The Drowned World - post I

One of the great joys of this year has been discovering JG Ballard. Following on from Millennium People the Drowned World shows him flexing his imagination even more with London flooded and inhabited by giant mosquitoes and lizards.

For those of us used to the idea of global warming this is of course a nightmare prophecy that might well come true. But the skill in the writing is that after just a few pages an environment of waterways, lagoons of abandoned office blocks and giant reptiles has become clear in the reader’s mind.

This is not done in a way that might put you off with too much description and explanation. If anything the real horror of the situation is the casualness with which Ballard describes how the world has heated up and how the human race is slowly dying out.

More tomorrow…

Midway review of the year - part II

If there is a theme to the second half of the year then the phrase coined by J.G. Ballard seems best to sum it up as a period of reading strange realities. Ballard himself provided Millennium People but there were also contributions from Don De Lilo.

Falling Man was a brilliant response to the grief, anger and confusion of 9/11 and left you understanding the reactions of those touched by the events even if like them you were no closer to understanding the motives for the attack.

But then Cosmopolis is a great Ballardesque commentary on wealth in the digital age where millions can be spent at the flick of a button and as digits cross a ticker on a screen.

Although you had to tilt the head to get the best out of those books it didn’t involve the schoolboy engagement with the text that Golding, with his images, does. The Spire was a story of faith, deceit and human fragility with the building of the spire echoing the destruction of its visionary creator the dean of the cathedral Jocelin.

Back to the science fiction was Kurt Vonnegut with his ability to make you laugh out loud even as he writes about the world ending. Cat’s Cradle and then The Breakfast of Champions were great insights into the imagination of this writer but also provided views from an America frightened of its own power and wealth.

With the first six months under the belt the only downside is that compared to previous years the reading rate has dropped slightly. This is partly because of changes in the commute that have reduced reading time. But it is a slight cause for concern that will hopefully be addressed in the second half of the year.

Midway review of the year - post I

The year started with a foreign theme with Winter Notes on Summer Impressions by Fyodor Dostoevsky quickly followed by some Huraki Murakami. The Dostoevsky was great to see a great writer show a more human side. This was repetitive and obnoxious in places with a sense of humour that didn’t always work. Following it up with his debut Poor Folk showed just how polished he could be.

Murakami’s book about running was more a book about writing with the author talking about discipline and routine and the fact they worked well for both running and writing.

Then things took a German theme and specifically the holocaust with The Reader by Bernhard Schlink, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas by John Boyne and Crabwalk by Gunter Grass.

The Reader was a clever book that challenged perceptions of victim status with a camp guard unable to read being sent to prison for amongst other things deciding who should die on prisoner lists. The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas was childlike but very powerful. The story of the boys on either side of the barbed wire ends in tragedy but the senselessness of racist persecution comes through strongly. Finally Crabwalk is Grass writing about modern technology and the power of the internet to spread hate. He tells a story about the power of the past and the failure of a guilty generation to teach the young the lessons they should have learnt.

Then came the marathon that was 2666 and the Red Riding quartet. First of all the Bolano. This 1,000 page opus is in many ways an odd book. Produced in a way that the deceased author never wanted – he had hoped for separate books – and without a conclusion it is a real challenge to stick with it.

The pay-off as far as I was concerned was that it showed an author who was clearly on a journey towards a grand narrative. The hundreds of women that were being killed in an industrial Mexican town were linked with a reclusive author. No doubt it would have all come together and you could appreciate the vision.

The Red Riding quartet, which benefitted from a TV series on Channel 4, was in some ways as dark as the Bolano with murders and corrupt policemen but this was closer to home and grittier. David Peace takes the reader into a nightmarish world where the lines between right and wrong have gone and night and day become a blurred living hell. As the story of corruption in Yorkshire unfolds through 1974, 1977, 1980 and 1983 so do a collection of inter-connected characters. Peace is writing not just about corruption but real evil and the imagery used and the content of these books is going to stick in the mind well beyond 2009.

Part two coming up…

Thanks for the support

managed to do the race in 1.05. The last km was particularly hard but in the end the sense of satisfaction at having finished was worth it.

£115 will allow Book Aid International to send nearly 60 brand new books to libraries in sub-Saharan Africa. Their (conservative) estimate is that at least 5 people will read every book we send yearly so those books will be read by 300 people.

thank you everyone who sponsored me.

Running for a good cause

Tomorrow it's the London 10k taking a route through central London. I am taking part and raising money for Book Aid International. The charity shares the gift of reading with some of the poorest children on the planet sending books to those in Africa that would otherwise never be able to get access to them.

