A literary barbarian

I was talking to an English graduate the other day. She prides herself on her discerning literary taste. She asked me what I was reading.

“Comics, mostly.”

A disapproving frown. “Are you serious?”

“I’m very serious. I spend a lot of money every month on comics.”

“Do you collect them?”

“No, I read them.”

Her eyebrows were knitted in concern. “What kind of comics?”

“My favourite is Conan the Barbarian.”

“What? Is he like an alter ego? Big, brawny… Is that how you wish you were?”

“It’s because it’s based very closely on the original stories. The adaptations are very good and the art work is superb.”

I often come across this prejudice about Conan and comics. Before I’d read any Conan stories I’d heard that Robert E. Howard had a cult following. ‘Cult’ usually means not very big. But many of his stories are still in print and very easy to find. That suggests there is still a widespread demand for them, which isn’t bad considering that they were written for disposable pulp magazines 80 years ago. Maybe ‘huge’ is a better word than ‘cult.’

I started to defend the Conan stories as examples of vigorous, thrilling prose and startling imagery. But I could see the literature graduate was unimpressed. Her eyes became hot and rebellious. Her cheeks flushed. Her brows remained steadfastly knitted.

When I learned, years ago, that there were weird literary cliques who curated museums and academies dedicated to the life and works of Robert E. Howard and brought out editions of his letters, I never imagined I would ever find myself being grateful to them. Surely, if a writer is any good, he should be read, not hoarded in a museum.

But Dark Horse publish extracts from Howard’s letters in the Conan comics and they’re always fascinating to read. I can’t help being driven to learn more about the man who produced these passionate stories.

But I bit my tongue. Some people will never be convinced. I’d rather read than proselytise.

“And what about you?” I asked her to change the subject. “What have you been reading?”

“Oh, I haven’t picked up a book in fifteen years,” she said.

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What I really look like

It’s not often people get to see me with my shirt off.

It’s not that I’ve got anything to hide. It’s just that I suffer from benign British reserve.

It’s funny how these cultural things work. You grow up surrounded by certain values and assumptions and – it’s hardly surprising really – you adopt them as your own.

It’s not very British to blow your own trumpet or flaunt what you’ve got. At least it wasn’t during my impressionable teenage years. Maybe things have changed.

We’ve been influenced by America where hiding what you’ve got is practically a crime.

I was chatting to a German this week. He works for a Swiss company in New York and was over in London for a week. He told me the women in New York are very forthright. I kind of knew this already because I’ve seen every episode of Sex and the City at least three times. He said if you go into a bar in New York, women approach you for sex. But you have to pass certain tests. One is having a fat wallet and a lean body. The other is having a great job. The third is having the ambition to get an even better job.

If women are really like that in New York then, if I’d grown up there, I would probably still be a virgin.

Or would I?

It could be that I’d have become the chief executive of a global company and have the body of Jared Leto (see picture.) Because cultural expectations rub off.

On the way to meeting my German friend I was listening to some frenetic rock music in my car. (It’s because I got it free in a magazine.) I found myself jumping in my seat like a metalhead on crack. I even started to become a touch impatient with my fellow drivers.

Earlier in the day I was reading an article in my favourite British newspaper, The Guardian, about how we become like the characters in the novels we read.

By the way, the comments on that article, if you’ve time to read them, are typically British, like this one from timbo1211.

After reading Slaughterhouse 5 I developed a distrust of linear models of chronology. I say after reading Slaughterhouse 5, it was really before, during, and after.

This is glaringly obvious really. You don’t need to pay a psychology professor to work it out for you. Reading good books makes you a better person and reading bad ones turns you into a vampire.

I’d like eternal youth but I don’t want to suck anyone’s blood in order to enjoy it. Luckily, there’s an easier way. Matt Posner and Jess C. Scott have just written a brilliant new book called Teen Guide to Sex and Relationships.

I’m going to read it and I’m hoping to shed at least thirty-five years.

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The Last Argument of Kings

Ultima Ratio Regum

One of the things that impresses me most about The First Law trilogy by Joe Abercrombie is his erudite use of quotations.

The Blade Itself comes from Homer. Before They Are Hanged comes from Heinrich Heine and The Last Argument of Kings comes from the cannons of Louis XIV.

I am now about half way through The Last Argument of Kings, which is the final book in the trilogy, so I feel qualified to comment finally, though I tend to be a bit dismissive of reviews written by people who haven’t finished the book they are reviewing. Have you seen those reviews on Amazon that start “I just ordered this book today and can’t wait to start reading it, so … 5 stars!!”

I have been reading these books for about three years, so I have had a bit longer to think about them than that. But I suppose one thing people always wonder about when they embark on a 1500 page epic is, “will I be disappointed by the ending?”

