KTH RDGWY

Faber have begun to publish their series of the complete works of Beckett in newly edited editions and in a "unified design".  And they look good. Rhys Tranter, who runs the wonderful A Piece Of Monologue site has kindly tipped me off that on the back of the new edition of Mercier And Camier is a quote from me. This is a lovely thing. It makes me feel quite pleased with myself. No no, Sam, please, don’t thank me, I’m happy to help.

I’d like to think that Faber have used me in an attempt to appeal to a younger, hipper audience. It’s more likely that I’m the only writer who’s ever bothered to write anything about Mercier And Camier and they had no choice. The quote is from an article I wrote for The Guardian ages ago, and you can read it in full here .

A French film production of my first novel The Long Falling starts principle photography in Northern France and Belgium this week. It’s directed by Martin Provost , who made Séraphine , which starred Yolande Moreau - who also takes the main role in the new film. The two of them have, as I understand it, been the driving force behind getting this project - a difficult sell, I’d have thought - off the ground. The novel has been adapted to a French/Belgian setting, and names and other things (including the title) will change considerably. I don’t know anything about the adaptation. I didn’t want to, and didn’t ask. But these are talented film makers, and I’m very glad it’s them, and I wish them well.

I’ve lost count of the number of times books of mine have been optioned over the years. The first time it happened I took a deep breath, thought about the money, and tried to keep a close eye on what they were up to. But I soon realised that film options are a weird sort of futures trading and have little to do with the actual business (never mind the art) of making actual films. It has become quite a welcome, modest, source of income for me. Film makers get in touch, offer money to have exclusive rights to try and develop a script and raise more money to film it, I say yes, they pay me, and then they can’t get it together and after a year is up, maybe even two, they disappear. Suits me.

It suits me because I don’t really want anyone to film my books. They are books. Novels, mostly. Complete unto themselves. They are not blueprints for art in another medium. Why can’t film makers just make films? Do they not have ideas of their own? It puzzles me. Making art might be thought of as a sort of elaborate, public cleansing ritual. It’s odd and unsettling to have some guy come along and climb into your dirty bathwater.

And I can’t be the only reader who gets pissed off when Hollywood comes stamping all over a novel that means something to me. When I love a book, I dread - and I really do mean dread - that some bastard will film it. And worse, that the film will be a commercial success. That characters and scenes and ideas that are alive inside me in complex non visual ways involving language and tone and a carefully, skilfully evoked atmosphere, will turn up as squashed, horrible, crushed reductions all over the television or the radio or the sides of buses.

Most recently for example, The Road . I have no idea if it’s a good film or not. I really don’t care. The point is that that man and his son have lived in my head since I read the book, and my emotional attachment to them, and to it, is so deep and genuinely meaningful to me, that the bits of clips that I glimpsed before I could hit the remote, the bits of useless special effects that suddenly appeared on the TV during ad breaks before I realised what it was, the face of Vigo Mortensen being anguished on posters, have - despite my vigilance - somewhat spoiled the life of the book in my memory. Where it lives as a world, a feeling, built on the language of Cormac McCarthy and the material of my own imagination and experience, and where it should be allowed to live on - without being subjected to a jarring translation into mundane specifics.

Next year, god help us, we get the Tintin films. You have no idea how depressed this makes me. Really. When I was about eight, my Dad bought me a copy of The Black Island in Dublin city centre. I read it in the car on the way home and it changed my life. Seriously. During my teens I learned more from Hergé about how to write than I did from any other writer. (For a superb account of just how good the Tintin books really are, I can thoroughly recommend Tom McCarthy’s Tintin And The Secret Of Literature .) And I lived in those books. Part of me still lives in them. To this day, when I take to my bed, it’s The Calculus Affair, Tintin In Tibet, The Seven Crystal Balls , that I take with me. Most of all it’s The Castafiore Emerald - one of the very few almost perfect books - that sustains my imaginative life. I have smuggled bits of Hergé into every novel I’ve written. Sometimes people notice, and it thrills me.

My point though, is simply that the boy detective and his friends are fully alive in my imagination. They live and breathe and speak there, and the colours of their world and the tones of their voices, though not fixed, move within an orbit created by the skill of Hergé as a writer and an artist, and by my own experience of reading about them, and my childhood and my youth and my life, and that inner world is precious to me, completely precious and valued and loved; and next year, with a deluge of advertising, breakfast cereals, action figures and nauseating celebrity interviews, that bastard Stephen Spielberg is going to fuck it all up, and no matter how much I try to isolate myself and ignore the whole horrible thing, my beautiful inner world is going to be violated by Jamie fucking Billy Elliot Bell and Andy fucking Gollum Serkis, and Nick fucking Frost and Simon fucking Pegg. And even if these people (all of whom I, annoyingly, quite like) create something marvellous, it won’t be my marvellous - the one me and Hergé created - and I’d really rather that the whole project was hit by a shooting star, an Inca curse, something, anything, that shut it down now and forever.

I’m not sure there’s anyone quite as emotionally invested in The Long Falling as I am in the Tintin books. But I know there are people to whom it means a great deal. I hope you won’t mind the film too much. If you think you will, I hope you can avoid it. I’m sure that won’t hit the takings too much.

The truth is that I needed the money. And I am sufficiently removed from the book that it doesn’t tug at me at all. To be honest, I can’t remember much of it. If I watch it (and I suppose I will at some point) I probably won’t be able to spot many of the changes. And I would be lying if I didn’t say that I am sort of intrigued at the idea of a bunch of people running around the Belgian countryside acting out scenes I imagined all those years ago. And I love Grace, and I hope they realise that …

Actually, it seems that it does tug at me. Because I remember things now that I had forgotten. Maybe I won’t watch it. I don’t know. I really don’t.

If I was rich, I wouldn’t allow anyone to make films of my books. But I’m not. Sorry about that.

“Have you a library?”
“We have two: one for film and one for music. I am in charge of the latter.”
“What about books?”
“Books?”

I read it first I think when I was in my late teens. It is coupled in my memory with Anthony Burgess’s Earthly Powers , and I’m not entirely sure why. I suspect I must have read them at the same time, or one after the other, or perhaps Burgess’s endorsement of Alasdair Gray got me to Lanark (“Gray is the best Scottish novelist since Sir Walter Scott”). Anyway. Earthly Powers has some explicit gay sex scenes, and Lanark confused me. So one of them was regularly consulted and the other was read once, fast, and I wasn’t sure that it had fully settled in me.

