Martin Martin's on the Other Side by Mark Wernham: do not buy this book

There's something about being ballsy enough to claim your first novel follows in the footsteps of A Clockwork Orange and 1984. It's a big claim to make and more important than anything else you do is to be bloody right about it. Mark Wernham wasn't right when he made that claim about his debut Martin Martin's on the Other Side. He's taken elements from all the dystopian classics, added a supremely stupid main character and created a novel that is poorly written, totally unbelievable and completely irritating. What's worse, this novel has the intelligence sucking properties of a black hole, an intellectual vacuum from which nothing can escape.

To cut a 300 page story short - it is the "not too distant future", Jensen Interceptor is a spy for the government. He's also an idiot. Jensen starts spying on a gang of zealots that believe a TV psychic from 40 years ago, Martin Martin, is actually God and will return to overthrow the oppressive government. Along the way he meets Martin Martin, or at least the spirit of a long dead soldier from WW2 who is inhabiting Martin Martin's dead body who tells him the government has planted a chip in his brain. I don't want to point out the obvious so early but a government that gets its information from studying the brain of a teenage moron should seriously rethink the quality of the information it's looking for.

Anyway, Jensen travels through time, vomits a lot, gets blown up, falls from a building, somehow gets laid, then everything goes back to normal. It is a clumsy rip off of all the other versions that have come before it. And I hate to point out the obvious about this male wank-fest but the only role women play in the novel is something to have sex with. Which I suppose puts Wernham's novel in good company but isn't appreciated nonetheless.

I enjoyed A Clockwork Orange. I enjoyed that although the main character was a violent thug, somehow he was constructed so we'd empathise with him. His dialect was a complex one and it remained consistent throughout the novel. I also enjoyed A Brave New World for its ability to tell a story so horrific in the most simplistic way imaginable. The language of both these novels embodied the stories they were telling, Clockwork was a world in which brutality was no less horrific for its various guises, New World was a world that embraced an infantile simplicity as a means of control.

Mark Wernham seems to have taken elements of both of these novels and completely misused them. In his vision of the "not too distant future" his main character is not a violent thug like Clockwork's Alex but is just purely mindless. Jensen lives in a hedonistic, misogynistic society that prizes drugs, orgies, porn, monster trucks and the status quo. He too narrates in his own individual style. But his style is what you'd hear in your average upper school classroom: "I was totally like fucking freaked out, you know?". That's not an edgy new voice, it's just irritating especially since Wernham is so conscious of using it. Take for example, this piece of wisdom:

"I start to get the feeling again. Not the scrapey achy-breaky feeling from all the violence that has been done to my bod thanks to the old death plunge on to the roof of the Old Bank, although that's there, right enough; and not the pukey yag-up feeling, although there's plenty of that too. No it's the swimmy feeling in the head that comes as the scenery's changing or someone dead's about to pop up and start chit-chatting with me. It's like when I talked to the lush caff lady and I Saw her story and how the gov fucked her lover over, shot him in his head - it's that feeling."

Yes. Quite.

The most annoying thing about it is that he isn't even consistent. In one of the most action packed parts of this tiresome and boring novel Wernham's has his main character drop his manner of speech just for convenience. I suppose Jensen's colloquial style was an effort to have him appeal to our sense of humour but he's so stupid you really just want to smack him in the face with a rock and be done with it. No matter how vile the world you're portraying is, unless there's something redeeming in the characters why would we care what happens to them? As Jensen would say "just fucking fuck it".

About a quarter through the novel I started to consider the possibility that this was a book designed for the lowest Year 10 English class that the teachers need to offer something with spies and explosions to if they hope to get the kids to read it. But there's too much swearing for upper school and too much juvenile humour for just about anyone so what Wernham's intention was other than ripping off past greats is beyond me. The most horrific thing is that one day someone might make a movie out of it. God help us.

