Death On The Nile

Agatha Christie

Last Thursday, the 3rd of March, was World Book Day, and the evening of last Saturday was host to the very first World Book Night massive book giveaway.

It pains me to say my sole involvement in the whole big, amazing-shaped give-party was watching all the TV shows about it. Really, I need to be better informed. Somebody, do something about that.

One of those shows followed Sue Perkins, wonderful person and former Booker Prize judge, delving deep into the land of the bestseller list... was it Henry James who pointed out that if you can't have a list of a single item, so you can't have a list of best-anythings?

The likes of John Grisham, James Patterson, Lee Child, Jackie Collins and Sophie Kinsella were talked about, some even appearing as talking heads to get very defensive (and I don't blame them).

I sell these books all day long, but I never buy them, and -- having never read them -- should probably have felt guilty about smirking along with Sue at the covers, prose and premises. But guilt didn't really happen. I'm on Sue's side.

I stoped smirking when Agatha Christie got mentioned, though; and interestingly, so did Sue (we have so much in common... it's love). Why is it okay for literary types to read formulaic, dated crime puzzles -- or, why is it not okay for literary types to ignore them -- when they have Agatha Christie written on the front?

Could we cite the lack of cheap thrill, lusty gore and gory lust? The constant cleverness of the plot? (They're formulaic, but you'll never crack the formula before Poirot does. Ever). The I-did-it-first rule? (One third of the cliches and predictabilities of crime novels were started by Christie, so maybe aren't cliches there). How about the sheer, plain, elegance of Christie's writing?

The problem with all these answers is something I've already mentioned: I've never read any of the books I'm snobbish about, so how do I know they don't have these things going on?

Can it really be that I like Poirot novels simply because they're old? Or simply because of David Suchet? Or simply because people like Sue Perkins like them too?

Literary Blog Hop

Can literature be funny?

This question surprises me. Is that even an issue? All my literary favourites are hilarious, I think. If they're not, they're the exceptions. I hate to bandy around the same few names every time, but the big guns -- Evelyn Waugh, Kurt Vonnegut, Michael Chabon, David Markson, David Lodge, David Foster Wallace, David-anything, really, PG Wodehouse (heavily dependant on which definition of literary you use); less well known ones -- Toby Litt, Nicola Barker, Andrew Crumey, Matthew Kneale, Mark Watson... I could go on.

That's a lot of names. Every single one of them is some combination of literary and funny. (Notice, I have ignored the second question: what is your favourite humourous literary novel. TOO DAMN HARD.)


Also, some admin: this post marks my return to the land of blogging after a too-busy fortnight. It's my New Year's Resolution to be more punctual, and as such, I have only just made my second New Year's Resolution. That is, to blog more regularly, rather than two weeks of posting every day, and then a fortnight without thinking.

My framework will be every Monday and every Friday, for now. If that isn't enough to contain my unabashed tide of wordiness, et cetera, then Wednesdays might get a regular go to. Lucky Wednesdays, if so.

Literary Blog Hop

If you were going off to war (or some other similarly horrific situation) and could only take one book with you, which literay book would you take and why?

If I was going to war, would I want to read war-books? I'm not sure. I don't think I'd want to be over-reminded of my 'horrific situation', but I don't think I'd want to read about anything else. A book about the social conflicts of a small village community, for example, could well seem bitterly irrelevant and unimportant, when read between skirmishes. At best, it would make you unhealthily homesick.

So I think I would go for a war-book. On my shelves, that leaves Waugh and Vonnegut, primarily. Waugh would point out the frustrations and abusrdities of army life on the every day scale, and it would be good to have someone to laugh with. Vonnegut would laugh, as well, but with a lot less spite, and I could read his heart constantly breaking over the tragedy of humans in war.

So it's Vonnegut. And I have to plump for the obvious answer, Slaughterhouse Five. Becauce if it turns out I don't want to read about war while at war, I can just flick to the time-travelling bits. More importantly, SH-5 is an essay in favour of one idea: that you are the same person when you are at war that you were beforehand and afterwards. You are not just a soldier.

Armageddon In Retrospect

Kurt Vonnegut

In his latter years, Vonnegut started to repeat himself. Not like an old man who can't quite remember that he's told you the story before, but like an old man who has worked out just what ideas are important, and has stop bothering with the rest.

Community, Marx and Jesus, humanism, semi-colons. All these reappear in Vonnegut's speech at Clowes Hall, Indianapolis, included here. But there's one repeated theme, more important in Vonnegut's writing than anything else, that holds Armageddon In Retrospect together.

War. Vonnegut was a POW in Dresden when it was fire-bombed by the allies. That bombing raid, on an 'open city,' had a higher deathcount than Hiroshima, but Vonnegut himself survived it. He was in the deep cellar of Schlachthauf Funf. Slaugherhouse Five, that is.

They say every writer has one book they are writing, all their life. Indeed, when anybody asked Vonnegut what he was writing, he would tell them: the Dresden book. The war book. Never mind the dozen other novels he must have spent a little time on.

Though Slaughterhouse Five is that book -- the one book that Kurt Vonnegut was a writer for -- the collected short stories in Armageddon In Retrospect study the same themes, albeit it on a lesser scale. And as is often the case, the smaller pictures side by side say as much as the full-size masterpiece on its own.

Every story is about war; more often, about the end of war; most often, about the individuals trapped in the immediate aftermath of war. There's as much cohesion here as in many of Vonnegut's novels. Far from being a cash-in collection of errata and pieces better left unpublished, as post-humous collections so often are, Armageddon In Retrospect can hold it's head up high in the top tier of Vonnegut's excellent canon.

Darkmans

Nicola Barker

Darkmans is long, but it doesn't feel it. It's flippant and compellingly written, and it has it's own grammer -- brackets and page breaks that keep the narration interrupting itself over and over -- which add so much white space that the pages turn twice as quick as normal.

And the size of the cast is important when you're stepping past a quarter-million words. Darkmans gets the balance just right; there's enough people that you never dwell long enough on anyone to wonder whether they can carry you through the next half-ton of pages; but there's not so many that you forget them, get confused, or struggle to see the connections.

Darkmans is certainly enjoyable. I knew it was going to be, after every page I picked at random (when bored in my bookshop) made me giggle. I was hoping, though, that it would turn out to be more.

Here's some background. The last book I read of this length was Infinite Jest. If you've been there, you know. It was hugely entertaining, I raced through it, I loved it, and it frustrated the hell out of me. The plot starts on the page the book ends. It's a nothing book. And yes, I know, that's the point. But I wanted it -- and now, by proxy, I want Darkmans -- to be a something book.

But it's not. There's certainly something more to it than a snappy way with word-hilarity. There's a twisted kind of poetry to it, the tripping, bending, unstable explosion of language; and there's such a huge mystery behind the whole thing, even if we never get a sniff of the 'solution.'

It's all about endings, I think. Nothing books -- entertaining, intriguing, infuriating -- don't have endings. I find it hard to imagine how Darkmans could have 'ended' without ripping me off or slightly cheapening itself (but imagining a way out of it should be the author's job, anyway).

I don't want to criticise a book I enjoyed so much, but I'm hungry for a great book. I want the 800+ pages, the massive ambition and wit and intelligence, and then I want it to get better, and better, and then blow my mind. I want 800+ pages of excellent middle, and then I want an ending that lives up to it.

And it is a good thing, that after the thickest book I've read in years, I'm wanting more. It's two parts Darkmans-awesome, one part greedy-bastard.