If you would like to sponsor my efforts then please make your donation online:

https://www.bmycharity.com/V2/simonquicke

thanks

Simon

Lights Out for the Territory - post II

This book is so dense that you almost end up re-reading parts of it in order to consume all of the information. Sinclair is being fluid with time delving back into the past to show its influence on the present and throwing names of writers, film stars and directors as well as criminals all into the mix.

Nowhere is the mixture of time more in evidence than the funeral procession for one of the Kray twins. The old east end comes back to the 1950s and the touches requested at the funeral are harking back to a Victorian era even before that.

Sinclair is looking for the things that make an area and is prepared to highlight the negative. The chapter focusing on dogs and dishes is both funny and disturbing. He is prepared to wage a war with the pen against the pitbull and the satellite dish owner.

No one ever said that London was some sort of paradise on Earth and it’s good to see Sinclair prepared to wade in and show the underbelly of the capital.

More soon...

The Mistress of Nothing preview

I have been given the opportunity of interviewing Kate Pullinger next week but in preparation have been reading The Mistress of Nothing.

The book is set into three sections – Life, Death and Afterlife – and tells the story, based on the factual experiences of Lucie Duff Gordon and her adventures in Egypt. I am not going to reveal much more at this stage other than to mention that there should be a Q&A on here with Kate Pullinger next week and a review of the book to follow.

On the stacks - fiction

Loads to catch-up with here over the summer.

Half started are:

Couples by John Updike
Lights Out for the Territory by Iain Sinclair

But also want to read:
Bejing Coma by Ma Jian
The Cold Six Thousand by James Ellroy

Plus some more I will add to this later

On the stacks - non fiction

This is a sort of summer reads list except these books will probably take longer than the summer to get through. In an ideal world over the next few weeks I might get through these:

D-Day by Anthony Beevor
Naples 44 by Norman Lewis
The Pleasure and Sorrows of Work by Alain de Botton
The Ascent of Money by Niall Ferguson

There is also a memoir by Eva Figes and a real doorstopper of a book about French history since 1900. Those might be too ambitious for the summer.

book review - The Russian Interpreter - Michael Frayn

In many ways this novella leaves you feeling that there could have been more. Maybe there should have been but the reader is expected to fill in the blanks themselves.

When you sit back and think about it the Russian Interpreter is a tightly contained story with a small cast. Ultimately it is a love triangle but with three men instead of the usual two. But it is also about the cold war and the suspicion that westerners were held in at all times by a Communist Russian State. The problem with the last theme is that is feels too stereotypically done.

He idea of being followed, having to stick to the rules and arousing suspicion at the slightest default from them is a very old concept. Spy thrillers have made the KGB man lurking in the shadows with his Mac pulled up to his chin something with a cartoonish quality.

At the heart of this story there are two characters. Manning. a student studying for his PhD and Proctor-Gould some sort of cultural enterepeneur who has a passion for Russia.

The story starts with Proctor-Gould looking for Manning and in the time it takes for that to happen you are filled in on the students life. He is frustrated by his studies, bored with Russia to the extent he dreams of getting away and keeps friendships with his minder at the university Sasha and a friend Katya who seems to be a victim of the regime.

But this is clearly not Stalinist times as there are references to the country no longer having a cult of personality so you are left to assume it must be 1970s or 1980s because it is still clearly in the period of the cold war.

Manning starts working for Proctor-Gould and the student finds himself taken further away from his studies and he is introduced to the mysterious and flirtatious Raya who seduces Manning but only to get to Proctor-Gould. That leaves Manning, who works for as a translator in the odd position of having to translate love messages between the pair.

But Raya becomes a problem stealing the belongings from Proctor-Gould's hotel room and stumbling across a secret that involves the books that the English businessman hands out to Russian friends. In that collection of books there is something important enough for the businessman to resort to breaking and entering and to lie to his friend Manning.

As Raya is exposed as a thief and exits stage left the spotlight falls on the two friends and their relationships becomes clouded by the distrust that seems to pollute the Russian atmosphere. Manning winds up wondering just who can he trust. He is lied to by everyone and ends up being booted out of the country.

If there is a message as such from the book then it is around this idea of trust. When no one can be trusted and the price of backing the wrong horse is so high how can you survive in that kind of society? The problem is getting to that question involves giving to get through what often feels like a parody of a John le Carre type world.

bookmark of the week

For the last couple of years my children have taken part in the summer reading challenge at the local library and one of the incentives for doing so is a free bookmark. This year it is about a quest to find the golden book and the bookmark shows some of the characters that are being used to encourage the children to read.

The challenge works by getting the kids to read six books and for each two they receive stickers and rewards like pens and cards. At the end they receive a certificate that always makes them proud of having made the effort.

book review - Cat's Cradle - Kurt Vonnegut

This book is going to rank as one of my favourites of the year; it is certainly one of the best of the first six months.

