Week Twenty-Three - Jeanette

The Good Soldier Švejk by Jaroslav Hašek (1921)

Recommended by Barry

It was my first week at university. I was overcome with finally getting out of Norwich and getting in ached-for London. (I say ‘finally’ – I was only eighteen – but, through that teenage telescope, it had felt like I’d been waiting for a century). Yet I was also terrifically scared of what I was doing. I had hoped everyone would magically crowd around, desperate to befriend me due to my knowledge of Elastica’s Peel Sessions or something. They didn’t.

Well, one did. And I was desperate to befriend him as well.

Barry.

We started going out, and remained a couple throughout university. The transition to the real world didn’t work out for us – we fell apart after graduation – but, and I think this is a credit to us both, we rebuilt our relationship into something else. Our very strong friendship has now lasted four times as long as our stint as partners.

He told his story with all possible detail, not even forgetting to mention that forget-me-nots were blooming on the dam of the lake where his misfortune had happened.

Is Hašek talking about the good soldier Švejk? Or am I still describing Barry? For Barry has a way with discussion – I think it was Jude who coined the phrase ‘Barry time’ – that explores, and unpicks, and muses. I don’t know anyone else who I could converse with on one narrow topic for well over two hours and never be bored (on the contrary, I become ever more engaged with every philosophical capillary we investigate).

Švejk, on the other hand, often exasperates the people he regales with his wandering anecdotes. His myopic military superiors consider him a gibbering dunderhead.

But, of course, even though he often pretends to be, he’s nothing of the sort.

The Good Soldier Švejk is a comment on the colossal preposterousness of the Great War. I’ve studied this period in some detail, and as well as all the usual Schlieffen Plan and Battle of Verdun material, I learned about cultural reactions to the conflict. There were many, of course (including sorrow, pride, humour) but a less immediately obvious one was calling it out on its phenomenal absurdity.

Jaroslav Hašek was a Czech author and, at the time of the Great War, Czech lands were part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (which was Germany’s main ally). Yet while Germany had relatively recently become a nation-state – and was confident, sleek, cohesive and industrially buoyant – the Austro-Hungarian Empire was its complete opposite. Rent with nationalist squabble (it also contained some of the modern Balkan nation-states), ethnicities fought over their own issues in their own languages, hardly presenting a clear fighting front. This crumbling empire was a feeble anachronism in 1914.

In comparison to the more famous literature on the Great War, such as Remarque’s All Quiet On The Western Front (German), Barbusse’s Under Fire (French) or the poetry of Wilfred Owen (British), The Good Solider Švejk already starts within a stranger locale. And it sets out its savage comedy stall right from the shooting of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

‘Which Ferdinand, Mrs Müller?’ he asked, going on with the massaging. ‘I know two Ferdinands. One is a messenger at Průša’s, the chemist, and once by mistake he drank a bottle of hair oil. And the other is Ferdinand Kokoška who collects dog manure. Neither of them is any loss.’

From here on in, Švejk navigates, as best he can, the ramble of petty bureaucracy, nonsense orders and pointless actions all generated by the war. Significantly, the enemy is barely mentioned. Švejk’s war is in and of itself: an exasperating maze within the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

The Good Soldier Švejk doesn’t have much of an over-arching narrative (the introduction asserts that the alcoholic Hašek was often blotto when he wrote it and, as the book was originally a magazine serial, he span it out to maximise his income). Instead, it’s a vignette-heavy read. Some of the most charming of these are between Švejk and Lieutenant Lukáš. Lukáš is the one senior officer characterized as something more than a sadist or an idiot, and Švejk is loyal to this irascible, yet somehow entirely adorable, man. Often, Lukáš will think he’s rid of Švejk, who seems to cause him naught but headaches. He should be so lucky.

Švejk and the Lieutenant were silent. Both observed each other closely for a long time. Lukáš stared at Švejk as though he was preparing to hypnotise him like a cock standing in front of a chicken and waiting to spring on it. Švejk as usual looked at Lieutenant Lukáš with moist tender eyes as though wanting to say: ‘United again, heart of mine!’

