Giovanni's Room

I enjoyed Giovanni’s Room so much.  James Baldwin was one of those writers who was so far ahead of his time that it’s almost unbelievable that he ever got anything published.  Following up on Go Tell It On The Mountain’s depiction of race, he wrote this; a book that sympathetically portrays a male homosexual relationship.  It was published in 1956; a time when it was still illegal to be gay in American (and a hell of a lot of other countries).  It’s staggering.  There’s more to it than just the achievement of not being super homophobic, though, this is a bloody good story.

Baldwin’s novel tells the story of David, an American man in Paris.  When his fiancée Hella leaves for the summer he begins an affair with Giovanni, an Italian barman in the club David frequents.  Naturally, this goes badly once Hella returns.  It’s such a simple story but it’s incredibly well told.  Post-affair Giovanni’s life falls apart and David is pretty unhappy too; the story is told as a flashback on the morning of Giovanni’s execution and, yet, the book doesn’t dwell on the misery.  It’s there, but it comes in every so often as a wistful melancholia rather than agony.  David no longer loves Giovanni at the time of the telling and it gives distance to the tragedy of the piece. 

The fact that both David and Giovanni are utter shits at times also helps.  David cheats on Hella more than once, always with men and yet still remains judgemental of the men he meets and sleeps with.  Giovanni just straight up belittles, “these absurd women running around today, full of ideas and nonsense, and thinking themselves to be equal to men… they need to be beaten half to death so that they can find out who rules the world.”  Despite this, I do like Giovanni.  He loves David who is too selfish and scared to love him back and this ruins his life.  He ultimately gives Giovanni up so that he can access his father’s money and then decides that Giovanni is pathetic when his heart is broken while he can still return to Hella.

Hella is another matter altogether.  I like Hella.  She doesn’t take David’s shit and argues with him just for the sake of it, to keep him sharp, to keep things interesting.  She is smart and she figures out the true nature of David and Giovanni’s relationship and she has the sense to leave.  She calls out misogyny when she sees it.  She is one of the only female characters that actually speaks and she is completely free.  It’s another case of Baldwin being ahead of his time.  Although she is bound by conventions of the period, she rules within those conventions. 

This book was written in 1956 and it could have been written today.  I can’t get over how ahead of its time it is.  I could tell you a thousand reasons why I was so blown away by Baldwin’s attitude to homosexuality, but it all can come down to one quote.  Jacques (a friend of David’s) is explaining his sex life, “You think… that my life is shameful because my encounters are.  And they are.  But you should ask yourself why they are… Because there is no affection in them, and no joy… Touch but no contact.”  Sex is not shameful because it is with another man, but because it is loveless and to say that in the 1950s is amazing.  I just wish that there were more authors like Baldwin around now, tackling the taboos that shouldn’t be in place. 

Now I’m reading The Lost Honour of Kathrina Blum by Heinrich Böll.

Watchmen

I saw the film version of Watchmen when I was in my final year of university and spent most of the three hour behemoth dodging the unwanted advances of a guy I was friends with at the time.  I tell you so that you understand that while I know the basic plot of the thing and the world in which it is set- superheroes, Vietnam, Nixon- some of the nuances were possibly lost on me.  Of course, I am here paying the film the compliment of assuming there was any nuance to miss.  I seem to remember enjoying it, as much as it’s possible to enjoy a film in which someone asks during a rape scene, “isn’t this so hot…?”

I assume others have seen the film too (probably in more auspicious circumstances) and so a recap of the plot is barely necessary.  I think that the only bit that really changes is the ending and, you know, spoilers.  Fans of the book don’t seem that keen on the film because apparently loads of bits have been cut out, but the only thing that really caught my attention was a subplot about a missing comic book artist/ writer and, to be honest, those are the worst parts.  I don’t care about pirates who are fictional even in a fictional world and are only linked to the real plot thematically and that’s all that that bit provides.  There is some philosophising about the nature of man, though, which is quite nice but really could have been explored more in prose.

I was a bit sceptical about reading Watchmen.  I was never really into comics as a kid and now I’m an adult I really don’t expect my books to have pictures.  I can read.  This is the only graphic novel on The List and I’m quite happy about that.  I know that Alan Moore is revered as one of the greats (and I’m sure in that world David Gibbons is pretty well known and respected too) but I just don’t get it.  Some of the art is nice enough, but it makes so much more sense to me just to have scenarios in books described to me.  There’s not enough detail to really express emotion in a comic book panel- there’s a scene in which Laurel confronts the Comedian over trying to rape her mother and his response is, “only once.”  And it should be awful but it’s so much harder to understand what the characters feelings and motives are and I’m sure there’s a knack to reading them but it’s not one that I care to pick up.  Give me words any day.

One of the bits that I ended up enjoying the most was something entirely coincidental about Adrian Veidt.  There are these extracts from various sources at the end of each chapter and one of them is private business and marketing correspondence for Veidt’s company and, more importantly, The Veidt Method (a course which promises happiness and health for a fee).  The material is a cross between wellness, positive thinking bullshit and those leaked scripts from Trump U.  It’s terrifying and hilarious that something like that can still be so on point when it comes to satirising big business.  I also enjoy the implications that Donald Trump is a comic book villain.

So, Watchmen.  To conclude; I do not like comics.  I do like philosophy.  More words are good.  (Imagine your own pictures to go along with that). 

