Book review

Who Killed Horror?

8 July 2016
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review

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I’m old enough to remember how, back in the 1980s, it seemed like the horror genre was going to take over the world. Stephen King, of course, had started it: Carrie came out in 1974, Salem’s Lot in ’75, The Shining in ’77 and The Stand in ’78. Jumping on the bandwagon, a whole host of writers and publishers began churning out horror books through the following decade – and I was a big fan of them, picking lurid covers off the shelves at bookshops.

And then, it died. Not for Stephen King, of course, but for the rest. The blood-stained tracks became too trampled, the public lost interest, the publishers stopped publishing. The 1990s saw lots of articles written, asking variations on the question, who killed off the horror genre.

Now, having read The Turn of the Screw, I can answer the question. We did. We writers, we killed it off. Drove a stake through its heart, chopped its head off, pulled out its entrails and painted its drained blood upon the walls.

And that’s how we did it too: by piling up bodies, horror on horror, and forgetting that, for horror to work, there has to be something worse than death and the pain of dying; something much worse.

This is what makes The Turn of the Screw, and the other Victorian ghost stories, so effective: because these writers believed – or at least belonged to a culture that believed – that there are things worse than death. That a soul can be lost and, in its loss, something infinitely more precious than the mere pumping of blood and inflating of lungs is lost too.

After all, the problem with death, when that’s all there is, is that death ends everything. It’s the black curtain, the exit, the end, the close to suffering and the final release. Writing in a culture where death is the great, the sole, evil, robs horror of, well, its horror. Take away dread, the unspoken, wordless, formless dread of things and fates beyond and above and below death, and horror is reduced to variations on torture porn: how much can we make the protagonist suffer before his end? There is no horror in this, only the workings out of a monkey curiosity, drained of empathy.

So, for horror to work, then there must, indeed, be fates worse than death. It is the knowledge that this is true that makes The Turn of the Screw – despite Henry James’s rather curious prose style, so much more laboured and laborious than his brother, William James’s – into such a haunting book. And, reading it, tells us how flattened we have allowed our imaginative world to become.

 

Adventures in Bookland: The Colour Thief by Andrew Fusek Peters

8 July 2016
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review

25590502Depression exists underneath words, and outside them. It drains meaning from them and renders them pointless squiggles on a page or passing breath, taken by the wind. So, this picture book largely dispenses with words and uses pictures to tell of how a young boy learns of, understands and copes with his father’s depression. It does so beautifully and the central metaphor – of depression as the thief of colour – works perfectly. Highly recommended for anyone having to deal with depression in the family, and particularly when it affects children.

 

Adventures in Bookland: Here Comes the Poo Bus! by Andy Stanton

5 July 2016
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review, Poetry

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In Here Comes the Poo Bus! narrative poetry – an undeservedly neglected form in the 20th century – reaches a new pitch of artistic tension and, final, blessed, relief. Have you ever reached that point, in the creative process, where the artistic load has grown to such a mass that it simply has to be dumped, immediately, no matter where you are and what you are doing? Even in the midst of the most important meeting or walking the high hills of Yosemite, unseen connections have been made in the dark, unplumbed places and then, suddenly, they all come together and have to be released.

Ever had that happen to you?

Or, if not, have you ever been overcome by the desperate, this-will-not-wait, desire to do a poo?

Then this is the book for you!

It contains what is, I think, the single finest verse ever committed to paper:

Here it comes! The poo bus!
Along the avenue.
It’s big! It’s brown! It drives through town!
It’s made out of poo!

I should mention that, before I read this extraordinary work, my favourite poetic couplet came from T.Rex’s seminal statement of artistic, cultural and political change, Children of the Revolution, and simply states:

I drive a Rolls Royce
‘Cos it’s good for my voice.

Mind, it’s worth bearing in mind, when choosing suitable reading matter for yourself and your children, that my own finest poetic achievement came in distilling the emotion (“Oh my goodness me, I cannot believe I am seeing this”) in the tranquility of recollection. So, to finish, here it is. If you like this, you’ll love Here Comes the Poo Bus!

Gorillas eat their poo?
I can’t believe they do.
Oh no! Oh yuck!
It’s true!