The illustrations, plenty of them, are by Josef Lada. Although Hašek never got to approve them as they were commissioned after the author’s death, Lada’s work can’t be faulted. He plucks out the tiniest moments from the text, and conveys character perfectly through guileless half-smiles, backwards head tilts and the angle of eyebrows.

There’s also room in The Good Soldier Švejk for some traumatic moments, made even more so because they are in the same satirical style. The references to wartime disease and injury, including the lack of respect for how people may be mentally affected by their experience, are particularly cutting. And then there’s the droll way that Švejk talks of dying in battle.

‘I think that it’s splendid to get oneself run through with a bayonet,’ said Švejk, ‘and also that it’s not bad to get a bullet in the stomach. It’s even grander when you’re torn to pieces by a shell and you see that your legs and belly are somehow remote from you. It’s very funny and you die before anyone can explain it to you.’

Although I don’t think it’s as well-written, this is a book in the same vein as Gogol’s Dead Souls. It is often bawdy and foul-mouthed, which must have caused quite a stir at the time. (I learned a cracking Serbian insult from it – jebem ti dušu – fuck your soul!)

What The Good Soldier Švejk gets across is that, yes, the Great War was a tragedy on a grand scale. But it was stupid on a grand scale, too. It allowed stupid people stupid amounts of power, and it encouraged them to exercise it stupidly. Moreover, if you weren’t stupid, you damn well better pretend to be stupid: else (rather stupidly) you’ll be the first to end up dead.

Week Twenty-Two - Jeanette

Westwood by Stella Gibbons (1946)

Recommended by Kathryn

‘I swear I put that fifty pence in,’ wrote Kathryn in her second ever letter to me. ‘If it’s not in this letter, you know to blame the thieving GPO!’

Kathryn had contacted me the previous week (sans fifty pence), wanting a copy of this:

Kirby was my fanzine, on its second issue. In an uncharacteristic fit of self-promotion, I’d sent it to Ceefax, which reviewed zines on a weekly basis. They liked it, called it ‘post-riot grrrl’, I got a rash (twenty or so) of orders, and one was from an Oxford girl called Kathryn. Once we’d settled the contentious fifty pence issue (yes, it was there in her second letter!) we started writing to each other very regularly.

Kathryn’s letters were amazing. Literally, some of the funniest, sweetest, most insightful words I’d ever read. We’d write about current music a lot, the lo-fi girl groups like Golden Starlet and The Rondelles that we both liked, plus we’d laugh and laugh about pop and indie culture. We’d make each other mix tapes. Soon we started writing about our lives, our dilemmas, our happiness and our hurts.

Eventually, we met. We arranged that she would come into my branch of Oddbins. Late that afternoon, while I was up a stepladder arsing about with champagne for a dithering customer, I could see this girl with a silver backpack out of the corner of my eye and I knew it must be her. The time it took for that customer to wrap up the champagne transaction felt like an absolute lifetime, so anxious was I to actually talk to this girl who had come to mean so much to me.

She was even more incredible in person than in her letters!

Eighteen months or so after that, we became Hackney flatmates. We had four glorious years there. So many details of that home remain with me: the pigeon infestation on the balcony (and Kathryn throwing out their egg because I was too squeamish to); the armchair where we’d dump our coats; the nonsensical sticker on the bathroom mirror that said ‘You’ve gotta sleep sometime’; the Polaroid of the two of us blu-tacked to the lounge door… but mainly it was the feeling of belonging. The knowledge that she and I had a very rare friendship.

While we lived together, I got to know her literary tastes. She enjoyed a wide range of writers, was vocal about the ones she didn’t (I remember her calling Dave Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius ‘a tedious work of staggering shite’) and she leaned towards British literary female authors of the early-to-mid twentieth century. In the last few years she’s read significant numbers of works of this style from the era, and has become very knowledgeable about it.

‘Margaret! Put that book away and come down here at once! Reg’ll be here any minute and I want the cloth set and some potatoes done, and he’s sure to want a bath, the boiler’ll want making up. Come along, get a move on, now!’

Margaret reluctantly returned to the present, put the book back among the many others that crowded her room, and went slowly downstairs.

Margaret Steggles, the central character of Westwood, is in her early 20s, rather plain to look at, and serious about Art and Literature. When she performs a chance good deed (the return of a ration book), she meets the artist, Alexander Niland, and his wife, Hebe. The grave and wide-eyed Margaret can’t quite believe she’s breathing the same rarefied air as these glamorous people, yet at the same time she is deeply disenchanted by the experience.

