If on a Summer's Holiday a Blogger

Monday August 18, 2008

I’ve become so accustomed to not reading that I don’t even read what appears before my eyes. It’s not easy; they teach us to read as children, and for the rest of our lives we remain the slaves of all the written stuff they fling in front of us. I may have had to make some effort myself, at first, to learn not to read, but now it comes quite naturally to me. The secret is not refusing to look at the written words. On the contrary, you must look at them, intensely, until they disappear.

You are on a few days holiday break in Italy. You have taken along a copy of If on a Winer’s Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino. You think it will be fitting to read a classic of modern Italian literature. Furthermore, you decide to write a post in the style of Calvino once you get home. You like the conceit of the book, reading it as you queue to enter tourist attractions, and when your family spend time looking in the shops selling carnival masks. You like the way the text plays with the reader, reminding them that they are reading a novel and constantly tantalising you with new and unfinished stories…

But when I got home I decided not to write a post in the style of If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino. Eventually the book gnawed at my patience for too long. Written in 1979, Calvino’s novel is composed of a collection of openings to novels. The reader (you) stumbles from one unfinished text to another, witnessing (and reading) a detective story, a murder and several meditations on the relationship between text and reader. This is a book that fans of literary theory will get very excited about, and it’s a book that David Mitchell also got very excited about (proving the inspiration and the structure for Cloud Atlas). The problem may be me; I have a short fuse with this sort of thing. Films-within-films, plays that remind you that you are the audience, books that remind you that you are reading them. So forgive me for endulging in a post that reminds you that you are reading it (that is, of course, if you’ve bothered to get this far).

Italo Calvino: If on a Winter's Night a Traveller

You are getting to the end of your post. You realise that you don’t have much to say about If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino. You are thinking more about the other book you read on your few days holiday in Italy. You begin to shape some thoughts on your next post…

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The End of the Affair

Saturday August 16, 2008

For some time now I’ve had a mental block when it’s come to Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair. No doubt this is due to the image of Ralph Fiennes’ heaving buttocks from the most recent film adaptation, which unfortunately come to mind whenever I think of the novel. But what Mr Fiennes has done is plant the suggestion of seediness in my mind, and Greene’s novel, both his depiction of London during and after the war and Bendrix and his snatched affair with Sarah and all that follows really does read as a seedy business.

Graham Greene: The End of the Affair

Bendrix narrates the novel, a writer by trade who can well articulate his own shortcomings as a human being. He’s aware of his own bitterness and hatred, but Greene also reveals one of the most arrogant voices I’ve read in a long time. He perches himself far above many of the people he encounters, whether it’s the humble private detective or the betrayed husband Henry. All inhabit a late 1940s world of bombsites, dark bars and darker weather; a setting that’s breathtakingly realistic. But this isn’t why I found the book seedy; it was more the people in it, and all but one of the characters I disliked. In fact the only one I was ambivalent towards, the young girl who Bendrix picks up and takes to Sarah’s funeral, is one of the few that has a lucky escape from him. Of those that suffer, particularly Henry, I tended to share the contempt that Bendrix has for them.

Like many of Greene’s other novels, the subject of Catholicism rears its head. Here, Greene treats Belief and God as something that can be caught, an infection, and just as Sarah contracts pneumonia from the dank London streets, Bendrix fears that he, too, will ultimately believe in God but it will be little more than an unwanted infection. Throughout the book there are also odd glimpses of the supernatural; a skin disease apparently healed by Faith, Sarah’s deal with God that she will not see Bendrix after she thinks he has died in an air raid.

For such a brief piece at 160 pages, The End of the Affair is incredibly dense. It drained me as a reader, and Greene continues to prove that less is more, and that the lesser writer would fail in the temptation to drag out the affair even more. But it’s a painful book to read.

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Three Steps to Heaven

Monday August 4, 2008

Christopher Petit’s Radio On was made in 1979 and has achieved status as a cult, and extremely obscure, British road movie. Filmed in black and white and featuring a soundtrack including David Bowie and Kraftwerk, it’s a moody and experimental piece that offers a fascinating snapshot of England at the end of that troubled decade.

Radio On

Radio On has escaped my clutches until now, so thanks to the BFI for finally releasing it on DVD. I’ve been interested in catching up with this film for what seems like an eternity; for its acclaimed soundtrack and the use of the twin locations of London and Bristol, my two home towns. The film is probably most well known for featuring Sting in an early acting role, although don’t let that put you off – his performance is far superior to the one in his other 1979 film, Quadrophenia.

Hearing of his brother’s death, a man called Robert (David Beames) embarks on a journey from London to Bristol in his unreliable Rover, encountering several odd characters on his way. A disturbed army deserter (who he wisely ditches by the roadside), a petrol punp attendant (Sting) living in his caravan shrine to Eddie Cochran (who, by no coincidence, died in a motorbike accident on the A4 where Radio On is mostly set), and a mysterious German woman looking for her daughter. Throughout the film Robert appears unable to communicate with others, left in his own thoughts he descends into a drunken spree that leaves him – literally – on the edge.