In short not only do I regret spending the $32 to actually own this hideous appropriation of the English language but I hate that I also wasted a large chunk of my weekend having my intelligence insulted by it. I took a punt on a book with a ridiculous title and I'm paying the price. Don't you get caught in the same trap. Not that I'm into mind control or oppression but I sincerely recommend should you come across this book in the wild you hold a ritualistic book burning rather than actually open it. Society needs to be protected.

Post script: If anyone does want to read the novel, either out of morbid curiosity or to establish exactly how full of shit I am, I have a copy. Please, feel free to take it off my hands.

let me introduce you to Mickey Sabbath

"But now, preposterously, the morning hard-on was gone. The things one has to put up with in life. The morning hard-on - like a crowbar in your hand, like something growing out of an ogre. . .There eagerly waiting while you brush your teeth - "What are we going to do today?" Nothing more faithful in all of life than the lurid cravings of the morning hard-on. No deceit in it. No simulation. No insincerity. All hail to that driving force! Human living with a capital L! It takes a lifetime to determine what matters, and by then it's not there anymore. Well, one must learn to adapt. How is the only problem."

Actually, in Philip Roth's Sabbath's Theatre, it didn't take Mickey a lifetime to determine what mattered, he knew right away. Then, after the death of his brother in WW2 and the retreat of his mother into the tortured recesses of her own mind, Mickey went in for debauchery instead. He spent years from the age of 17 on the "Romance Run" as a merchant sailor, the route that included cities with the highest number of brothels per capita in the world. His first wife, damaged by her father, mysteriously disappeared. His second, equally damaged by her father, disappeared into alcoholism. His lover, a woman as licentious as he, dies. Finally, at the end of his life, alone, "wifeless, penniless, mistressless", without so much as a morning hard-on, Mickey wants nothing more than death himself.

Or does he? Because he's a puppeteer, our friend Mickey. He's been performing so long, even he can't tell the difference between the real tears and the crocodile. When he tells people about murdering his first wife, the reader starts to wonder what really happened. In fact, the only way you know he's telling the truth is when he doubts himself. He wants to die, but around every corner he is confronted by another reason to live. It is the masochist's nightmare, no matter how empty and dire his life is, it keeps failing to hit rock bottom.

"Fuck the laudable ideologies. Shallow, shallow, shallow! Enough reading and rereading of A Room of One's Own - get yourself The Collected Works of Ava Gardner. A tweaking and fingering, lesbian virgin, V. Woolf, erotic life one part prurience, nine parts fear - an overbred English parody of a borzoi, effortlessly superior, as only the English can be, to all her inferiors, who never took her clothes off in her life. But a suicide remember. The list grows more inspiring by the year. I'd be the first pupeteer.

The law of living: fluctuation. For every thought a counter thought, for every urge a counterurge. No wonder you either go crazy and die or decide to disappear. Too many urges, and that's not even a tenth of the story. Mistressless, wifeless, vocationless, homelesss, penniless, he steals the bikini panties of a nineteen-year-old nothing and, riding a swell of adrenaline, stuffs them for safekeeping in his pocket - these panties are just what he needs. Does no one else's brain work in quite this way? I don't believe that. This is ageing, pure and simple, the self-destroying hilarity of the last roller coaster. Sabbath meets his match: life. The puppet is you. The grotesque buffoon is you. You're Punch, schmuck, the puppet who toys with taboos!"

Everything I read about Roth as I started this book was along the lines of "not for the faint-hearted". Oh, yeah, ain't that the truth. Roth wants to toy with you, he wants to shock you. But then somehow he comes out with something brilliant and all is forgiven. Sabbath is totally unlikeable - but he's often honest, which makes up for a lot. Did that just contradict what I said earlier about him always performing? Well, best get used to that, Roth likes his contradictions. He chooses to flit between first person and third person, present tense and past tense, hopeful comedy and dire tragedy.