I can’t answer that question because I haven’t reached the ending but I am very much enjoying getting there.

In fact, one of the reasons it has taken me three years to almost read all three of these books is that they are so pleasurable. I come from a very hard-working family where pleasure was always looked upon askance. Reading was a serious business, at the end of which you had to have something to show for it. What I had to show for it was a university degree. Then a career as an English teacher, which is ancient history now, I’m glad to say.

Which is just as well, because a knowledge of ancient history comes in useful when seeking pleasure in the work of a writer who quotes Homer.

After the erudite quotations, what impresses me most about these books is the immersive narrative voice. It gets you from the very first paragraph of the first chapter of the first book, wittily entitled The End.

Logen plunged through the trees, bare feet slipping and sliding on the wet earth, the slush, the wet pine needles, breath rasping in his chest, blood thumping in his head. He stumbled and sprawled onto his side, nearly cut his chest open with his own axe, lay there panting, peering through the shadowy forest.

You don’t know who Logen is but already you have become him. You are there, immersed in the sensory experience of what it feels like to be running, somewhat clumsily and out of breath, through a damp forest. Joe Abercrombie must write like this naturally because he has managed to sustain it effortlessly across more than 1500 pages and dozens of characters.

It is this quality of being immersed in another world, in other sensations, that makes reading so pleasurable. It is what makes it such a deep pleasure. Because in being immersed like this in another person’s world, you inhabit that person’s skin, you learn empathy, your feelings are changed and your opinions about the world can change too.

But there is no didactic message in Joe Abercrombie’s work. The Guardian even called it “delightfully twisted and evil.”

Over the Easter Holiday I’m afraid I lay in bed late with nothing in particular to do except read and enjoy a delightfully twisted episode in The Last Argument of Kings in which three Northerners crept up on a witch while Logen battled an enchanted monster called Fenris the Feared. And I have nothing whatsoever to show for it except a very relaxed and satisfied frame of mind and this somewhat lacklustre entry in my blog.

If forced to make a comparison, I would have to say it’s a bit like The Iliad, with some Beowulf thrown in, but more ironic, a lot longer and without the English Literature degree at the end of it. Although, as I said, I haven’t yet reached the end of it, so maybe there is a surprise in store.

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Are you afraid of the beasts in the Amazon jungle?

There are many good books out there but I am having trouble finding them. Ever since I came across Jess C. Scott’s teenage blog novel, Eyeleash, I’ve known that some very talented writers will emerge from the epublishing revolution.

The trouble is, so many bad ones are overwhelming them.

The marketing tactics used by some of the bad writers show enormous creativity. It’s frustrating that their creative energy doesn’t get channelled into their books. I don’t doubt that these authors are working very hard. But their methods in some cases are so fraudulent that I’m surprised they’re legal.

Amazon seems to encourage the worst of them. Anything that sells books is OK with Amazon.

So for readers it is becoming more and more important to have an expert guide with you when venturing into the Amazon jungle.

One such guide, I’ve discovered, is book blogger Vanessa Wu, who writes very readable reviews. Unlike many bloggers, she is not there just to serve indie writers. She reviews a whole range of authors, from Jane Austen to Stephen King and her insights are both witty and incisive. The indie authors she singles out are well worth investigating, I’ve found.

Of course, it’s a little off-putting that her focus is on erotica which, being a respectable English gentleman, I don’t read. But it would be a great shame if, like Henry James’s character, John Marcher, we wasted our lives and denied ourselves the greatest pleasures because we were afraid of the Beast in the Jungle.

The picture is a famous optical illusion. Can you spot the hidden tiger? It helps if you can read.

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Oh no, a total stranger has posted a review!

The other day I was reading the blog of a writer who has published her novel on Amazon.

I have been following her blog for about two years so I know her novel underwent a great deal of polishing. The first chapter alone must have been rewritten about fifteen times.

As you might expect, it got some great 5 star reviews.

“a terrific book”

“nothing short of amazing”

“an awesome read”

“I was addicted from the very beginning”

“a truly talented author”

Then a couple of 1 or 2 star reviews appeared. The author was livid. “People I don’t even know are reviewing it,” she railed on her blog.

They accused her characters of being immature.

The author wrote a lengthy defence of her book (in another 5 star review) in which she proved that she was as immature as her characters.

The reviewers responded:

“plain awful”

“woefully immature”

“underdeveloped”

“messy”

“a terrible, terrible book”

“the worst I’ve read in years”

This proves that there is no point giving some people advice. You can polish your book endlessly. You can network in all the right places. You can guest blog and solicit reader comments. You can spend years building your author platform and then, when your book is finally published, you can totally destroy yourself.

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The Black Company

A civilising text

One of the problems with listening to audio books is that it’s not so easy to quote them in your blog.

