Music of Chance

I think I might have mentioned this a few times before, but I bloody love Paul Auster.  Having said that, The Music of Chance isn’t his best book.  Of course, “not Paul Auster’s best book” is still actually quite a lot better than most people could hope to write and quite an enjoyable read.  It’s more like the middle bit of its immediate predecessor Moon Palace than any of his other works (the covers are even sort of similar)- more concerned with Middle America and the average Joe than New York or the life of a performer.

The novel is about Jim Nashe, a single father fireman (calm down ladies) who inherits a large amount of money from his long absent father.  Nashe has long since abandoned his daughter into his sister’s care, as it’s impossible to have a job while being a single parent, and instead of doing anything responsible with the money, he buys a nice car and dosses around America for a year until it’s all but gone.  It’s at this point he meets Jack Pozzi who encourages him to bet and (naturally) lose the remainder of his money in a game of poker against two hermit-like millionaires who have spent the last month learning how to win at poker.  Shockingly, it turns out that this loss was probably all just set up by them, because they have a wall that needs building and Nashe and Pozzi are the kind of suckers that look like they could build a wall.  What follows is quite a lot of wall building, revelations that manual labour is wonderful and being blue-collar is a true joy and a fair amount of things that would definitely count as spoilers.

The Music of Chance is a book that, as I mentioned earlier, I did enjoy.  But it’s also one that I can’t help but be a little sarcastic about.  The plot’s fairly simplistic and it’s incredibly obvious what’s going to happen as soon as Pozzi mentions the poker game.  I mean, who’d write a book about winning a few thousand dollars in a poker game?  And yes, the theme of chance runs through the entire thing quite nicely.  Messrs Flower and Stone are only millionaires because of chance; winning the lottery, Pozzi and Nashe only meet by chance.  Chance is, without a doubt, the driving force in the narrative.  Unfortunately, this doesn’t make for massively interesting characters.

I wasn’t mad keen on Nashe as a character.  He doesn’t make any sense.  I don’t personally know any firefighters, but I’ve seen them on reality TV (both British and American) and none of them were as well read as Nashe is.  When he and Pozzi are on their wall building mission they are provided with whatever entertainment they desire and Nashe plugs for books.  And high-brow books too.  He reads Dickens.  He enjoys Dickens.  Even I don’t enjoy Dickens.  I wasn’t aware people actually did.  I’m strongly of the opinion that people who say they like Dickens are lying to look smart.  It doesn’t make sense to me that someone stupid enough to fall for Flowers and Stone’s obvious “play poker with us” plot would gain any actual enjoyment from Our Mutual Friend. 

In all this is a good read.  If I’m honest, yes- I was slightly disappointed by it, but I think that’s because I’ve been waiting months to read this book.  It’s one of those ones that’s been sitting off to one side of my radar as I slowly accept that it’s just not available at my local library.  There is also the fact that the book features maybe two named women who feature in a grand total of about three scenes.  It’s all terrifically masculine.  Poker and most gambling, in fact, is one of those things that is unnecessarily gendered.  An (albeit) stereotypically female touch might have brought sense to proceedings and stopped the ridiculous poker game, and the entire book, in its tracks.

My net blog will be on Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino.  Thankfully, I’ve already finished the book.

Their Eyes Were Watching God

I want to think of positive things to say about Their Eyes Were Watching God.  Nothing’s springing to mind, though.  It’s a real shame as loads of authors who I admire love this book; it’s endorsed all over the shop by people like Zadie Smith and Alice Walker.  I feel like by not liking this book, I’m missing out on something.  It’s probably not even that it’s a bad book.  It’s just that I could not get into Zora Neale Hurston’s classic.  I really tried, but it just didn’t speak to me and so I felt a real frustration with both the book and myself when I read the thing.

The book tells the story of Janie Crawford, in her own words.  Janie, from a family already blighted by tragedy and tied up in a past of slavery, is married off at sixteen.  This is not so much to prevent teenage pregnancy, more to legitimise it.  Anyway, she marries much older Logan Killicks, who wants her as a partner on his farm.  She wants this less, so leaves him for Jody Starks.  This doesn’t last long either and she soon grows too old for Starks.  Once he dies, she hooks up with Tea Cake who is pretty wonderful.  That is until he gets rabies and tries to kill Janie.  She kills him instead, gets accused and acquitted of murder and is left alone.  All by the time she’s in her mid-forties.

The plot is fairly convoluted and this isn’t a long book.  But I think that my real issue was it was the language.  The speech, at least, is written phonetically in the dialect of the Deep South.  And I get that this is partly what is meant to make the book great.  That it is a poor black woman writing in her own voice and that that voice sounds like her.  But it makes the thing bloody hard to read at times.  Sometimes it felt like most of the battle of the book was understanding the barest bones of the words and so their message got lost.  It’s so annoying because I know why Hurston did it and it would probably be just a trashy and lurid tale had she not but it made my enjoyment of the book near impossible.