Lanark was too disturbed to feel the tears on his face. He said,
“You don’t know me. I’m not called Thaw. I’ve been none of these things. I’m something commonplace that keeps getting hurt.”

And although reading it now is much like reading it for the first time, there are scenes and lines that are suddenly, acutely, familiar; and I have had the occasional nagging sense that ideas in it have found their way into my own work. Though I may be mistaking being human for being a writer. It’s a book full of recognition. I’m like that . Or, I know someone who does that . Or - this is the way it works .

Duncan shut his mouth. After a few minutes Mr. Thaw said on a note of pleading,
“Tell me the matter, Duncan.”
“I had a wish to be an artist. Was that not mad of me? I had this work of art I wanted to make, don’t ask me what it was, I don’t know; something epic, mibby, with the variety of facts and the clarity of fancies and all of it seen in pictures with a queer morbid intense colour of their own, mibby a gigantic mural or illustrated book or even a film. I didn’t know what it would have been, but I knew how to get ready to make it. I had to read poetry and hear music and study philosophy and write and draw and paint. I had to learn how things and people felt and were made and behaved and how the human body worked, and its appearance and proportions in different situations. In fact, I had to eat the bloody moon!”

A quick summary … is difficult. There are four Books, and they are presented to us in the order 3, 1, 2, 4. Books 1 and 2 form a structurally straightforward, realist account of the short life of Duncan Thaw from boyhood to early adulthood in and around Glasgow. He wants to be an artist. He is doomed. Books 3 and 4 bracket this conventional narrative with the peculiar adventures of Lanark, a version of Thaw in a version of Glasgow called Unthank - and other places - that is fantastical and absurd and which echoes what we know with the grotesque distortion of what we suspect. Lanark wants sunlight and love. He is doomed.

Lanark ran to his bed, grabbed the radio and flicked the switch; he said, “Get Dr. Munro! Get me Dr. Munro!”
A small clear voice said, “Who is speaking, please?”
“I’m called Lanark.”
“Dr. Lanark?”
“No! No! I’m a patient, but a man is dying!”
“Dying naturally?”
“Yes, dying, dying!”
He heard the voice say. “Will Dr. Munro report quickly to Dr. Lanark, a man is dying naturally; I repeat, a man is dying naturally.”

It’s often funny. Earnest young men usually are. And it’s an easy, relaxed read, despite its length and the peculiarity of the structure. Things happen. People talk. It fairly gallops along. It’s full of bits you’ll want to mark and come back to. It’s quotable. And it has Gray’s own beautiful bookplates to ruin your eyesight on.

Like a lot of readers, I am moved more by the story of Duncan Thaw than I am by the rest of it. I find it impossible to read of the death of Mrs Thaw without weeping. And I love Mr Thaw. I love his good sense and his dignity, and his patience with his son. I love his love. Thaw himself is a pain in the arse of course, but my god, he’ll break your heart. And he is, more than Lanark, the emotional centre of the book. He’s where the reader stands. This reader anyway. Despite the fact that his life is narrated to Lanark, and that Lanark is the container, it is Thaw that makes sense to me. The book insists that what we understand about Thaw is bracketed by what we don’t understand about Lanark. It is from the sunless confusion of Unthank, up to the familiar streets of Glasgow, and then back down again, that the book and the reader moves.

I wanted madness to blot out the memories with the strong tones and colours of a delusion, however monstrous. I had a romantic notion that madness was an exit from unbearable existence. But madness is like cancer or bronchitis, not everyone is capable of it, and when most of us say, “I can’t bear this,” we are proving we can.

But I can’t really get along with Unthank, the Institute, Provan, the Council - all the elaborate architecture that exists in Books 3 and 4, and which seems ultimately, to me, to do not much more than elucidate by deprivation what we get from books 1 and 2. As with all delineated fantasy a fair bit of time is spent on exposition. Time spent explaining a metaphor is time spent weakening it. The best bits of 3 and 4 are the formless, drifting intuitions and impressionistic resignations of Lanark. When he simply falls into a sad acceptance that he doesn’t know what the hell is going on, and that it isn’t fair. Which is when he is mostly Thaw. Sometimes you get the feeling that his (Thaw’s, Lanark’s and Gray’s) fear of women might derail things completely, or that the voluble self-conscious nervousness about everything will swamp us. The trouble taken to get him into politics towards the end, and have him attend the Council assembly in Provan, feels to me less like a nod to Kafka and more like a kind of epileptic fit to him. It does create a powerful pathos, finally, but it seems like an over amplified insistence on universality, on extrapolating the cruelties of Thaw’s small world into a larger one.

“Attention, please note! Attention, please note! The expansion committee announces that after the hundred and eighteenth all twittering is to be treated as a sign of hopelessness.”

I have a dim memory of feeling that Books 3 and 4 were over my head the first time I read them. Now though I get the sense that Unthank is half vision of the messy innards of the capitalist mistake, and half a topography of Gray’s own lack of confidence. Because there’s too much of it, for me. And it’s too clever - its contrivances laid bare and pointed at are contrivances nevertheless. There is too much elaboration and emphasis. By the time Gray himself appears, as Nastler, the king, to tell Lanark how it’s all going to end, and to parade his “Index of Plagiarisms” (they are no such thing), I’d had about enough.

Which is probably why Gray brings it all to a halt not long after. It’s too fine a book, and he is too skilled a story teller, to ever actually lose the reader. And in any case, he anticipates and undermines this sort of criticism, sometimes by directly making it himself, from inside the text, more often through his wonderful sense of pace and timing and tone. Lanark is persistently engaging. For a book that is 560 pages long, written over the best part of 30 years, that is some achievement.

And make no mistake. I’m the man who climbs a mountain and is moved to tears by the view but complains then about the ache in his knees. Lanark is one of the great books. There is nothing comparable really. Idiosyncratic and berserk, it swells in my nit-picking consciousness with a generosity of spirit and an ache of love and sadness that did, it seems, after all, settle in me all those years ago, hidden, like a piece of advice, waiting for me to be old and broken down enough to hear it.