The reason why is because of the clever mix of satire, wit and science-fiction that are weaved together by Kurt Vonnegut. He manages to describe the end of the world in a way that both horrifies and amuses which is no mean feat. The way he does so is to describe and develop a select cast of odd balls that have the power to destroy the world left to them by a man who almost did just that.

The idea of a writer following through what happened to the fictional co-creator of the atom bomb Felix Hoenikker on the day the bomb was dropped on Japan is where the book starts. But quickly the narrator moves away from his original purpose and starts to follow the threads of Hoenikker’s dysfunctional family. The scientists three children are all damaged by an upbringing starved of love and normality. One has become a dictator’s aide on a remote island in the Caribbean, another a strict repressed clarinet playing housewife and the last is a dwarf who has a history with the circus and an equally small Russian spy.

What ties them together is their father’s last deadly discovery, Ice-9, which has the power to turn water instantly to ice. The impact of using it would be to freeze the oceans and rivers and bring about an environmental catasprohe not too far removed from nuclear war.

And that is the point because this is set against a backdrop of the cold war and the horror that a bunch of idiots in positions of power could, as easily as mistakenly dropping a chunk of ice-9 into the sea, press the button and end the world.

What keeps you reading is the humour and the various sub-plots with a primitive religion holding sway on the island making the remote Caribbean world seem like a million miles away from civilisation.

Underneath the occasional oddity and incredibly imaginative story lies a biting commentary on the era. Even down to the cycle factory owner who is relocating from Chicago to the Caribbean to exploit cheap labour this book is picking big targets including consumerism, nuclear war, and the shallowness of power and the dangers of science.

Just because it is possible to invent something in a lab that can destroy the world is not necessarily a reason to unleash it on the world. The lethal mix of science, politics and war which became so visible with the mushroom clouds is a fear that might have been acutely heightened in the 1963, when Vonnegut published this book, but they still speak to us now.

Lights Out for the Territory - post I

Sinclair often makes references to JG Ballard and so it seemed like a logical jump to go from one writer talking about London to another. In Lights Out for the Territory Sinclair sets out the ambition of making nine journeys across the capital using graffiti and signs to chart the real feelings and mood of places he walks through.

This is a very similar idea to London Orbital where he walked round the M25 noting the asylums and the decaying communities made accessible by the road but at the same time over taken by the concrete and the exhaust fumes.

here he starts by setting off from his native Hackney with the intention of walking to Greenwich and then back again over the other side of the river to the M11.

He packs it full of information not just about what he can see now but also the links to the past. he is a mind of information and facts and figures that come out almost like a stream of consciousness. This is a tour not just of the streets but a world of booksellers, film makers and communities that have gone, but because Sinclair is here, not been forgotten.

more next week...

Millennium People - post V

This book has not only been a pleasure to read but reminds you of just why those authors that bend reality, Vonnegut is another that springs to mind, can ask some very important questions but couch them in humour and against a background that is slightly surreal.

The result of reading about disaffected lawyers and doctors planning to use terror as a way of over throwing attitudes in society could be grim if it was not done in such a way that all sides of the argument were shown in a sympathetic light leaving the reader to answer their own questions. Ballard manages to do that because Markham is in the middle. Not just in terms of relationships but in his own mind.

At the climax it is his own inability to resort to violence that confronts him and helps him go back to his middle class life. Seeing the horror that can be caused by hatred and fanaticism he pulls back from the brink. Although understanding the idea of a random motiveless attack he could never carry one out and could never really condone that action.

in the current climate with the war on terror still raging this is a book that makes you think. it's not just about class and apathy but also about terror and what it will take to shake us out of our slumbers. But there is a clear warning in the form of Gould that behind the entusiasts and the politically commited are the fanatics ready to kill and maim for personal pleasure more than to prove any particular point.

A review will follow soon...

Millennium People - post IV

Increasingly Markham finds himself caught between the two groups of active but relatively contained protesters at Chelsea Marina with Kay and the residents blocking the streets, fighting with police and burning their homes in protest.

Meanwhile Gould seems to have split away and each time he meets with Markham things get darker. As it emerges that he did in fact plant the Heathrow bomb, kill the TV presenter and have involvement with the Tate bomb the danger to Markham ratchets up a notch. he was the intended target in the airport and he seems to remain as a target for Gould. By now the doctor working with children abandoned by their families because of their mental illnesses and short-term futures has clearly lost his grip on reality. No longer working in an official sense and no longer able to curb his interest in violence he leaves Markham in a car park in heathrow postponing the final confrontation.

Back at Chelsea Marina the police swoop and the bailiffs come kicking through the doors and the middle classes abandon their protest. Their attempts to undermine the status quo by attacking video shops, refusing to pay for private schools and trying to prick the balloon of the system ends with a two fingered salute which is willingly misunderstood by the authorities.

More tomorrow...