It’s easy to succumb to the holiday reading obsession. Choosing the most appropriate books for your summer break and making sure things won’t be tarnished by bad choices. Has a holiday ever been ruined by a bad book? I’m not sure, but I think I probably would have enjoyed the South of France more five years ago without a copy of The Line of Beauty. And I may have brought back better memories of Cyprus without Brick Lane. This year I holidayed in Turkey for the first time since 2004 where I enjoyed Birds Without Wings by Louis Louis de Bernières. Would this year’s choices be as good at that, or would I succumb to another dose of the Hollinghursts?
So perhaps best to get Turkey’s turkeys out of the way. After deciding to give Orhan Pamuk’s Snow another chance I confess to abandoning the book for a second time. I’d fancied an appropriate read for Turkey, but confess that this is a writer I cannot contend with. The Girl With Glass Feet by Ali Shaw looked like an intriguing read but rapidly turned into a tedious and far from involving novel.
As for the two books I picked up second hand before departing, I didn’t touch them at all. Don’t Tell Me the Truth About Love by Dan Rhodes was left in a villa somewhere near Fethiye whilst I donated David Nicholls’ The Understudy to family members. Two of them read it and enjoyed it thoroughly, so it was good to pass on a good read.
Falling into the middle category was The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene. I enjoy Greene, but somehow this didn’t suit poolside reading at all. This faintly depressing novel didn’t fit the air of frivolity, and Greene’s gloom would be far suited to the current wet climate as I peer through the office window.
There were only two winning books for this summer holiday.
C is Tom McCarthy’s follow up to Remainder, my holiday best for 2008. Remainder was a real literary treat, a book that managed to be refreshingly original, clever and compelling. C is also very good, although I found that McCarthy was moving into the David Mitchell territory of cleverness. It attempts to tackle very big issues; the nature of communication, real and artificial networks, Man’s misalignment with nature until it’s far too late. The book has some excellent passages that make it a must, the best being the chapters set during the First World War that portrays the conflict from the unusual angle of a plane. Highly recommended, although McCarthy appears to have lost the sense of humour that make Remainder so addictive.
My best holiday read is also likely to be my novel of the year and comes from an unusual source. Thomas Pynchon doesn’t usually suggest light summer reading. However his most recent book, Inherent Vice is possibly his most accessible novel to date. Set in California at the end of the 60s this is a mix of detective fiction, brilliant comedy and a wry observation of the era. It centres around a hippy private eye known as “Doc” and his investigation into a missing property magnate, although his movements take increasingly weird and wild twists and turns.
What’s so good about Inherent Vice is that the elements are all strong enough to work independently; remove the trademark Pynchon humour and there is still an intriguing and well executed crime story beneath. And whilst the book is full of crazy yet well observed characterisations (rarely for me I regularly laughed out loud when reading this) it is canny enough to hold California circa 1969 (let us not forget that this was the awful Manson era) at arm’s length. My book of the year. An absolute must.
Books in the family circle that I couldn’t get my hands on included Ordinary Thunderstorms by William Boyd, Fool’s Alphabet by Sebastian Faulks and Fingersmith by Sarah Waters, although my good lady informs me that this was a disappointing read. So I might save them for next year.
This summer I have immersed myself in a selection of excellent comedy biographies, all of them highly recommended.
John Fisher’s study of Tony Hancock and Graham McCann’s Spike and Co are excellent companions. The first is a very detailed and well written biography of the comedy genius whilst McCann’s book casts the net wider to contain not only Hancock’s world, but also Spike Milligan, Eric Sykes and Johnny Speight. It follows the activities of Associated London Scripts, set up in the 1950s as a joint venture between Hancock (and later Steptoe and Son) writers Ray Galton and Alan Simpson and Milligan and Sykes.
There is inevitably some crossover with the Fisher book, and also with Humphrey Carpenter’s Milligan biography, although it still remains essential reading as a brilliant study of comedy writing in the 50s and 60s, with chapters dedicated to The Goon Show, Till Death Us Do Part and the long running Sykes. There’s also a look at the origins of Doctor Who, as Dalek Creator Terry Nation was also amongst the ranks of writers that ALS employed.
McCann has also written Bounder, the definitive biography of Terry-Thomas, and here explores the early days of television where T-T became arguably its first true comedy star with his show How Do You View? McCann’s writing reveals him as a huge fan and Bounder goes on to follow the successful film career and proves, if it needs to be done, that Terry-Thomas was one of cinema’s best comic actors. It’s urged me to revisit some of his classic films recently, such as School For Scoundrels and The Naked Truth, to reassure myself that McCann’s view of him is – as T-T would say – bang on!
Also on the bedside table is The Life and Death of Peter Sellers by Roger Lewis which may emerge for me as the King of all comedy biographies. A review will follow shortly.
I began to comb picture morgues and newspaper files, turning up hundreds of photos with similar figures in them. Most depicted disasters or near disasters; I began to notice that the number – and demeanor – of the figures often depended on the amount of destruction that surrounded them. Their faces glowed with pleasure in ratio to the amount of mayhem and carnage. This was by no means a strictly quantifiable thing, but the correlation, in general, seemed to exist.
Al Sarrantonio, The Cult of the Nose
Stories is the much talked about anthology edited by Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio, featuring 28 new tales by a variety of authors. Although not all of the writers featured are known for Gaiman’s home genre of fantasy with a dash of horror, this is the general theme that runs through the book. in some cases it works very well, for example Roddy Doyle’s Blood is very out of character for him but nevertheless outstanding.