You're not supposed to like Sabbath but you empathise with him to an extent. You consider mortality through him, because a painful death couldn't happen to a more deserving person. Then, just as his complete moral and mental annihilation is complete, precisely when he's offended as much as he can possibly offend - death shies away. But the joke's on us, because somehow by the end of the novel, when he tells a son that pissing on his mother's grave while dressed in an American flag and a yarmulke was a "religious act", you just can't find it in yourself to hate him as much as you should. Sabbath's Indecent Theatre indeed.

The Line of Beauty

I have been doing an absolutely atrocious job on the mission I, among others in the blogging fraternity, embarked on at the tail end of last year to make our way through the winners of the Man Booker prize. Not only have I lost my list of the winners but I have failed to read a single one of them (excluding those I’ve read before obviously) until last week. Laziness is a curse, I know.

Last week, however, I was fortunate enough to pick up Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty and, gosh, wasn’t it pretty. The title refers to a phrase coined by William Hogarth in his rather famous The Analysis of Beauty to describe a certain S-bend that, in Hogarth’s mind, gave us a jolt of visual pleasure (well I’m paraphrasing but that’s my interpretation). This book gave me several jolts of not-so-visual pleasure.

Sceptics among you may suggest I only like this novel because it involves terribly English, terribly good looking boys having lots of sex and doing lots of drugs but, while I do appreciate all of these things, the book itself is so prettily written, delivering up absolute corkers of sentences that quite literally had me rereading them and rereading them in the hope of committing them to memory, that the hot sex and the drugs sort of fall away into the background. Even Margaret Thatcher’s presence about halfway into it – surely the perfect cold shower – failed to dent my appetite for this book.

Unintentionally or not the book also has parallels with that great favourite of mine The Great Gatsby: a narrator (called Nick) finds himself thrown together with the very rich and powerful and gets caught up in its pull. Except this time instead of the roaring 20s it’s the soulless 80s and instead of the elegant Gatsby we get politicians.

Strongly recommended if you’re into 1)boys, 2)elegant sentences 3)Henry James (yeah as with other Hollinghurst HJ is basically an unseen character in this book). I loved it.

Sign of the Times

I have become, god help me, quite a convert to The Times since my trip home. I'm being throughly spoiled. Firstly, the paper (and many other of its sister broadsheets) is handbag-sized. A newspaper! Handbag-sized! Genuis! Secondly, after lashings and lashings of real, actual news, of varied descriptions, both local and international it also has a plethora of columnists whose insightful commentary drives me wild.

Comment pieces from dating and assessing your chosen man's books collection when he is not looking, to queueing at Waitrose, to the price of oil to what-have-you. There was even a rather useful one on doping up your cat the other week (note to self, Bach's flower remedies...). These are grown-up columnists who like a gin and tonic and dislike great swathes of things about ordinary life and tackle it with intelligence and humour. They also fill me with despair. I'm going to stop reading the Worst (aside from work purposes) and start reading real newspapers again, otherwise how in hell's name am I ever going to get any better at what I do?

On the upside, the benchmark in WA is quite low so I suppose it's not a huge leap. Must remember to read outside the square and perhaps write something that's not a huge load of bollocks for a change.

summer reading: A Clockwork Orange

You'll be shocked to learn that I have not seen Stanley Kubrick's interpretation of Anthony Burgess' 1962 novel (or maybe not depending on how much you care) and so came to read it with an open mind. I at once felt I was in cahoots with Burgess after reading his scathing introduction explaining that the US version had the final section cut off at the request of the publisher, which entirely changed the meaning of the novel and the subsequent film (which he doesn't think an awful lot of either). I'm tossing up whether it is safe to talk about the ending here. I'm going with yes, because Burgess talks about it himself in the introduction (talk about a plot spoiler) and because it is one of the most interesting aspects of the novel. Stop reading after the third paragraph from the end if you wish.