The snow covered landscape of the South West roads with their seedy filling stations and grimy cafés appears very far removed from the pristine Marks and Spencer Motos of today. Petit’s world is almost an alien one, both from the almost bygone era it represents and for the fact that it is so unlike any other British film of the period. The monochrome shots of the Westway tower blocks look distant and almost East European, and the director does like to dwell on this. There’s also the Kraftwerk tracks and Bowie screaming Heroes in German, and the suggestion that the brother has died as a result of involvement with a European porn ring. But this is no Get Carter. Robert isn’t out for revenge, he isn’t sure what he’s out for at all and the film asks more than it answers. In this way it’s extremely demanding, and what at first appears inconsequential turns out to be a deeply thought provoking look at people stranded in a tired and wasted landscape. As a period piece that looks at Britain on the edge of Thatcherism it’s as good as, if not better, than Stephen Frears’ Bloody Kids.

Yes, there’s an undeniable strange taste to much of Radio On, but it really is a work of art; and the soundtrack is so memorable because it sits so oddly with the film’s content. During the opening scene a camera roams nervously round an empty flat to the accompaniment of Bowie’s Heroes, eventually settling on an apparently dead body in a bath. Workers on a factory shop floor listen to Ian Dury’s Sweet Gene Vincent in a scene that out-weirds David Lynch. Robert lurches drunkenly in a bar to the background of Lucky Number by Lene Lovich and there’s a stunning driving scene to my favourite Bowie song, Always Crashing in the Same Car. Not everyone admires the strange beauty of the Westway or the M4, but you’ll certainly see it in this film. It’s beautifully shot and very, very strange – but well worth a look.

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Holiday Books

Sunday August 3, 2008

Inspired by Simon’s post I’ve been giving some though to my holiday reading this year. As I’m currently restraining myself from buying anything new I’m going to find it difficult to pass the airport exclusive stands. Like a smuggler who tries to pass through customs as quickly as possible on the way in to Heathrow, I’ll be dashing past Waterstone’s with my head down on the way out. But I’m determined to keep plundering my existing stock of books.

I’m currently halfway through Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing. It’s taking me so long to read that I’ll probably be taking it away with me in a couple of weeks time. And if I can stomach any more McCarthy I might also pack Cities of the Plain, the final part of his Border trilogy. Although experience has taught me that it’s wise to leave long periods of rest between McCarthy novels.

This weekend it’s the annual harbour festival in Bristol. Finding the heat and crowds overwhelming yesterday, I excused myself for an hour to find a quiet and shady tree to read by. I noticed only one other reader in my field of vision, a young lady halfway through The God of Small Things. So a chance inspiration for my next title.

The other books will possibly be a choice between The Bone People by Keri Hulme, something else by Joseph Conrad or Graham Greene (often good for holidays). Or I may allow my wife to buy an airport exclusive for me. Which isn’t really cheating.

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Youth, oh Youth

Thursday July 24, 2008

Although just a week in, the new regime of strictly reading old books from my shelves and not buying new ones is working very well. Whilst searching for Graham Greene’s The Human Factor I accidentally toppled over a pile of books to reveal a yellowing 1975 edition of Joseph Conrad’s short story Youth coupled with the longer The End of the Tether. I dusted it down, climbed into the hammock – fitting for seafaring tales – and began to read.

Conrad was a favourite of mine as an English student. After studying a lot of 18th Century novels that appeared to bend over backwards to be authentic I found Conrad’s fiction absorbing because he obviously lived or observed at close quarters much of what went into the yarns he told. Youth is like that – the absolute determination of a young sailor to get to Bangkok in the face of madness personified by a ship that is sinking one half of the time and is on fire the other. It breathes its realism and Conrad doesn’t appear to try hard to achieve this; the prose comes from the pen of a seasoned sea dog, although he only uses this in making it all seem authentic. His personal experiences of the sea just appear to leak into his writing. And just as the life at sea over a century ago appears totally alien to me as a reader – and I snuggle comfortably and safely into my hammock all the more for it – so does the idealism and arrogance of youth. Being so young is as distant to me now as the far off lands that the young Marlow dreamt of. Is Conrad playing on my desire to be youthful again?

This is a brilliantly written piece that matches the acute characterisation and intensity of Heart of Darkness. I like the way Conrad draws you into a tale within a tale and then draws you out again – Marlow interrupting his narrative with the occasional request to his friends at the table to “pass the bottle”. And like Heart of Darkness it’s also very dense; only forty odd pages long yet I came out of it feeling like I’d digested a full length novel. The companion piece, The End of the Tether, is much more sober and nowhere near as enjoyable, although it’s look at old age makes it an obviously fitting companion and it’s well worth reading the two together. But it may leave you on a downer, Marlow’s early idealism now even more distant.

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