July - a month in reading

As the end of term approached, all grey matter began to seep out of my ears... reading became less important to me than travelling. But I don't have a travel blog (though I do have a travel notebook) so I kinda fell off the edge of the blogging universe for a bit. However, I return now, a nutty colour (not pistachio - maybe walnut shell?) from a Thelma-and-Louise* style tour of southern Spain, head filled with Moorish architecture and tummy stuffed with paella. And what of reading during this time?

How to Paint a Dead Man by Sarah Hall
This has been well-blogged about, so I shan't dwell. It was my first by this author, whom I know has had a lot of praise heaped on her. She has a very clear, crisp style, and an authoritative tone, and whilst I enjoyed this book, it felt a little experimental to me. A bit Rick Wakeman: a bit 'I do this because I can'. The shift in gear as one is jolted from one narrator to another can be hard to adjust to, as it is not simply a change in voice, but in tense and person. Interestingly, the story I thought would be most intriguing turned out, for me, to be the least gripping (that of Annette and the Bestia), whilst my favourite character was not even one of the four narrators - Danny, Suzie's dead twin brother, stole my heart.

It is an existential novel, one that requires attention and thought, and the questions it raises are simultaneously tiny and huge - why does Giorgio paint bottles? Is there more to the thread that links these people's lives than the tenuous one apparent - and what does this mean for the threads that link all our lives? (This could become a little 6 Steps from Kevin Bacon...)

How to Paint a Dead Man is essentially a book full of, and about, subtext; what is below the surface and between the lines. It is about the nuance of relationships, and the traffic between life and death. It is about the subtleties of shade, the position of art in life and life in art. It is not a curl-up and live-in kind of book, but it teased my brain, and woke me up. I look forward to trying some of Hall's other novels.

The Passage by Justin Cronin
Yes, I fell for the hype and the beautiful packaging. And I really fancied something that wouldn't tax me too much, although I hadn't bargained on it weighing quite so much and nearly spraining my wrist. So, weighty in volume if not content. I do not tend to read horror or sci-fi, let me state that up front. Both genres, for me, work better in film-form. I've read the modern classics - Interview With The Vampire, Neuromancer, and cinematically, I'm not averse to a bit of neck-biting or zombie action. But reading The Passage was a bit left of my usual centre.

I would say that you need substantial stretches of time to spend in chunks with this book. It doesn't work if you just dip in and out. You have to take a deep breath and commit. I did, and it came up with the goods. It's well-written, and once the future-post-apocalyptic world comes in, I found myself really warming to the characters and actually caring about them - I came dangerously close to shedding a solitary tear when one particular character dies. The world of the book is well-constructed and believable, the action fast-paced and clearly, in places, written for the Big Screen, to which I have no doubt it will be coming soon. My only bugbear is...I'm not convinced that it's original enough to be getting all the praise it's had. It has elements for me of those terrifyingly bleak Children's Film Foundation films I was raised on in the seventies, things like Brother in the Land and The Weathermonger, in which a few surviving youngsters cross nuclear-attack ravaged Britain to find sanctuary on the Isle of Wight or somewhere. The Vampires - or Virals as they're called here (and that's another thing - hasn't that been done in 28 Days Later?) - are interesting: part Giger creation, part Aphex Twin video, they are potentially something new, but I don't know if that's enough to make this whole novel something new.

At the end of the day, you know whether you want to read this or not. Either it's your cup of Earl Grey, or it isn't. It is more literary than most in the genre, for sure, but that doesn't convince me that there's going to be thousands of discerning Persephone readers suddenly turning up in the horror section of Waterstones. An enjoyable, bloody romp, to sound like a Sun newspaper reviewer.