It is a difficult novel because there is not a single character there for you to like. Alex is a brutal self-indulgent thug, the State brain washes 17 year old murderers, parents are emotionally absent, pensioners prone to brutal retaliation, political activists self-serving as always, police barely distinguishable from the criminals they beat into submission. Everyone uses everyone else, everyone, from parents, to political activitsts to prison chaplains, just wants to get what he can for himself. Throughout it all there is the language, which is a veil to keep characters apart from each other and the reader. We are all alone in our choices, Burgess is saying, we are free to make them on our own and we alone will face the consequences.

It is a terrible indictment on people's suggestibility and the notion of conformity, through peer pressure, expedience or subtle brain manipulation. The novel is telling us that free will is the most important gift humans have - preserving our ability to choose is the ultimate good, even if the choices we make are not. But underneath it all is the desire people have to overpower each other, whether in the street or in the jail cell. It is about power by force or stealth and it suggests there is no solution.

Burgess says the missing final chapter in the US version overlooks the character's growth, he says, which is what allows his novel to say that life is something other than brutish and short. Personally however, the final chapter read to me like an afterthought. Alex has his epiphany awfully quickly. He looks to find a wife, settle down, have a child. These are the aspects of society that enforce restraint on all of us in reality: jobs, marriage, insurance, superannuation, mortages. Did the State plant that idea in his head? Did our parents put it in ours? Is conformity a tool to control us? So, really what is important is not that we have a choice, but that we believe we have a choice when in reality we're following our social conditioning?

Alex admits he will fail to control his child, his child will be the same monster he was, until he has a child of his own who he will try to control, but will fail. And the cycle goes on. Which really is the most terrifying vision because it suggests that our lives aren't just brutish and short, but they will also be played out over and over again indefinitely.

The Information, which is nothing and comes at night.

In his big fat tubthumper of a novel The Information Martin Amis says a writer should be able to say that he’s never had to pay for it (being published) in his life. The unintentional irony being, of course, that Amis paid a high price for writing this particular novel – that being a huge public falling out with his publisher (whom he fired) and then-friend, author Julian Barnes, husband of Amis’ former publisher, which culminated in a series of friendship-ending emails which Amis reproduced (partly) in his autobiography.

I assume most people in Australia don’t know about these shenanigans because you’re not complete dorks who follow international literary scandals like yours truly but there you go. Anyway, my point is only that I didn’t pay for my copy of The Information, as it came from a library, but I did start reading it on the way home from the library and barely stop until I finished it and I think it might be quite brilliant. It starts like this:

Cities at night, I feel, contain men who cry in their sleep and then say Nothing. It's nothing. Just sad dreams. Or something like that... Swing low in your weep ship, with your tear scans and your sob probes, and you would mark them. Women – and they can be wives, lovers, gaunt muses, fat nurses, obsessions, devourers, exes, nemeses – will wake and turn to these men and ask, with female need-to-know, “what is it?” And the men say, “Nothing. No it isn't anything really. Just sad dreams.”

It’s the story of two writers – one famous who writes crap effortlessly – and his far less successful best friend (who, naturally, hates him) and decides to, in his own words “fuck (his friend) up”. The theme of the novel is schadenfreude and although big and as prosey as any of Amis’ more recent novels have been it’s so freaking readable I actually took it with me to the pub on Sunday so I could get another ten minutes into me while I waited for my hot lunch date.

I've been ploughing through Amis lately, with mixed results, but this has been the biggest surprise so far - Excellent.

Jam Will Win the War

My great aunt died a few months ago, and I have taken possession of a few things left to me (not specifically, but by virtue of being the last one to grab stuff, I suppose). Let me just say though, that I have had to endure the horror of my father reading out to me every letter and postcard I ever sent her as a child (and god, I was a good grand-niece) because she kept every single one. And sorry Kato, But I have three sets of pristine, still in their packages, original 1960s seamed stockings. If you're good to my cat, there may be a pair for you.....