Currently I am listening to The Black Company by Glen Cook. It has some fine sentences in it. The words are very well chosen. The vocabulary is advanced yet unostentatious. Mr Cook eschews ornamentation. He prefers to be visual, visceral and direct.

In this it serves my purpose well. I don’t read for idle entertainment but to stimulate my imagination and keep my literary senses sharp. I have a fear of shrinking into inarticulate taciturnity.

This was a theme in The Virginian, which I finished last week. That was also an audio book, though I must admit I also downloaded it as an ebook on Stanza. It was quite helpful to have the text to refer to. I re-read the first quarter of the book because I was a little confused after the first listen. My mind had wandered at some of the crucial moments and I missed some pivotal interactions.

I also wanted to quote from The Virginian but, even though I had the ebook, I couldn’t find the sentences that struck me as memorable. And now I have forgotten them completely.

But I do remember that Molly helped draw out The Virginian’s true character by encouraging him to read Shakespeare and Jane Austen, much as Cathy helped tame and civilise Hareton in Wuthering Heights.

So now The Black Company is civilising me.

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Contemporary style

Keanu Reeves as Johnny Mnemonic

Recently I bought a collection of short stories called Pulse by Julian Barnes. He’s a writer who receives very good reviews in the British press and I’d often wanted to read one of his novels after seeing it favourably reviewed in this or that newspaper or hearing someone talk about it on television but somehow, after browsing through his books in bookshops, I lost interest and he dropped down on my list. This time I didn’t browse his book in a bookshop because I’ve more or less stopped buying books and in any case I don’t like to buy hardcover books, which this is. Instead I downloaded the audio book and I listened to the first story of the collection. I was very glad to be able to get the audio book. There is even an ebook version, which shows the publisher is trying, like the author, to have a finger on the pulse of contemporary Britain, even though it’s clear we can never cure publishers of this old-fashioned habit of trying to sell us unwieldy expensive hardbacks when all we want is a convenient throwaway paperback.

The story I listened to is inarguably contemporary. It makes several topical references to the way life is changing in Britain – beach huts selling for £30,000 and the huge influx of people from Eastern Europe, for example. But the story seems from another age to me. The narrator is middle-aged, a little dull, and very old-fashioned. His sentences are insipid. The language is lifeless and uninteresting.

So next I switched to Johnny Mnemonic by William Gibson from his collection called Burning Chrome. These stories were first published in Britain in 1986 and I read them in 1988. I read them after Neuromancer because I was so impressed by Neuromancer that I wanted something more by the same author. Their publication was no doubt a cynical move by the publisher cashing in on a successful debut novel but in this case it was justified by the quality of the stories. Johnny Mnemonic is a very sharp piece of writing and feels much more contemporary than Pulse. It’s not because it’s science fiction, it’s because the way Gibson writes is so very modern. Both Barnes and Gibson set part of their stories in some sort of café; it’s their styles, not their settings that are worlds apart.

Here is the first sentence of Johnny Mnemonic.

“I put the shotgun in an Adidas bag and padded it out with four pairs of tennis socks, not my style at all, but that was what I was aiming for: If they think you’re crude go technical; if they think you’re technical, go crude.”

A few paragraphs later, the shotgun is alluded to again, elliptically.

“Pardon me. Pardon me, friends. Just Eddie Bax here, Fast Eddie the Importer, with his professionally nondescript gym bag, and please ignore this slit, just wide enough to admit his right hand.”

More paragraphs go by, packed with distracting detail. Then Eddie needs to use the shotgun. Unfortunately, he can’t. He is the victim of a neural disruptor.

“I put everything I had into curling the index finger of my right hand, but I no longer seemed to be connected to it. I could feel the metal of the gun and the foam-padded tape I’d wrapped around the stubby grip, but my hands were cool wax, distant and inert.”

I love all the physical detail. Foam-padded tape. Stubby grip. Cool wax. But it is not there purely for our pleasure. Many more paragraphs go by, we are treated to many more distracting details, and then finally, Eddie pulls the trigger. But we are not told he pulls the trigger. We don’t need to be told because the ground has been prepared so carefully.

“I brought the gym bag up, and my hand convulsed. The recoil nearly broke my wrist.”

This is the essence of modernity. Allusiveness, surprise, physicality, shock. But with an economical elegance. Cinematic precision. Explosive inevitability. This is why William Gibson is so good.

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This guy is scary

An uncompromising artist

Whenever I see a new book by China Miéville, I panic. I remember reading an interview with the great novelist in which he said he gave up work in order to write. If you have a job, you can’t write. I suppose if you are a revolutionary socialist from hippy parents you can get away with this. But as it turned out, he now makes a very good living from his writing. And I, who gave up being a writer in order to advance the collapse of global capitalism through my efforts in the lower echelons of the banking industry, have to be content with only the partial success of my revolutionary goals, as seen in the recent international banking crisis.