And it’s what Thaw, and Lanark, and Gray are really interested in and long for - kindness, fairness, and love - that Lanark delivers. Gray’s socialism and his furious compassion for people animate this book. It’s full to bursting, but with a very calm centre, and if there are stutters and hesitations and missteps, Gray is well aware of them, and they are honest and involving. And Lanark trips through this clutter of obstacles and doubts and diversions, and emerges as a bright, sunlit memorial to the ideas of art and decency and generosity and love. And when all that fails - as it inevitably does -  we are left at least with the hope of “annihilating sweetness.”

I fear that the men of a healthier age will think my story a gafuffle of grotesquely frivolous parasites, like the creatures of Mrs. Radcliffe, Tolkien and Mervyn Peake. Perhaps my model world is too compressed and lacks the quiet moments of unconsidered ease which are the sustaining part of the most troubled world. Perhaps I began the work when I was too young. In those days I thought light existed to show things, that space was simply a gap between me and the bodies I feared or desired; now it seems that bodies are the stations from which we travel into space and light itself. Perhaps an illusionist’s main job is to exhaust his restless audience by a show of marvellously convincing squabbles until they see the simple things we really depend upon: the movement of shadow round a globe turning in space, the corruption of a life on its way to death and the spurt of love by which it throws a new life clear. Perhaps the best thing I could do is write a story in which adjectives like commonplace and ordinary have the significance which glorious and divine carried in earlier comedies. What do you think?

I was living like everybody else, looking at life with the open, blind eyes of man, without surprise and without understanding. I was living as animals live, as we all live, carrying out all the duties of existence, examining and thinking I saw, thinking I knew, thinking I was familiar with, my surroundings, when one day I perceived that everything is false.

I read Guy de Maupassant’s The Horla while on a flight to Dublin the other day. (It’s very short).  I was reading the handsome volume from Melville House , part of their "Art of The Novella" series. It includes two versions of the story, from 1886 and 1887, and an earlier version entitled Letter From A Madman , of which the quote above forms the opening paragraph. I think I prefer this first take. It’s very direct, much shorter even than The Horla itself, and it ends with the line, "What should I do?" which had me looking out at the runway of Dublin Airport in a bit of a panic. Damned if I know what you should do, Guy.

The story is straightforward. A man feels that he is gradually becoming in some way haunted, or perhaps possessed, or in any case considerably fiddled with, by a presence, an invisible something-or-other, which drinks the water on his bedside table while he sleeps, and drinks the milk he leaves as a test (because he hates milk himself) and which causes him to suffer greatly and feel deep fear and unease and dread, unto the point of despair, and in the last version, violence. He thinks he’s going mad. Then he thinks that there is another possibility. That the creature, which he takes to calling Le Horla (he doesn’t know why) is a higher form of life that has arrived to take the place of mankind. He finds evidence for this in reports of a strange illness in a town in Brazil.

The translation is a lovely piece of work, by Charlotte Mandell. In an afterword, she points out that the neologism ‘horla’ combines hors , meaning outside, and là , meaning there. "So le (note the masculine gender) Horla sounds like the Outsider, the outer, the one Out There."

De Maupassant’s descriptions of nocturnal activities in a locked room where he is ostensibly alone immediately put me in mind of Thomas Glavinic’s Night Work , about which I’ve written on this blog . Glavinic takes (I’m sure he must have read The Horla ) what is a slight but startling set of ideas about our perceptions and our sense of ourselves, and expands them into a terrifyingly empty world, which nevertheless seems to have someone else in it. These are stories about the self. But the self isn’t single.

Melville House tell us that The Horla "was published shortly before the author was institutionalised for insanity". It’s a bit of a stretch, that, I think, to be fair. He wrote Letter From a Madman a full seven years at least before he entered the asylum after a suicide attempt. But it’s clear that De Maupassant was thinking and writing about what ‘insanity’ feels like. It’s terrifying, clearly. And the terror comes in large part from what it also feels like - reasonable, and logical, and precise.

The stand off between Amazon and Macmillan over the last few days has been covered all over the place by people with a firmer grasp of the economic and legal ins and outs of what’s going on than I possess . But. This is not going to be the last such confrontation. For reasons that are all about technology and business - and have next to nothing to do with writing - the shiny spotlight of new gadgetry, and all the money that powers it, has turned its heat on the world of book publishing. Of all things.

(And I do mean books. I don’t mean newspapers and magazines, which are a separate business. And one in which the application of new technology makes more sense. While there are cross overs and tangled interests, the similarities tend to be red herrings.)

The books business has operated on a fairly predictable, if complicated, model for a long time now. There are subtleties and oddities, and I’m simplifying somewhat, but basically …

1.        The author writes a book.
2.        The author hands the book to an agent.
3.        The agent finds a publisher for the book.
4.        The publisher has the book edited, designed and printed.
5.        The publisher markets the book to retailers and readers.
6.        The retailers buy the book and present it to readers.
7.        The reader buys the book.
8.        The reader reads the book.

In an ideal world, steps 2 to 7 would not exist. In the world of new technologies - of Amazon, the iPad and iBooks, of the Google Book Agreement - steps 3 to 7 are in a mess, scrambled, being fought over, argued about, and written off and on again as everyone tries to find the right combination that will keep everyone employed.

Notice anything? It’s pretty much certain that ten years from now, those 5 steps from  3 to 7 will have been cut down to maybe 4 steps. Maybe even 2 or 3 steps. We are approaching the ideal world.

The only essential steps in this process are steps 1 and 8. If I want to pay my rent, step 7 is good too. And in order for step 7 to happen, some of the other steps are going to have to stay in place in one form or another. But the process is going to shrink. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing.

Mostly the debate about what to shrink and how is being had between publishers and retailers. Agents are a canny lot and are keeping a watching brief. Readers are interested, and are vaguely hopeful that when the dust settles they might have some cool new ways of reading books, and that it might be a bit cheaper. Authors are worried. Authors are always worried of course. But in this instance, how worried should we be?

Publishers certainly need to worry, particularly the big ones. Traditional retailers don’t need anyone to tell them that they need to worry. But non traditional retailers, Amazon chief amongst them, need to worry too, and from their actions over the last week, I think they know it. Neither of these two giant cogs in the process want to give way. So inevitably the pressure is being forced outwards. Readers are feeling it (or, are being asked to feel it by Amazon’s pricing games), and authors are feeling it - mostly by being told that the days of big (or any) advances are over, and that royalties aren’t going to improve either, sorry about that, and that we should shut up and be grateful that anyone does us the honour of publishing us in the first place.