 

Adventures in Bookland: The Lion Comic Book Hero Bible

26 May 2016
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review

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While the beginning was a Word, spoken by God to and of himself, what are we to do in an age when words – the packets of meaning that carry the dim, refracted reflection of the original Word of creation – are being systematically devalued and drained of meaning? Think on it: from the inversion of meanings in slang and street talk to the complete draining of sense and colour and, sometimes, even logic that occurs in business speak, our language is having the sense drained from it, so that the awareness of power that once existed in speaking and reading, the belief, sometimes inchoate sometimes explicit, that words carry power and that that power might be made concrete in arenas as different as the working of a spell or the raising of a crowd, that sense of the power of words has diminished and in places disappeared. After all, look around you. Everywhere, people looking at screens but, for the most part, they’re watching cat videos or, thumbs blurring, they’re playing some graphics heavy game.

Our words have grown old and tired. Maybe it’s the penalty of centuries of civilisation. Maybe it’s a consequence of hearing ourselves speak so much that we have grown sick of the sound of our own voices. Or, more likely, it’s the response to the flashy new toys of the video kid. After all, movies are only a century old, TV just over half a century, and the new era of instant visuals is barely a decade old. No wonder people are dazzled by them – they still carry the flash and dazzle of movement, the deeply laid instinct to look towards something that catches our eye. Words, in comparison, are static: you have to seek them out. So no wonder then the Bible, the source of so many of the words, and most of the ideas, that underpin our creaking civilisation is passed over: it’s all just words on a page.

One way of facing this visual deficit is exactly what Lion have done with this brilliantly produced and richly conceived book: turn words into pictures – to be precise, the sorts of pictures that were the precursors of much of the film and gaming entertainment of today: comic-book art.

Siku (Old Testament) and Jeff Anderson (New Testament) draw the Word, and do so with a richness, immediacy and strangeness that kindles the Secret Fire of life back into words and stories grown old with repetition. I particularly liked Siku’s take on the Old Testament – the stylisation of his work marrying perfectly with the mythological strands of the Pentateuch.

I can think of few better ways to gain a new and fresh take on the Bible – or to have a crash course in the major aspects of biblical history. The Bible has a lot of words – the Lion Comic Book Hero Bible has a lot less!

In a culture that is rapidly losing its cultural roots, I’d also hugely recommend this book to any RE teachers looking for a quick and accessible and engaging way to introduce the Bible to a class of de-facto heathens.

 

Adventures in Bookland: Mr Fitton in Command by Showell Styles

22 April 2016
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review

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Most books and most writers are forgotten. No less than yesterday’s news wraps today’s chips, the flavour-of-the-month writer of a decade ago is landfill now. It’s a melancholic thought. As a writer, I spend a great deal of time and effort trying to create something of value, something that will resonate with readers and cast a light (albeit refracted through the lens of the past) on the human condition. But a visit to a second-hand bookshop is enought to tell me that, despite my efforts, everything I do will be forgotten, left to gather dust on an obscure shelf until the last page cracks and moulders into dust.

So my appreciation of what Faber is doing with its new imprint, Faber Finds, where the publisher republishes worthwhile work and writers that had otherwise slipped from view, is redoubled: not only have they rescued from the obscurity of the second-hand bookshop some excellent writers but someday, after I am dead, a future editor browsing through some dusty shelves will stumble across one of my books and think, ‘Hang on, this is worth a fresh audience.’

The first book I read from Faber Finds was Susan Brigden’s London and the Reformation, one of the most enjoyably scholarly books I’ve ever read and one certainly worth republishing. Now, I’ve started on Faber Finds’ repackaging of Showell Styles’ Mr Fitton series: adventures at sea in the Napoleonic era and, I think, as good a series as CS Forester’s Hornblower. They are a delight to read. Showell Styles died in 2005. Most writers, ten years after death, have been long forgotten. He does not deserve to be and, through Faber Finds, will I hope find a whole new generation of readers.

Adventures in Bookland: Italian Ways by Tim Parks

20 April 2016
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review

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Listen up, I’ve got this great idea for a book. It goes like this: for two thirds of the book I write about my commute to and from work, throwing in some stuff about the history of the underground to fill things out a bit, and then for the final third I write about my summer holiday. There, what do you think? Reckon I could get a publisher to stump up 20k in advance?

Sadly, probably not (although, if you’re a publisher and you like the idea and, more importantly, are willing to give me a 20k advance then let me tell you about my other idea for writing about my school run and the weekly shop).