Aside from a few pieces of jewellery and a fabulous button collection (i know, it's not normal, but I love them), I have inherited her collection of books. I'm going to have to ship them over and there are a whole load of brilliant ones, such as the entire Dickens collection, an original imprint of Scott's Antarctic diaries and some fab 1940s cookbooks. So good, I share the intro to this one with you now:

Make Your Own Jams

- Complied from Famous Recipes

"EVERY HOUSEWIFE has at the back of her mind the problem of storing food against an emergency. One excellent way is to turn fruit and sugar into jams and preserves. Here are 263 tested recipes from which you can stock your larder with jams and bottles of delicious confections, and make the plainest fare into a feast".

How good is that? A tip for gracious living if I ever heard one. Even better is that I have open slather on all the letters she has kept which reveal the deepest, darkest family secrets. Should keep me going after it gets dark at 3.30pm....

Darkmans: there's nothing like leaving a little to the reader's own sick imagination

I've been scooting around the internet trying to find out everything I can about Nicola Barker, the author of Darkmans, the latest novel to smash my mind into a thousand pieces, melt the pieces down into a syrup and then put it in the freezer until it's solid again but forever changed. I love those novels. I love the people who write them. I google them obsessively. I promise I'm not weird. Well, not very.

I'm thrilled to learn that Barker's been busy making herself known as the author of fiction that is weird, marginal and confronting. "Not for every reader" seems to be the refrain. According to Man-Booker Prize judge Giles Foden's suggestion in the Guardian her work couldn't win this year's prize because it wasn't reader-friendly. "With much more disciplined handling, [the novel] could have been a 'Middlemarch' for our times," he writes.

Darkmans wasn't supposed to be "disciplined". It isn't well behaved, it doesn't so much have a plot as an underlying theme and its protagonists are all people on the very fringe of society who are difficult to feel sympathetic towards. It's also more than 800 pages long. It's creepy, dark and at times very funny. Apparently judges don't like that. But who cares, apparently I do.

Generally speaking, Darkmans is about history catching up with the present. But it's not so much a collision as a congruence. The present, the novel says, is informed by history - the two cannot be separated, they walk the same path, they inhabit the same places and all kinds of strange things can pop up when you least expect them. At the centre of the novel is an Edwardian jester called John Scoggin. He inhabits each of the characters by turns, making them do terrible things. He is funny, irreverent and dangerous. So is the novel. So when Foden suggests it should be more "disciplined" I wonder if he actually read it.

Darkmans is also about language. It is about the development of language, its influences, its evolution. Characters in searching for words, dredge up medieval English and Latin among other languages before landing on the one they want. Writing a book about language is dangerously self-referential but to do it Barker steps outside of traditional form and she does it brilliantly. She is all word-play, in-jokes and asides. She has one of her characters, Peta, say it directly in the last few pages when she talks about an "absurd idea that language has these gaps in it and that lives can somehow just tumble through" and admits that in floating the concept she "just said what I needed to, so we'd both end up here". Barker is talking directly to the reader, apologising, in a way, for the confusion but saying that the ends justify her means.

I didn't get the ending at first. It is like the first time you saw The Sixth Sense and when you realise Bruce Willis is dead and you think, "wait a minute," and you have to quickly replay the entire film back in your mind. In fact when the novel ended I felt I had to turn around and read it again, which is saying something for a book close to 1000 pages. The novel says what it needs to subtly. It glances obliquely at concepts without looking directly for fear that an already jittery reader may go blind. It hints, it suggests, it whispers in your ear and lets the gap between your neurons put in all the scary details. Then it claims innocence - you thought of that all by yourself, you sicko.

Anyway, I'm really bad at reviews so read this one by Patrick Ness that says everything I want to say but better.

Does anyone have a copy of...

Does anyone have a copy of Ethan Frome? It has been recommended to me by a friend in the US who exceedingly keen for me to read it.

