‘I’ve lost all sense of proportion regarding alcohol. You know how they say time slows down as you get older – or is it speeds up? One or the other. Days whizz by so that it’s Christmas every other week (God, what a prospect). Well, a similar thing happens with alcohol. Alcohol slows down as you get older as well, so that it takes more and more to get you pissed. Whereas when you’re young it flashes through your body like lightning, doesn’t it? You can feel it going into your blood, you can feel all the little blood cells getting drunk … and then you can feel it here – ‘ he touched the front of his head – ‘it gets you right in the frontal lobes. I remember in the army – that was the first time I ever drank much. And then you think, “What’s the point, how much time have we got left on this earth, do we really want to spend it feeling dizzy?” On the other hand, do we really want to spend it sober? You know there’s a theory that senility is nature’s way of stopping you from worrying about death? Alcohol does the same thing. What’s the difference between senility and drunkenness? Drunkennes is artificial senility.’
In A Curious Earth, Gerard Woodward follows the progress of Aldous Jones, first encountered in his previous two novels August and I’ll Go To Bed At Noon. I must confess that the premise of Aldous as a central character in a novel was somewhat unpromising. Anyone who has been reading this series may agree; previously Aldous stood on the sidelines of the action, an easy going and dreamy head of the mad Jones household of sixties and seventies English suburbia. With the more interesting characters gone, mostly due to the devastating effect of the demon called alcohol that haunts these novels, how could the gentle retired art teacher possibly hold his own? Thanks to Woodward’s skill as a writer, he does us proud.
We first met the Jones family in August, where Aldous takes his family to the same spot in Wales for the annual camping holiday. Innocent times, although we slowly begin to follow his wife’s Colette’s drift into addiction – firstly glue (sniffing something quite new and perfectly legal in the 60s) and then alcohol. I’ll Go To Bed At Noon follows a darker path, with Colette and other members of the Jones family in the clutches of the bottle, most disturbingly their son Janus – who is gripped by alcoholism and madness with tragic consequences. But although these novels deal with much sadness they are also terribly funny and I’ll Go To Bed At Noon is one of the most entertaining books I’ve read in the last few years.
At first I wasn’t sure if Woodward could go any further with the Jones family but proceedings quickly fall into the familiarly entertaining style. It starts with Aldous, now widowed and living apart from his surviving grown up children, slowly taking comfort in the bottle himself. He slips into apathy and increasingly eccentric behaviour; one amusing scene has him proudly displaying the mouldy potatoes growing into a huge plant in the cupboard to his perplexed daughter. Following a health scare he attempts to get his act together and visits his son in Ostend, where Woodward can really let rip with his trademark humour – Aldous losing his false teeth on a cross channel ferry, his general confusion at being abroad for the first time since the War, the many characters he meets who far more eccentric than himself (these include an insane author of several volumes on sexual perversion, and the young and attractive love interest for Aldous and the sudden appearance of her irritating and bullying husband).
Best of all is Woodward’s prose. He is a writer who can work wonders with the everyday, and with ordinary thoughts, hopes and regrets. Aldous falls in love again, rediscovers life and has some very high hopes for the old Jones family home. A Curous Earth is a wonderful celebration of the ordinary, with Aldous Jones enjoying a late flowering before our very eyes.
Torbett studied the country out there. The shadows long on the road. Who the hell are these people? he said.
I dont know. I used to say they were the same ones we’ve always had to deal with. Same ones my grandaddy had to deal with. Back then they was rustlin cattle. Now they’re runnin dope. But I dont know as that’s true no more. I’m like you. I aint sure we’ve seen these people before. Their kind. I dont know what to do about em even. If you killed em all they’d have to build a annex on to hell.
For anyone who has recently finished The Road and are looking for another Cormac McCarthy fix I highly recommend No Country For Old Men. This is another helping of McCarthy’s distinctive and highly original prose that immediately grips from the start. There’s also a high quota of bloodshed, some disturbing themes running throughout and one of the most effective literary villains I’ve encountered in a long time.
Similar to The Road, No Country For Old Men works wonders with an ostensibly simple story. A Vietnam veteran (the setting is 1980) stumbles across the aftermath of a drug deal that has gone horribly wrong. He finds a suitcase full of money and decides to take it, a decision that immediately causes him a lot of anguish.
After stealing the drug money Llewellyn Moss is pursued by the ruthless killer Anton Chigurh. Also thrown into the heady mix is the laid back and contemplative sheriff Ed Tom Bell. Although a fast moving thriller – at times Chigurh’s determined and tireless pursuit of Moss makes him seem like a distant cousin of The Terminator – this is also a deep and thoughtful piece. McCarthy takes his sleepy Texan setting and slams the modern and ugly world of drug running in its face. No Country For Old Men is also a novel that trips you up just when you think it’s possible to become comfortable following Moss’s life as a fugitive. McCarthy turns the whole thing on its head with a shocking turn of events – and then he does it again with stomach churning effect.
I couldn’t wait to finish whatever else I was doing and get back to this book; it raises the stakes on what can be justifiably be classed as a page turner. No Country For Old Men has recently been filmed by Joel and Ethan Coen and I’ve already heard good things about it. In fact, if it’s anything as good as the novel I’m expecting a masterpiece. I do wonder though how they have turned this into a piece of cinema; whilst the novel at times reads like a screenplay – and McCarthy writes smart, witty dialogue that outstrips anything the Coen brothers have ever written – some may judge the outcome anticlimactic. No Country For Old Men becomes a quiet and resigned rumination on unbeatable and sickening evil and I admire McCarthy all the more for it. He’s brave enough to avoid the happy and neat ending – something that doesn’t belong in this young man’s world.