Other stand out stories include Jodi Picoult’s Weights and Measures, which is a subtle and eerie tale. Kurt Anderson provides an old school slice of science fiction with Human Intelligence. Gaiman’s own contribution, The Truth Is a Cave in the Black Mountains, is as good as expected. By far the best, however, is Al Sarrantonio’s The Cult of the Nose . This is a disturbing story that plunders the depths of obsessive madness. It demands more than one reading.
I have to admit that I found many of the stories disappointing, and the editing could have been better (for example Fossil-Figures by Joyce Carol Oates and Wildfire in Manhattan by Joanne Harris both deal with a similar subject – twins – and are clumsily presented back to back). In general there appears to be an over readiness to please Gaiman, writing the type of story that might pander to his wishes. Not the dream anthology it could have been.
I very much enjoyed my first taste of China Miéville, the highly original The City and the City. This novel was billed as an existential thriller with shades of Orwell and Kafka. There’s some truth in this, although what impressed me most was the sheer originality and imaginative scope of this book .
Set in the fictional city of Besźel, the body of a murdered woman is discovered and a detective, Inspector Tyador Borlú, is dispatched to investigate. So far very run of the mill, but Miéville cleverly drops subtle hints that this is going to be far from an ordinary whodunnit. Firstly, we begin to learn of a sister city to Besźel called Ul Qoma. Citizens of each are forbidden to associate, even to look at, one other. Failure to follow this doctrine strictly results in breach, with perpetrators investigated by a sinister body known as The Breach. Miéville begins to unravel a very complex and often challenging premise, daring the reader to keep up with him. It’s this aspect of The City and the City that I enjoyed, whenever you pause for breath this author just keeps running ahead of you with fresh ideas and twists.
The twins Besźel and Ul Qoma and the complexities that result from their division are at first reasonably acceptable. However, as Borlú tentatively begins his investigation, it slowly emerges that citizens of each are not just expected to avoid a neighbouring city. The two inhabit each other; more – they are one and the same from the eyes of a casual – or uninitiated – observer. Streets from each city intersect, even at times forcing traffic to avoid, or “unsee”, traffic belonging to the other city. The act of “unseeing” keeps the respective citizens suitably fearful and repressed. Miéville slowly unravels this ambitious conceit, creating further intrigue when Borlú‘s investigation leads him to visit Ul Qoma, unseeing everything he’d previously become accustomed to.
The murder story at the heart of The City and the City is at times overblown and unnecessary, and Miéville is over determined to solve the mystery for us. What’s most impressive is the novel’s extraordinary premise and setting, this odd take on an alternative Eastern Europe, with the close of the book particularly satisfying. Torn between the twin cities, there is only one place that Borlú can go, and his final realisation of this is deftly handled.
The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim
A silence fell between us, and I felt a mounting sense of frustration. Was this what it had come to, my relationship with my own daughter? Was this all she had to say to me? For God’s sake, we had lived together for twelve years: lived together in conditions of absolute intimacy. I had changed her nappies, I had bathed her. I had played with her, read to her, and sometimes, when she got scared in the middle of the night, she had climbed into my bed and snuggled up against me. And now – after living apart for little more than six months – we were behaving towards each other almost as if we were strangers. How was this possible?
There are many sequences like this in The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim. Jonathan Coe portrays a man who grimly realises that his life has receded away to leave him desperately lonely and isolated, whilst at the same time having to come to terms with the realisation that, as a 48 year old, he doesn’t feel he’s reached adulthood at all. Coe achieves this with the perfect balance of comedy and despair revealed by his increasingly unhinged narrator. They are certainly fears I could well identify with.
We meet Maxwell Sim at a period in his life where he’s lost a lot. His wife and daughter have left him, resulting in a period of depression and inactivity. The novel begins in Australia, where he concludes an ineffective visit to his father, revealing an undeveloped and disappointing relationship between the two. During his final evening before returning home he watches a Chinese woman and her daughter at an adjacent table in a restaurant, their touching closeness to one another demonstrating to him that there are deep, mysterious relationships between human beings to be inspired by. Sim craves human contact, and the novel continues with a series of odd, often chance, encounters where his efforts to interact don’t always pull off (an early encounter results in his mugging).
Offered a job as a toothpaste salesman, Sim starts a journey to the most northern part of the British Isles. As he begins to lose touch with reality (visiting his father’s flat left unoccupied for more than twenty years, embarking on a failed romantic interlude with a childhood friend, starting a dubious dialogue with his Satnav), Sim begins to associate his plight with that of Donald Crowhurst, the lone yaughtsman who attempted to fake a round the world journey in the late 1960s. Worryingly, Crowhurst’s deception ended in madness and suicide…
Throughout the novel Coe cleverly weaves in other voices distinct to Sim’s often questionable view of life (this is man who marvels at the delights of the motorway services). An essay about Crowhurst, two stories based upon family holidays and his father’s candid journal dating from the early 1960s all offer insight into Maxwell’s make up. Sim’s methods for discovering these pieces are a little contrived, and what also let down slightly was the very, very odd ending. Sim finally meets the Chinese woman, but after offering an apparently neat resolution Coe slips unexpectedly into a different gear and finishes in a way that doesn’t gel with the rest of the book.
I’ll forgive him for that. The Privacy of Maxwell Sim is a whirlwind read which proved to me, counter to many of the recent reviews, that Coe hasn’t lost his knack for extremely well written novels. Despite appearing relatively lightweight, they tend to leave the reader reeling with the complexity of human emotion.
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