One track mind

I found Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World in my brother's room recently.
The title piqued my interest at the start, then I saw it was written by a Japanese author, Haruki Murakami. Anyone who has chatted to me in the past 12 months knows of my love for that place from my visit there last year - and so I thought I'd give it a go.

As it turns out, Murakami is one of the most celebrated Japanese authors world-wide, and coincidentally, my uncle's PhD thesis was a cultural analysis of Murakami's works.

I was not disappointed.

The novel starts with two storylines - one set in contemporary Tokyo, in which the narrator is a Calcutec. A Calcutec's job is to work for Headquarters, a company which is linked but not part of the Government, and basically involves information processing.
The narrator reads information, shuffles it using the right and left sides of his brain, and then interprets the info.

The second story involves the first-person narrator arriving at a mytholgocial world with unicorns and gatekeepers and the like. When he arrives at the world, the gatekeeper removes his shadow from him "because that's what happens" and we watch as the narrator gradually loses his mind because of it.

The juxtaposition of these two worlds is brilliant, and serves to highlight the running theme throughout the book, which focuses on the mind and its limitations, or lack thereof.

"Your body dies, your consciousness passes away, but your thought is caught in the one tautological point an instant before, subdividing for an eternity. Think about the koan: An arrow is stopped in flight. Well, the death of the body is the flight of the arrow. It's making a straight line for the brain. No dodging it, not for anyone. People have to die, the body has to fall. Time is hurtling that arrow forward. And yet, like I was saying, thought goes on subdividing that time for ever and ever. The paradox becomes real. The arrow never hits."

The idea that the mind continues infinitely in death is an interesting one.

In all, this book is much easier to read than it is to review. However the two storylines link up beautifully by the end of the book, and I have to say it is one of the most rewarding reads I have had in quite some time.

Beautiful Losers

"[F[ind a little saint and fuck her over and over in some pleasant part of heaven, get right into her plastic altar, dwell in her silver medal, fuck her until she tinkles like a souvenir music box, until the memorial lights go on for free, find a little saintly faker like Teresa or Catherine Tekakwitha or Lesbia, whom prick never knew but who lay around all day in a chocolate poem, find one of those quant impossible cunts and fuck her for your life, coming all over the sky, fuck her on the moon with a steel hourglass up your hole, get tangled up in her airy robes, suck her nothing juices, lap, lap, lap, a dog in the ether, then climb down to this fat earth and slouch around the fat earth in your stone shoes, get clobbered by a runaway target, take the sensless blows again and again, a right to the mind, piledriver on the heart, kick in the scrotum, help! help! It's my time, my second, my splinter of the shit glory tree, police, firemen! look at the traffic of happiness and crime, it's burning in crayon like the akropoliss rose!"

I have just finished reading Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers and um, for reasons which may or may not be clear upon reading the above extract, I'm not entirely sure what to think.

I didn't know anything about the book coming into it and I think that's probably a good way to tackle it, although it certainly makes for some surprising and occassionally shocking reading.

The novel centres on a reasonably twisted sort of love triangle between the narrator (who spends most of his spare time wanking into a sock and thinking about dead people when he's not obsessing about long, long dead Mohawk saint Kateri Tekakwitha (who happens to be my confirmation saint, just in case you wanted to know)), his dead wife (whose method of suicide was um... more disturbing than most) and his dead lover/friend, referred to only as 'F'.

The experimental, part Joyecian (Joycian?), part not-writing-just-typing style definitely plays to Cohen's strengths as a lyricist-poet and just about every page is studded with a nice turn of phrase ("what makes the mountainside of maple turn red?") that bears a second read. He has a knack for putting words together. The girl who "lay around all day in a chocolate poem" for instance is a phrase that will stick in my mind.