She began to listen to what Alexander Niland and Lev were talking about, but was disappointed to find that it concerned the difficulty of obtaining matches.

Margaret soon learns that Hebe’s father is an idol of hers, the playwright Gerard Challis. Gerard, unlike Alexander, doesn’t chatter idly about matches.

‘There is a helpless quality, don’t you agree, about a room that is prepared for a party,’ he observed. ‘The silence and flowers are like victims, awaiting the noise of conversation and the cigarette-smoke and dissonant jar of conflicting personalities that shall presently destroy them.’

Margaret had been thinking that the hall looked perfectly lovely and wishing with all her heart that she were going to the party too, but she hastily readjusted her point of view, and answered solemnly, ‘Yes, I know just what you mean.’

Enamored with Gerard and his purple prose, Margaret begins to neglect her old friend, Hilda. Hilda is really awesome; she’s a jolly sensible girl, whose pretty face and sprightly manner attracts many a man – including Gerard. Gerard’s attempts to woo Hilda are absolutely priceless. He describes the main character of his latest play, Kattë, to her.

‘She makes men suffer,’ said Mr Challis somberly, gazing at her, ‘even as you do.’

‘I don’t do anything of the sort!’ she exclaimed indignantly, turning round. ‘My boys are always ever so cheery.’

            ‘Perhaps they suffer without your knowledge,’

            ‘Well, I can’t help that, can I?’

A quote on the back cover compares Stella Gibbons to Jane Austen – and that seems very astute to me. Gibbons explores the sexual and class mores of wartime British culture as deftly as Austen dissected those of the early nineteenth century. And, just as with Austen, Gibbons is exceptionally gifted at exposing flaws and strengths through humour. Westwood has a wide cast of supporting characters, from American GIs to a little girl with Down’s Syndrome, and all are memorably drawn; the children especially are believable mixtures of gits and angels. Westwood is charming and wistful and delightful, but it is never shallow. Furthermore, as it’s a wartime story, you do get an honest sense of how it must have been for civilians: a bore and an inconvenience as much as a horrific and life-changing experience. Westwood is a superb book. I can’t think of anything to criticise in it.

It doesn’t surprise me that Kathryn picked up on Stella Gibbons – an author who is really only known for one book, Cold Comfort Farm, but who wrote plenty of others that are mostly out of print. I remember her scouring charity shops for Rosamund Lehmann books when those, too, were very hard to find. And, generally, Kathryn is gifted at teasing out life’s detail; she enjoys observing and disentangling the ebb and flow of situations and feelings, so it is logical that Westwood appeals to her.

I called Kathryn my soul sister in the Seasons They Change acknowledgements, and I can still think of no better way to express my feelings towards her. She’s still just incredible. Westwood is, too: yet it could never, ever be as incredible as she.

Week Twenty-One - Jeanette

Three Blind Mice by Caron Freeborn (2001)

Recommended by Naomi

This weekend, family has been high in my mind.

My uncle died. He was a gentle, gentle man. That gentleness is the main thing I recall right now (well, and that he ate his tea very slowly, which became something of a standing joke among the relatives – ah, those little foibles, always jumped on and exaggerated in a family). I’ll be going back to Norwich for the first time in nearly two years, and seeing people I haven’t seen for even longer, not since my own father’s funeral in 2006. That’s how family goes as you get older, I suppose. If you don’t have children of your own, the word becomes ever increasingly synonymous with rot and loss. Slowly, those people who knew you as a barely-formed, instinctive thing depart: the character you were before self-consciousness, before wanting to impress friends and lovers, before the branding iron of the day-to-day burned the skin.

What has this to do with Three Blind Mice? Nothing, really. It has a family in it, the Spences, but then most books have a significant family in it somewhere, even if it is one in absentia. It is about a working class family, but the differences between the Spences’ version of working class and the Leeches’ version of working class are such that I might as well compare my family to the Tudors. The Spences live in the East End, call each other the c-bomb all the time, and indulge in the odd bit of arson and GBH. We, er, didn’t.

Although Three Blind Mice is more thoughtful than a TV show such as Shameless, I do get a little edgy with works like this. When class is a central part of a book – and it often is with working-class authors, in a way it normally isn’t for other classes – it’s a difficult thing to get right. As Jude wrote in Week Fourteen, Jeanette Winterson is very skilled at honestly unpicking her roots while managing not to stereotype, or to come across with a massive chip on her shoulder. I also think the first series of The Royle Family did this very well. Apart from the major signifier of their house décor, identity was expressed incrementally, via tiny details. My favourite vignette is where Twiggy comes round to the house, to flog some cheap Wash ‘n’ Go; he says it’s ‘like in the shops, but there’s Arabic writing on the bottles.’ Most families can relate to incidents like these. Another example is the brilliant scene where Nanna Royle gets giddy at seeing a woman from Droylsden undergo a makeover on This Morning (‘Droylsden’s only ten minutes from me’). Nannas from Lancashire to Berkshire might do this. Taken individually, the incidents of The Royle Family are widely relatable; taken together, they paint an effective and human picture of a family who are, both economically and culturally, working-class.

At a time when the working-class is demonized by government, one could argue that it’s harder to write these natural depictions. Caroline Aherne and Craig Cash might, in 2013, think twice about creating Jim Royle. They may, for example, worry that they were propagating the myth that all people on benefits are ‘scroungers’, or simply think that an audience would not sympathise with a family who didn’t do much paid work, but who did watch a lot of telly.

Caron Freeborn was writing Three Blind Mice at the time when the grating Guy Ritchie fad for working-class gangsters was still flaring, and her book bears the mark of this. The main plot – which, until the end, is mainly a framing device for the issues she wants to explore rather than acting as a strong spine to the book – is debt collection gone awry, violent confrontation, stool pigeons and fall guys. This, in itself, is pretty Mitchell-brothers-in-Eastenders fare, but what Freeborn does well is – as in The Royle Family – humanizing the Spences through tiny details. I particularly enjoyed Darren (or ‘Spence’, the brother, and main hard nut of the book) and his almost constant observations of life’s minutiae.

Ben got a Mars out. Unwrapped it slow, more than what was natural.

Fucking nail varnish though – that white stuff what made out like it weren’t meant to show, but it was.

Rosie, the spiky sister, is the main focus of the book. Much of the story concentrates on her relationship with Alex, a rather earnest middle-class substance misuse worker. About a third of the way through, the dynamic between the pair is explored.

She offered him the glass, but when he went to take it, instinctively she refused to let go; he swore under his breath but leaned forward to sip as she held it. Rosie wiped her thumb across his lips.

                        ‘Thank you’.

Soon, their domination-submission dynamic is expressed sexually. Freeborn writes this aspect very believably; it’s far from the millionaire-in-sex-dungeon stuff. Instead, it’s often messy and instinctual, Rosie and Alex getting off on everyday circumstances such as muddy walks as well as via their more theatrical situations. Curiously, few of these scenes are really sexually explicit. I wonder, if Freeborn was writing Three Blind Mice in a post-Fifty Shades world, whether she would have written (or been encouraged to write) in a more detailed and overtly erotic prose style.

The hurt gleefully suffered by Alex is in contrast to the fate of the most interesting character in the book for me, Ben. Ben is Darren’s friend, and has been in love with Rosie for as long as he can remember (although has never got anywhere with her). He’s not a particularly pleasant person – racist and sexist, to start with – but has flashes of self-awareness and real poignancy.

At this rate, him and Spence’d end up two lonely old gits, off down The Mice every night with no-one giving a toss if they got off their heads.

Mixed up with Darren in the shadowy criminal netherworld, he suffers a horrific facial injury. Unlike the middle-class Alex, he’s not playing at pain, and nor can he cover up his wounds.

He touched the scars. Felt horrible, they did, like he was growing extra skin, with lumps underneath it. Him and Spence had took the piss something chronic out of Paul Carter for his acne at school, even now he was called Crater Face. They’d call him [Ben] something soon, if they never already.

            […]

            ‘Rosie, what do they call me?’

She never made out for one second like she didn’t know what he was on about.

‘Frankenstein,’ she said. Looked right at him. ‘Franky. Won’t be long before they’re calling you it to your face.’

