Skagboys (novel), Irvine Welsh

 Some years ago I saw the film of Trainspotting. Subsequently I read the novel and much preferred it to the film.  Years later I read Skagboys, a prequel to the earlier book.

These novels are written mostly in Scots dialect (a term that is probably ideologically unacceptable but who cares). One effect of this is to force an Antipodean reader like me to read slowly and carefully, almost sounding out the words in my head. Partly for that reason and partly because Irvine Welsh is a very fine writer the events of the novel are heard almost as much as read. The result is a vivid account of the lives of junkies - unjustified optimism, degradation, euphoria, false hope, disillusionment, betrayal and more degradation.

When I was young many of my friends and acquaintances were heroin users. I never tried it myself: whether that was from cowardice or good sense I no longer know. Perhaps I just preferred alcohol, a foible which was viewed with tolerant condescension in those circles. In any case, the memory of that time gives me an interesting perspective on Skagboys.  

I was always amused by the degree of snobbery that was characteristic of junkies.  Many heroin users looked down on people who restricted themselves to acid or dope.  “At least heroin’s a physical drug.  It only affects the body.  I’m not going to take something that stuffs up my mind.”  As Monty Python would have said, “It’s all this Cartesian dualism that’s to blame!” It was the same kind of snobbery that was apparent, in wider social circles,  in music styles or clothing brands. Interestingly, the junkies in Skagboys don’t mix with potheads or acid freaks so the phenomenon that I observed isn’t visible here. Neither is the unspoken degradation competition that resulted from junkies measuring themselves against famous musicians or, less commonly, writers.  “Great artists are tormented souls, alienated from conventional society. I’m tormented and alienated; therefore I’m a great artist. However I’m more degraded than you so I am the greater artist.” The closest to this in Welsh’s novel is that some of the characters fancy themselves as musicians, though their musical careers don’t amount to much. I must also say (to prove that junkies aren’t the only snobs) that the main character’s taste in music is deplorable.

One of the saddest things about junkies - in real life and in Skagboys - is the degree to which their moral sense becomes subordinate to their addiction. In life I knew one or two honourable exceptions, but the characters in the novel are more typical. They hold out on their colleagues, steal from their families and pimp out their girlfriends. And yet, both in life and in fiction, I never found myself able to condemn them totally. It’s as if we make two simultaneous moral estimates of them. “Nice bloke, bad junkie.”  “I like him, but I wouldn’t turn my back on him.“

Anyway, read the book. Some scenes will make you laugh aloud, though most will make you cringe. A lot like life, really.

As I was saying ...

 This blog, has been in abeyance for a couple of years but I've decided to resurrect it. The idea is that when I read a book, old or new, I'll offer my response to it and hope that you think it's worthwhile to comment. Please feel free to disagree with me or start a civilised argument discussion.I hope some of you will also go back through the earlier posts with the same end in view.

I expect to have some new posts up within the next week.

Disputed Land (novel). Tim Pears

I've now read four of Tim Pears' novels - the West Country trilogy (The Horseman, The Wanderers,  The Redeemed) -and this one. Three or four months ago I'd never heard of him. It's a depressing thought that despite a lifetime of avid reading I am still ignorant  of so many fine novelists (not to mention poets or historians).  When I come across  writers who make a tremendous first impression on me (T. Pears, for instance) I have always been moved to tell as many people about them as possible. This tendency may account for the fact that in the days when I used to frequent pubs I could never enter the front door of one without becoming aware of two or three people sliding out the side entrance.

In 2008 a thirteen-year-old boy named Theo is travelling with his academic parents in their clapped-out car to a family reunion on the Welsh/English border. Over the next few days they  experience a number of crises and arguments about the nature of society, about their  places in that society, about the influence of money, social class and status; about the nature of transition between the generations; about what can be passed on and what might be used up; about the function of reflection and the function of activity; about the relationship between mankind and the rest of the natural world.

In some ways the novel reads like a stage play, particularly when significant characters (woodpeckers, badgers) are mostly off stage and made known to the reader by the comments and reflections of  Theo and the members of his family.