Buuut the book is by no means perfect. The monologues can turn into rambles. The poetry can turn into a big fat mud pit. Every so often there are a few pages in a row that read as though they were written while Cohen was quite mind blowingly high. Which he may well have been but which doesn't necessarily make for interesting writing.

Even so this book is interesting. And mildly disturbing. And fascinating. And frustrating. I lingered for awhile on certain pages and skipped over others altogether. Every so often I had to put the book down just to get another glass of wine or focus on something else that didn't involve reading about a 13-year-old girl's arse. But, faults and obstacles aside, I do feel like it's rather crept into my mind a little bit, which is just about as much as you can ask from a book some of the time.

Junkie

I have never tried smack and I've certainly never been a junkie so I can't say with much authority whether William S. Burroughs' book Junky (sometimes Junkie and originally published under the pseudonym William Lee as Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict) is an accurate representation of the life of an on-again-off-again heroin addict. I can, however, say, it's fascinating stuff and not just in a car-crash-curiosity sort of a way.

Burroughs, apparently, was a friend of Jack Kerouac's but while Truman Capote might have had a leg to stand on when he claimed the latter's On the Road was typing, rather than writing, I don't think he could do the same with Junky.

This is my first brush with Burroughs but his style is lovely: he packs a lot of description into relatively clipped sentences and is capable of being pretty funny, especially when you least expect it:

"As she talked she moved around the room, throwing herself from one chair to
another, crossing and uncrossing her legs, adjusting her slip, so as to give me
a view of her anatomy in installments."

Conisdering the book was first published more than 50 years ago and especially considering its frequently instructional style - not exactly a 'How To' guide but a nice little look at the day-to-day minutia of an addict - it's a surprise to find it incredibly readable. Although the plot is pretty much secondary to the prose the dialogue and descriptions are cute and fast enough that it doesn't get bogged down to much in the details.

"Junk is not, like alcohol or weed, a means to increased enjoyment of
life. Junk is not a kick. It is a way of life."

At 158 pages it's a quick read, which makes it doubly worth the effort. I read it in two or three short sessions today and, although I wasn't entirely sure whether I wanted to develop a heroin habit or kick one, it certainly made an impression.

homelessness: tragedy or just a breather?

I have, finally, finished Down to This. Let me start out by saying it is really a great read, well written given the circumstances and a look at the world that will change your outlook as you walk down the street. Really.

In Lindsay's post on the novel she said she had a lot of questions. So here we go: "Stall, being a well educated middle class person just accepts his life in Tent City and goes about his way." Discuss.

I have a deep distrust of autobiographies for just this reason. Very few people are entirely honest, everyone makes decisions about what is relevant, no-one wants to look as bad, addicted, hopeless or culpable as they actually are. There's probably some brilliant mathematician somewhere who could develop an algorithm to detect the percentage of truth in any given autobiography based on the author's background, predilictions and the book's subject matter. But all of that aside.

I got the impression from Stall's book that he was pretty much down and out when he made his date with Tent City. He was always a bit of a wanderer having travelled around Mexico, Italy and other places. Although he was a writer you don't get the impression that at 27 years old he'd ever held a steady job. In the course of the novel you learn that he rarely saw his parents. He was addicted to cocaine. He had just suffered a horrific break-up and been forced to move out of the apartment he shared with his girlfriend.

Sure, he had a few hundred dollars lying around probably, sure, he could have called his parents or friends. He could have hibernated for a week or so and come out having faced his demons and ready to solve the problems of another day. But mentally he didn't have it in him. His life may still have had a full tank of petrol but mentally he'd cracked a cylinder and his gearbox was stuffed. Technically his life could still go, but it wasn't going far.

So he went to Tent City with it. He told a story about it that was selective. He acknowledges it. He says that he's not been totally honest, that he didn't want to write about people until they did something to direct the course of the plot. Sure, he got sick, drink addled, mentally damaged while he was there. However, halfway through his time in Tent City he was signed up with a publisher for the book. That isn't a man full of desperation, that isn't a man like the others in Tent City, abused, imprisoned, hopeless. That is an author. No matter where you are or what your circumstances if you know why you're doing this and you know when it will end it's going to be easier. Not to say that it was easy for Stall. But when Tent City folded he had a book deal, not a crack addiction.

