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.

A Bit of a Blur

Somewhere in the 200-ish pages of his autobiography A Bit of a Blur Blur bass player Alex James finds himself twisted up in expensive sheets in a hotel room somewhere in South America, alternating between having sex with the five prettiest girls he could find, drinking champagne and snorting a dick-load of cocaine.

It was, he says, pretty much at the height of his excesses.

It’s certainly as close as he gets to detailing them as this is a book that was almost more interesting in what it didn’t say than in what it did. Oh sure James is pretty up-front about constantly cheating on his long-term girlfriend and his partying ways but the booze and coke consumption is all skated over a bit finely for my liking. Call me morbid but I want to hear about nights spent snorting coke off someone’s boobs, passing out in toilet stalls and attempted interventions by friends. Instead we get vague references to waking up covered in blood in casualty and, only when he estimates he spent about a million pounds on coke and booze do we start to get a picture of just what it is that he’s not saying.

I seem to be reading a lot of autobiographical stuff lately, which isn’t particularly like me, but it’s always fascinating to have a look at someone else’s life.James’ role in the rise and rise of one of the 90s biggest bands certainly makes a compelling read - I romped through it last night with barely a break - and as someone with a soft spot for band boys myself it’s fascinating to see fandom from the other side of the fence.

He’s also a surprisingly deft writer, which I wouldn’t necessarily have expected, and I found his meditations on music and astronomy almost more interesting than his encounters with Johnny Depp, Bjork and Marianne Faithful.

It’s also full of helpful tips for the burgeoning alcoholic, such as eating carrots between glasses of champagne to stop your breath from stinking, or having something fizzy every few glasses of spirits to avoid getting too drunk too quickly. Valuable lessons those.

The Hungry Years

"I wake up on the fattest day of my life, 20 January 2003. I am just over 6 feet tall, and weigh... how much? I step on the scale and off it very quickly, to limit the damage. 236lbs. At best! My bathroom floor slopes slightly, and I have positioned the scale carefully to ensure the smallest possible reading"

So begins UK journalist William Leith's book The Hungry Years: Confessions of a Food Addict.

This is a fascinating and addictive book. The story, which is pretty meandering but follows Leith's battles with food addiction and attempts to understand why he is the way he is, is the best kind of voyeurism. I picked it up in London a couple of years ago when it had just been released. It was a whim and I was attracted by the sight of a large, half eaten donut on the cover as well as some good reviews on the back. I don't want to take the food metaphor too far and say I devoured the thing in one sitting but the prose is so good and the subject matter so ludicrously enthralling that I have to say the book was bloody hard to put down.

I picked it up again tonight, too tired to read anything new, and had the same reaction. I've never knowingly read any of Leith's stuff (he writes for the Guardian, the Observer and the Daily Telegraph apparently) but I'd imagine he's a very good journalist because he has an incredible knack for telling you the kind of things (and not all about food) that make you squirm a little bit with embarassment but keep reading anyway:

"(Leith's girlfriend) had this one position she favoured. I would lie on my back - which, being fat, I preferred anyway - and she would lower herself on top of me, and then tell me to do a specific thing . . . Sometimes I would do the specific thing slightly wrong and she'd be furious - she'd get up suddenly, angry, and put her underwear back on, and that would be that. Once I had to stop doing the specific thing because I got a cramp in my hand."

It's about consumerism, of course, but the structure - which reads almost like a series of blogs or diary entries - manages to make what might be a tired subject sound new. Having read a fair few women's magazines in my time, for instance, I thought I had read every possible variation on the story of fat people dealing with their fatness but I can very honestly say that this book said things I have never, ever thought about before - some of which I could probably have gone without ever reading in my life, if I'm honest, but all incredibly engrossing.

It's hard to say if my interest in the book stems partly from my own on-again off-again battles with food which, although, not particularly serious, seem likely to last forever, or not. I'd be fascinated to see what someone with a completely 'normal' (or at least healthy) attitude towards food thinks of the book. I suspect, however, that the voyeristic impulse in everyone is somewhat universal and that most people would find this as readable as I do.

To conclude I'll turn it over to Leith, who writes of his fascination with watching an obese family wolf down snacks on a train - a spectacle he enjoys for probably exactly the same reason I loved reading this book:

"The sight of these poeple is almost entertaining. They each carry a plastic bag full of snacks - bags of potato crisps, cylindrival tubs of potato crisps, chocolate bars, bags of sweets. As soon as they sit down, the show begins - they grab the snaks, they tear at them, they wolf them. Their hands - soft, oversized hands - begin to cram the snacks into their mouths. Constant eating has developed in them superhuman abilities to chew, to release enzymes in the mouth, to form the food into a bolus and swallow. They do not talk to each other. The guy inhales two large bags of crisps in
three or four minutes. The girl kills a Mars bar in a couple of gulps. Then she hits the Pringles. She eats the Pringles in two-inch stacks. When she runs out of food, after about fifteen minutes of uninterrupted eating, she starts moaning. She tries to snatch her brother's food bag. There is panic, fighting. The girl is making sub-orgasmic noises. The guy is grunting. He's lashing out. The mother bops the girl on the head, and gives her a Mars bar to calm down.

It is after breakfast and before lunch, These morbidly obese people are moving towards a meal, having recently finished a meal. I think: they are addicted - to starch, to sugar... But then I think, no, it can't be that simple. There must be something else, something deep, ugly. Something unspeakable in these people's brains. When you see fat people, you want to blame them for their condition. Those fat bastards. You want to blame them."

