The Book Tower

When I was 20 I worked briefly as an assistant in a record shop. It was easily the worst job I’ve ever had; the oppressive concrete of Hammersmith Broadway, the rude, insistent, positively insane customers I had to face. And the odd types who work in record shops. And the sheer monotony of a job that somehow fails to meet the romanticism you first attach to it. So I was interested in reading Catherine O’Flynn’s What Was Lost, the first novel of a writer who’d endured the same job as me and chosen to set her debut work in a huge, sprawling shopping centre.

What Was Lost reminded me a lot of Jonathan Coe; similar in writing style and similar in how a mystery spanning two decades lies at its heart (although it’s years since I’ve read it, I was reminded a lot of Coe’s House of Sleep). O’Flynn’s mystery surrounds the disappearance of a young girl who, we learn from the opening chapters, daydreams through her waking hours as a would-be detective. Essentially we are in Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time territory, but the novel begins to pick up speed when it jumps from 1984 to 2003. A long time after her mysterious disappearance we follow some of the shopping centre staff who are all, as you might expect, linked in some way to the girl.

Laura is our record shop assistant enduring the nightmare customers and staff, whose own brother also disappeared after being linked to the disappearance and questioned by the police. Kurt is a security guard, who sees a mysterious girl on the CCTV late a night, apparently lost in the empty, labyrinthine corridors. The novel manages to successfully combine humour with sadness; there are some very funny scenes surrounding Laura’s working days (her aggressive, burnt out colleague in the easy listening section is quite hilarious), and there are also many moments of dashed hopes and regret in Kurt’s background story. But best of all What Was Lost offers a very subtle and eerie ghost story, and whilst the solution of the “whodunnit” is not particularly surprising, the explanation of the “whydunnit” is very well constructed. A fine debut.

Comment [1]

Anyone who occasionally looks at these pages may be aware that I feel bad about abandoning books. I feel a duty – however odd – to finish a book once I’ve started it. Probably wrongly, I often feel it’s something lacking in me when I give up on a book. I feel am unable to appreciate something that’s often very widely acclaimed, I’m just too dim to get it when everyone else has.

No Laughing Matter by Angus Wilson is a book that’s sat on my shelves for longer than I can remember. My yellow paperback copy has a inscription written by an old work friend (long since lost) who gave me the copy as a gift. Giving up on a book that I always meant to get round to makes the process all the more disheartening. The novel came back to my attention as it’s one that often turns up in top 100 lists. It’s one of Peter Boxall’s 1001 books before you die. It also turned up in last Saturday’s Guardian, named by several contemporary authors as the out of print book they’d love to see available again.

So what’s my problem? I found No Laughing Matter, like most of Wilson’s work, very difficult to get into. I also found it incredibly dated for a novel only written in 1967. Perhaps because it looks back on the period between the two world wars in its microscopic study of an English middle class family, although there are some similarities with Waugh – and I don’t find his work as dated. There are also echoes of Joyce, and it’s here – Wilson’s irritating experimentation – that led me to toss the book aside. I’m really sorry. But the hot weather at the moment inspires reading in the park beneath a shady tree – and I don’t want to spoil such rare perfect days curled up with a novel I can’t stand…

Picking books from must read lists often has this effect on me. It’s the same with films – and I wouldn’t want to be watching Citizen Kane on a sunny day either.

Comments [3]

Then we Came to the End by Joshua Ferris gave me one of the strangest reading experiences of recent years. My reaction to the book slid from liking it to hating it in only three stages.

The novel begins as a well written and amusing study of office life in Chicago. The style reminded me very much of Joseph Heller, especially his novel Something Happened, which many fans prefer to the more celebrated Catch 22. A sort of White Album vs Sgt Pepper debate. Anyway, Then we Came to the End starts promisingly and I liked it a lot, although there was the nagging doubt at the back of my mind that the book was far too Hellerish. So a word of advice to anyone who’s not a fan of Joseph Heller: don’t read this book.

The first section is quite lengthy and begins to grate because the story doesn’t really go anywhere; there’s no real story at all – simply a series of dryly observed views of office life overshadowed by the depression of the workers facing the onset on redundancy. There’s funny passages – very funny in places – and some excellent dialogue that captures the pettiness and absurdity of office life. Ever stolen somebody’s chair after they’ve left the job because it’s a far better chair than your own? You’ll be hesitating before doing it again after reading this novel.

Ferris does something interesting by changing gear for what I’m calling the second section. This is an althogether more sombre series of chapters following a single character – the office manager as she faces breast cancer. I found it an outstanding piece of writing that surprised me in its sadness and insight. Unfortunately once this section is over Ferris returns for act three and he appears to have lost interest in proceedings. The last 150 pages or so of the novel was one of the biggest struggles I’ve had with a book for a long time. I didn’t want to trawl through any more of the Hellerish style and Ferris appeared to have lost focus. The novel became more of a drag than getting up for work on a winter Monday morning.

So a curate’s egg; funny and incisive but a little too close to the style of a classic author, and really just too long. Where are editors when you need them? At half its length this would have been much better, possibly an outstanding debut novel, but it’s ultimately boring and repetetive, undoing all the good done in the early chapters. And very overrated.

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