I very much enjoyed my first taste of China Miéville, the highly original The City and the City. This novel was billed as an existential thriller with shades of Orwell and Kafka. There’s some truth in this, although what impressed me most was the sheer originality and imaginative scope of this book .
Set in the fictional city of Besźel, the body of a murdered woman is discovered and a detective, Inspector Tyador Borlú, is dispatched to investigate. So far very run of the mill, but Miéville cleverly drops subtle hints that this is going to be far from an ordinary whodunnit. Firstly, we begin to learn of a sister city to Besźel called Ul Qoma. Citizens of each are forbidden to associate, even to look at, one other. Failure to follow this doctrine strictly results in breach, with perpetrators investigated by a sinister body known as The Breach. Miéville begins to unravel a very complex and often challenging premise, daring the reader to keep up with him. It’s this aspect of The City and the City that I enjoyed, whenever you pause for breath this author just keeps running ahead of you with fresh ideas and twists.
The twins Besźel and Ul Qoma and the complexities that result from their division are at first reasonably acceptable. However, as Borlú tentatively begins his investigation, it slowly emerges that citizens of each are not just expected to avoid a neighbouring city. The two inhabit each other; more – they are one and the same from the eyes of a casual – or uninitiated – observer. Streets from each city intersect, even at times forcing traffic to avoid, or “unsee”, traffic belonging to the other city. The act of “unseeing” keeps the respective citizens suitably fearful and repressed. Miéville slowly unravels this ambitious conceit, creating further intrigue when Borlú’s investigation leads him to visit Ul Qoma, unseeing everything he’d previously become accustomed to.
The murder story at the heart of The City and the City is at times overblown and unnecessary, and Miéville is over determined to solve the mystery for us. What’s most impressive is the novel’s extraordinary premise and setting, this odd take on an alternative Eastern Europe, with the close of the book particularly satisfying. Torn between the twin cities, there is only one place that Borlú can go, and his final realisation of this is deftly handled.
The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim
A silence fell between us, and I felt a mounting sense of frustration. Was this what it had come to, my relationship with my own daughter? Was this all she had to say to me? For God’s sake, we had lived together for twelve years: lived together in conditions of absolute intimacy. I had changed her nappies, I had bathed her. I had played with her, read to her, and sometimes, when she got scared in the middle of the night, she had climbed into my bed and snuggled up against me. And now – after living apart for little more than six months – we were behaving towards each other almost as if we were strangers. How was this possible?
There are many sequences like this in The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim. Jonathan Coe portrays a man who grimly realises that his life has receded away to leave him desperately lonely and isolated, whilst at the same time having to come to terms with the realisation that, as a 48 year old, he doesn’t feel he’s reached adulthood at all. Coe achieves this with the perfect balance of comedy and despair revealed by his increasingly unhinged narrator. They are certainly fears I could well identify with.
We meet Maxwell Sim at a period in his life where he’s lost a lot. His wife and daughter have left him, resulting in a period of depression and inactivity. The novel begins in Australia, where he concludes an ineffective visit to his father, revealing an undeveloped and disappointing relationship between the two. During his final evening before returning home he watches a Chinese woman and her daughter at an adjacent table in a restaurant, their touching closeness to one another demonstrating to him that there are deep, mysterious relationships between human beings to be inspired by. Sim craves human contact, and the novel continues with a series of odd, often chance, encounters where his efforts to interact don’t always pull off (an early encounter results in his mugging).
Offered a job as a toothpaste salesman, Sim starts a journey to the most northern part of the British Isles. As he begins to lose touch with reality (visiting his father’s flat left unoccupied for more than twenty years, embarking on a failed romantic interlude with a childhood friend, starting a dubious dialogue with his Satnav), Sim begins to associate his plight with that of Donald Crowhurst, the lone yaughtsman who attempted to fake a round the world journey in the late 1960s. Worryingly, Crowhurst’s deception ended in madness and suicide…
Throughout the novel Coe cleverly weaves in other voices distinct to Sim’s often questionable view of life (this is man who marvels at the delights of the motorway services). An essay about Crowhurst, two stories based upon family holidays and his father’s candid journal dating from the early 1960s all offer insight into Maxwell’s make up. Sim’s methods for discovering these pieces are a little contrived, and what also let down slightly was the very, very odd ending. Sim finally meets the Chinese woman, but after offering an apparently neat resolution Coe slips unexpectedly into a different gear and finishes in a way that doesn’t gel with the rest of the book.
