Hospital

Toby Litt

Toby Litt writes his books alphabetically. Maybe you've heard about that. His first book began with A (Adventures in Capitalism), and his most recent with K (King Death). Not only will this look excellent on my bookshelves, but it's pretty brave. If he gives up before Z, or breaks the pattern, everyone will know. He will have failed. He will have gone Sufjan on us.

I didn't know about the alphabetic nature of his canon when I first bought I play the drums in a band called okay. I didn't cotton on when I got his next most recent book at the time, Journey Into Space. I found out just before borrowing Hopsital, but it's too late to change now. I'm going backwards.

Hospital is brilliant. It is a force of nature. It is epic in scope, minute in timeline, absurd, ridiculous, hilarious, and many other adjectives. It manages the tricky job of not taking itself too seriously but still providing an oversized cast of characters you genuinely care about.

Hang on, I was talking about adjectives. Let's try vivid. The giant trees crashing down through the building (see cover) are pretty awesome, but I was most taken with another image. It's hard to explain without giving away too much of the premise of the book, but I'll try.

Nurse Gemma Swallow, our heroine, is trapped in a room. She is trapped because bodies all around her are growing to thewir full human size, and the room isn't big enough to hold them all. A quite horrid suffocation-in-flesh is on the cards. But up steps von Sinistre, our pathological friend, with his bone saw. he cuts a tunnel through the mass of expanding bodies, cutting off their legs quicker (just about) than they grow back, and eventually our heroine can crawl out. This makes complete sense in the context of Hospital.

***

A gripe:

I have one minor issue with this book, that I only mention because Margaret Atwood did the same thing with The Handmaid's Tale which I read the other week.

It ends brilliantly. But then, there's an extra bit. Litt puts a 'fairy tale' in, which is vaguely relevant to the main plot, but completely, utterly unnecessary. And after the whizzing prose that comes before it, pretty boring to read. Atwood ends her novel brilliantly, but then puts a future-lecture about historical context, which is equally unnecessary, mood-killing, and less than entertaining compared to the novel itself. Why don't these authors know when to stop?

The Fry Chronicles

Stephen Fry

This book is in turn a frank and amusing conversation with an old friend, an in-depth picture of a world I am fascinated by (Cambridge Footlights and the Britcom scene that stems from it), and a warning-by-example for my own future. I expected the first two, but not the third.

The examples cuts both ways. There's a Do and a Don't.

The Do:

I'm positively not alone in joining Stephen in the battlefield between self-indulgence and self-disgust, nor the similar setting for brutality that lies between needing to be liked by other people and not always liking yourself.

The author states that pretending to be confident and smooth and okay and at ease with yourself can form the habit that leads to a pretty good simulacrum of those same states. But his example speaks more strongly still; pretending to be these things is the same thing as being them. However false that looks from the inside.

The Don't:

Among the many things Fry lambasts about himself, one stuck out to me like a sore thumb on a hand with no fingers. If only I was more focused! he cries. If only I didn't try my hand at everything!

It's no surprise to me that his earliest ambitions were in the direction of novels; after all, his novels are the best thing he's done, without Hugh Laurie's help. And it's no surprise that, lacking boringly singular focus, he is not known primarily as a novelist. It's no surprise that his (excellent) novels never reached the heights he is capable of. If only he was more focused!

When I learnt that he was in his 30s by the time A Bit Of Fry & Laurie started, I was struck by how much time that gave me. Having missed out on Footlights, I've always thought myself far too late to get into comedy writing, but it turns out I have 6 years+.

But no! Focus! Try and write the best novel you can. (And you're a confident lovely person. Deal with it.)

The Drought

JG Ballard

I find myself desperately wanting to like Ballard. Maybe I should never have read his coolly endearing memoir, Miracles of Life. Maybe I should stop listening to blurbs that use words like 'unique' and genius' so freely and convincingly.