Bog Child by Siobhan Dowd
Dowd died in 2007 of Breast Cancer, leaving a legacy of brilliant YA novels keeping her name alive. This one deals with the troubles in Northern Ireland in the eighties, and is an intelligent and beautifully crafted story. For young people outside of Ireland, I would suggest a brief grounding in the history of the IRA and particularly Bobby Sands and the Hunger Strikers to be of help in understanding the plot - Dowd assumes knowledge, and does not patronise with background. It seems particularly poignant at the moment, with pockets of rioting flaring up again, and could be an important reminder for all of us of how complicated and violent life can be under extreme circumstances. There is a lesson here in the price one pays for nailing oneself to a cause, a lesson that a whole new generation might need to consider. Probably not one to go onto straight from Horrid Henry...

Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
I was sitting in Costa Coffee in Manchester Waterstones' when I literally had, totally out of the blue, an overwhelming desire to read this book. I honestly do not know what inspired this desire, but there it was, like the urge for an ice-cold Coca-Cola, and so I acted on it. And I was not disappointed. What an extraordinary style of writing! It almost feels like an unfinished manuscript, and yet that is exactly right for the nature of the story. In the same way that Charlotte Bronte gave us landscape as character in Jane Eyre, so Rhys does in Wide Sargasso Sea, and the rip, the tearing, we feel as Bertha is taken from this Caribbean dreamland to Rochester's tower is tangible. Rhys teases us: the nature of madness is questioned, played with, and our only response, surely, can be that insanity is relative; relative to one's surroundings, to one's family, to one's acquaintances, to one's treatment. There is an edge of hysteria to the whole short novel, and yet an eerie calmness to the denouement.

For me, had I not known Jane Eyre well, it would have been a more difficult book, but loving Jane Eyre as I do (in the old-time debate, yes, I prefer it to Wuthering Heights), the deeper dimension offered here was rich and delicious. It's quite unlike anything I've read before, and it has stayed with me in ways I didn't think it would. I may never read Jane Eyre in the same light again.

Just Kids by Patti Smith
Horses is my favourite album of all time. That, combined with the beautiful photograph on the cover of this partial (it is solely about Smith's relationship with artist Robert Mapplethorpe) autobiography, meant I simply couldn't wait for it to come out in paperback.

Smith's love for Mapplethorpe is evident all the way through the book - every word she uses drips with adoration, sometimes worship, sometimes a cooler respect, but always with unadulterated love. It was, for me, however, educational in terms of Smith's own artistic intent. I was surprised, given that I've always sensed an undercurrent of violence to Horses, to find that Smith was/is so much of a hippy. I was fascinated also by the way she considers herself a poet who happens to have rock musicians playing alongside her; not that I didn't know she's a poet - I have books of her poetry - but that she seems to have genuinely accidentally become a rockstar. Her entire approach to her own career is intriguing, and does in fact, from about halfway through the book, become the dominant interest.

Despite my sometime lack of tolerance for all things hippy-dippy (astrology, witchcraft, meditation etc - I was brought up with it and rebelled at an early age), I find Smith an engaging as well as profoundly talented artist and person, as well as edgier than I suspect she thinks she is. Just Kids is an extremely interesting and insightful book, and a wonderful record of the oh-so-dirty glamour that surrounded the Chelsea Hotel and New York in the seventies. Pass me my CBGBs tee-shirt...

* Driving the roads of the high eastern Alpujarras in the Sierra Nevada very nearly resulted in a re-enactment of that film's ending. I even had my headscarf at the ready...

A Most Unnecessary Post

I feel it must look as though I've either stopped reading or have taken to reading things too embarrassing to admit to, and though I try to avoid those "sorry I haven't posted in a while" posts, I can't really excuse this one on any other grounds. This blog isn't supposed to be a diary, and it also isn't supposed to have a particular theme, or genre of book that's written about, but the fact is that whilst my reading time, as noted previously, has diminished somewhat due to exam and coursework essay marking, the books I've been reading are probably not going to find much of an audience here. I began House of Leaves, having been given it as a present, but it's text-book size and shape and I just can't carry it around with me, so I've relegated it to the 'summer holiday' pile. I've just read Everything: A Book About Manic Street Preachers, which is a truly great rock biog (in which my old fanzine is mentioned, heartwarmingly), but it's 11 years out of date and unless you're really into the Manics, not of great interest. And if you are into the Manics, you probably read it 11 years ago... So now I'm just grabbing things off my shelves, thing that are easy-to-read and small enough to fit in my bag. I've read half The Virgin Suicides in the garden today, which fitted perfectly as the weather has made everything look like Sofia Coppola's beautiful film version, and almost made me wish I was blonde again. That finished, I think I may head into Elaine Feinstein's biography of Ted Hughes, about which I will make a detailed and 'proper' comment. There, as I said; a most unnecessary post.

