Weeks Sixteen to Thirty-Two - Jude

Troubles by J.G. Farrell (1970)
Recommended by Neil Stewart 

Hello. Remember me?

So, this tale of two readers has been a tale of one for four months now. That's a new year's resolution for you. That's also the difference between Jeanette, the brilliant queen of willpower, and me, queen of doing 327 other things that aren't engaging my brain properly and reading a book. (Jeanette - you've been doing an amazing job, by the way. I love reading your stuff. I also loved the brilliant week we had writing together in Suffolk. You rule, and all that.)

Earlier this year, I also had a tough time after miscarrying a pregnancy. It knocked me for six, really, and turned my mind to mush – I'd stare at a page of a book and my eyes would zone out. But now I'm fitter, happier, more productive, etc, and have spent time going away to great places, and doing work that I've really loved. And I'm bloody marvellous now, thanks. Jeanette told me I didn't have to come back here at all if it didn't feel right, too. But today, I decided it did. So here I am.

I don't know if this'll mean I'll be here every week, but I'd like to. I've already bought a few books for my holiday next week in Spain (a disclaimer already, I won't be posting next week as I'll be "en Espana sin wi-fi"). And who knows? I might even get the old book bug again. I hope that I will.

But before I go, a quick bit on the last book I read for this blog, way back in April, which I didn't write about then. It's called Troubles by J.G. Farrell. It was recommended to me by the lovely Neil Stewart, a friend that I've known since 2005. Neil is two days older than me, but funnier and more clever, although he basically loves most of the same things I do – especially weird films, and music from the early '80s which is in any way electronic. I covet all his Electro twelve-inches, and we had a brilliant time back in January at Koko watching Peter Hook have a go at playing New Order's first two albums. Neil and Peter met after too. Neil's beard was better.

Troubles is about an English soldier, Brendan Archer, who has just left the British Army, and arrives in Wexford in Ireland in 1919, at a strange, crumbling old hotel called The Majestic. He's there because Angela Spencer is there, with her family, and he thinks he proposed to Angela three years ago; they have written to each other for the past three years, anyway. His act of coming to Ireland is one of sweet-natured, bimbling propriety, an accident in a way, as if he didn't know what to do otherwise. The humour behind that act – melancholy, but also sharply black – runs right through this wayward, unusual book.

Reading this book is like being underwater, or in a dream. Farrell's prose is simple but languid, ordinary but wistful. (He's got quite a sad story on his own, has Farrell – overcoming polio as a child, he went on to write three novels, one of which, The Siege Of Krishnapur, won The Booker. He died after falling off rocks while fishing, then drowning, at the age of 44, in 1978). His protagonist, Archer, doesn't really know what's going on either, or what's really happening inside of outside the house. Newspaper reports alert us to the fact that not all is well in Ireland, that the War of Independence has begun, and that political tensions are increasing. The hotel is a fading, dark, dishevelled place in the middle of everything, slowly eroding. Yes, you're right, it's a metaphor, but a gentle, controlled one.

 J.G. Farrell in early 1978

The book is slow too – it has the pace of a tortoise inching along – and I found it tough at times, but Archer's character wins you over. When he obviously starts to fall in love with a girl called Sarah, you cross everything for him. But in Troubles' peculiar world, nothing could ever be straightforward.

This book was also 500 pages long – thanks for that, Mr Stewart, you rogue – and books like this demand sustained concentration, which is why it took me more time to get through. Not four months though, I assure you – the distance from book to screen was my problem. But here I am now, at the keys, quickly typing away, before pausing to hold a paperback in front of my face. It's good to be back. Let's cross everything for me.

Week Eighteen - Jeanette

A Book Of Common Prayer by Joan Didion (1977)

Recommended by Tom

This is Tonantzin Villaseñor.

Tonantzin is my favourite character from one of my favourite things: Gilbert Hernandez’s Palomar stories (a key part of the Love And Rockets comics). I’ve read these strips dozens of times. Tonantzin is a strong and confident woman, who sells fried babosas (slugs, yum) and looks like Sophia Loren. She becomes very politically committed, a stance to which her friends, lovers and family find difficult to adjust.

Palomar’s location is never disclosed: ‘somewhere below the US border’ is all Hernandez tells us. However, we do learn, through Palomar's course, something of the complicated relationship between the US and Central American nations. This most obviously happens in the story ‘An American In Palomar’; it concerns a photojournalist, Howard Miller, who comes to document (and simplify) the lives of the Palomar residents for consumption by the US.

There are very notable differences between Palomar and A Book Of Common Prayer (which I’ll come onto shortly) yet both have a central unhappy idea that wider societal forces, especially the relationship between nations with a history of explicit or implicit colonization, poison individuals and their naturalness with one another. Within a few chapters of A Book Of Common Prayer, I was compelled to pick up Palomar yet again.

A Book Of Common Prayer is set in Boca Grande which is (like Palomar) a fictional Central American location. Our narrator is Grace Strasser-Mendana. Originally from Denver, Grace – like Howard Miller – looked outside the US, fascinated by the ‘other’.

I studied under Kroeber at California and worked with Lévi-Strauss at São Paulo, classified several societies, catalogued their rites and attitudes on occasions of birth, copulation, initiation and death; did extensive and well-regarded studies on the rearing of female children in the Mato Grosso and along certain tributaries of the Rio Xingu, and still I did not know why any one of these female children did or did not do anything at all.

Grace, disillusioned with anthropology, marries a rich Boca Grande man and takes up amateur biochemistry instead, ‘a discipline in which demonstrable answers are commonplace and “personality” absent.’ Her status allows her knowledge of both the high political machinations and everyday gossip of Boca Grande.

Give me the molecular structure of the protein which defined Charlotte Douglas.

Charlotte is another American, yet she is a far more recent traveller to Boca Grande; the locals refer to her as la norteamericana, or sometimes la norteamericana cunt. She is attempting to track down her daughter, Marin, who is being investigated by the FBI for her political activism and terrorist links.

Like Tonantzin, people found it hard to adjust to Marin, a young woman, becoming enmeshed in radicalism. However, whereas Tonantzin explains her ideology (which is then generally dismissed as crackpot paranoia), Marin only really gets to express herself through slogans on a fuzzy tape recording.

This is not an isolated action. We ask no-one’s permission to make the revolution.

These slogans – not explanations, but merely empty signifiers –are not dismissed, but taken very seriously indeed (even when it is revealed that at least one was lifted wholesale from someone else). Marin thus becomes the sum of how other people attach meaning to her, slivers of a fun-house mirror glued together.

Although Charlotte’s physical and psychological search for Marin might be the premise of A Book Of Common Prayer, it quickly ceases to be its point. Instead, Didion creates a completely unforgiving web of human relationships – parental, sexual, communal – within and beyond Boca Grande. Conversations are mannered and conventions often polite, but obviously people want to garrote one another with piano wire.

The first thing to say about this book is that it’s extremely well-written. Magnificently so.

But the second thing to say about this book is that I’m not sure I liked it.

I admired it; I found it to be almost perfectly structured and ferociously intelligent. But its greatest achievement – its pitilessness – was what prevented me from bonding with it.

             They had made that crab bisque in Greenville. She had bought the crabs and Warren had

             shown her how to make the bisque.

‘You’re ruining it,’ she had said. ‘You’re putting in too much salt.’

‘You don’t know anything about it.’

‘Taste it, it’s brine.’

‘Taste it yourself,’ Warren had said, and pushed the wooden spoon in her face.

Unlike Hernandez’s Palomar stories, which invite you, allow you, demand you to care about every single character, even those who appear in only a few frames, and even leeches like Howard Miller, the surgical precision of A Book Of Common Prayer allows for little human sympathy. As I was reading it, it struck me that I would hate to know Joan Didion, because she would find your flaws as easily as a night vision camera finds a fox.

I think this aspect of A Book Of Common Prayer surprised me, given who recommended it: Tom, also known as Thomas Jerome Seabrook, the author of the brilliant Bowie In Berlin. He edited my book Seasons They Change and in the acknowledgements I gave my thanks to him first and foremost. I stated that I couldn’t have written it without him.

This is because Tom’s importance to me and to Seasons was never confined to the physical task of editing text. From the very earliest stages, he listened to my worries, gave me priceless advice, kept me focused and – something I’ll never forget – stood up for the integrity of my work to others. When I submitted a manuscript way over my agreed word limit he got it down to a manageable length without changing my intention or tone. Tom is overflowing with sympathy – and not only for people, but for words, too.

Given that, I think I’m missing something of Didion’s intention. The skill of the woman is such that it must have been a very conscious choice to savagely cut back on the emotional content of what could have easily, and perhaps more naturally, been a melodrama: after all, the story deals in terrorism, sexual intrigue, fractured relationships and political shitstorms. Until I understand why she takes the tone she does – which will require a re-read, plus a wider investigation of her authorial notions – A Book Of Common Prayer is, to me, a perfect heart of marble.

Week Eight - Jeanette

Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino (1972)

Recommended by Rupert

Rupert and Kathryn (my best friend) had just got together. The three of us were driving somewhere, probably for a mooch around the record shops of north west London. It was only about the third time Rupert and I had met. We were all chuntering happily away about the Girls In The Garage compilation LPs.

Kathryn suddenly exclaimed, ‘I’m so glad you two are getting on!’

‘Well, we do like lots of the same things,’ said Rupert.

Perfectly in tune, Rupert and I said: ‘Like Kathryn!’

Yes, Rupert and I do like lots of the same things (although Kathryn remains the thing that we each like best). I am in awe of Rupert’s literary taste. I pretty much know that any book he recommends me will be a challenge. I don’t mean a willfully awkward read, nor something full of tricksy prose: but a book that challenges the way I think.

One of the earliest books Rupert and I discussed was Georges Bataille’s Blue Of Noon. I gave a brief nod to Bataille’s Story Of The Eye last week, and Blue Of Noon is equally brilliant, if unsettling in a totally different way. After talking of our mutual admiration for Bataille, Rupert pointed me towards Henri Barbusse’s Hell: I read it and my mind was blown.

Rupert says he found out about a lot of his favourite literature in his early twenties through reading the music press. Rupert has one of the country’s best record collections, and he is particularly attracted to the independent spirits of post-punk and 80s cerebral indie. He would read interviews with artists he admired in the NME, they would namecheck books, he would read them. In this way, he came upon some of the twentieth century’s most remarkable modernist works.

I had read the little Penguin 60 Italo Calvino, Ten Italian Folktales, many years ago, and greatly enjoyed it. Calvino’s rolling of language was divine, and the content appealed to both my Aesop- and folklore-loving tastes. I had always intended to read more.

Gore Vidal says of Invisible Cities:

Of all tasks, describing the contents of a book is the most difficult and in the case of a marvellous invention like Invisible Cities, perfectly irrelevant.

Thanks for that, Gore. Let’s give it a go anyway.

Invisible Cities is a series of short prose descriptions of locations in the Mongol Empire. The travelling merchant, Marco Polo, tells them to the emperor Kublai Khan; every so often, the tales of the cities break off for a conversation, or a chess game, between the two men.

The city must never be confused with the words that describe it. And yet between the one and the other there is a connection.

Yes. For these cities are entirely created by words. Unlike Polo’s genuine travelogue (the thirteenth century work The Travels Of Marco Polo), Invisible Cities constructs the imaginary rather than maps the real. Some cities are grounded, and it’s easy to believe that they exist.

A stain that spreads out shapelessly, with crooked streets, houses that crumble one upon the other amid clouds of dust, fires, screams in the darkness.

                                                            (Eudoxia, ‘Cities & The Sky 1’)

Others initially seem impossible in the corporeal world. Yet, deliberate over them, and they become deeply plausible. What seems more fanciful than Argia, a city with dirt instead of air, where the residents’ bodies decay quickly with damp (‘Cities & The Dead 4’)? But, then, what happens after a natural disaster vomits the earth into a city? What is Trude – ‘the world is covered by a sole Trude which does not begin and does not end’ (‘Continuous Cities 2’) – if not a prescient comment on globalisation?

I found Invisible Cities an interesting contrast to the book Jude discussed in Week Three, Jane Jacobs’ The Death And Life Of American Cities. In Jacobs’ work, she considers the function of a city, and how it should serve its people. As does Calvino.

It is pointless trying to decide whether Zenobia is to be classified among happy cities or among the unhappy. It makes no sense to divide cities into these two species, but rather into another two: those that through the years and the changes continue to give their form to desires, and those in which desires either erase the city or are erased by it.

                                                                                      (Zenobia, ‘Thin Cities 2’)

How a city is designed, and how this moulds its populace is a strong philosophical idea in Invisible Cities, and nowhere more so than in the sad case of Perinthia. ‘Nature’s reason and the gods’ benevolence would shape the inhabitants’ destinies’, a team of learned astrologers argued, as they set about designing the perfect city. But:

In Perinthia’s streets and square today you encounter cripples, dwarves, hunchbacks, obese men, bearded women. But the worse cannot be seen: gutteral howls are heard from cellars and lofts, where families hide children with three heads or with six legs.

                                                                                       (Perinthia, ‘Cities & The Sky 4’)

Were the astronomers’ calculations wrong? Or does Perinthia actually reflect what the gods’ desire for human destiny?

And then, there’s my favourite, Sophronia. I grew up in Norwich, and every summer my parents and I would day-trip to the seaside towns of the Norfolk coast. Some of these are beautiful; some of these are gaudy, tatty blots of unhappiness. Look at Hemsby:

Like many seaside towns, Hemsby is divided into the tourist Hemsby - all one-armed bandits and fatal-looking funfairs - and Hemsby village, a quiet residential area.

The city of Sophronia is made up of two half-cities. In one there is the great rollercoaster with its steep humps, the carousel with its chain spokes, the ferris wheel of spinning cages, the death-ride with crouching motorcyclists, the big top with the clump of trapezes hanging in the middle. The other half-city is of stone and marble and cement.

Every year, one half of this city is taken away. It is not the half of the funfair; it is the half of the administration, the money, the public services. And what happens to the half that remains?

The shout [is] suspended from the cart of the headlong rollercoaster, and it begins to count the months, the days it must wait before the caravan returns and a complete life can begin again.

                                                            (Sophronia, ‘Thin Cities 4’)

Invisible cities are memory, invisible cities are the future, invisible cities are life, and invisible cities are death. And, sometimes, as I walk around Sheffield, I think of how my own emotions have grown and crashed on its streets. Then, visibility or invisibility, it suddenly makes no difference.

Week One - Jeanette

The Hitch Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy by Douglas Adams (1979)

Recommended by Gary

In the autumn of 2000, I visited a four-person house in Crookes, Sheffield for the first time. Gary lived there. He once put the housemates in order of geekishness: he, modestly, ranked himself second.

During my frequent weekend stopovers, we watched Charmed and Alias, and played computer quiz games such as You Don’t Know Jack, while the housemates tried to explain things like ‘NaN (not a number)’ to me. Gary and I also forged a pop alliance that continues to this day. He had a Freeview box, something of a delicacy in the early century, and I’d sit in his room: we’d flick between music channels The Hits and TMF, cursing when the adverts coincided and we were denied seeing the t.A.T.u. video for the millionth time.

Gary has told me on numerous occasions that he ‘doesn’t read’, but I still asked for a book recommendation, offering him a get-out clause if he didn’t fancy it. But he did. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy is his favourite book and, I’ve since discovered, a text held in huge affection by numerous other friends.

The initial concept of H2G2 is strong: Earth is demolished because it is an inconvenience to the rest of the Universe. The Visigoth-ish race, the Vogons, make a perfunctory announcement and the deed is done. This propels the human Arthur Dent, and the undercover alien Ford Prefect (who is ‘from a small planet somewhere in the vicinity of Betelgeuse and not from Guildford as he usually claimed’) hitch-hiking through the Galaxy. They meet various life forms and have several near-death experiences; they even discover the answer to Life, The Universe, and Everything.

The overall plot becomes increasingly irrelevant as the book progresses, with the wacky adventures aggressively taking the foreground. This is my only real complaint with H2G2: I could tell that Adams initially wrote it as a series of radio plays, and the transition to a cohesive novel was not completely successful.

H2G2 deserves its reputation as an extremely funny book. It snuggles neatly between Pythonesque gentle surrealism, and the sharper edges of 1980s alternative comedy. This kind of intelligent British wit was absolutely wonderful when done well, as it is in H2G2. Yet humourous as the book is, one can easily get this kind of thing elsewhere; if that’s all H2G2 had going for it, it would simply have been a pleasant time-waster. But I found the book satisfying on a deeper level. Time and again, Adams evokes an absolute sympathy for the human condition. In the preamble, he writes:

This planet [Earth] has – or rather had – a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much all of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.

Adams expresses this humane pity brilliantly through Marvin The Paranoid Android. Marvin is lovingly described; yes, sometimes he’s played for laughs, but usually he invokes a touching frustration in the reader. He’s lonely and those he talks to despair of him. He’s self-aware enough to know this, and it makes him even lonelier. Adams nails a description of how depression manifests itself in speech:

            ‘Alright,’ said Marvin, like the tolling of a great cracked bell.

I was interested enough in Marvin to investigate how he’d been portrayed onscreen, in both the 1981 BBC TV series and in the 2005 Hollywood film. Sadly, the clips I’ve seen don’t award him the same complexity that he has in the book. However, it seems the TV character was very popular; he even cut a record, which is actually quite good, even if it rather undermines the book’s take on Marvin’s despondency.

My other favourite character in the book is the little Babel Fish. When inserted into the ear, the Babel Fish reacts with brainwaves and automatically translates languages for its host. It’s a genius plot device to ensure Arthur Dent understands numerous alien dialects, but Adams goes far further with it, playing around with the cultural implications of such a creature. For one thing, the Babel Fish leads to more wars, because all barriers to communication between races are removed. And, because the Babel Fish is so phenomenally useful and it is difficult to believe that it evolved by chance, it sparks off a philosophical debate on divine existence (summarised in the best-selling book Well That About Wraps It Up For God).

H2G2 was a perfect starting point for this project. Short and easy-to-read, it nevertheless surprised me how cleverly and pithily Adams writes. Without Gary’s recommendation, I doubt I would ever have read H2G2, and that would have been a huge shame. Because…

‘My father eventually died of shame, which is still a terminal disease in some parts of the Galaxy.’