This is bullshit.

Retailers and publishers are non-essential. New technology means that I can, in theory, sell you my new book on this website at a price that suits both you and me, and cut out the middle men. But I want to be a writer, not a businessman, and you want the enjoyment of browsing your local bookshop and stumbling over my book there, all nicely presented. So, I employ a middle man. But why on earth would I need two middle men?

Authors have power.

It’s very difficult to convince any but the biggest name authors of this. Most of us feel that we have no power whatsoever. This is because we tend to forget, indeed we are encouraged to forget, that we are, to use the iLanguage, the ‘content providers’. And what is content? King. Without us, there are no books. No books, no business.

It’s difficult to do anything with that. It’s difficult to organise a bunch of isolated, solitary social misfits. But it’s not really necessary. Agents form a strong, though admittedly not comprehensive, bodyguard. They act of behalf of individual authors rather than some greater ideal, but they know what side their bread is buttered. The generality of agents’ work is done to the benefit of the generality of authors. They are, after all, a non-essential step as well, and they know it.

And within publishing there is a core of people who know full well that the business is about writing, and that what serves the writing will in the long term win out over what serves the process. These people are clinging to door frames maybe, but they’re there. And they’re right. And the wrong ones who have replaced their colleagues will not last.

I’d argue, and I don’t think it’s a controversial argument to make, that publishers and retailers have done a pretty good job of diminishing quality over the last, say, fifteen years. They’ve become involved in the chase for big money phenomenon books; they’ve invested in non-writing celebrities and have tried to contrive titles to appeal to perceived markets; they’ve sacrificed long term modest sales authors in favour of one off high sales ones - part of the misguided strategy of focussing on titles, not on writers; they’ve taken discounting to an absurd level - seeming to misunderstand the very nature of what it is they’re selling, believing books to be as amenable to regular bulk buying as ready meals. They have, and it’s a generalisation that doesn’t have to contend with very many exceptions, behaved bloody stupidly.

The current scramble for the future of books hopefully lends itself to a refocussing on books themselves. People want good ones. Formats and methods of delivery may change, but people will continue to want great books and great writing. Anyone who misses that point, be they author, agent, publisher or retailer, is going to lose out. Anyone who forgets that it’s about connecting the reader to the writer is going to lose out. Anyone who thinks the authors are the non-essential cog in this process are going to lose out spectacularly.

A future is opening up in which retailers and major publishers will in all likelihood merge, probably bloodily, and will start cannibalising each other’s traditional roles. The biggest book publisher in ten years time could be Amazon. Or Apple. Or perhaps the biggest books retailer in ten years time will be Barnes & Noble. Or Apple. But certainly, something has to give. Probably not Apple.

It may be that big corporate publisher/retailers will become simply an annexe of the entertainment industry, publishing only the brand name authors with guaranteed returns. And that literature will be carried out elsewhere, by smaller, independent publishers working both with old fashioned physical books and their digital counterparts, selling directly online to a worldwide readership. Some would argue that this is exactly what’s happening now.

But I’m not simply whistling past the graveyard here. At least I hope I’m not. Authors are the books business. In all the shouting that’s going to go on (and on) in the next while, listen out for the businesses - be they retailers or publishers or both - who are putting writers at the centre of their plans. They’ll be the ones left standing.

The night before I set off by train and ferry to Dublin for Christmas I grabbed, at more or less random, two short novels from my buckled ‘to-read’ shelf and stuck them in my bag. The first was Homo Faber by Max Frisch , which I had wanted to read since reading Man In The Holocene earlier in the year, which I wrote about on this blog . And the other was William Golding ’s Pincher Martin . I’ve returned to Golding in the last couple of years, very slowly, after a brush with him in my teens (instigated by Lord Of The Flies at school I presume) which had left me feeling that he was too oddly English and peculiar and serious for me. He still is oddly English and peculiar and serious. But.

I didn’t know it, but the two books have things in common. They were published within a year of each other (1956/57); they both tell the story of a middle aged man faced with what looks very much like his death; both central characters are given generalising eponymous nicknames; both writers fiddle with our perception of accuracy (Golding with detailed renditions of hallucination and mental derailment, and an unfortunate Tales Of The Unexpected last line twist; Frisch with a much more subtle, dissembling first person narrative); they both involve sea journeys; they both render a disgust and terror at organic natural things; they both involve sex that really shouldn’t have happened; they’re both about going a bit bonkers.

I felt very comfortable with Walter Faber, Frisch’s Swiss UNESCO engineer whose flight crash lands in a Mexican desert. He’s a practical man, has no time for novels or dreams or religion or myths or any of that stuff, and finds himself thrust nevertheless into a daft series of coincidences which unravel his sense of himself and his world, sort of. He survives the plane crash (or does he? (yeah, he does, I’m pretty sure (really?))) but through it meets the brother of an old friend who married the woman he perhaps should have married. He sets off to find this old friend, who is missing in the jungles of Guatemala, with the man’s brother. After a horrible journey consisting mostly of sweat and entrails, they find him - hanging by his neck in a plantation hut. Faber goes back to his apartment and his girlfriend in Manhattan and dislikes everything. He sets off for Europe by ship. On board he sees, is attracted to, meets, and gets involved with a young woman who reminds him of the woman he should have married all those years ago. There is a gradual escalation of dread, but it’s comic, absurd, and Faber is dizzy with it, disbelieving. The extended, perverse ending, involving a snake bite and a fall (or is it a fall? (I really don’t know)) is compelling and rather beautifully ridiculous.

Pincher Martin is much more foreign to me. I suspect that like a lot of readers who were raised Irish and Catholic, I’m at a bit of a disadvantage when it comes to reading English writers who are concerned with, in broad terms, religious things. They seem so earnest. So worried. Golding worries an awful lot. In Pincher Martin the worrying takes the form of a kind of self created hell - a rock in the North Atlantic where Martin finds himself washed up after his ship is torpedoed. The physical details are great. The scraping and scouring of the body, the fright caused by gulls and seals, the terrifying assault of the wind and rain and the sea. But the important thing for Golding is that all this provides an arena in which Martin remembers and regrets and, importantly, digs his stubborn selfish heels in. He does not surrender, and that seems to be his sin. It’s an odd book. It seems to have come from another world - a different, scarier world. Like the 1950s for example. Homo Faber on the other hand seems to come from last summer.

Both books visit upon their central characters the theoretical, if you will, repercussions of their past actions. They’re both pretty cruel. Golding’s cruelty is blunt and quick and bloody. And maybe there’s something to be said for that when set against the playful, complicated, slow cruelty of Frisch. But Frisch’s Faber is more recognisably us. And Frisch grants him the larger rock, half the world, on which to come face to face with what’s he’s created and destroyed.

My friend James Meek writes an interesting piece on David Peace in the LRB (of a couple of issues ago probably - I’m behind). And he does a very good job of drawing your attention to Peace’s method. And in the end he’s not very sure about him. His review reminded me of that book about sex my embarrassed father gave to me when I was about 12. Impossible to fault the accuracy, but it did rather leave me with the idea that sex was really very dull and I shouldn’t bother with it.

David Peace is a sensual writer. His style, his technique, is upfront, to the fore, obvious, and so the temptation when writing about him is to concentrate on that. And because he uses fact for the bones of a lot of his fiction, that goes greatly remarked upon as well. So the idea is given - to people who have not read him - that he is a technical, difficult writer entangled in a dodgy sort of conspiracy-theory view of recent history. And actually I think his intention and his achievement lies elsewhere. He’s a sensualist. He is not difficult to understand or follow if you rely on your senses a little more than your sense. He is a writer who is a lot more enjoyable when you trust him, and allow yourself to fall backwards into his arms. He won’t catch you of course, and that’s the beauty of it. Before you know where you are you’re scrabbling around in a smelly, grimy, noisy, scary acre of disgusting humanity, gasping for breath, and thoroughly smothered. At least, I am.

I haven’t read the new book. I can’t afford hardbacks any more. But I wrote a review of the last book for the Irish Times, which you can read here *. And when I read the new book, I’m sure I’ll want to write about him again.

_____

*Oh. Seems that you actually can’t read it there. They want you to pay a subscription. Boo! I thought the Irish Times had given in and made everything free. Anyway, here follows below the full review :

David Peace is contemporary literature’s most compelling chronicler of defeat. In a series of corrosively affecting novels, he has examined the interiors of various English traumas, from the Yorkshire Ripper case (The Red Riding Quartet) to the miner’s strike (GB84) to Brian Clough’s stint as manager of Leeds (The Damned United). As a body of work, it has a distinctive style - a kind of reportage-of-consciousness – and a steady layering of detail. It feels organic, permeated by its subjects, oozing masculinity and fear. You can smell a David Peace novel. Tokyo Year Zero stinks. It’s a remarkable book.

The prologue takes place on the day of surrender in August 1945, as a destroyed city prepares for and absorbs the shock of Emperor Hirohito’s broadcast to the nation confirming surrender. The body of a young woman has been discovered, and Tokyo Metropolitan Police Detective Minami and his colleagues are at the scene. The case is closed in no time at all, blame and punishment meted out to an old Korean man who happens to be nearby. The brutality and the sense of collapse are immediate.

The narrative proper opens a year later with the discovery of two more women’s bodies in Shiba Park. We follow the course of the investigation, and the manner of it, and are submerged in the  misery of a defeated people, a defeated city and a defeated country. Everything is rubble, including the population. Tokyo is ruins. There are no communications. The police have no cars, no guns. Trains, when they run, are packed tight with a shocked human cargo. And that cargo in turn carries its own - ringworm, lice, sickness, hunger, filth, humiliation. It is a stifling August, and Detective Minami’s desperation, paranoia and helplessness are rank, as is his relentless, inch by tortuous inch forward movement. He narrates the story, and Peace has found for him a remarkable voice – a voice from the rubble, filled with a jagged, chopped up momentum, haltered by despair and doubt, but always with a kind of broad, startling poetry. Peace is a master of repetition, knowing always when, and how much. Words, phrases, even paragraphs are repeated. Minami’s constant itching, scratching, the endless hammering in the background, the calls of prostitutes in the wrecked alleys, and much more, combine to form an incantatory percussion, a rat-a-tat-tat that marches the reader along at bayonet point.

Identifying the murdered rather than the murderer soon becomes the focus of the investigation, and identity is a bigger puzzle here. This is an occupied city. And the Americans are conducting various purges amongst the survivors. As a result, the police force seems full of people who a year previously went by a different name. No one is necessarily who they say they are. Add to this a gang war over the city’s markets, and Minami’s deeply uneasy relationship with one of the market bosses, as well as the spectre of the original body, which obviously should form part of this investigation but which nobody seems to want to mention, and there is a sufficient tangle of plot to keep us guessing.

But the engine of this book is Peace’s depiction of Tokyo and its people, through the frangible and furious voice of Minami, who seems at times to carry Tokyo on his back. An addict, an adulterer, a killer; he is sometimes slow, stupid and weak – but he is complete, not just as a point of access for us, but as an utterly convincing man of his time and place.

There was a danger that when Peace left the familiar setting of the north of England, and the familiar grubbiness of the 70s and 80s, that he would lose some of his gift for authenticity. And that in choosing a historical setting as specific, desperate and abject as Tokyo in 1946, his grim meticulousness might not be up to the task, or his prose might seem to parody itself. Although there are some English tics which Peace has taken with him (people are never standing, for example, they are stood) nothing is diminished. Peace is as convincing here as he was back in the bleak macho grime of Leeds in 1973 or on the Yorkshire pickets of 1984. Once again, his fiction is based on fact – not just the facts of post war Tokyo, but the facts of this murderer as well - and once again he has created a fiction that leads us far closer to truth than you feel we could ever otherwise get. The instinctive politeness and the underlying rage, the battered deference of a society reeling from violent catastrophe, the impossible balance of obligation - all are beautifully drawn. Tokyo Year Zero is a story about the agony of survival and the choices a society makes in order to survive. It engages all the senses, in ways that should be impossible.

I lived in Florence briefly, about ten years ago. In terms of getting to know the place, I really only scratched the surface, finding a fairly closed, almost claustrophobic society - mono-cultural and deeply conservative - in an astonishing, surreal setting. It was at its weirdest, and its beautiful best, in the depths of winter when there were no tourists, and the ancient, quotidian traditions of the citizens re-establish themselves in a gentle, sensuous sort of way. Italians generally, and Florentines perhaps in particular, like to do things just so . And each Italian will know, better than any other Italian, what just so actually involves. I miss the cafés and the narrow streets, the mysterious, touchable buildings, the damp cold mornings and the mist on the Arno, and the frequent feeling that you’ve turned a corner into 1498. And of course, the Renaissance art, which seems inexhaustible, and is exhausting, and which can, if you let it, colour and shape every thought you have while there. I found it, after just a couple of months, a very difficult place to write in. It squats in your imagination like a hulking, mostly malevolent, melodramatic bully.

Around the city are the sweet hills of Tuscany, dotted with the sort of tiny villages and historic villas that you’ll see in the tourist brochures. But there is another side to the idyll, of course, and as undersides go, it’s grimy, crawling, repulsive and scary - or at least it is in Douglas Preston ’s at times almost unbelievable account of the murder mystery that has been playing havoc with the Italian national psyche for nearly three decades now.

In 1981 a couple having sex in a car in the countryside outside the city were murdered. Both were shot to death. The young woman was mutilated. It didn’t take long for the murders to be linked to another, almost identical double murder from 1974. The lid was lifted on two previously obscured aspects of Tuscan life. The first was that young couples could be found in  cars all over the the hills around Florence, looking for a quiet spot to have sex. Italians, traditionally, live at home with their parents until they are married. Privacy becomes a major concern early on in their lives. The second was that of the Indiani - the voyeurs who spend their time watching the youngsters. This scene, it was revealed, was an elaborate and organised staking out of “prime sites” where the best action could be viewed, and where vantage points were claimed and traded, bought and sold, often with seasoning of violence.

The police arrested one of these voyeurs and charged him with the murders. While he was in prison awaiting trial, another couple were murdered. It would became one of the hallmarks of the investigation - the police would arrest someone, lock him up, and then wait and see if the killings stopped. They didn’t, until 1985. The killer’s total is fourteen, at least. And although a man named Pacciani was convicted in 1994, he was acquitted on appeal in 1996, and no one now seriously believes he was responsible.

A journalist called Mario Spezi has followed the case. He is credited as the joint author of this book, and in many ways he is the character who dominates it, though he never actually takes charge of the narrative. Spezi seems to be the sort of journalist that they don’t make ‘em like anymore. Dapper, chain smoking, dogged, clever, cunning, congenial, his investigative intelligence is more sober, more careful, and a lot more impressive than that of the authorities. He remains a still point of sanity in what quickly becomes an astonishing shit storm of craziness.

Spezi’s experiences from 1981 until the present day are narrated by Douglas Preston, who arrived in Florence about a month after I left, in 2000, and who stumbled into the case of Il Mostro while attempting to write a medieval murder mystery. Preston is an American, a writer of crime fiction, thrillers, and his writing style is pretty much as you’d expect - journalistic, pacey, fond of the cliff hanger and the shock reveal, and with excellent organisational skills. He marshals a vast amount of complicated information without ever neglecting his duty to engage and entertain. He is helped by the nature of the material - but he could have been swamped by it, and he isn’t. I admired him a great deal by the end, long past the point where a less robust writer, like me for example, would have thrown in the towel and gone running home to mummy. Not least because the investigation, eventually, insanely, perversely, turned its attentions on him, and more worryingly, on Mario Spezi.

There have been, broadly speaking, two main strands to the investigations over the years. By far the more convincing is the one that the police first embarked upon. They knew that the same gun linked all the crimes, and that this gun had been used in a double killing, superficially similar to Monster killings, which had taken place in 1968. This first crime had been ostensibly solved. A Sardinian man had shot his wife and her lover in a car in the hills outside Florence, while their six year old son slept on the back seat. The gun had never been found. Find the gun, and you find the Monster. It turned out the the murderer in this first case had been accompanied, and probably manipulated, by a man called Salvatore Vinci, another Sardinian. Suspicion, for a long time, alternated between Salvatore and his brother Francesco.

It’s complicated. I’m not going to redo in miniature the job Preston does so well in large scale. Suffice it to say that this “Sardinian Trail” involves a probable murder back in Sardinia dating from 1961; the two brothers, each of whom seems by turns creepier than the other; a boy who hates his father and loves his uncle; and a whole mess of complicated violent and sexual intricacies between a bunch of characters who provided the model for the mad Sardinians in Hannibal - the ones who do horrible things with wild pigs. Thomas Harris sat in on the trial of Pacciani, and hung out with the chief investigating officer. The detail about the pigs, which seems so over the top in both film and book, is real.

Despite the apparently obvious evidence that the Vincis are linked in some way to the Monster killings, there are too many reasons why Salvatore or Francesco cannot have been the Monster. The police, frustrated, pressured, looked elsewhere.

The other strand to the investigation involves a kind of fantasy world in which Pacciani (a violent and disgusting killer and rapist - of his own daughters) is the Monster. In this fantasy, Pacciani was sent out by a group of respected and wealthy citizens of Florence to collect the sexual organs of women, for use in Satanic rituals in which portals between this world and others are opened. I kid you not. This fantasy is, currently, the official story of what happened. A lot of it seems to come from, or bear a marked similarity to, the rantings of a "medium" called Gabriella Carlizzi, who runs an conspiracy website. The evil satanic organisation behind the Monster killings is the same, according to Carlizzi, as the one which masterminded 9/11. She’s like a Dan Brown novel come to life. The investigators seem to have been using her as a source.

Mario Spezi was arrested in 2006 as part of the investigation into this infernal conspiracy, and was released only after an international outcry. The main problem that the investigating authorities had with Spezi was that he was pointing out (and here, unbelievably, he was in a minority in Italian journalism) the bullshit nature of the official fantasy. Such attempts to discredit the conspiracy theory amount, in the prefect-circle logic of the crank, to evidence of complicity in the cover up. Preston was taken in for questioning, placed officially under suspicion of a conspiracy to plant evidence, and more or less intimidated out of the country.

It’s breathtaking. Shocking, scary, troubling stuff. You’ll laugh at it, think it impossible for times like our own. Impossible that it could continue. Today. Think again.