I’m now on to Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin.  

News From Nowhere

Until recently I had no idea that William Morris ever wrote books.  He was another obscure joke in my family when I was young.  My mum was jokingly convinced that I loved his wallpaper patterns when I was about seven and as a result I ended up with this strange pack of Morris-Pattern wallpaper postcards.  They would have all looked god awful in any room smaller than a football pitch, but they worked in postcard format.  Good for computer wallpaper, horrible for walls.  There was a quite nice khaki one with birds I seem to remember.

Anyway, Morris was also well into his socialism and News From Nowhere is effectively a manifesto on the subject.  It’s partly that, it’s also a bit gothic-novel-y in the sense it’s one of those stories that’s bookend with ramblings about how it didn’t happen to the main character, it happened to someone else. The book tells the story of not very imaginatively named William Guest a man from the nineteenth century who hops forward in time to see how things are shaping up in 2052.  Given that at this time it’s been 100 years since The Revolution, he is surprised at the changes.  They have sorted out all the social inequality and whatnot, but there are still no mobiles.  There are never iPhones in the imaginary future.

The novel itself is okay, I guess.  It’s a nice thought and I do like the ending; Guest returns to his capitalist hell but he returns with hope, or more accurately knowledge that things do get better and that he and his brethren are laying the foundations for a stronger future.  But… the whole thing is a little dry.  The plot is mostly Guest being shown things and having the socialist system explained to him, while his hosts laugh at how old and grizzled he looks.  And the ideas are so naïve.  The idea that socialism or communism would work is hard enough to accept but the one that nations would eschew education in favour of glorifying physical labour is impossible to believe.  I know I am biased when it comes to books but people always want to learn.  This is why there are non-fiction books and films and I don’t accept such a cultural shift. 

The other thing that I found interesting in this book where the dates.  Morris published more than one edition of News From Nowhere and, if the explanatory notes are to be believed, each new version set the time line of the revolution and of the socialist evolution back as Morris grew more disillusioned and cynical.  Even things as small as the date a bridge was built changes.  And I like that; for all the rhetoric and big dreams it’s awfully human to just give up a little bit.  To compromise those big dreams in the face of an unchanging reality.  I usually regret reading the explanatory notes, (especially in Oxford World’s Classics editions) either because they’re for Americans and so tell us just super patronising England-facts or because they’re riddled with spoilers.  But this time it made the book better.  And it made me like William Morris a little bit more. 

I’m now on to Watchmen by Alan Moore and David Gibbons.  There are more pictures than I’m used to in books for adults.  

Billy Liar

I’m not sure I really got the full amount of enjoyment that I could have from Billy Liar.  I read it while moving house and, naturally, most of my time and mind were taken up by the stress of that and then settling somewhere new rather than actually reading words.  On top of all of that, it’s been about a week since I actually finished the thing as I seem to have barely had a spare moment lately.  What I can tell you it that it’s good.  It’s pretty much what I was expecting, having read the blurb, but that’s no bad thing.

Keith Waterhouse’s book tells the story of nineteen year-old Billy Fisher; a dreamer stuck in a dead end job in a quiet Yorkshire town with an opinionated family and at least one too many fiancées.  Billy spends most of his working day finding new ways to not work and dreaming of moving to London and making it big as a comedic scriptwriter.  It would all be fairly standard kitchen sink drama (and in many ways the book is) but there is an element of surrealism that keeps creeping in.  Billy’s family and friends are all walking Yorkshire stereotypes, the book itself pretty much demands to be read in a Yorkshire accent, but somehow it’s better than just clichés.  The only thing that I can think that saves it is the brilliant balance between humour and tragedy.

The whole book is about comedy, Billy’s dream is to leave the Yorkshire pit towns, move to London and make it big.  Convinced that he’s the best thing to happen to comedy since sliced bread, he never shut ups with his jokes or his small successes.  He sells some jokes to famous stand-up Danny Boon and while his jokes are very much of the “take my mother-in-law” calibre when it comes to originality and despite the fact that no-one has really heard of Danny Boon, this fuels the fires for Billy.  This will lead to a great career, he thinks.  We know as readers that it will not.  Never more so is this shown the when Billy actually performs some stand-up.  He bombs.  It’s heartbreakingly relatable, who didn’t have dreams that were just unattainable when they were nineteen?

There’s also a wonderful element of farce that runs through the book.  Billy lies pathologically and this gets him into hot water all the time.  There’s a great scene in which fiancée number one (The Witch) is finally due to visit the Fishers for dinner.  At this point, Billy is forced to admit that his father was never in the navy and was never a prisoner-of-war, that the family do not have a budgie called Roger who was at constant threat of being eaten by the cat.  They also do not have a cat.  It’s such a well written piece of comedy and it’s thoroughly enjoyable because the lies are ridiculous. 

Waterhouse balances our view of Billy so well, we can laugh at him but also agonise with him.  It’s really very clever and it makes the book.  As I said earlier, I did enjoy Billy Liar.  I intentionally read it when I knew I’d be stressed and need something light and funny to take my mind off of things and I’m slightly sorry that I did that.  I couldn’t really give the novel my full attention at any point and I’m sure there are a hundred and one things that I missed in the book because of it.  On the bright side, I’m now really looking forward to watching the film without it being too greatly spoiled. 

Next time, the far more serious News From Nowhere by William Morris.  Yes, the wallpaper guy.