Spineless Reviews

Seek and destroy

The Demolished Man, by Alfred Bester

£6.99, Gollancz (1999)

We follow murderer Ben Reich and ESP-capable detective Lincoln Powell as they battle it out in twenty-fourth century America and in the timeless provinces of the human mind. Reich is an abnormality, a psychotic, who has hidden himself through tricks and bluffs from the sprawling organization of espers. The gifted have become, through Hippocratic principles, guardians of mankind’s psychology. If Reich is a first-class killer then Powell is a first-class ESPer, and to trap Reich will take first-class methods. Everything hinges on the motivation, which only the espers can divine. Can they get to Reich in time?

Science fiction arguably works better as a style rather than a genre—the pure desire to present fascinating ideas and scientific speculations is more suited to an encyclopædia than a novel, but by using those ideas as a medium and source of analogies for a story is a subtle balancing act that makes good, better, bester. That the The Demolished Man is a thriller, and a fast-paced, convoluted one at that, enjoyable and rich in detail and characters is undeniable; but that it’s SF? Well… SF definitely takes a back-seat at times, but if it weren’t along for the ride then where would the fun be?

The novel has aged badly in places. While Asimov can be forgiven for programming his spaceships with punched cards, making them charmingly Heath-Robinson, in fact, it’s hard to forgive Bester for concretizing pre-1950s psychology. Ascientific Freudian nonsense mapped out before your eyes—a telepath having highly literate conversations with someone’s preconscious, for example, or a trip through their ego, id and superego like the cheap special effects in Star Trek V—stumbles, and is stuffy and unconvincing. The more highfalutin reasons for risking so much to catch Reich are also, it must be said, nonsense: Reich killed someone, which nobody has done in mainstream society for years; why abstract it further when there’s no need?

But if it is nonsense (and the careful characterizations, fascinating cultural/technological interfacing, and otherwise watertight plot must surely rescue the rest from such a condemnation), it’s grand nonsense, blockbuster, rollicking, thumping, readable, enjoyable nonsense. If it’s nonsense, then let’s have more.

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The quill is mightier than the sword

The Porcupine, by Julian Barnes

£5.99, Picador (1993)

Every Julian Barnes book is different from the rest. Nonetheless, there is a particular method he returns to in order to drive the plot. He lets each character play out a rich, complex internal life in front of the reader to inform their often otherwise often inexplicable actions. It is this which lends a humanity to Barnes’ least human—and, in some stories, non-human—protagonists. In The Porcupine, a short story about the trial of fictional, deposed, Soviet-satellite leader Stoyo Petkanov, he uses this method to achieve the impossible: to make liberals fall in love with a communist Alf Garnett.

Petkanov is a totalitarian boor, a lost soul, a Kurtz that cannot be brought back from the darkness. Yet, as Martin Amis accomplishes in Time’s Arrow, Barnes forces us to examine our own morality through its mad inverted twin, which permeates Petkanov’s tirades against the running-dog upstarts who dare to question his rule. His world has fallen apart but he remains together—although not for long—and we feel the visceral heat of his coherent outrage. As Peter Solinsky, chief prosecutor under the new regime, tries to find a foothold for the intended public prosecution of the old dictator, the reader must face the imperfections of post-Soviet societies stripped of their capitalist rhetoric, and wince at the bitterness that Petkanov feels, when he remembers the chance he had had to rejuvenate and perhaps even save communism. Gorbachev, fucking Gorbachev, supposed hero of the cold war, broke his promise to Petkanov, Petkanov’s country, all of the Soviet Union and communism itself. Well, didn’t he, Petkanov demands?

If Arthur Koestler had had a more jesterly sense of humour, we would have had from him The Porcupine instead of Darkness at Noon. Koestler’s moral ambiguity stems from Rubashov’s own admission of his guilt, as part of a system immoral both as a whole and as its constituent individuals, and his later attempts to live, briefly, with himself; Barnes plays on the sympathy one feels, sitting outside this irredeemable old man. It’s a sympathy born of pity—he’s a pathetic figure, twisted in the absence of his moral compass—but the feeling itself stands as a testament to man’s eventual humanity to man.

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It’s good to talk

Talking it Over, by Julian Barnes

£6.99, Picador (1992)

Whose opinion do you trust, when three friendships become a ménage à trois that disintegrates catastrophically? Who is the victim and who is the perpetrator? Is there an innocent bystander, an unsuspecting accomplice, or a selfish socipath in their midst? Can any one character ever be described in such extremes, when everyone might be guilty or blameless to some degree? Julian Barnes attempts to answer, or at any rate pose, these questions in Talking it Over. His three narrators all speak in the first person, discussing their own versions of events, their reactions and calculations, and their readings of each other’s experiences: the last, with varying degrees of accuracy.

It’s an an illuminating portrayal of three incomplete personalities which, while forming a whole that’s just a little too big for the comfort of its component parts, would be unstable with any piece missing. But this method of contrasting first-hand accounts, while illuminating, has its own risks. Lengthy internal monologues have difficulties retaining emotional ambiguity. James Joyce and Mark Haddon both triumphed over the internal monologue’s literalization and crystallization of emotion: the one by sly, ungrammatical undercurrents of id; the other by the transformation of an emotional dysfunction into emotional tension. But while Barnes effortlessly causes the reader’s sympathy to move from one character to the next, by revealing some event or motivation that was never suspected, he nonetheless pins the sympathy in place after each move. We are in no doubt, on any given page, about who we should be rooting for, exactly how they are feeling and who is at fault; when the scene rearranges it quickly clears once more.

The characters, for all their development and internal coherence, often feel like two-tiered constructs, their structure designed specifically to illuminate the difference between how their outer surfaces are perceived and how their inner selves suffer. And there’s much that Barnes doesn’t address here that Beckett’s Endgame covers admirably, even if Barnes is far more accessible. Still, Talking it Over is written with Barnes’ typical and accomplished skill for characters and dialogue, and an attention to detail that serves him well as—almost as editor of these three personal accounts—he juxtaposes opinion with opinion so as to try to approach the truth. Whatever that might be.

posted at: 12:28 | path: / b / ba-be / barnes_julian | permanent link to this entry

A tangled web

Silk, by Alessandro Baricco

£3.99, Harvill Press (1998)

The breeding of silkworms was once a secret closely guarded by a Japanese elite. Western traders, such as Hervé Joncour, would rarely be offered even the fertilized eggs; when they were, it would be strictly at a certain stage of gestation, and the race would be on to return before the eggs hatched. In such a manner does Joncour spend his days, following the trade routes to the Orient and back on a timescale of seasons and years. Then he finds himself falling in love with the conccubine of Hara Kei, his Japanese contact. His whole world is seized with a great tremor, and when the dust has settled nothing will be the same again.

While writing Silk, Baricco probably had in mind that he was putting together a stylish novel; this self-consciousness has created a rather stylized one instead. The many quirks such as repetition and dwelling on details (the importance of which isn’t immediately obvious) veer between being evocative to being annoying and back, passing through endearing on the way. More difficult to digest than that, though, is the lead character. Joncour is presented as a thoughtful, taciturn man: we are expected to believe that dark currents move beneath his show of repose. But none of them are ever really alluded to, still less rise above the waves. His emotional reactions are tangential: practically unemotional.

A love story where, owing to narrative constraints, the central character could easily be autistic seems an ill-advised proposition. Indeed, it’s difficult to engage at all with Silk on a human level. Still, the conceit of a Western novel told in the cadences and rhythms of Japanese poetry is an exciting one, and there are many set pieces—Joncour’s journey across south-east Europe and Asia—that have a charm all of their own. If only the same could be said of the characters.

posted at: 21:02 | path: / b / ba-be / baricco_alessandro | permanent link to this entry

The father, the stroke and the holy mess

Three Stories, by Alan Bennett

£7.99, Profile (2003)

(This review appeared in the ReadReverb newsletter, Nov 11, 2005.)

A newly-invested vicar lets the funeral of a well-known masseur (both literal and euphemistic) get out of hand, as the congregation starts chipping in with their dirty stories. A middle-aged couple’s life is turned upside town, as their London flat is turned inside-out, swept clean by burglars and bringing on a seizure in the husband. A teacher’s father begins the long, quiet process of dying in his sleep while his family, and the ties within it, whirl and stretch and start to snap around him.

Each story in this anthology acts like a window into other people’s lives, and revel in the loose ends and commonplace, irksome complexities from which all of our own stories suffer. Each has also been fêted by the press, and rightly so: Bennett shows us what it’s like not just to be human, but to be other humans, to feel the itch of that person scratching over there and not just to perceive that they have an itch. And each story has its own individual arc and tempo: now pulling you along, now stopping to show you a detail, now involving you in the convolutions and complications.

Bennett sometimes dwells on details a little too much; a little gauchely, as the voices of the characters whose lives he is narrating suddenly leak out, and take over the telling from the otherwise disinterested voice of the author. But, as with his Talking Heads, such clumsiness could be just as studied as unintentional, and lends an endearing, conversational tone to what might otherwise be an unbelievable collision of circumstances. Ultimately every single word is engaged in the act of apologising for, indeed defending, people who any other writer might give up as inexcusable and indefensible; only the artist’s own giving-up, Bennett implies, has itself no defence.

posted at: 14:32 | path: / b / ba-be / bennett_alan | permanent link to this entry

Something from the security of every man’s life

Running Wild, by J G Ballard

£6.99, Flamingo (1997)

(This review appeared in the ReadReverb newsletter, April 14, 2006, and on the ReadReverb website)

That the task of shocking people becomes more difficult over time is a truism borne out, broadly speaking, by the trajectories of popular culture: yesterday’s X-rated films are today’s ironic artefacts; the antics of Kenneth Williams or Joe Orton are now interesting commentaries on their time; and books whose themes were once wholly beyond the pale are now ripe for discussion at A level. Nonetheless, it’s surprising to find that the disturbing plot twist of Running Wild, a foray by the iconoclastic Ballard into the world of the rich middle class, can be guessed halfway through the third page.

When the inactive CCTV cameras of a secure estate near Pangbourne are the mute witnesses of the brutal, organized killing of all the adults, and the abduction of their children, the desperate denizens of the Home Office call in a maverick psychiatric adviser to solve a problem which months of departmental work couldn’t crack. So far, so Lynda-La-Plante; but as the novella progresses it’s clear that this particular suspense thriller is hardly Saturday-night ITV fare. Indeed, the book strikes to the heart of that genre’s assumptions—all nonces are scum, the loose cannons are the true lawmakers, and if the guilty don’t get their just desserts then they’re at least verifiably guilty—and might cause the average viewer of The Bill to slam the book closed in horror, or at any rate write a jolly angry letter of complaint.

Unfortunately, the catch for Ballard is that the audience that might be genuinely disturbed by this, a deep excursion into the farthest reaches of id similar to the terrible revenge wrought by Saki’s Sredni Vashtar, are unlikely to read his books; those who appreciate a decent evening’s account of the churning, shifting sands upon which civilization’s trembling castle is built, on the other hand, are now so post-Paedogeddon that the writer needs to be either more subtle or more provocative than this. Even accounting for its age, this book was published at around the time when David Lynch was already exposing the rotten timber of the lower foot or two of America’s white picket-fences; while it’s far more approachable it’s also less bizarre and less dangerous than other examples of the genre. The biggest shock, therefore, is how unshocking it really is.

posted at: 19:15 | path: / b / ba-be / ballard_james_graham | permanent link to this entry

A photograph is a secret about a secret

Master Georgie, by Beryl Bainbridge

£6.99, Abacus (1999)

Beautiful George Hardy has never been alone. With some utterly undefineable charisma he is able to attract and then surround himself with a coterie of friends, quasi-servants and general hangers-on. The cerebral Dr Potter hovers around him, gradually exhausting Georgie’s good will and his purse. Meanhwile, poor Myrtle is so devoted to him that she has become an it that loves, while Pompey Jones, with his birth-bruised upper lip and a dark heart, knows he is closer to what Georgie really wants. Between them these three tell their stories, inextricably entwined with Georgie’s own, and punctuated by the drawn-out procedures that the taking of photographs demanded in the 19th century. Georgie is a force of nature, pulling them all along in his wake. But he couldn’t stop his father dying; he can’t deflect his own desires; and ultimately nothing will help him dodge whatever Crimean bullet bears his name.