Spezi and Preston have an impressive theory about who Il Mostro di Firenze actually is. They make their case calmly, and pretty convincingly within the pages of this book. The man’ s photograph is there. They interview him. He denies it of course, but he’s one fairly scary individual. He lives in Florence, ignored by the authorities, to whom he is simply impossible, irrelevant. He doesn’t fit the fantasy.

And by the last third of this book, the monster you find yourself contemplating is not the killer, but the investigation into the killings. Monstrous is truly the word. A simple account of it suggests serious problems in Italian investigative practise. The detailed account you get here exposes Italy’s justice system as a complete basket case. And the most worrying thing about it is the fact that it is ongoing. Right now. Summer, 2009. The monster of official paranoia and tunnel vision currently has in its gaze the pitiful figure of Amanda Knox.

The investigating official responsible for the Pacciani fantasy has been indicted on charges relating to illegal wiretaps of journalists, and other matters, arising out of his conduct in the Monster case. Despite this (Ciao! Italia! ) he remains in post as the Public Minister of Perugia (the region next to Tuscany, to the south), with responsibility for the conduct of major investigations, and for their prosecution in court. He is called Judge Giuliano Mignini. He recently took time out from his busy schedule of phantasmagoria to tell the BBC that he isn’t “mentally unstable”. He is the chief prosecutor in the Amanda Knox case.

Preston gives us a troubling afterword on Amanda Knox. She’s on trial for the murder of Meredith Kercher, a murder which it is highly unlikely that either she or her boyfriend had anything to do with. She has been demonised by the media (inside and outside Italy) to a horrible extent, in ways which put (or should put) the journalists involved to shame. Lied to in the course of interrogations (coordinated and led by Mignini), allegedly mistreated both physically and psychologically, not given access to a lawyer or a translator, the American student seems to have been effectively set up. Mignini, true to form, has been throwing around accusations of “rites” and dark forces in his case against her. It’s a case which requires an acceptance of hysterical, gothic improbabilities in order to stand up. The alternatives, which Preston goes through calmly and carefully, seem to make a hell of a lot more sense.

As you can tell by the length of this post, this is one of those books that contains a story so shocking and bewildering that it can turn you into a real bore at parties. The book itself never bores. Preston does a great job, and his own bewilderment and anger, and real fear (he has been warned, within the last year, not to return to Italy), are honestly presented, without any self aggrandisement. You really do get the impression that he’d rather not have become part of the story thanks very much.

And he writes well about Florence. He has succeeded with the city that defeated me. He is always aware of the historical context, and of how it both charms and distorts. One of his most memorable portraits is of Florentine nobleman and Anglophile, Count Niccolò Capponi, who pops up throughout the story with words of wisdom about the peculiar nature of Italy and Italians, delivered to Preston with a gentle and cautionary solicitude. He talks about dietrologia , telling Preston that it’s the only Italian word he needs to know in order to understand the investigation into Il Mostro.

“ Dietro - behind. Logia - the study of. Dietrologia is the idea that the obvious thing cannot be the truth. There is always something hidden behind, dietro. It isn’t quite what you Americans call a conspiracy theory. Conspiracy theory implies theory, something uncertain, a possibilty. The dietrologist deals only in fact. This is how it really is.”

The case of Il Mostro is a labyrinth of wrong turnings, a succession of doors leading to other doors, and behind each of them nothing but the promise of something else again behind the next. Italy is perhaps one of the few places left in the world where it’s possible that a tyranny of the imagination can take hold on such a scale. If Giuliano Mignini can imagine it, then it exists. Such power in the mind of one person can create wonders - Florence is full of them. And such power can create nightmares. Florence is full of them too.

The Shanghai Gesture is Gary Indiana’s 48th novel, and his 183rd published book. I finished reading it a couple of weeks ago and since then I’ve been doodling about it, around it. I’ve been giggling a little, if the truth be told. It’s impossible to say anything about this book really. I feel a little like I’ve been out on a bit of a bender with a someone my parents don’t approve of, and now I’ve safely climbed back up the drainpipe and into bed, with nothing expected of me but sleep, and my head is full of bright lights and stupid jokes and ways of not sleeping.

It’s actually his seventh novel, I think. Though I’m never sure whether to include Three Month Fever , a book that is certainly full of facts, but which uses fiction to support them. Non-faction. And it’s quite unlike anything he’s ever written before. If, like me, you’re a fan, then it may be a bit of a culture shock. I spent most of the first couple of chapters muttering whatthefuck , and going back to the beginning.

I should give you a taste. I can’t. There’s no point in quoting from it. Anything at all, no matter how long, would be out of context. But, to give you some idea, by the last third or so, there is a long scene in which Dr Obregon Petrie, using a “loop needle” fired through a miniature blow pipe, and a device called an iMe2, both given to him by the daughter of a scientist in the service of Dr Fu Manchu, has occupied the consciousness of Fu’s pet marmoset Cutie and become vertiginously high after taking a hit from the doctor’s opium bong, while simultaneously transforming his own physical shape and structure (leading his companion, Weymouth-Smith of Scotland Yard, to see in him a distinct resemblance to Buddy Holly) in order to enable his escape from the shackles in which Fu has placed both him and the detective, deep in the dungeon of Fu’s Paraguayan hideout, while he (Fu) prepares for the invasion of Great Britain, using amongst his weapons swarms of genetically modified insects carrying toxins and GPS devices, and twenty five dead children. If you understand any of that then there’s something wrong with you.

There’s nothing much to keep this kind of thing in check, and the reading of it forces upon you several strategies which you must employ if you want to continue. And you will want to continue, because frankly it’s a hoot. But, you must suspend not only your disbelief in the plot, but also you must suspend your disbelief that this author is inventing it. It goes almost without saying that you must suspend your understanding of the conventions of character, narrative voice, perspective, chronology, time and place, verisimilitude and imaginative allowance. You must suspend also your expectation of sense and rationality, your insistence that they must be in there somewhere, even if ingeniously hidden and disguised. You must suspend so much that by the time you’re half way through The Shanghai Gesture , the inside of your head feels like a butcher’s back room after a morning of slaughter.

What’s great about it is mostly that it fucks with your idea of yourself as an intelligent reader. It plays with you. In a good way. It toys with you, dazzles you, confuses you, flatters you, entices you, leads you on, until you’re suddenly in a spotlight, acutely aware that Indiana is looking you over, asking you a question. What do you make of this? And you have to answer. It’s part con trick, part rescue mission. I love it. Even if I think it may have stolen my wallet.