American Psycho - Bret Easton Ellis

I saw the movie years ago and loved Christian Bale's performance of a yuppy serial killer, so I thought I'd pick up the book and have a read.
What a brilliant piece of work.
The character development is top-notch and while it can be, at times, a little wordy, the descriptions of settings and characters really does set the reader up well for the rest of the novel.
The book is narrated in first person, which makes reading it all the more unsettling, and goes to sometimes painstaking lengths to describe the complete outfit that every single character is wearing at the time.
For example: "Carruthers is wearing a silk double breasted pinstripe suit from Armani, an off-white shirt by Hermes and crocodile-skin shoes by Gucci."
This constant reference to brands and appearances, while cumbersome at first, really sets the scene for the culture in which the main characters exist.
It is far from subtle yet extremely effective.
The reader is given the impression that these people don't live in the 'real world,' that the normal rules don't apply to them, which sets the scene nicely for a bit of needless violence, torture and murder.
The book is far more graphic when it comes to the detail of what the protagonist, Patrick Bateman, does to his victims. Some of the scenes in this book you just can't show in a movie.
But aside from that, the first-person perspective allows the reader to track Bateman as he slowly loses it and becomes (more) criminally insane.
There is one scene near the end of the book when he is involved in a gunfight with police (while resplendent in his Versace suit) and during the middle of it, the narration switched from first-person to third for a few pages, which is quite effective in emphasising the protagonist's detachment from reality.
Oh, and without spoiling the end for anyone, the movie ending is Hollywood fluff. The book ending is a lot more satisfying for the reader who, amazingly, is still made to empathise with the character despite the fact that he is a cold-hearted, remorseless killer.

Kate

I demand you write your observations on Down to This here immediately. And please try not to sound smarter than me. xx

I am Down to This...

OK, because of my literary schizophrenia, I picked up a completely random book the other day - A book called Down to This by the improbably-named Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall. In 2001 Stall (then aged 27) decided his life was shit and he would go and live for a year in Tent City, in Toronto, among the homeless and perhaps write a book about it.
I was quite transfixed. I'd like the other members of this literary wankfest to read it and tell me what you think. It's spruiked as a memoir and I suppose it is,but it raises on hell of a lot of questions for me.

Stall at no point really, really seems to regret his decision. He never seems to question the validity of his choice or really deeply longs to just go home. He accepts his new life as easily as we accept that what we want to order isn't on the menu today. It is curiously written and perhaps more refreshing that way. He doesn't write the book I expected him to write.

Sure, he describes the people he lives with in details, in depth, but somehow I don't have a picture of them in my head. Nancy, Jo-Jo, Karen - they are all bonkers, one had a baby, one is dying, one fights with two-by-four, one is a hooker - I can't remember which. Maybe all. They are interestingly sad people whose lives have been characterised by violence and abuse. They, in turn, abuse themselves and each other but, like any people, ahve an immense capacity to care and love and look out for others.

Stall, being a well-educated, middle class person just accepts his life in tent city and goes about his way. Sure, he ends up with carbon monoxide poisoning and the shit kicked out of him, not to mention more, but this is his real life. I suppose it shows how much he wanted to run away from his old one. There's crack and coke and booze of all kinds every second of every day. But there's a community and a shit-kicking affection that seems to be missing from his regular life.

And after finishing the book , I don't have closure, and I have been dreaming endlessly about it, to the point that for the last two days I have been grumpy and sleep-deprived. He writes about being cold (remember canadian winter, living in non-waterproof shack that you built yourself/tent), the way that Knut Hamsun describes being starving on the streets on Sofia in the 1800s in his aptly-called Hunger (it's fictional BTW) in a way that you can't help feeling it yourself.

When I read Hunger, I had to get up and make a sandwich every few chapters. I had sympathy pains. And when I read Down to This snuggled up in bed, I couldn't get warm. I am confused by this book. I want to ask Stall a whole bunch of questions. It is a curious tome that really grabbed my attention and I could go on but I don't want to spoil it.

Maybe the end message isn't about homelessness or what Stall thinks about it in the end. I think it's about love and where you find it.

On the courier to the next person who asks. Unless it's Kate. Then I just throw it at her head.

in a world of danger the pen is still mightier

Every now and again something inspires you to pick up a book that is completely out of character for you. It is completely unlike something you would normally read and you don't even know why you want to read it. But you have to. I felt that way about The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall.

It is a post modern voyage into the conceptual. No, that's not me trying to be smarter than I am, it actually is. You start with a man who wakes up with no recollection of who or where he is. Gradually, through notes left for him by himself before he lost his memory he is introduced to a world in which all the communications, information exchange, relationships, memories, thoughts and ideas between people form a kind of conceptual fluid. In this fluid swim conceptual fish. This particular man, the main character, is being hunted by a shark - it wants to feed on his mind until there is nothing left.

Cue adventure story, clue following and conceptual shark hunting. The great thing about the novel is its premise, the adventure story lost me a little because it felt a bit too Indiana Jones - complete with love interest and humorous side kick. Although the intertextuality of the story was great and made me remember how much I love postmodern writing. Collective subconscious anyone? The brilliance of Hall's tale is based on the idea that words and ideas are powerful and dangerous. The fact that people are impressionable and easily manipulated, that minds and identies are easily fractured.

This is not something I'd normally pick up, but something I'm glad I read. It does have a Da Vinci Code feel to it and it is a film waiting to happen, both of which cheapen it a little. But I'd still recommend it. It's like taking a can opener to your mind.

Incidentally Kate, you might be interested to know that Hall has named Get Me Away From Here, I'm Dying by Belle & Sebastian as his main character's theme. Oh yes, film rights on their way.

P.S Might I add that it somehow reads like a manga movie in parts, a comic book in others and a philosophical tome in the rest (that isn't adventure story). It's a good read.