ever actually do anything, whether it is for Ilford or to prevent his mad plans, he needs to first believe in his own power to conjure.