At first glance this is a light book. Sparsely told, Myrtle’s first story (of six: two told by each companion) seems far lighter and simpler than the events that it portrays. But it soon becomes clear that Beryl Bainbridge spares not a single one of her sentences in this novel: each is necessary, a grain of oxidized silver that permits us eventually to see the full picture of these tragic, twisted lives. The more stories we read, the more the truth of the characters’ history is filled in, and we are given not merely the appearance of past events but also their sinister import. We gradually learn the truth about Potter’s dysfunctional marriage, Georgie’s friendship with Pompey, and the provenance of Georgie’s children. Always there is something more, some other dimension to the events already described, that change their aspect completely and leave the reader guessing: is this really the truth? Is the truth yet to come?

Indeed, despite the apparent simplicity, this book can perform arcane and legion magic tricks on the mind of the reader. Each chapter begins with a description of a photograph to be taken at some point before it ends, ironically summarizing some subtler aspect of the story. And the first time it switches voices between characters is a sublime event, so apparently effortless is the manoeuvre. The gradual dissolution of one narrator’s senses in the heat of war is terrifying in its sense of rationality falling unstoppably downhill. And as the dirty secrets of each character start to tumble out one by one, littering their understandings of each other, so too does the dirt and blood of war multiply and spread, filth piling upon filth, with our four characters scrabbling over the dead and dying to keep their heads above its level, still climbing, still devoted to Master Georgie, right up to the book’s cold, cold climax.

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The kitsching of the prevalent

The Pedant in the Kitchen, by Julian Barnes

£7.99, Atlantic (2004)

Cookery columns are cool. Just ask Alex Kapranos of art-indie band Franz Ferdinand, who wrote a number of articles for the Guardian about what he ate while touring. Fellow reluctant Guardian foodie (and much more besides) Julian Barnes wrote a series of similar pieces, with the theme of how the reluctant, easily confused newcomer deals with existing books on cookery, the specifics of ingredients and utensils, and the general hilarity which a fool and a pan can invoke. The resulting collection, novella-length, is gently and rather casually written, like the writings of James Fenton (another Guardianista) who Barnes cites. There are quasi-subversive references to the Big Mac and the Martha Stewart, and the now obligatory debunking of the myth of Mrs Beeton. Generally, though, Barnes’ confusion and wide-eyed amateurish fear is almost entirely sympathetic, and really quite funny. The book has a warm humour and an unthreatening charm that makes you wonder just how far Barnes has moved from the axis of Amis and Swift he once happily and edgily sat upon.

An illuminating if unexpected companion piece to The Pedant would probably be one of Jeremy Clarkson’s recent bound diatribes. Both authors have a unique tone and a recalcitrant fanbase who are more than happy to read anything written in the genre. Both authors write as prisoners of powerful, ubiquitous systems, the political views of which are anathema to the writers themselves: Clarkson sees wet liberals everywhere in society, restricting the freedoms of honest white male car-owning well-off folk; Barnes’ kitchen library is full of passive-aggressive authoritarian Tories, keen to maintain a Victorian culinary status quo and refusing to provide him with information precise enough to liberate him from the bondage of novicehood. Both then proceed to rail against these systems: Clarkson in his witless, anti-intellectual “common-sense” bombast, Barnes in an overanalytical, weedy, self-undermining whine.

And both, ultimately, are unwilling to resort to any action that might bring about the revolutions for which they seem to be longing. Both are happy to complain, berate, hold up for mockery and generally work themselves into emotional froths, so long as it gains them the audiences they crave. Their personal bêtes noires are also their vaches de cash, and to actually slay them would be financial and—if you like—artistic folly. Instead, they happily perpetuate the systems with which they have vitriolic, dysfunctional but ultimately lucrative relationships. Still, that’s life. Or, more pedantically, that’s entertainment.

posted at: 14:16 | path: / b / ba-be / barnes_julian | permanent link to this entry