Some time ago Indiana wrote a sensible article about Kathy Acker, which is a rare thing, by way of a book review for the LRB .  (He also posted it on his gloriously insane blog a couple of months ago.) I was reminded of Acker when reading The Shanghai Gesture . There are occasional bites of the annoyance you get with her work. The impatient Oh what now? and the despairing Come on! But they are overwhelmed by what (Indiana points out) is most often missing from the work of Acker and what is here in spades - communication and collusion with the reader. More than that though, there is this challenge I’ve mentioned. And it’s not a challenge in the sense that you might call a difficult book a challenge. It’s much more literal than that. It does feel like a slap in the face from a man wielding a white glove.

It may be just a coincidence in timing on my part, but I wonder how much of that Acker stuff Indiana had in mind when writing this. Because while he matches Acker here in the tearing up of conventions, he also seems to address, even over compensate for, that which he criticises in Acker - being a snob, ignoring the reader, writing past the reader, making far too many assumptions about the art of reading as well as the art of writing. The Shanghai Gesture at times seems to be the Acker novel that Indiana would have liked Acker to write. Maybe I’m reading too much into all that.

But Indiana does seem here, dangerously so, to have you very much in mind as he writes. And his attentions are sort of friendly aggressive. He pushes you around a little. In a nice way. You do find yourself, having read maybe the description at the start of the book of the town of Land’s End (in England, north of Newcastle, don’t ask), putting the thing down and staring at it from across the room. You’ve changed, Gary. But go with it. Do go with it. It’s worth the ride. You don’t need to have seen the same old black and white films (including the eponymous one) that he’s steeped in, or to pick up all the fragrances of other books and other writers (and their plots) that waft around his paragraphs, nor have a grasp of Edmund Husserl’s ideas on the similar, or Roger Casement’s exposure of colonial atrocities in the Congo, Peru and Bolivia. But you’ll put this book down with your interest in all these things stimulated to some degree. And I’m sure there’s a hundred other enticements in there that I haven’t noticed. And you’ll have had a laugh. A giggling sort of light headed, wide eyed laugh.

Funny ha ha and funny peculiar.Which is my kind of funny.

Night Work is about a man called Jonas who wakes up one apparently ordinary summer’s day in his home city of Vienna to find that the television isn’t working, the newspaper hasn’t been delivered and the internet connection is down. He accidentally slices open his finger in the kitchen and it occurs to him that nobody else has ever seen the bare bone he can now glimpse. He goes to the bus stop. There is no one on the street. There are no buses, no cars. Fairly quickly, Jonas comes to realise that he is the only living creature in the city. There is no one else. There are no people anywhere. He is utterly alone.

I’ve written here recently about Ferenc Karinthy’s Metropole , and mentioned in passing Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled . In my own small mind, Night Work forms a sort of loose trilogy with these books. I’m not very well read. I’m sure there are other books which place a character in a city which makes no sense to him, and subsequently examine ideas of isolation and fear and panic. Panic books. They prod that scary childish part of me that is scared of being abandoned. All three of these books alarmed me in the reading in one way or another, but there is a rising scale. The Unconsoled is rather beautiful, gentle. It’s disorienting certainly, but it has the quality of a dream, in which the peculiarities tickle and stimulate, and it is, or it is to me, ultimately a positive, warm book. Metropole is much more unforgiving. It is more extreme, and its sense of dread more pervasive and persuasive. It has an open ending, to which you can attach ideas of your own, depending I suppose on your temperament. I felt doomed.

Night Work though, in terms of effect on me, was of a different order altogether. I found it genuinely scary. It unnerved me. I felt odd when reading it. I had to stop sometimes, get up from where I was sitting, walk around, look at things, think about something else, look at something on the television. I didn’t like reading it at night. I had to stop leaving it by my bed.

Jonas begins, very quickly, to get the idea that he is not alone. Things happen. He finds doors he left open shut. He finds a photograph of himself behind the bread bin that he can’t account for. His solitude is so peculiar to him that it takes on an otherness that is impossible to reconcile with reality. He sets up video cameras to film himself sleeping. He begins to think of the person he watches on these tapes as The Sleeper. The Sleeper does strange things. Frightening things. The Sleeper starts to use the night.

There is a literary mechanism here that brings to mind Dostoyevsky’s The Double , and Stevenson’ Jekyll And Hyde , and similar stories. But what is most unusual about Glavinic’s book is the horrible spotlight that the set up places on this idea of a man haunting himself, terrorising himself. There is nothing else in the world but Jonas. With the hell of other people not available, Jonas creates it out of parts of himself. And though it’s fully diagnosed from the beginning, this pathology persists and worsens and begins to unravel in the reader both the sense that it can ever be overcome, and any notion that understanding it might have been of any use in the first place.

Night Work is wonderfully well written. The pace is perfectly judged. The tension, and the often excruciating suspense, is completely at the service of large ideas about isolation, witness, and existence itself. It’s one of the ironies of the book, and one of the clever tricks it plays on the reader, that you become increasingly conscious as you go on, of how the activity of reading is such a solitary experience. You wander through this book alone, wanting to take someone with you, wishing there was someone else at your shoulder reading the same lines as you. And then you stop and think about that for a minute. And it becomes a terrifying idea.

Glavinic’s only other book currently available in English is Carl Haffner’s Love Of The Draw . It’s a fictionalised portrait of the Austrian chess player Karl Schlechter, whose style of play emphasised caution above all else. It’s a very different book to Night Work , and it hasn’t stayed in my mind to nearly the same degree. But it’s quiet and sad and lovely, and it shows a skill in the portrayal of relationships that you don’t, obviously, get any clue of from Night Work .

Glavinic seems, on the basis of these two books, a writer of immense range and talent. A (lukewarm) review of Night Work in the LRB last year by Philip Oltermann gave me some idea of the Austrian context in which Glavinic writes, and, tantalisingly, an idea of what’s going on in some of his other books. Night Work is published by Canongate, in a slightly silly cover that suggests a high tech surveillance thriller. Well, perhaps that’s not so silly. I don’t know. I hope they’ve done well enough with it to persuade them to publish the other books. I want to read more by this man. Lots more.

Regardless though of what else might come, Night Work is an amazing, arresting, alarming piece of work.