Like my uncle with his leisurely eating habits, then.

Ben’s own family comes second very much to how he feels about Rosie and Darren; they are his people, his safe space in the world, even though his involvement with them ends up being far from safe.

And that’s, I suppose, how I want to wind up this rather rambling post, a post that (sorry) has been far less about the book and far more about my own tricky few days. For Naomi has been a very good friend to me over the last near-decade. Absolutely unshockable, she rallies round during difficult times, and her help does more than to tackle the problem in hand. I’ve always believed in myself that extra half an inch after a conversation with her.

For years now I’ve seen more of friends like Naomi than of any family member. So, friends, family: the distinction is a matter for semantics.

Week Twenty - Jeanette

The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde (2001)

Recommended by Alix

My hands were shaking.

I’d been interviewing Steven Collins of The Owl Service for Seasons They Change. Halfway through the conversation, I realised my purse had been stolen. Somehow I managed to complete the interview; very surreal talking of Blood On Satan’s Claw and Vashti Bunyan’s comeback while knowing someone might be racing to the nearest Rhythm ‘n’ Booze for a case of Remy Martin on your dollar.

Outside the pub, I called Alix. ‘I don’t know what to do,’ I burbled. I was staying with Alix and her husband Malcolm. ‘I just don’t know what to do’. I didn’t. My security walls were always so high, and I couldn’t believe they’d been breached.

Alix, her voice rock solid, checked that I had enough money to get back to hers (I did; the compassionate Steven had loaned me the fare), advised me to go directly to my bank to cancel my cards, then told me to come right back. That night, she and Malcolm took me to one of their favourite foodie pubs, where the chef too was kind; he kept cooking after the advertised time, and didn’t mind having a vegan sprung on him.

That incident definitely intensified the friendship between Alix and I. Since then, we’ve supported one another over various creative projects, and we’ve even been jilted brides in a video together:

(Alix is a professional actor. I am not. It shows: while she creates a character, I fall off the bottom of a child’s slide and flash my knickers.)

Alix and I have talked of our mutual love for the great English novelists on several occasions. I wonder if that was something behind her recommendation of The Eyre Affair: a nerd’s paradise for Jane Eyre fans that masquerades as a detective story.

I’ve read Jane Eyre but once, and a long time ago. I personally prefer Charlotte Bronte’s last novel, Vilette, yet Jane Eyre is so very striking that I remember a huge amount of the plot, purpose and imagery of it. This was a real help when reading The Eyre Affair; in fact, I’d say it’s essential to have a basic knowledge of Jane Eyre, and ideally a hearty love for it, to appreciate much of this book (and especially towards the end).

The Eyre Affair is set in a quasi-parallel England where supervillain Acheron Hades runs riot, dodos have been recreated, and (more unbelievably) the government is prepared to fund a department devoted to protecting literary integrity. This, SO-27, is where Thursday Next works. She chases Hades as he steals the Martin Chuzzlewit and Jane Eyre manuscripts, penetrates their worlds, disrupts their plots, and kidnaps their characters.

Within twenty seconds of Jane’s kidnapping the first worried member of the public had noticed strange goings-on around the area of page one hundred and seven of their deluxe hide-bound edition of Jane Eyre. Within thirty minutes all the lines into the English Museum were jammed.

In the age of Kindle, this is a very interesting idea. As we travel ever more towards the all-electronic reading experience, what is to stop a Nineteen Eighty-Four-ish control of text in this way? After all, that’s what happened to ancient works. We’re at the mercy of what survives, or what controlling forces choose to let survive. This makes Fforde’s choice of Jane Eyre, and Charlotte Bronte, especially biting. There is a never-proven rumour (first told to me by my sixth form English teacher) that Charlotte, jealous of Wuthering Heights, destroyed the manuscript of Emily’s second novel immediately after her sister’s death. If true, then Charlotte herself is a kind of Acheron Hades.

While it served the plot for Hades to be so overblown, I had a problem with Next’s character. Perhaps satire was Fforde’s intention (and her name does suggest it), but she is so much the spunky-yet-emotionally-vulnerable heroine that I found her, often, completely unrelatable. Her love interest, Landen Parke-Laine, is even worse, and I wish the romantic aspect of the book wasn’t in it at all. Perhaps Fforde thinks he’s created a new Mr. Rochester but, for me, Parke-Laine is both unbelievable and reprehensible. He’s happy to marry someone he doesn’t love, yet equally happy to call it all off for Next if she says the word. Of course, people do sometimes marry people that they don’t love, and don’t marry people that they do love, but I’d wager that this is a fearsomely complex process that almost never works out well. Next and Parke-Laine’s happy splashing in this very real emotional effluent seemed insulting.

(EDIT: I've thought a lot about this in the last few hours. I wondered, was I too guilty of 'happy splashing in very real emotional effluent' in the video I posted above? Being left at the altar (or leaving someone there) must be one of the most traumatic experiences of a life. All I can say is that I felt the video was cathartic, depicted a moment, and was celebratory of how women can help one another through a crisis, while I do feel Fforde's take on ill-advised marriage was insufferably glib.)

There are a lot of ideas in The Eyre Affair. It’s as if, once Fforde decided that he had to break the rules of physics to get people in and out of Victorian novels, he thinks what the hell and does anything he pleases with the rest of reality, too.

            ‘New car, Uncle?’
            ‘No, no,’ said Mycroft hurriedly. ‘I don’t drive. A friend of mine who hires these out was    lamenting about the cost of keeping two, one black for funerals and the other white for weddings – so I came up with this.’

He reached in a turned a large knob on the dashboard. There was a low hum and the car turned slowly off-white, grey, dark grey and then finally to black.

Some vignettes (as above) are charming. And, I’m sure for many tastes, this is the central appeal of the book: the reader is pelted with so many incongruities that it feels almost Pythonesque. However, much like my main criticism of Jonathan Carroll’s The Panic Hand back in week nine, it generally didn’t suit me. I felt sometimes as if I was sitting in Fforde’s brainstorming session rather than reading his novel. I would have loved to understand a bit more of Fforde’s philosophies on impermanence and state support for the arts, on reader interpretation and the culture of literary superfans, all of which were brought up in The Eyre Affair. But it simply felt Fforde would rather get on with his next bright idea.

I’m starting to sound like Andrei Tarkovsky, wanting things to be slower and duller.

To be fair to Fforde, he became more measured in the final Jane Eyre-fixated section, and I really did enjoy that. It would be interesting to know – as this is his first book, and he has written further Thursday Next adventures – what happens to his style. I suspect the multicoloured chaos will ramp up, and that would be a shame for me, because I like him best when he calms down and looks around Thornfield Hall for a while.

Week Nineteen - Jeanette

 Zona by Geoff Dyer (2012)

Recommended by Andrew

‘I’m off to see Tarkovsky’s Stalker tonight’, Andrew texted me last summer. He was in Edinburgh, spending some time at the festival.

‘Oh, Stalker!’ I replied. ‘I have opinions about Stalker. “Enjoy”.’

I shared those opinions when I next saw him. I considered Stalker overlong and indulgent: a great concept frittered away by a director too in love with his own visuals and not with his audience. I related an anecdote that, to me, summed it up: I’d been watching the film, got bored, gone off to make a cup of tea, came back, and exactly the same shot was still on the screen.

Fast forward a few months, and Andrew recommends me Zona, Geoff Dyer’s recent book about his love affair with Stalker. I’m going to have to watch the bleeder again come May, I thought.

However, through Artificial Eye being useless and happily letting important films go out of print (don’t get me started on their treatment of Rainer Werner Fassbinder), Stalker is unavailable on DVD in the UK at the moment. So I did the next best thing; I rewatched another Tarkovsky movie, Mirror.

I first saw Mirror not long after Stalker and vastly preferred it (I’ve also seen Solaris, which I consider the worst of the three). Mirror probably has even less of a plot than Stalker, but there was a warmth to its images: without wishing to sound too pretentious (very difficult to avoid when talking of Tarkovsky), Mirror evoked the curious space of childhood memory and its impact on the present with great sophistication and candour. I liked it even better on a second viewing.

Immediately, in Zona, Geoff Dyer addresses my moans about Stalker.