I’ll forgive him for that. The Privacy of Maxwell Sim is a whirlwind read which proved to me, counter to many of the recent reviews, that Coe hasn’t lost his knack for extremely well written novels. Despite appearing relatively lightweight, they tend to leave the reader reeling with the complexity of human emotion.
The Syd Barrett story is a well documented one, although it’s a story crying out for a sensitive biography that is wise enough to debunk the many myths surrounding the man. Myths that have grown steadily prominent over the years. An LSD casualty, a raving recluse, a harmless eccentric, a troubled and mentally ill man; all are varying accounts of what went wrong in the life of Pink Floyd’s founder member. In Syd Barrett: A Very Irregular Head Rob Chapman pieces together Barrett’s life, documenting the solid evidence and dismissing the fanciful rumour to produce a very well written and painstakingly researched work. It’s a valuable account of a complex and often misreported life.
Barrett first caught my eye as an impressionable 12 year old, when the Relics compilation album fell into my possession. Quickly realising that Pink Floyd weren’t going to be my cup of tea, I was however fascinated by three songs all composed by Syd Barrett – Arnold Layne, See Emily Play and Bike. They were all strikingly far removed from the Pink Floyd of Relics and worlds away from Another Brick in the Wall, which had recently brought them back into the singles chart. Barrett’s songs offered charm and humour that was evidently lacking in the later incarnation of the band; he was my first clue of the eccentricities, invention and brief glimpses of genius that the best music of the 60s had offered. Further research into his mystique revealed that he had virtually withdrawn from life to exist only as a legend, glimpsed rarely in his home town of Cambridge.
Considering that the surviving members of Pink Floyd didn’t want to talk to him, it’s odd that Chapman’s book works so well. A Barrett devotee, he makes no secret of the fact that he’s no fan of the group once Syd had left the ranks. Indeed, he almost relishes in the irony that part of Barrett’s legacy rests upon his former band going on to become one of the most successful of all time – despite the reality that the musical style they settled on was far removed from his own. Given the lack of Floyd input (although Chapman does include a generous dose of Gilmour, Mason, Waters and Wright interview snippets from elsewhere) there are arguably richer contributions from many other players in the Barret story, including teenage girlfriend Libby Gausden, manager Peter Jenner, flatmate Duggie Fields, sister Rosemary and loyal fans from successive generations of songwriters Robyn Hitchcock and Graham Coxon (the Blur guitarist is interviewed at length and writes the introduction).
So why, apart from the Pink Floyd connection, are people so fascinated – so obsessed – with a man who stopped recording in 1970 when he was 24, gave his last interview the following year and avoided any contact with the world right up until his death aged 60 in 2006? A man who’s recording output amounted to the Pink Floyd debut album Piper at the Gates of Dawn and three solo albums The Madcap Laughs, Barrett and Opel (the last technically a compilation and only released in 1988). A man who, despite being regarded as a talented painter, destroyed most of his work so only a fraction remained after he’d died. A man who, by many accounts, was often repetitively bothered by intrusive pilgrims rolling up on his doorstep.
Chapman concedes that the Barrett fire was partly kept alive by the perpetual rumour mongering surrounding a sensitive man reportedly sent insane by drugs, possibly spiked by an uncaring circle of friends. Rumours that became more and more fantastic, but never challenged until now, as Barrett became more withdrawn and introverted, apparently getting fat on Guinness, apparently standing outside Harrod’s in a Yogi Bear tie, freaking out and putting his head through ceilings, even trying to flag down an plane he’d missed. Apparently an often violent and uncontrollable man (oddly though, one of the greatest myths of all – that Syd walked all the way back to Cambridge when he eventually left London – turns out to be true). But Chapman is willing to prove any perversely romantic urban myth untrue, and attempts to get to the root of Syd’s mental state, although drawing mixed conclusions (the closing chapter is almost painfully moving). Most revealing is the accounts given by his sister Rosemary, who portrays him as more complex than the sorry image of the Cambridge recluse, but nevertheless a lonely and often distressed individual.
A Very Irregular Head also works strongly in proving Barrett’s strength as a performer and songwriter, and Chapman at times moves into Iain MacDonald Revolution in the Head territory in closely analysing both music and lyrics. It’s convincing, proving that Barrett’s small and briefly executed body of work was both highly original and hugely influential. Chapman also argues that it’s no great crime that Barrett abandoned the music world, reasoning that his surviving contemporaries The Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney and Bryan Wilson continue a pointless and uninspired career path. Syd Barrett was an original while he lasted and he’s remained an inspiration. Let’s celebrate that.