Their Eyes Were Watching God is such an important book.  And this is why I am annoyed I couldn’t enjoy it.  Hurston rejected the idea that African-Americans should better themselves by acting more like white Americans.  The Racial Uplift programme of the time essentially wanted black people to aspire to be more white.  Hurston instead celebrated rural African-American culture; a thing practically unheard of in 1937.  The book’s refusal to say what it should meant that it flopped at the time of publication.  It’s only in retrospect, in the 1970s and 80s, that this novel has been elevated to the status of classic that it holds now.  

There it is, then, Their Eyes Were Watching God.  Probably a good book; just not for me.  Certainly a vitally important that went against the party line for what it should be to be black and American and poor in the 1930s.  More than that, it gives a woman’s voice to African-American poverty.  It’s a shame that do to this, all Hurston had to do was present reality.

I have now moved on to more Paul Auster and The Music of Chance.  I’m enjoying it more.  

A Handful of Dust

I’ve not really been feeling the reading since The Secret History.  I really struggled with Lovecraft recently and I’m not loving the book that I’m currently on.  Evenlyn Waugh’s different, though, I loved Brideshead Revisited and so was really looking forward to A Handful of Dust, even if it is my final Waugh book on The List.  I didn’t straight up love this book, though.  My feelings towards it are more complex and conflicted.  The start and ending are fantastic.  It just wanders off and away from being brilliant somewhere in the middle.

A Handful of Dust is the tale of a young married couple falling apart after the wife begins an affair (with the wrong sort of man, it must be noted).  Even though it’s heavily inspired by Waugh’s own divorce and reaction to the end of his marriage, it’s nowhere near as bitter as it could have been which is nice.  The story, in a very spoilery nutshell, Lady Brenda Last grows bored of country living, so takes a flat and lover (John Beaver) in London, away from her husband Tony.  The pair drift apart, connected only by their son John.  Once John is out of the way, killed in a riding accident, Brenda giving precisely zero shits about her dead child goes for the jugular and asks for a divorce and Tony leaves to explore South America and heal.  This is where the story kind of veers off track.  There’s a fair amount of uncomfortable racism, and not precisely politically correct depictions of tribes (utterly unintentional, I believe, and caused more by shifts in attitudes than bigotry). 

It’s the ending that I really want to talk about.  It’s fantastically cruel.  The book was actually originally serialised in an American magazine which insisted upon a different, happier, ending.  Usually when Americans fuck about the intended endings to British stories it goes horribly wrong and A Handful of Dust is no exception.  I don’t actually want to say what the ending is, because it doesn’t sound as good when summarised.  Waugh did actually also publish it- with a few changes- as a short story, The Man Who Liked Dickens.  Read it.  It’s brilliant.

I don’t want to bang on about the ending too much.  But it is the best thing about the book, so I will.  As I mentioned, Tony’s exploring South America and generally feeling a bit sorry for himself while being very British.  Unfortunately, it’s still the kind of British that believes we should have an Empire.  He’s at his least likeable; even though he’s been cheated on and has a dead son, it’s hard now to pity him because the way he speaks to the Brazilians is just so cringeworthy- like when elderly relatives are racist, but if they were still young and in power.  Tony’s downfall happens entirely because of these attitudes.  The British are arrogant and so the British suffer.  That alone permits the harshness of The Man Who Liked Dickens.

So there you have it.  The last of the Waugh.  Essentially a good book with a wonderful ending.   Did I mention how good the ending is?  I don’t think I could enough.  It absolutely saves what is otherwise a fairly witty but nondescript satire of 1930s English society.  And it teaches us all that imperialism doesn’t pay.

Next time: Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurtson.  As I mentioned up at the top, it’s not captured me.

At The Mountains of Madness

I think I picked my scary Christmas story poorly this year.  Or last year.  You know what I mean.  Following on from the success of 2014’s In A Glass Darkly, I was really looking forward to the horror of H.P. Lovecraft’s At The Mountains of Madness.  But it’s nowhere near as spooky.  I’ve been saving it since about June, so I’m actually really disappointed.

I think the problem is, in part, the setting of the story.  I was after the old dark house variety of fear, but what Lovecraft provides is more a kin to The Thing.  The setting is the wilds of Antarctica, the fear comes not from beasts spotted out of the corner of one’s eye, but fully realised monsters that stand and kill in the light.  It’s not what I was after, especially over the hottest Christmas time that I can remember.  There’s also the problem that not much happens in the tale.  The novella follows the story of William Dyer, a geologist, who after receiving fantastic reports and then radio silence from a satellite group of the Antarctic team sets off to find out what has happened.  What follows is pretty much just a description of corpses and a history of the Old Ones which is far too detailed to be a believable reading of cave hieroglyphics. 