Richard

I know. This sits uncomfortably amongst the books that surround it here; it stands out like a Manics' fan at Glastonbury in the days before the invention of that modernist oxymoron, 'festival chic'. But ...Lamp - and Book is nothing if not eclectic. I'd like to take it a step further and say ...Lamp - and Book is a dichotomy, but that implies something altogether more planned and active; ...Lamp - and Book is more gently at odds with itself than that, and so is merely eclectic. I digress. Richard.

Ben Myers has fictionalised the story of Richey Edwards, lyricist with the Manic Street Preachers until his unexplained disappearance in 1995. I was sent this proof for a reason by a friend who works in the book industry. The reason is simple - we were Manics' fans.

We must have seen them 30 times between 1992 and 94. Once in 1996, but the Richey-shaped hole stage-right was too much to bear and we drew a line under that part of our lives. I have never read any of the books about the band or Richey, I have read and seen very few interviews with the remaining three members of the band in the last 15 years and I have avoided thinking about what happened to Richey / what Richey did, for the simple reason that I will never know the truth and speculation seemed irrelevant and indeed, irreverent. I don't think my friend expected me to read this book; I don't think I expected to read it myself.

But I have. And so... what of it? This is going to be a hard book to comment on - for me now, and for future reviewers - as the chances are high that we will all offend someone somewhere whatever we say; that is inherent in anything that touches on this subject. Myers must have known that when he started writing the book, and must be braced for whatever hurricanes will come his way upon publication in October. He's a brave man. For there are as many theories about what happened to Richey as there are people who care, and the loyalty that Richey inspired in his fans means that even after all this time, every one of those theories is fiercely believed and guarded by its thinker. We all had a little piece of Richey, we all knew him in our own way, all had our own relationship with him (I'm talking existentially here rather than literally, though for some, the latter may apply). Therefore, there are things that we all KNOW, in our hearts, he did or did not do in February 1995. I KNOW, for example, that he did not jump off the Severn Bridge. I have no evidence for this, I just KNOW. Call it gut feeling, call it wishful thinking, call it denial if you want, but I KNOW. What he did do, or where he went, I have no idea. Honestly, I've never felt the need to think about it. But that he didn't jump, I am absolutely certain.

So to read a book, written in first person - in other words, that purports to be Richey's voice - that may trash what one has KNOWN for fifteen years, is quite an undertaking, and will be so for the thousands of fans who will devour this when it is finally available. It was brave of Myers to write it, and it is brave of the fans to read it.

In keeping with the spirit of its subject matter, then, Myers' book does some things brilliantly and some things less so. I'll start with what it does well.

Primarily, it tells a very plausible story. I won't give away the ending - and it's interesting that though a true story, Richey's is one that has either a choice of endings or indeed, no ending at all - but for me, it seems that this is very likely as a recounting of what happened in those (possibly) last days. It fits with the Richey I knew - existentially, again.

It has forced me to look again at certain aspects of the 'Legend' of the Manic Street Preachers: for example, that seen from the inside, the so-called Cult of Richey put an enormous strain on Richey himself. He must have felt a huge responsibility for the kids that copied his look, that cut themselves and wrote poetry and cried out to him. Yet what could he do for them? They were just another statement of his own impotence; he created them, these beautiful, screaming misfits, he validated them, yet he could no more ease their pain than he could stop his own. And look what happened to Shelley's Victor Frankenstein.

In amongst the bleakness, there is humour. And these few moments - fewer, to my mind, than they should be - are where Myers' Richey seems most real. Short bursts of banter with the rest of the band make him inescapably, beautifully three-dimensional.

Myers splits his narrative into two clear parallel tales: one, the first person present tense story that starts the morning Richey leaves, and the other, flashback, and it is here that my first literary problem with this book begins: the flashback narrative is written in second person. It is Richey talking to himself. Now, we all do it, we all talk to ourselves, whether aloud or in our heads: "Oh, you idiot, what did you do that for?" we will reprimand ourselves. But this is a very tricky technique to use well in a novel, as it must be sustained over a long period, and it works only in the hands of a very accomplished writer. I can understand why Myers did it - there is a clear trail of schizophrenic discourse throughout - but for me, it's just not a valid narrative form, certainly not when it is, in present tense, recounting what happened in the past; this is, however, a very personal view - see my problems with Wolf Hall, also.

And this brings me to my other problem with the book, one which I doubt I will be alone in having, and one which Myers must have realised would be a controversial sticking point. Third person would have worked fine - I'm a Rupert Brooke fan, and loved Jill Dawson's fictionalised account of his life, The Great Lover, because she never assumed she could get inside Brooke's head. And this is the overwhelming difficulty with Myers' book: that first person. In order for Richard to really work, it has to find Richey's voice, and I'm afraid it simply never does that. It just doesn't sound like him. It's a competent telling of the story of the Manic Street Preachers with emphasis on Richey, but it isn't Richey telling the story. It's too dumbed-down for it to be Richey. Richey would never just have told us his thoughts were shattering; he would have written a page that looked like something squeezed from the mind of ee cummings. Myers has underestimated his readership (which, surely, is comprised mainly of Manics' fans - who else will read this?) We have read Sartre and Kerouac. We can understand and make sense of fractured syntax: Myers' Richey tells us that he cannot finish a sentence, and yet he does, in page after page after page of perfect grammar. It does not follow, then, that these are Richey's thoughts. I will not second guess Myers - I don't know whether it was lack of confidence or lack of ability that resulted in this stylistic blandness, but as the story of a man's descent into madness, it just doesn't convince. And as Myers is also, in another life, a poet, this is doubly disappointing. Richey was a living, walking soundbite machine, yet there is not one attempt to create something similar in here. Not one line of Myers' would I quote, and yet I am supposed to believe that these are Richey's thoughts. Richey's raison d'etre was breaking moulds; Myers should have pushed himself to follow that philosophy. But of course, cynical old me can't help thinking, it would have been a risk to sales figures. Innovation doesn't sell. Look at Clegg.

I'll be honest and admit that I was sceptical from the first moment I heard about this book. It would have had to have been something truly extraordinary for me to really like it, and it just doesn't hit that button, though it is, as I have said, competently written (though competent was never a word I remember being applied to Richey...) But it shouldn't be dismissed out-of-hand. And I know Manics' fans well enough to know that some of them will do just that - it's a way of forming a protective shield, over themselves and over Richey. But this is a work of fiction, and it's important that we remember that. And I cannot begin to imagine what someone would make of it who had never heard of Richey - that, I suppose, we will discover in October.

I will leave you with this final thought - though plausible, Myers' version of events has one flaw: it never mentions the £200 a day that Richey withdrew from cash machines in the two weeks leading up to his disappearance. Myers' Richey has the money with him, yes, but he never mentions the sustained, considered, systematic way in which he came by it. Those withdrawals are surely (correct me if I'm wrong; as I say, I've not read much) the main indication that somewhere inside all the scribbling madness in his head, Richey had a plan. And Myers' Richey has no plan. So, believable as this story is - and it really is. I really do think Myers presents us with an entirely possible series of events - it still does not lay to rest all the questions and the niggles and the buts that have come to define Richey's memory.