The fact is, however hard I tried to like The Drought, I couldn't quite manage it. It's impressive, yes. The imagery is untouchably weird, the (bad) feelings it evokes are heady and authentic. His writing has natural authority and a certain completeness of vision.

But...

It's not very pleasant.

(If that makes me sound like a narrative coward, I should at this point explain that I am very much a narrative coward. I can't even watch comedy shows on my own these days, because I will chicken out and change the channel the moment things necessarily go bad for the protagonist.)

Ballard's world, effective and unique though it clearly is, is not enjoyable. It's bleak, disconnected, distant, free of relatable characters. Distant strangers do distant things and there's nothing much to suggest I should be interested. I don't think I ever believed -- not really-- in the existence of unrelatable main characters, before this.

Here's an example. This book is about what happens to humanity, and a man called Ransom, when the water supplies we take for granted disappear (hence the name). Ransom spends every second of this book driven by water. Water would solve all his problems. Water would make him in control. Water could do a lot of things for him, yet not once while reading The Drought -- not once! -- did I ever feel thirsty.

The Handmaid's Tale

Margaret Atwood

I once read an essay about writing fantasy. That's probably not that unusual, except I don't read or write fantasy. I don't look at it in bookshops, wish it merry Christmas, or sit next to it on the train. But this essay was written by Pratchett, and I do read Pratchett. (I don't sit next to him on the train either, but only out of deference.)

And Pratchett said something along the lines of this: good writing shows you the familiar from an unfamiliar angle. It shows you the ordinary in an extraordinary light. (At least, I think he said that. If my memory made that up, then that's awesome too.)

I remembered this when reading The Handmaid's Tale. What's so fascinating about the world of Gilead is not what is different, but what has stayed the same. There are still shops and boredom and gossip. The one thing that has completely not changed, of course, is people.

But this isn't a normal-people-story with a shiny new background. You probably weren't thinking that, and I should apologize for presuming it; but I think I would have thought that, a while ago. It's only this year, readings books like this, The Road, and The Yiddish Policemen's Union, that I've realised how supremely relevant, how utterly foreground, the world of a book can reign. And also, how thoroughly and expertly it has to be handled.

I flinch to think of my first couple of novel-attempts, both set in deeply alternative worlds, both unexplored and incompetently presented. I wasn't taking that side of things seriously. The world isn't just wallpaper, it's context. Context is king, by definition, by constitution, and by creed, in the medium of text.

My favourite things about The Handmaid's Tale are the brief glimpses backwards in time. Offred looks over her shoulder at the world she has left behind -- our world -- and my, how it looks strange.

What To Read?

There's a frankly ridiculous number of books out there. Even if I only stuck to authors I've already read, catching up on their catalogues would surely take me a lifetime. And there is also -- no offence -- non-fiction. Not to mention that despised indulgence, re-reading. And some people are writing new books. We readers don't stand a chance.

I've read a heady plethora of posts recently in which people talk about their reading plans this year, or their top ten anticipated reads, or which genre/classic author/letter of the alphabet they are expecting to conquer. I wish I had such a clear idea where I was heading across the multi-dimensional vastness of bookspace.

2010 has left me in a bit of a mess. I have nearly thirty books on my desk, waiting to be read. Some of these are lends from friends, some are thick books by untried authors, some others are thin tomes by old favourites; and some are -- no offence -- non-fiction. I have a handful of unrelated titles and authors on various scraps of paper and Word documents. I have book vouchers. I haven't got a map.

I do have some idea where I'm taking my reading in 2011, though. I'm determined not to be so free with new authors. My reading time is too precious to gamble with so freely, when there's over a hundred books out there by authors I love that I haven't got round to. It should mean I'm going to be reading a lot of books that I am very likely to enjoy. But like I said earlier, even that vastly limiting factor leaves me with a small-town library to get through.

And where does re-reading fit into this? Will all the favourites I've stumbled across over the last few years remain doomed to only that single, virginal reading? That's hardly fair. And why exactly am I buying these books, collecting them and organising them, if they're never going to get read again? And why do I still not feel well-read?