He didn’t want to look into its face. He’d expected the eyes to be closed, but they were open. Staring up at him. The sockets beneath were black. Impulsively he tapped on the glass.
Random internet searches on The League of Gentlemen will return unsurprising descriptions of the television series; bizarre, macabre, mad, surreal, eccentric, weird and demented are some of them, although my favourite is probably the single word brilliant. Yes, I was a big fan, although a decade on I’d almost forgotten about them. So discovering the writing talent of Jeremy Dyson (the fourth, non-performing, member of the team) was an unexpected joy.
Dyson’s writing will appeal to any admirer of The League of Gentlemen, although he’s moved on from comedy to deliver The Cranes That Build the Cranes, a collection of nine short stories that have a sinister flavour to them. It follows Never Trust a Rabbit, an earlier collection, although in comparison Cranes is a much more accomplished and impressive book. Dyson has moved, and I hope is still moving, into the league of truly great writing.
Most impressive are The Coué, quoted above, and Michael, two modern horror stories that deserve to become classics of the genre, forever reprinted in terrifying anthologies. Other stories reveal Dyson’s weird and inventive imagination; Yani’s Day defies description in its fresh originality. His writing has sometimes been described to Dahl’s adult stories. There are similarities, but don’t expect neatly executed tales with a twist. Quite often Dyson leaves a lingering doubt, where you are left checking the shadows behind you. Highly recommended.
So impressed with this, I sought out his 2006 novel What Happens Now. It’s a well written book that reminds at times of Jonathan Coe, and after dragging slightly at the halfway mark emerged as a truly great piece. Dyson ties up his deliberately loose threads and themes with great skill; this is a thought provoking book about action and inaction, and the consequences of trying to right terrible wrongs when it’s far too late. It delivers a terrible irony in its closing pages, and I found it a powerful meditation on, as you might expect, the bizarre and the weird aspects of life. But all done brilliantly.
I believe in the things that were done, and there are evidences of many things done on Mars. There are streets and houses, and there are books, I imagine, and big canals and clocks and places for stabling …. Everywhere I look I see things that were used. They were touched and handled for centuries.
Ask me, then, if I believe in the spirit of the things as they were used, and I’ll say yes. They’re all here. All the things which had uses. All the mountains which had names. And we’ll never be able to use them without feeling uncomfortable. And somehow the mountains will never sound right to us; we’ll give them new names, but the old names are there, somewhere in time …. No matter how we touch Mars, we’ll never touch it. And then we’ll get mad at it, and you know what we’ll do? We’ll rip it up, rip the skin off, and change it to fit ourselves.
Until now my only exposure to Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles is very hazy memories of the tv series featuring Rock Hudson some 30 years ago. I doubt if this version would stand up to the test of time, although I remember the premise of the astronauts visiting the dead planet Mars being a rather haunting one. What I’ll call the Hudson episode is one of countless memorable scenes in the book, which amounts to a set of extremely effective and mostly chilling short stories set in the period 1999 to 2026 (The Martian Chronicles was written in 1950).
Bradbury explores the impact upon Humanity in attempting, and largely failing, to colonise a seemingly inhabitable but ultimately very alien world. The technicalities of science fiction don’t really interest him; the colonists travel by rocket and he goes no further in explaining the mechanics of their interplanetary movements. And although it’s more than likely that the prospect of Mars being able to sustain human or any type of life was well known at the time, Bradbury is more concerned with the romance and intrigue of space exploration; Mars merely serves as the setting for his wonderful interlinked stories. He’s said himself that The Martian Chronicles is much more of a fantasy novel than science fiction.
The Martian Chronicles begins with accounts of the first few exploratory space missions to Mars, mostly resulting in the disappearance and death of the early settlers at the hands of the distrustful Martians. One rocket crew are locked in an asylum and then later “mercifully” euthanised to rid them of their delusions about being from the planet Earth. Another band of settlers are fooled by the telepathic Martians into thinking that their family and friends are there to greet them. A further mission to the Red Planet (the Hudson episode) finds it deserted; Martians apparently wiped out by Chicken Pox; the episode results in a crew member going insane and killing his fellow travellers.
The apparently deserted world weighed down by the history of the Martians sets the premise for most of the book’s remainder; with settlers driven mad by the ghosts – real or imagined – of the dead fathers of the planet. Abandoned cities, long empty highways and very lonely settlers abandoned by a nuclear war on Earth make a brilliantly written, almost poetic, meditation on Man’s ambition to wander the skies. And how he might be doomed.
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