By any standards it’s a slow start to a movie. Officials from Gosinko, the central government agency for film production in the USSR, complained about this, hoping the film could be ‘a little more dynamic, especially at the start.’ Tarkovsky erupted: it actually needed to be slower and duller at the start so that anyone who had walked into the wrong theatre would have time to leave before the action got under way. Taken aback by the ferocity of this response, one of the officials explained that he was just trying to see things from the audience’s point of view… He was not able to finish. Tarkovsky couldn’t give a toss about the audience.

So I was right about the Tarkovskian arrogance towards the paying public! But how about that static shot when I went off to get a cup of tea?

Often, in Tarkovsky, when we think something is still it’s not; at the very least, the frame is contracting or expanding slightly, almost as if the film were breathing.

Pah. One-all.

Dyer broadly sees the total lack of interest in a cinema audience as a plus point for ol’ Tarkers: it’s exactly because of that attitude Stalker is the achievement it is. Although mostly Dyer was persuasive as to his argument, he annoyed me at one stage:

At first there can be a friction between our expectations of time and Tarkovsky-time and this friction is increasing in the twenty-first century as we move further and further away from Tarkovsky-time towards moron-time in which nothing can last – and no-one can concentrate on anything – for longer than about two seconds.

This may very well have a kernel of truth in it, yet Dyer’s tone and use of ‘moron-time’ smacks of unpleasant superiority. This was its most obvious example, yet there were other hints that Dyer occasionally didn’t care about his audience, either.

Zona – and I suspect this was the reason Andrew recommended the book to me, rather than simply to argue by proxy about Stalker – is part-autobiography. Dyer not only considers his relationship with the film, but how its various ideas and imagery offer insight into his own history.

The football pools: that, for many British people, was their equivalent of the Room, the thing that would make all their wishes come true. ‘All I’d like to do,’ my mum said with a mixture of pride and humbleness, ‘is go down to the supermarket and buy the nicest piece of steak there. That’s all I want.’

Reading these bits, which increase in frequency as the book goes on, was great, and really helped me understand why Dyer loved the film, and perhaps, also, why I did not. It seems to me that if we only admire a movie for its innovation or beauty, cinema wouldn’t work the way it does, and none of us would have a favourite movie at all, even. But those treasured films, those that do touch us deeply, they set in motion a special chemical reaction. Their content pings off our own yearnings or regrets, loves or hatreds. It’s easy when writing – or speaking – of a film to neglect this, perhaps because we don’t think others will be interested, perhaps because we don’t want to unpick our own muddled feelings, perhaps because its simply easier to praise (or criticise) an audaciously lengthy still shot than to analyse why it affects us so. And this is where I come back to Andrew: in the relatively short time I’ve known him, it’s been his unapologetic and intelligent capacity for introspection, along with an unusual and eloquent means of expressing it, that has had a striking effect on me.

So I can see why Zona has resonated with him. Dyer explicitly applies his own narrative to Stalker, and sometimes this means the structure of the book is messy – many will be frustrated with the digressions via footnotes, everything from a bitch about Lock, Stock And Two Smoking Barrels to missed opportunities for ménage a trois – but I found it a price worth paying. Zona has much more in common with House Of Leaves than, say, with a coolheaded Cahiers Du Cinéma anthology.

Another text from Andrew (yesterday):

            If we ever find a copy of Stalker I demand a gala viewing.

And what did I reply? Has Zona convinced me to sit through it again?

            You’re so ON.

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 Seventeen - Jeanette

The Sisters Brothers (2011) by Patrick deWitt

Recommended by Craig

Fresh from university, what is an English Literature graduate to do?

Work in Oddbins, of course.

Ah, Oddbins. Already consigned to history. Part of a time when we used to go to different shops to buy different things, and where the people who worked in those shops knew about the stuff they were flogging. It seems unbelievably quaint already, but Oddbins really did care that its staff knew their wine: they’d put us on tasting courses, have events where we’d sample new vintages, and quietly accept the odd stock ‘irregularity’.

Craig was Assistant Manager at my branch of Oddbins, Notting Hill. He liked classic cinema and modern literature, he liked singer-songwriters and expensive whiskey. He had the world’s worst memory, but he could reel off scenes from minor Hitchcock movies, and he’d be accurate to the frame.

We hit it off very quickly.