The book is fascinating in that it tries to pinpoint why people end up that way. Was it the desperation that led to Tent City or was it Tent City that led to the desperation? Stall decides it was the latter - after it folded half the former residents were moving up in the world after six months. He ignores the irony that he himself is proof of the opposite - he wouldn't have ventured into Tent City if he hadn't had nothing to lose. Whether he'd admit it to us or not.

Brideshead Revisited (Kate's take)

"I'm not going to have you get mixed up with my family. They're so madly charming. All my life they've been taking things away from me. If they once get hold of you with their charm they'd make you their friend, not mine and I won't let them."

So Sebastian Flyte tells the protagonist Charles Ryder in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited. Of course it's Sebastian who's the charming one. Looking and sounding as though he's drifted in from an E.M Forster novel Sebastian is a bloody delight to read and he dominates the landscape of the book in its first half, seducing Charles (though probably not like that) and the reader with charm and booze and food and more booze.

In the preface for a reprinting of the novel Waugh said"

"It was a bleak period of present privation and threatening disaster — the
period of soya beans and basic English - and in consequence the book
is infused with a kind of gluttony, for food and wine, for the splendours of the
recent past, and for rhetorical and ornamental language which now, with a full
stomach, I find distasteful."

He has a point - it is a little bit like the literary equivalent of a turkey stuffed with a chicken stuffed with a lobster. In this I thought it was a big departure from the clipped efficiency of the wonderful A Handful of Dust or the comic stylings of Scoop but Waugh's style is so good and his ability to switch between spot-on humour and pathos that I found it completely charming and engaging.

And then we reach the second half.

Well. I don't want to spoil the book for anyone who hasn't read it because, despite my mixed feelings, I think it is incredibly well written and very much worth reading, but the book does change - a lot - in its second half as Waugh slowly takes Sebastian apart and refocuses the novel on Charles and a new (female) love interest. I think perhaps it would have worked better if Waugh was as good at writing sympathetic women as he is men but I do not think he is. However good he is at writing bitches I've never warmed to a female character in a Waugh novel and Brideshead wasn't the one to make me start.

All that said the book is sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, incredibly beautifully written and quite fascinating in its way.

Next on the list: Decline and Fall, which should round out my Waugh education fairly decently for now.

Brideshead once visited...

I once told someone I enjoyed the prose of Evelyn Waugh. He turned to me and said "Urgh, how can you? How can you like anyone who can do that to his characters?".
And the primary evidence in the trial of Evelyn Waugh was Sebastian Flyte: The brilliant teddy bear-carrying academe and bon vivant who is perhaps one of the greatest characterisations ever written.
A character Waugh slowly and maliciously turns into a sun-seeking invalid and booze-soaked lay-about.
The descent of the character is absolute. He is the creation that keeps you reading, initially, because he is so entertaining. Somehow, despite the entire tome descenting into a celebration of mediocre success, middle-aged vanity and upper-class immorality, it is still Sebastian who keeps us reading, despite the soul of his character being evicerated by his creator. Flyte becomes a shadow - both in character and in motif. Hope of his resurrection keeps you reading, long after all hope is lost.
Waugh gives all the sentimentality to setting and scene and saves none for his characters, prefering to torture them - and the reader - slowly.
This I could handle but the hero is DULL. Everyone is soooo dull. I recognise that Waugh was trying to show-up the flaws, hypocrisy, immorality and deficiencies of the upper classes but he could at least have given us SOMEONE to put our faith in.
So anyway... I read the book ages ago and seeing as Kate has just read it too, I wanted to put this out here in the hopes some of you other peeps might have something to say as well.