After looking forward so much to reading Don De Lillo’s Falling Man I’m unable to hide my bitter disappointment in the novel. This is a big subject tackled by one of America’s leading authors, but simply stamping “9/11” on a work of fiction isn’t enough to make it a great one. I just spent too long waiting for the book to kick in, and while I was nodding sagely throughout – attempting to gel with the novel intellectually – it didn’t grip me emotionally. I found the characters flat and unengaging, and although Keith – survivor of the attacks on the twin towers – may be written as an invisible person, walking back into his family’s life after the terrorist attacks like a virtual ghost – the undead survivor perhaps – this is way beyond my capabilities as a reader.
While I commended De Lillo for waiting so long to tackle “9/11” – while others (British authors, I won’t mention their names) were bashing away at their keyboards to produce articles for next morning’s press before the second tower had even fallen – I wish he hadn’t produced something so leaden and pretentious. This isn’t going on my list of recommendations for 2007.
I finished Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin with a sigh; I found it a disturbing, haunting and exhausting novel. It made me address a lot of difficult issues; mainly the huge and heavy responsibility of the parent. Who can justifiably hold their hand up and say that they are fully qualified for the job?
There is a point in the novel where Eva, the narrator, tells the story of a mother who leaves her small child in the bath for three minutes to answer the door. In that short time the child suffers a fatal accident; the mother – dutiful as a parent for all the other minutes in the day is now forever tortured by this terrible act of neglect. How many of us have been in a situation where this could have happened? How many of us make mistakes in the protection and nurturing of our children? How many of those mistakes are irreversible? Who do we blame when we get it wrong? What do we do when it really goes wrong? Let’s face it, “I blame it on the parents” is an often repeated cliché we’re all used to.
We Need to Talk About Kevin is composed of a series of letters by Eva to her estranged and unresponsive husband Franklin. Their son, now sixteen, has committed several murders in a single act of aggression which Eva sees in her resigned view as another instalment in the depressing series of similar events in the USA. Eva’s voice is an exhausting one because it drilled right into me, nagging away to make me decide whether or not I could or should condone her. Ever felt guilty about something and constantly gone over events trying to iron them out and persuade yourself that you’re blameless? This is what goes through Eva’s mind; she also picks over incidents in Kevin’s early childhood to discover clues to why he has turned out the way he has. The vandalism of Eva’s maps, the cycling accident of a neighbour, bugs in his sister’s backpack, even the failed attempts at potty training – are they all examples of a dangerous individual?
For me, We Need to Talk About Kevin was the literary equivalent of a hangover. It took a while to get over and it left an unpleasant taste in my mouth. It has a truly shocking outcome, but I’m glad I can now rid myself of Eva’s torment, a privileged position compared to the other tortured Evas of this world.
‘Just the place to bury a crock of gold,’ said Sebastian. ‘I should like to bury something precious in every place where I’ve been happy and then, when I was old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember.’
A famous television series from 1981. Jeremy Irons and Anthony Andrews. Teddy bears. Long visits to Venice to meet Laurence Olivier. Oxford undergraduates drinking heavily and speaking through megaphones. These are just a few of the images that have haunted me over the years, stopping me in my tracks every time I thought about reading Brideshead Revisited. But I decided it was time to take the plunge, and although I had many flashbacks when I was reading the novel I just held on tight until they passed. My edition is the 1957 Penguin; it’s been in my possession for as long as I can remember. I’ve moved house eight times in the last 15 or so years and this is one of those books that has always travelled with me.
An army captain is billetted to an old house during the Second World War. He’s been there before, and it evokes memories of his past; Oxford in the early 1920s, where Charles Ryder befriends the effete, charismatic and extrovert Sebastian Flyte. They quickly develop an intense and often disturbingly insular friendship; whilst their relationship is never revealed to be a homosexual one, they prefer their own company to others and are indifferent to the charms of women. Although both from the priviliged upper classes, both also come from dysfunctional families; Charles’ closest relative is his eccentric and slightly mad father, Sebastian’s own father lives in apparent exile overseas after leaving his mother. They begin to drift apart when Sebastian himself drifts into hopeless alcoholism; neither Charles or his own family are able to help him. Ten years later Charles, now a successful artist, embarks on a doomed love affair with Sebastian’s sister Julia.
Although he’s perhaps not someone you’d want to be associated with in real life, the star of Brideshead Revisited is definitely Sebastian. He’s the friend from hell; you begin to despise them and their actions of self destruction but you still try, and fail, to save them. He irritated and infuriated me, but the parts of the book where he wasn’t around were just dull. And the teddy bear, which was a suitable affectation for the fashion conscious of the early 80s, is one of just many keys to the personality of a doomed individual. And putting the homosexual debate to one side, Sebastian, as Charles’ first love, represents the first love for all of us – the one we can never forget even if we might want to (even if it means settling for the sister).
I’ve heard reports that the new cinema version, due for release in 2008, will concentrate mainly on Charles and Julia’s relationship. Something that won’t capture the imagination, or haunt the memory, nearly as much. Why? I found them unappealing characters, and the novel sagged without Sebastian’s disturbing exploits. Unfortunately Brideshead Revisited is ultimately a depressing read. The scenes with Charles’ father are hilarious but the comedy in this novel is minimal. There’s always the sense that life will be a disappointment, even before it’s really got going, with things lost never to be retrieved again:
I felt that I was leaving part of myself behind, and that wherever I went afterwards I should feel the lack of it, and search for it hopelessly, as ghosts are said to do, frequenting the spots where they buried material treasures without which they cannot pay their way to the nether world.
Crocks of gold? I think in Waugh’s mind, if memories of youth are rekindled they invariably only serve to cause feelings of sadness or regret. Depressive that I am, I tend to agree with him.
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