But that’s pretty well what Tim Parks does in this book. To be fair to him, he’s a fine writer and he argues, reasonably convincingly, that any human enterprise is necessarily so conditioned and embedded in its culture that to look, in detail, at that enterprise is to potentially understand the whole culture that produced it. However, he really is writing about his commute in to work (from Verona to Milan, so a long way) and what he did on his summer holidays (go and visit the south of Italy).  This can’t help but strike me as a writer blagging his way towards a subsidised holiday – and good luck to him, there’s few enough perks to being a writer nowadays. Well done, Tim! Now, if you read this, could you let me know which editor you sold this to at Vintage. I need to tell him just how fascinating the Piccadilly Line is.

 

Adventures in Bookland: No Ordinary Man by Donald McCrory

13 April 2016
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review

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He wasn’t. Miguel de Cervantes that is. But he was almost as elusive a figure as Shakespeare, right down to the doubt as to whether they really did die on the same day (23 April 1616). There’s a bit more flesh on his life story: Cervantes fought at the Battle of Lepanto, rising from his sick bed to take part and receiving a wound that left his left hand permanently maimed; he was captured by Barbary Coast pirates and kept as a slave in Algiers for five years; he served the king of Spain as official and tax collector. But there are as many blanks as filled-out pages. McCrory does a good job of telling what we know and makes reasonable guesses as to what we don’t. He’s also good at setting Cervantes’ world in context. But it is, unlike Cervantes himself, a trifle worthy and just a little bit dull. Still, an excellent introduction to the man behind the man from La Mancha.

Adventures in Bookland: The Night Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko

28 March 2016
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review

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Having tried American vampires in The Passage I thought I’d take a look at their Old World rivals: the vampires, shapeshifters, magicians and witches of Russia. (Also, I was away on holiday, and the place where we were staying had this book in its small library and there’s few things I enjoy more than the bibliodipity of thrown together book collections in out of the way places – there’s no telling what you might find there, since this is where books go to die. As many of the characters in the book are undead, it was all the more appropriate.)

So, how do these Russian vampires compare with their American counterparts? Considerably better personal hygiene and a marked tendency to break the action for long discourses on philosophy, in particular the emptiness at the core of human (and vampiric) experience. The American vampires just want to eat people. And, yes, the Russians drink more. Much more.

The Night Watch is much shorter than The Passage. There are more stories. The world does not end.

Go with the Russians!

 

Adventures in Bookland: The Passage by Justin Cronin

27 March 2016
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review

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OK, let’s get one thing clear from the start. If, by any chance, you ever find yourself on a military appropriations committee and someone appears before the committee to ask for the funding to create a race of super soldiers that, by the way, happen to derive their powers from psychotic vampire bats, just don’t do it! Seriously, just say no. No, no, no.

This is the biggest draw back to the first part of Justin Cronin’s mega blockbuster vampire apocalypse: can you really believe that anyone, even the most jingoistic of patriots, would really say yes to such an idea? What’s more, after giving these potential super soldiers ‘the shot’ – distilled super vampire bat essence – these new super soldiers (who are all, incidentally, condemned killers just to add some human darkness to the vampire brew) all hunch up in corners, eating rabbits raw while producing rows of new razor teeth. Now, come on. Suppose you’d been mad enough to let things go this far, you’d still decide, being a ruthless sort, that the time had come to bring a curtain, a terminal curtain, down on all this.

But no. You leave it too late and the vampire super soldiers escape and – well, not to put too fine a point on it, eat the world (or at least America, the two being pretty well synonymous for the purposes of the book). And that’s just in part 1!

So, despite the slightly (well, completely) ludicrous premise, the story rips along and I really enjoyed part 1. But then, we reach part 2 and it pretty well all stops for about 200 pages. Yes, this new, post-apocalyptic world is all very interesting, but come on, do we really need to hear ALL the backstory? I think not. I have a life, commitments and lots of other books to read. So, I skimmed and I advise you to do the same. You can do so safely: I suggest taking a quick look at every fifth page, just to get an idea of what’s going on, and then continuing. The story does get going again, but it takes some 300 or 400 pages to do so. And then, you get to the end, and find that’s just the end of part 1. I mean come on! So, getting to page 872, or whatever it was, I faced a question: how much of my life did I want to devote to this story? Now, it’s true some stories can illuminate an entire life but The Passage isn’t one of those. I’d suggest limiting yourself to a week’s reading time on this one, while hoping that Justin Cronin employs a more aggressive editor for part 2.

The obvious comparison is Stephen King’s The Stand. Is The Passage as good? No. Despite The Stand being even longer (although it does finish the story within the confines of one book) at no point reading it did I start skipping – I wanted to read it all. With The Passage, I wanted to know what happens in the end, but preferably without having to plough every furrow along the way.