The level of detail in regards to the Old Ones is one of my main issues with the book.  It broke the suspension of my disbelief very quickly.  Rather than a standalone story, At The Mountains of Madness seems designed to fit in with the canon of Lovecraft’s other work; none of which I have read.  We were expected to know about the Old Ones, to be aware of what the Necronomicon contained and I just wasn’t.  On top of this, their entire history is chronicled in detail, as is the history of the Shoggoths, an enslaved shape-changing race that ultimately rose up and killed them.  It’s hard to be scared of things that are explained so plainly and the book would have benefitted massively from fewer details.

At The Mountains of Madness is Lovecraft’s only book on The List and until this point, I was unsure as to why.  He is, with a doubt, a hugely influential author; the book itself has spawned numerous unofficial sequels and attempts to get the thing made into a film.  And the Necronomicon is a term that has slipped into, if not mainstream, certainly the pop culture of horror as has Cthulhu (both words, it is worth noting are recognised by Microsoft’s spell check).  I think that, like Edgar Allen Poe, for me Lovecraft is one of those authors who is important because of the culture that he inspired and for that reason I’m glad that some of his work is on The List.  I’m just grateful that it’s only one little book.

Next up is Evelyn Waugh’s last entry on The List; A Handful of Dust.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

I'm not too sure where to start with The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.  I liked it.  Putting why I liked it into words is just a bit of a head-scratcher.  I'm also a little conflicted because, although it's good, I just didn't enjoy it as much as after the quake or Kafka on the Shore.   The fact I enjoyed the latter of these two more isn't too difficult to reason out, it's about cats and libraries.  These are two of my favourite things.  The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle features just the one cat, and he's named after a human and missing for a good half of the book.  I feel like if Haruki Murakami just added in more cats to all his books he'd finally win that Nobel Prize.  It worked for T.S. Eliot; eventually.

There's a sort of plot to the book, but it winds away and changes throughout the novel.  Ostensibly, it is the tale of Toru Okada searching for his lost cat.  In reality, this is a jumping off point for Toru finding a bunch of characters with long stories to tell, his wife leaving him and getting stuck in a well.  The cat, once forgotten, returns on his own.  I'm not explaining it well, but it's a tricky book, the plot slips through any attempt to summarise it quickly. Characters disappear and are replaced by new enigmatic figures just as each one begins to lose its sense of mystery.  In this way, we're put into the same (slightly frustrating) position as Toru.  While I love the style of story-telling and that not everything is explained to the nth degree as in most western literature; Toru, for example, gains a loses a blue mark on his cheek through out the book for no clear reason.   The disappearing characters and plot lines that trail off mean that this isn't an easy book to love.    

Toru is bland.  He needs to be, I think for the book to work.  He is a character who, rather than driving action is acted upon by the larger personalities of those he meets in the novel.  The fact that he is the character we're stuck with is almost a shame.  Early in the novel, Toru meets Malta and Creta Kato who are a fascinating pair of sisters offering psychic help to find the missing cat.  Instead of actually helping they reveal their life stories and Creta, the younger, acts as a kind of dream-prostitute, eventually seducing Toru in the real world for payment in clothes.  The pair only feature in the first two of the three volumes of the novel and the later part of the book suffers for it.  I want to go with them where ever they go rather than be stuck in the Tokyo suburbs with Toru and his next bad influence.  Even if we can't follow them, I want to know what happens to them.  They seem too important to just fade away.  There is also a phenomenal sub-plot about the brutality of World War Two, which crops up through out the three volumes.  This is probably the only plot line that feels resolved by the end of the book.

Again, I feel like I'm not explaining any of this with any particular clarity, so I'll move to something easier to put my finger on.  The well.  There is a well in the garden of an abandoned (possibly cursed) house.  Toru takes to climbing into this well to think, this is actually where he acquires his blue mark.  Anyway, on his first trip to the bottom of the well, his rope ladder is pulled up and the well cover is sealed over by his teenage neighbour May Kasahara.  This leads to deep introspection by Toru, but it reminded me so strongly of Ringu, both the book and the film that I struggled in taking the whole thing seriously.  I think the Koji Suzuki novel does pre-date or is, at least, contemporary to the original publication of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and while I doubt Murakami was influenced in his writing, I was certainly influenced in my reading and I really can't help but wonder if anyone else was.  This kind of makes me want to go off on a tangent, wondering if teenagers today would understand the VHS tapes used in Ringu, or if they'd be just as confused as I used to be by references to betamax. 

Anyway, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is good.  That is the message to take away from this blog.  It's by no means the place to start with Murakami, though.  I'm glad it's not the first of his books I've read because I think if it were I'd not be looking forward to his others on The List.  Being somewhat familiar with Murakami's style and tendency to blend the real world with the fantastic helped greatly.  If I'd have been expecting a linear narrative I would have been incredibly disappointed with the whole thing.  Having said that, I really do want to know what happened to Malta and Creta.

I'm now on to my Christmas horror story: At The Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft.