The Pigeon

After a trip to London (and the request seven hours on various and much delayed coaches) has coincided with a stack of very short books I’m stuck playing catch up on the blog.   By the time you read this my trip to the capital will probably be a month past.  That’s what you get for reading three books in one day.  Anyway, future trips will align with long books; kicking things off with a 77 page novella was a mistake.  Or maybe it wasn’t.  The Pigeon is short and super intense so it’s kind of ideal to read in one sitting, the way I’ve been forced to read it.  Add to that a creepy guy trying to take up half of my seat and making me feel awkward as balls and you get a pretty much perfect reading scenario for a story about a guy completely flipping his shit over nothing.

The Pigeon it is important to establish isn’t one for ornithologists.  Anyone expecting some kind of urban Kes is in the wrong place.  In fact, the bird itself appears in one scene.  The book’s more about the consequences of the pigeon than an actual bird.  One day, well respected man Jonathan Noel is leaving his dingy rooms to start another day of work just as he has for the thousands of days that preceded it.  But on this one day there is a pigeon in his corridor.  The pigeon is essentially just the catalyst that causes Noel to question his brand of living and so from this point on, he is on edge.  Noel questions thirty carefully constructed years of order over one event he cannot control.  As the day wears on he is distracted at work, tears a hole in his trousers and plans to never return to his room because the pigeon has sullied it.  It doesn’t sound like much of a story, but Noel’s problems pile up so thick and fast that you forget he’s obsessing over nothing.

Now, I myself am inclined to worry and obsess over nothing.  I even have a healthy hatred of a

common pest (one that caused two different friends to buy me spider repellent kit for my last birthday).  As such, I can relate to Noel.  It’s refreshing to know that I’m not the only person in world who blows insignificant things out of all proportion.  Admittedly, it’s a tad disconcerting to read simply because Noel seems to be having a bit of a mental breakdown and the book’s full of moments and thing that I recognise myself doing and I like to think that I pretty much have my shit together.  Noel is one of those characters that you don’t really want to be similar to.  His life is a happy one.  But it is a lonely live contrasted with painful care.  It’s not the sort of life most people want to end up living.

I feel like I’m not saying that much about the book itself.  But that’s only because so little really happens.  Everything that is of any interest in The Pigeon is down to Patrick Süskind’s marvellous style.  It’s strange to refer to a book in which one of the main events is literally a man tearing a whole in his trousers as unrelenting but it’s true.  I don’t remember the last time I cared about the fate of someone else’s trousers so much.  It’s a something that is going to be lost in the retelling, so I don’t see the point in saying too much more.  Just go and read it.

Next up (and already read in full): Hideous Kinky by Esther Freud.  It too has a misleading title.

Red Harvest

Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest is one of those books that it’s essential to read quickly, if only to keep track of each character’s brief existence and inevitable violent death.  I swear some of the smaller time mobsters are just introduced to up the body count.  This is particularly true of the end of the book where all character development seemingly goes out of the window in favour of more killing.  Having said that, that is my only niggle with the book.  Mostly it’s a fun and fast read simply because it’s a fast paced book.  The original crime, that kicks things into motion, is solved in the first 50-odd pages and after that the story rockets off to other crimes that are being committed thick and fast.  The whole of Red Harvest is set over three or four days and, read at the same pace, neither the novel’s protagonist nor the reader has a chance to catch their breath before the plot rattles on.

The plot of the book is a simple one.  Newspaper man Donald Willsson hires a private eye, only before the pair can meet Willsson is murdered and the detective takes it upon himself to solve not only Willsson’s murder, but to clean up the corrupt town of Personville.  Personville is pretty much the Gotham of Batman Begins.  Before Batman shows up, naturally.  There are fewer mad costumed criminals and Gotham has a few policemen that aren’t completely corrupt, but there’s a whole lot of mob-based crime which the police can’t even begin to tackle.

Red Harvest is a staple of the hard-boiled genre, with which I’m pretty familiar, but there are surprising bits to it as well.  There’s a woman.  A dame, if you will.  And for while I was expecting romance.  Women in these books fall into the virgin-redeemer or the whorish-corrupter categories and, while Dinah Brand certainly isn’t a virgin type, she is a helpmate to our detective hero.  When it became apparent that none of the redeemer types were going to have anything to do with him, I hoped she’d step up to the plate despite her gold-digging tendencies.  Hammett waxes lyrical about her for a while, (“I don’t like being manhandled, even by young women who look like something out of mythology when they’re steamed up,”) but ultimately she meets the same sticky end as many of Personville’s residents.  I think hers might have been the death that was only remotely shocking and it’s only because she’s female.  Dinah spends most of the book naïvely playing very dangerous men off against each other; she’s crying out to be murdered.  And yet, part of me expected her to be protected by genre conventions, or by the protagonist, as she is a woman who hasn’t done anything actually illegal.