The reason I panic when I see another one of China’s books is that it reminds me how busy my life has become. Too busy to do what I enjoy. I would like to read all his books but I’ve only read two of them. I wish he would slow down and publish them less frequently. Not that he rushes, I’m sure, for his books are exquisite works of art.

When I first read one of China’s books, I was sure his name was a fabrication. I thought he might even be a professional consortium. It didn’t seem natural that any one man should know so many fine words, have such a terrific imagination and yet have such a masterful grasp of structure.

But I was wrong.

My parents were hippies, and the story is that they went through a dictionary looking for a beautiful word to name me. They nearly called me Banyan, but flipped a few pages on and reached “China,” thankfully. The other reason they liked it is that “china” is Cockney rhyming slang for “mate.” People say “my old china,” meaning “my old mate,” because “china plate” rhymes with “mate.”

So China is real. His books are real. And every time I see another one I panic.

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Watcher of the skies

Galileo watching the skies above Venice

I’m missing those short, pithy, poignant, saucy, thrilling James Bond books I was reading earlier in the year. What on earth made me download 37-hours-and-26-minutes’ worth of Part One of Peter F. Hamilton’s Commonwealth Saga called Pandora’s Star?

I only knew it was part one by looking up Peter F. Hamilton on Wikipedia and Amazon. Audible in the UK had had part two, Judas Unchained, available for download for some time before part one appeared. In fact, until recently, Judas Unchained was one of only a handful of English science fiction novels available on Audible in the UK. Otherwise I would probably never have considered downloading it. Needless to say, I did consider it. But when I looked it up, a reviewer on Amazon said I would find it incomprehensible if I hadn’t read Pandora’s Star.

So I waited.

I was so desperate to listen to some science fiction by a living English author. All the other books I’d heard of that I wanted to read weren’t available on Audible in the UK. So you can imagine my excitement when Pandora’s Star finally appeared. I had given up expecting to see it.

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken.

That was roughly 23 hours ago. 23 hours of listening time, that is. Or about three weeks of normal time.

I say normal time, but when you’re immersed in a science fiction novel with this kind of epic sweep, time is an elusive concept. In fact most of the concepts in the novel are elusive. Perhaps this is what some people call hard-core science fiction, meaning people like me with a background in the arts and humanities have no chance of understanding any of the science in it.

But there is a story in there too. Somewhere. If you can remember who all the characters are. Actually, I can remember because I have been noting them down while listening. Well, you’ve got to find something to do. 37 hours and 26 minutes is a long time.

I’m not sure what motivates a person to write a novel of this length. Or twice this length, to give him his due. Presumably he spent considerably more time writing it than I am spending listening to it. In fact I may have already spent more time listening to it than I spent writing my own novel this year. Let me do some sums in my head…

No, that is an exaggeration. I have spent considerably longer than 23 hours writing my novel, but, owing to my background in the arts and humanities, I am unable to do the sums in my head that would give you the precise figure for that.

But the conclusion is probably going to be the same as last year: I need to spend more time writing. Something like Pandora’s Star is way out of my orbit, but maybe I can manage 7 hours or so of novel if I knuckle down and get on with it.

Maybe it’s time to make another of those valuable New Year’s Resolutions.

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Quicksands

Sybille Bedford

I love it when books come alive and talk to you and enable you to experience things that you could never have experienced without them. That’s what has happened with the biography of Ian Fleming by Andrew Lycett.  It is full of surprising details.

One of the details led me to search out some books by Sybille Bedford, who I’d never heard of. The most alluring of these is her memoir, published in 2005 and called Quicksands.

Sybille writes eloquently about her uncompromising ambition to be a writer, her failures, her frustration, her missed opportunities.

I had reached the age of twenty-nine when typescript number three was turned down by Chatto and by NY Harpers and this, except for a little journalism, brought me to a stop for — I must face it — many years. These and other long fragments of the life I wasted in not working lie heavy on me, and now, in the 2000s when lost time is irretrievable, I am often overcome by regret and disbelief. Oh what has remained undone by sloth, discouragement, and of course distractions… Distractions of living the siren song of the daily round — chance, often choice had led me to spend the squandered years in beautiful or interesting places: to learn, to see, to travel, to walk in nocturnal streets, swim in warm seas, make friends and keep them, eat on trellised terraces, drink wine under summer leaves, to hear the song of the tree-frog and cicada, to fall in love… (Often. Too often.)

She led an eventful and unusual life. Here, in this candid, rambling, wise and beautiful memoir published in the year before she died, she invites us to share it all. This is what writing should be. Delightfully uninhibited, a celebration of life and friendship, utterly irresistible.

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