Reviewed – Beatrice and Virgil

The Booker Prize long list was announced today - http://bit.ly/ddGMg1 – much to the literary community’s delight.  There’s some great novels on there and I can’t wait to see who makes it through come September. For now though, I’d like to talk about an old Booker Prize winner, Yann Martel. Having just read and reviewed DBC Pierre’s new novel I’ve been inspired to reopen Martel’s latest offer since Life of Pi; Beatrice and Virgil and continue the theme of working out how these writers are getting on post-Booker win.

Ah! I hate to be negative about one of the twenty-first century’s most exciting talents, but I can’t help how I feel. And I feel that Beatrice and Virgil, released back in April, could have been better. For those of you who’ve not gotten around to reading it yet, Beatrice and Virgil are two allegorical animals who feature in a play written by a taxidermist. Henry, an author and the novel’s protagonist, has tasked himself with helping this strange man perfect his play until he learns the truth behind his illusive pupil. (I’m desperately trying not to spoil the plot!)

I think the fact that the novels about struggling to write a novel about what this novels about (complicated, I know), doesn’t do it any favours. Henry’s similarity to the situation Yann was in when writing the book; namely trying and failing to write a novel about the holocaust, makes it seem a little forced. Recently I read an interview with Yann in Canadian paper The Globe and Mail. – http://bit.ly/9cU3S8 – Interestingly he said that he ‘wrote a whole play featuring Beatrice and Virgil, a full two act play, and it just didn’t work… I needed more distance.’ I can understand that if it had have just been a play about Beatrice and Virgil it may have felt sparse in terms of plot yet intense in terms of imagery and meaning. But in the same breath I think that that sounds like a winning combination to me. I mean not a lot really happens in Life of Pi after the shipwreck, and that’s a bloody fantastic piece of writing.

But here’s the thing, and thankfully it’s far from negative, the extracts of play that make up a good chunk of this book are, without mincing words, fucking excellent. They equal or excel anything that Yann has written before and are well worth the laboured passages of prose in between. Much like the pear in the following quote, the style and subtly of the play extracts are hard to describe. The reader’s first encounter with Beatrice and Virgil is when, as I said, Virgil is trying to describe a pear to Beatrice, who has never seen one before…

Virgil: Slice a pear and you will find that its flesh is incandescent white. It glows with inner light. Those who carry a knife and a pear are never afraid of the dark.

This chatter goes on for a while. And without sounding too wet, definitely made me look at pears in a new way, as well as reaffirming my belief that a writer can go on about nothing for pages and pages and still make it as beautiful a piece as anything. Of course Beatrice and Virgil’s back and forth does become far more haunting, with very strong parallels to the holocaust, made all the more haunting for their simple style and earlier, innocent pear-talk.

I think I’ve mused all of the musings I can muse for the time being about this book. It’s been padding around in my head since I read it earlier this year and I still can’t decide what I fully think of it. Whether I’d like it to have been purely the stunningly allegorical donkey and monkey; Beatrice and Virgil, or whether the prose in between just needed a little more work for it to be a five out of five. I don’t know. Anyway, I’m going to file this under ‘Reviewed’ even though I’m a little late for any relevance, and therefore feel compelled to give it a rating. I’m going to have to go for 3.5 out of 5, which can be broken down into 2 for the prose and 5 for the play. I’ll put it this way; at some point I’ll read it again. On my own. Late at night. In one big go. And I’ll probably love it.

CM

The Artist is Dead, Long Live the Artist

It’s not going to be a particularly long post today. I’m having one of those days that only come around once every couple of weeks or so where I decide to write loads and be incredibly productive, thus counterbalancing all the laziness that’s sure to follow. Today I’ve started redrafting my novel whilst dipping in and out of research for a paper I’m working on about the Booker Prize. Anyway, working on my own writing has got me thinking about all of the dead authors in the world whos unpublished manuscripts keep on getting dug up and fought over.

Kafka has been the most recent one, to my knowledge – http://bit.ly/93X4lg – his box of unpublished manuscripts have been opened and it seems they will be revealed. Which will surely leave old Franz spinning in his grave seeing as when he was alive he’d wanted them burned.

The Guardian has since re-opened the case of the lost Shelly poem – http://bit.ly/azesmn – but only tells us that no real progress has been made on a debate that has been rolling along for some four years. (A little side note, I think The Guardian’s Michael Rosen had lost his thesaurus before writing this article: ‘We can easily envisage an owner owning a manuscript while we collectively own and know the piece of literature it contains.’)

In the case of the Shelly poem, I’m pretty pissed off that the world hasn’t been allowed to read it. I’m not a huge fan of Shelly and am therefore not that desperate to read it. But that’s besides the point. I will always argue that literature is for the people. Why else would we have libraries, for example? I can’t think of many other mediums of entertainment that are, essentially, widely available for free. A few years ago Nick Hornby released a teen-novel, Slam, and copies of it were spread around Southampton on buses, trains etc in the hope that people would give it a read and just pass it on. Another great example of how the written word, in all of its shapes and sizes, is not an exclusively high-browed thing that should be locked up in professor’s libraries to be studied, analysed and never allowed to be read by the people who actually matter, the people who actually decide whether a poem is good or bad. That’s right, you and I, the people.