Craig left Notting Hill for Manchester a few months later. I visited him. He had this gorgeous flat in Chorlton with high, high, ceilings and no curtains. It all felt very bijou, well apart from the person in the flat underneath playing The Verve’s Urban Hymns six times a day (no exaggeration). I made Craig a tape (tape!) of the best songs from Elliott Smith’s first three albums; I complained how Elliott had ‘gone rubbish’ with XO. We ate pancakes at a pancake house for breakfast.

We also watched films. Perhaps it was that weekend, or perhaps it was on a later occasion, Craig and I watched Fargo. I’d never seen it, and it was one of his favourites.

It was Fargo that kept coming back to me as I was reading The Sisters Brothers. Something in its manner, its language, its imagery (and, of course, the thought of Craig).

I felt a sharp pain at the long toe of my left foot. I upended and tapped at the heel of the boot, expecting a nettle to drop, when a large, hairy spider thumped to the ground on its back, eight arms pedalling in the cold air.

The Sisters Brothers concerns Eli (who narrates) and Charlie Sisters, two feared hitmen in the American frontiers of the 1850s, a time of gold rush and lawlessness. The pair work for the Commodore, and he has ordered the death of Hermann Warm. As is standard for the Commodore, he doesn’t tell his henchmen what the unfortunate Warm has done, and this is increasingly troubling to Eli.

Despite his profession, Eli is a sensitive man. He has a loyal relationship with his good-natured but useless horse, Tub, and refuses to be rid of him, even when Tub is aged and brain-damaged. Eli is also self-conscious about his weight, and forces himself onto a hated diet.

I ate a small portion of eggs and beans and was still very hungry when I was finished. I sat looking at the greasy plate, wishing, frankly, to lick it.

                […]

The boy returned and asked if I wanted anything more before paying up. ‘Fresh pie this morning,’ he said.

                ‘What kind of pie?’ I demanded. I thought, don’t let it be cherry.

                ‘Cherry,’ said the boy.

These aspects of The Sisters Brothers could easily turn Eli, and the book itself, into something cuddly and safe. But he, and it, is neither. Violence jolts through the brothers’ quest, and Eli is as much a willing part of that as Charlie is.

Charlie himself is hard to like at the start, for he seems to exploit his younger brother, blindly follow the Commodore’s instructions, and rob and kill without compunction. But he has the driest humour, and soon I became very fond of Charlie, too.

‘What’s that? You’re not smiling are you? We’re in a quarrel and you mustn’t under any circumstances smile.’ I was not smiling, but then began to, slightly. ‘No,’ said Charlie, ‘you mustn’t smile when quarrelling. It’s wrong, and I dare say you know it’s wrong. You must stew and hate and revisit all the slights I offered you in childhood.’

The first half of the book is comprised mainly of vignettes such as these: scrapes on the brothers’ way to tracking down Hermann Warm. But when they find their target, the tone of the book changes. The brutality had been plentiful, casual and bloody up to this point. Now it is charged with deep philosophical questions, as Eli and Charlie realise why they’ve been told to murder Warm. The differences between the two halves of the book is akin to the contrast between the kaleidoscope gore of The Evil Dead and the depressing savagery of Henry: Portrait Of A Serial Killer. Sometimes, with a narrative shift such as this, it can seem as if the author is belatedly trying to tack on a measure of depth to a story, but here it’s exactly the opposite. It feels natural, if upsetting, that the story goes where it does: again, this is something that the Coen Brothers, at their best, are extremely good at.

The other clear reference point for me was Deadwood. I watched the first season of this a couple of years back, and once I got over thinking ‘it’s Lovejoy!’ every time Ian McShane appears, I thought it was fan-fucking-tastic.

'That's what the fuck life is, one vile fucking task after another.'

Yes, DeWitt likes Deadwood very much.

However, I think The Sisters Brothers has a wider appeal than Deadwood, even. It’s readable, it’s got ballast, it revels in moments of black farce and its characters – even the minor ones – are extraordinarily vivid. I can’t think of any literary comparisons for this book; partly this is due to my ignorance of the Western genre, but also its something in the book itself.

I bet this will be a film, and probably an Oscar contender. Read it before the 'now a major motion picture' cover makes you too embarrassed to.