Red Harvest is another book narrated by an unnamed protagonist.  He’s meant to be, I think, a faceless private eye.  Hammett draws our attention to his lack of names several times- there are frequent references to any given names being pseudonyms.  Unlike The Time Machine, however, this doesn’t prevent us from connecting with the character.  In fact, as we know he is the only one who can’t die in the whole mess, it’s fairly easy to relate to him.  He’s a safe bet, at least.  And any distance that there is in the book allows us to relax around the horror of all the dead.  The ability to connect is partly down to the style.  Whereas Wells’ unnamed scientist is very factual, Hammett’s detective is full of hard boiled poetry.  He thinks as the people of his world speak and the fact that it’s written in the present tense rather than a tale relay to us second hand helps with the immediacy.

Dashiell Hammett is an author I like and Red Harvest is the kind of book I enjoy.  It’s a solid genre piece in a genre that I love.  And I don’t really need to say much more than that.

 

Next to be written about is super short The Pigeon, by Patrick Süskind.

The Time Machine

At just 88 pages The Time Machine is by far the shortest book I’ve written about here so far.  The book itself is the last HG Wells one I had left on the list and it wasn’t half as enjoyable as my previous reads of his.  As with any of the books I haven’t enjoyed, there are good bits to it.  In fact, it starts incredibly well.  My issue is with pretty much everything that happens once the Time Traveller takes over the narrative.  Accordingly, it picks up again once he shuts up.  And I think I know what my problem is with the story.

For those who don’t know the bare bones of the tale, The Time Machine is about a man who travels forward in time to the year 802,701 AD and his brief adventures there.  After presenting a lecture a never name man jets off in his machine to a world of innocent Eloi and industrious Morlocks.  For some reason the Morlocks are the bad guys, even though they’ve been driven underground and their toil allows the Eloi to spend their days doing nothing.  In Wells’ defence, the Eloi are shown to be completely useless and just sit around eating fruit all day, but the Morlocks are actively trying to make things worse for the Time Traveller by stealing his machine.  It’s a nice little allegory for class divide, really; it’s just a shame that the Morlocks are treated with such contempt whereas the Eloi (a sign that the dream of human intellect had “committed suicide,”) are only to be pitied.  After that there’s a bit about the end of the world, but that’s not really important.

As I said earlier, despite the fact that I didn’t enjoy the book much, there are bits of it that are very clever.  Very few characters are named and even those who are have names like Blank or Dash.  The book opens with a scientific lecture and debate and so I initially assumed this so the novella could engage in a shorthand fashion with its contemporary theories.  It’s much simpler to represent a school of thought through the Medical Man or the Provincial Mayor, for example, than to flesh out characters that could hold similar views and this works marvellously at first.  The problem comes when Well propels us into the future.  We are already distanced from our protagonist as we don’t know who he is, when he’s place so far into an unrecognisable future it’s so difficult to connect with him or care much about his narrative.  Even the introduction of a named Eloi, Weena is not enough.  By the point she is named, my interest had waned into apathy.

The ending of the book annoyed me too.  I can’t make up my mind if I liked it or not.  The Time Traveller arrives back in his own time and tells the story to his friends, many of whom (unsurprisingly) call bullshit.  And there’s part of me that wants the story to end like this- with the mystery of whether it is all an elaborate lie or not.  The mystery is resolved and a new once replaces it, though.  One of the Time Traveller’s friends sees him disappear in his machine, never to be heard of again.  What we’re left with is supposition as to where and when he could have gone and why he doesn’t return.  Personally, my money’s on gruesome death, but that’s not an option Wells presents.

I don’t really know what to say about the book in closing.  It’s short and clearly the work of an inexperienced writer.  I loathe to write it off as it has been such a genre changing book.  In this story, Wells invented the time machine.  It’s such an undeniably important book.  Without it the sci-fi genre and our pop culture landscape would be completely different.  If only he’d been a bit nicer about those Morlocks.

I’m now reading Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest.  It’s a real page turner, so shouldn’t be too long.

Love in a Cold Climate

Love in a Cold Climate is an odd book.  It’s a good book.  But odd.  It’s Nancy Mitford’s sort of sequel to The Pursuit of Love and, like the first book, it’s narrated by Fanny Logan and concerned, primarily on the love lives of everyone but her.  I can’t say I blame Mitford for brushing over her narrator’s romances; they’re as dull as dishwater.  She marries young and stays married, popping out the odd child as and when it becomes appropriate.  The rest of her family and social circles, however, seem far less set on settling down or being appropriate.  This time it’s the turn of Lady Polly Hampton, her straight lace mother, Lady Montdore, and their shared lover, Polly’s uncle, Boy Dougdale.  At this point, I do need to clarify that Polly’s uncle and mother are not brother and sister.  Sexually inappropriate (and shocking for the time) as it is; there’s no incest.

Anyway, back to the oddness.  The book is split into two distinct sections: the Polly Years and the Cedric Years.  These are not official titles of the parts, but they’re pretty apt.  Fanny grows up with Polly and a lot of it takes place at the same time as The Pursuit of Love- that book’s main character is absent largely because she is not deemed a suitable companion for Polly by her mother.  The early chapters do have a sense of Mitford ret-conning her earlier work.  I don’t have The Pursuit of Love available to check in any great detail, but I don’t remember too many mentions of Polly Hampton in that book.  Polly is beautiful and rich and indifferent to men.  She is a difficult character to identify with because she is so ethereal.  At times she seems to be only façade.  Even when she elopes with her lecherous uncle Boy, there’s a sense disconnect there.  Yes, we’re told of events through Fanny and it’s all parsed through her shock but the marriage seems like an act of parental defiance first and an emulation of love secondly.  As such, when it all goes wrong, the reader is left with a sense of inevitability rather than pity.

The Cedric Years too are strange.  Once Polly marries her uncle she is written out of the will and the inheritance passes to an obscure Canadian relative, Cedric Hampton.  Rather than getting anything like the Hound of the Baskervilles or Remains of the Day fish out of water, slightly quirky new Lord scenario that I was expecting, Cedric is a screamingly camp gold digger who himself seduces Boy (spoiler).  Considering the book was published in 1949, you can see what I mean about it being shocking and delightfully ahead of its time.  Cedric’s pretty hilarious.  Somehow he seems to have no guile but is full of charm.  I want to write all his actions of as a pursuit of wealth, but can’t- there’s part of me that believes his motives could be pure despite it all.  And even if they’re not, he makes people happy.

The other reason the book is odd is mostly a case of times and attitudes changing.  Boy Dougdale is the family joke because of his lecherous tendencies and his interest in young girls.  At one point in the novel, Polly’s mentioned that she has loved him since she was 14.  There are recollections of dubious games of sardines when the girls are young and a fairly open acknowledgement amongst Fanny’s family that Boy is a paedophile.  Their whole romance, seen through modern eyes, appears to be one of an older man grooming a teenager until she believes herself in love with him.  Rather than it being a crime, it’s written off as a bit of a shame.  Added to the fact that Polly always seems a bit ambivalent to love and sex, it can be seen in a fairly disturbing way and, at times, the humour is lost.

There are a thousand things more I could write about Love in a Cold Climate.  I’m again left with the feeling that I’ve barely even scratched the surface.  Lady Montdore herself deserves to have essays devoted to her; she’s such a wonderful character.  Again, I enjoyed this book immensely.  It doesn’t have quite the same feel to it as The Pursuit of Love and I’m glad that the third book in the trilogy, Don’t Tell Alfred isn’t on the list.  I don’t think it would be bad, not by a long shot, but by the end of this book, Fanny is a mother and a wife and a proper adult and part of me just wants her to grow up and stop sticking her nose into other peoples’ affairs.

The next book up is HG Wells’s The Time Machine.  At 90 pages, it’s more of a novella really.

Murder Must Advertise

I’d never heard of Lord Peter Wimsey until reading Murder Must Advertise.  In retrospect, he’s one of those things that I really think I should have known about.  I love a good murder mystery.  And there’s a whole series of them.  In fact, until picking up this book I knew basically nothing of Dorothy L Sayers.  It was a name that carried a vague association with the genre, but I kind of thought she might be an American version of Agatha Christie.  But with more crime organised crime.  Aside from her nationality, I don’t think I was far wrong.  The fantastically named Lord Wimsey and the book as a whole is very Miss Marple meets Bertie Wooster.

It all kicks off when young Victor Dean falls down the stairs to his death when at his job at Pym’s Publicity Ltd.  Naturally, this isn’t as accidental as the police first believe and so enters Peter Wimsey, disguised (sort of) as regular-Joe, Death Bredon: copywriter.  Wimsey proceeds to solve the murder largely by partaking in water-cooler gossip and skulking around pubs.  All is not as it seems, and after uncovering a cocaine ring and blackmail plot, not to mention single-handedly winning the company cricket the criminals are all banged up or carted off to the morgue.  I hope that’s not too much of a spoiler, but the detective does solve the mystery.  All this makes it sound like there’s not much deeper going on in the book and, on the surface it is a pretty light and quick read.  But there is more going on under the surface.

Murder Must Advertise paints a pretty disturbing picture of capitalism and the necessity of advertising.  The process of creating adverts is explicitly detailed and broken down; Wimsey even gets stuck into creating campaigns of his own (even if he is bafflingly successful without really trying).  There are whole paragraphs of the book dedicated to just advertising slogans.  In fact, this is how the book ends.  Once all the crime is over it is the power of advertising that is shown to endure and what we’re left with is a bombardment of slogans.  It’s scary that even in the 1930s adverts were everywhere and we’re now buried even deeper in marketing.  Sayers uses the slogans to overwhelm us so that we recognise it as simply crazy that it is so prevalent in society.  When taken out of context it is mad, but it’s something that we accept without question on a daily basis.  Hell, it’s become fashionable to pay for the privilege of wearing a t-shirt featuring some slogans.

According to the Internet, this wasn’t Sayers’s favourites of her books.  But it’s still enjoyable.  It seems to be a case of her needing to write a book quickly and so she wrote what she knew and she wrote it well.  Okay, I have no experience, beyond what I’ve read, of the 1930s London drug scene, but it seems pretty likely to me; a careful balance of desperate down and outs and those with money to burn.  Besides, any book featuring a bored Lord who decides that crime solving is just the ticket probably isn’t that grounded in reality to begin with, so I don’t know what she was so disappointed about.  I mean, my main issue with the book was the entire chapter dedicated to a cricket match.  Reading it was almost as painful as actually having to watch one, plot points be damned.

I had fun reading Murder Must Advertise.  Yes, it has a serious side, but it’s quite easy to overlook that and just slip into the slightly silly crime novel frame of mind (which I find far more enjoyable that the worrying critique of consumerist society mind set).  It’s nice that there are both elements at play in the book.  When all the capitalism and cynical marketing gets too much it’s lovely to have a good old fashioned murder to fall back on.

My next read is a second Nancy Mitford book, Love in a Cold Climate.

Labyrinths

I’m going to start straight off by saying that I didn’t really get Jorge Luis Borges’s Labyrinths.  It’s a collection of short stories, essays and parables that were combined in an anthology after the author’s death and, as such, they’re not really stories that are meant to be together.  Overall, it’s not a work that’s bad but it’s really heavy going (the essays especially) and not really the kind of thing one can read on snatched lunch breaks at work or lazy Sundays.  As usual when I really didn’t enjoy a book, I’m more willing to blame my short comings than the books and I’m sure if I’d read this when I was younger and still studying bits of philosophy I’d have loved it.  It’s the kind of book to read late at night with a cup of black coffee and no responsibilities to an employer the following morning.

As I said, one of my issues with the book is that the stories were not designed to be together.  Unlike in something like In aGlass Darkly, there’s no sense of progression through the stories.  Maybe this is an intentional ploy by the books editor to create a compilation that is itself a winding labyrinth but it’s also kind of annoying.  Ideas are repeated time and time again, and it’s not just the simple bits like the use of labyrinth metaphors; it’s really complicated things like Zeno’s Paradox.  Stuff you have to Google a little bit to understand properly.  In fact, I still don’t think I know what Zeno’s Paradox is.  Here’s the Wikipedia page, see if you fare any better.  Everything might be more comprehensive if this were how Borges intended his works to be read but instead what we have is a posthumous greatest hits from a writer that I’ve been assured is as important as he is marginalised.  I actually think it’s on the list because it seems like the kind of thing academics would pretend to have read. 

For all my dislike of it though, some of the short stories are pretty good.  My favourite by far is The House of Asterion.  It’s probably only 1,500 or so words long and is well worth a quick read.  And, unlike a lot of his other works, only requires a basic knowledge of Greek mythology to understand.  I recommend searching it out, to say anything further would just be a spoiler.

Other than the odd pretty turn of phrase (“to have grown old in so many mirrors” is a particular favourite) there’s not much I can honestly say that I enjoyed here.  For all its repetition it is a very fragmented book.  Often the short stories are only a few pages long and seem like exercises in creative writing.  And there’s an essay on the concept of time that I’m pretty sure would make Stephen Hawking throw a shit fit.  There’s a quote in the 1001 Books to Read book stating, “Borges has read everything and especially what no-one reads anymore,” as though he were some kind of literary proto-hipster.  The only issue is that, hipster-like, Borges thinks we should know all the obscure things he knows and so rarely deigns to explain just what it is he actually means.

Book number three hundred and something (I’ve lost track again) is Murder Must Advertise by Dorothy L Sayers.  It’s shaping up to be a nice little whodunit.

The Day of the Triffids

First of another confession that I’ve broken my own rules.  I was all set to blame the fact that I had to change the order I read my books in from the one I planned.  I went to renew a pile of library books the other night, only to find that The Day of the Triffids had been reserved by someone and so couldn’t be renewed.  I naturally assumed this was a ploy by some ultra-cool fourteen year old boy to sabotage my pattern.  Then I discovered that Louis de Bernières isn’t American and I was paddle-less up a creek a while ago.  This is a very obvious side effect of a glut of Victorian literature.  Anyway, after a swift reshuffle of my book plans I was left with the task of reading The Day of the Triffids in 24 hours to avoid library fines.  It wasn’t too difficult a task, and at least it made for an interesting Valentine’s Day.

This is another of those books that I knew a bit about without actually knowing the full plot of.  My previous knowledge can be summed up in the phrase; giant plants- humanity boned.  And, to be fair, that’s not far off the actual plot.  Triffid scientist Bill Masen wakes up in hospital on morning after a fabulous meteor shower.  Temporarily blinded after a triffid sting, Masen is one of the view people on the planet who hasn’t watched the shower and he quickly discovers that everyone who did watch it has been struck blind.  With the humans weakened the seven foot tall walking, stinging triffids become the dominant species on the planet and, while the remnants of society argue amongst themselves about how to survive the triffids get on with the business of taking the place over.  I think what surprised me most about this book is that the triffids aren’t really the bad guys.  Humankind is laid low by circumstance rather than an unrelenting exterior evil.  Most people are wiped out by their inability to cope with sudden blindness and those that survive are offed by a sudden plague.  The triffids have no malicious feelings towards man nor any motive but survival.  In fact, the only malice towards people comes from opportunists who grasp power.

The Day of the Triffids like The Island of Dr Moreau is one of those books that really reminded me of works that it has inspired.  The most frequent of these for me was Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later.  From the utterly obvious man wakes up in hospital to find the world changed beginning to the idyllic cottage in the country and moment of soaring hope when our heroes suddenly spot a plane, the links are undeniable.  Unlike in The Island of Dr Moreau, this wasn’t distracting and it made me feel a deeper appreciation for 28 Days Later even if it’s not particularly surprising that a sci-fi genre giant like John Wyndham would have his influence felt decades later in Brit horror flicks.  The image of an abandoned London is so unsettling that it’s no shock other people have adopted it for their own monsters.  Slightly more distracting were the tones of Dr Strangelove that came through in plans to rebuild a society which encourages polygamy and the breeding of women and the intellectual arguments for it.  The image of Peter Sellers spouting the same rhetoric in an exaggerated German accent makes it pretty difficult to take seriously.

John Wyndham does include some strange period typical politics though.  The book was first published in 1951 and, because society falls apart, it’s a mostly timeless book.  Every so often, though a glimmer of staunch Fifties morals come through.  The female lead, Josella Playton is the author of a book titled My Adventures in Sex, of which she seems unspeakably ashamed every time anyone mentions or attempts to discuss.  She belittles her work and her career.  Her introduction is also pretty problematic.  Despite being a strong modern woman she is introduced when she is despairing and in need of being rescued.  It seems that any later competence (and she shows a fair amount) is permissible due to her swooning heroine introduction.  There’s also this odd sense of entitlement present, that I don’t think would have been as prevalent had the novel been written later.  No-one questions whether the human race is worth preserving.  More than that, the British way of life and the British people must endure.  It’s a difficult concept to explain, but there is a sense that people deserve to live simply because they are alive and to remain the dominant species when they so clearly are not.  It doesn’t feel like a lamentation of a loss, more of a childlike tantrum that we’re not the best anymore.

I enjoyed this book.  It’s another quick and easy read that has clearly lasted for a reason; Wyndham came up with a simple but utterly terrifying concept.  Although the book isn’t scary by modern standards and it would be easy to write off as cheesy and ridiculous (there are giant killer plants) it’s not.  There’s something so uncanny about the idea of abandoned cities; it’s an idea picked up again in things like 28 Days Later and Stephen King’s The Stand because it’s such a good one.  Even the odd bit of 1950s sexism can’t detract from that.

Next time, is non-European (for reals this time) author Jorge Luis Borges and his collected works Labyrinths.  It’s a touch more serious that the giant killer plants.