Anyway, that’s my rant over and done with for today. As for Kafka, I’m looking forward to reading his unpublished works if I get the opportunity but I can’t help but feel sorry for him. I guess he probably should have done a better job of keeping them hidden if he was so bothered about it. Maybe he should have bloody burned them himself. The lazy git.

CM

Reviewed – Lights Out in Wonderland

So, my first real post. I’m excited. I’m sure you’re probably not. But I’m going to crack on regardless in the hope we find some common ground. I thought I’d start with a straight forward no thrills review and we’ll see how we go from there.

I was lucky enough to have an advance copy of DBC Pierre’s Lights Out in Wonderland come sliding through my letter box last week. He’s a writer I very much admire. His attitude and style bring a much needed rock and roll feel to contemporary fiction, mainly due to his Booker Prize winning debut, Vernon God Little. When I read it a few years ago I remember thinking that here was a writer that knew how to use the English language creatively. Teenage angst is a topic tackled by many authors, myself included, and is rarely done with anywhere near as much creativity and passion as Vernon God Little. It was like a fresh, rated-18 Catcher in the Rye. Which, if you’re anything like me, is a concept that makes the pupils dilate and the mouth foam with anticipation.

So I sat, pupils dilated, mouth foaming, with Lights Out in Wonderland on my lap. It promised a lot. The blurb described an orgy of a romp through some of the worlds greatest cities. Sexual encounters with an octopus were cited, drugs, drink and general debauchery were just a few pages away. All of this, I’m pleased to say, was true. London, Tokyo and Berlin in particular play host to some quality decadence as Gabriel Brockwell sticks more drugs up his nose than a five year old me did with crayons. But he’s also a whiney little bastard. Don’t get me wrong, I agree with pretty much everything that Pierre’s capitalism-hating protagonist says, it’s just the way he says it. It seems to me that Gabriel comes from that London ilk of bourgeoisies that carry an iPhone but complain constantly about corporate greed, say they like the alternative but turn up in the trendiest bars with the trendiest companions. Always with the perfect ratio of girls to guys, the perfect ratio of high fashion and high-mindedness. I won’t get started on that. It’s a genre of humanity that really pisses me off and unfortunately one that Gabriel Brockwell seems to belong to.

In fairness to him, during his suicidal waltz he goes some way towards shedding this. It’s Berlin that does it to him you see, and only further confirms to me that Germany might well be my spiritual home. They’ve been there, done that and I love the attitude of the Germans in this story. They see Gabriel for who he is and change him for the better. This is where the book starts to get interesting. The orgy of a party that the blurb promised in the ‘bowls of Berlin’s majestic Tempelhof airport’ soon rolls around, punctuated with the excellent pacing that Pierre brings to the closing stages of all of his novels. And it’s here that the reader will start to buy into Gabriel, as the greed and general filth that is the upper echelons of Capitalism is paraded in front of us. Fuck I hate them. But don’t worry, they get what’s coming to them. Pierre will always see to that.

So, the novel does pick up. And I’m sure if you can get your head around Gabriel then you won’t even need it to. But for me the key thing with this book was, despite it being set in the present day, it’s slight dystopian feel. I’m not sure whether this is intentional, it could simply be my reading of it, but the 1984-esque London in particular just hints at how close we have come to the world which great literature has always strived to warn us against.

Another highlight for me was the Basque’s likening of capitalism to a rocket ship, where the masses are merely fuel tanks which blast the rich few into space before falling ungraciously back to earth, their simple job accomplished.

All in all, Lights Out in Wonderland is a solid little book. I think it’s let down by it’s overenthusiastic ideas about itself, which is pretty much all I had to go on before reading it seeing as how it’s not out ’til September. I have to say it gave me the wrong impression a bit and left me feeling a little disappointed. I wanted to love it, to proclaim it better than Vernon God Little. But I just can’t do that. As I said, if you can get over Gabriel then you’ll like it. If not then stick with it, because the end comes through with the novel’s true bildungsroman colours, a genre that Pierre obviously writes well with.  A middling three out of five stars I think for this, Charlie Marlow’s first reviewed book.

CM

Mission Statement

How does every new blog open its doors? An ironic nod to its voyage into the sea of web 2.0? ‘Seems like everyone’s blogging these days, thought I’d give it a try’, for example. Or should the slippery journey from womb-like brain to tomb-like permanence start, like every good speech, with a joke? Perhaps the best way to go about it is with a clear-cut mission statement; a bold, bullet pointed introduction to what this blog is really about. Well that’s the thing. This blog isn’t really about anything. Except for books. And general musings. A place to let off steam. A place to tell you, possible reader, what I’ve been reading and what I think about it.

Yes! That’s a mission statement if I’ve ever read one. A place to talk about what I’ve been reading and what I think about it. Amongst other things. O.K. there’s not the fluidity of language coined by many of the writers I hope to be blogging about. Nor the rousing, corporate shine employed by your average FTSE 100 company, but it’s a purpose, which is something I’ve been lacking aboard this lonely steamer. And everyone needs a purpose.

For now though, I’m off. There’s a piece about The Flintstones on the news at ten that I don’t want to miss.

CM