In the end, despite much discussion of change,  my enduring impression was of the continuity of human society, largely because of Theo's haunting vision, towards the end of the book, of Welsh raiders coming over the border just as an important betrayal is ruining what remains of the family's inheritance. 

This is a wonderful novel.

Dead if You Don't, Peter James

 Another in the fine series of police procedurals  featuring Roy Grace. With each book the plots become more adroit, the villains more contemptible. The mystery in Roy's past has been revealed (perhaps) but the reader can't help but feel that another mystery is looming in his future.

This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (History) Drew Gilpin Faust

 The US Civil War, like the Crimean War, occupies an intermediate place in the history  of warfare between the Napoleonic Wars and the First World War. Technological development between Waterloo and the middle of the nineteenth century, though impressive, was to be dwarfed by  the corresponding changes in the second half of the century and, even more, by innovations  between 1914 and 1918. This interesting book is not a history of the war but an account of some of the changes that it wrought in American society.

Central to the book is the concept of "the good death", which included notions like being reconciled to the idea of dying, reaffirming the worthiness of the cause  and expressing traditional pieties for the benefit of families and friends (so important was this concept that surviving comrades often wrote to the families of dead soldiers affirming that they had complied with these conventions even when they clearly hadn't). Some families went to enormous lengths to find the bodies of their sons and bring them home. 

Deaths in the war,  whether of soldiers or civilians, whether from wounds or disease were on a scale for which American society was unprepared. The responses were both institutional (ambulances, welfare organisations, army liaison with families, war graves registration) and commercial (freelance embalmers, sellers of elaborate coffins). The war also coincided (more or less) with the development of some of the wilder speculative flights of Protestantism about the nature of the afterlife and, consequently, the type of reunion with the dead that survivors could expect.

In subsequent wars the United States' armed forces  have  sometimes been the target of derision for the emphasis they place on the welfare of their troops ("How many flavours of ice cream does an army need?"). But  concern for the welfare of soldiers is entirely  admirable and if governments are going to have obsessions this is a good one.  It may be that it is one of the most enduring effects of the American Civil War.

The Poems of Roy Campbell

Roy Campbell's reputation is sad proof that decisions about artistic merit are often made on political grounds. At a time when Communism was fashionable Campbell converted to Catholicism.  When much of the literary world was endorsing the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War Campbell supported Franco. When the avant-garde was experimenting with new forms in poetry, music and art Campbell wrote rhyming, strictly metrical verse. I don't necessarily endorse Campbell's right wing opinions but I do say that he was no more a fool for supporting Franco  than many of his contemporaries were for supporting Stalin. The malignant power of fashion is such that Campbell's poetic reputation will probably never be restored and those who love words will always be the poorer for that. 

Campbell was proud of his efforts to live in the physical world as a cowboy, a fisherman, a soldier, a farmer, a sailor. He was proud of his familiarity with horses, bulls and the wild animals of his native South Africa. He liked to emphasise his physical vigour as a  point of difference between himself and most other poets (An amusing version of him appears as the character Zulu Blades in the 1930  satirical novel The Apes of God, written by his friend Wyndham Lewis). Campbell's  poems reflect those aspects of his life. On the other hand he exaggerated his physical prowess and is a highly unreliable witness about details of his own life. Truth to tell he was a bullshit artist, but a bullshit artist of genius. Somewhere, many years ago, I came across a quote from Campbell that I've never been able to locate since.  As I recall, it was "When I'm among poets I'm a cowboy and when I'm among cowboys I'm a poet".  If anybody can tell me where the quote actually comes from I'll be very grateful. (My thanks to Under Protest for identifying the source of this quote.  It appears in David Wright's 1961 biography of Campbell.)

When I first read Campbell I was astonished by the sharpness of the mirror which he held up to the real world. Have you ever encountered a snake at close quarters?   The opening lines of "To A Pet Cobra" are alive with sibilants in mimicry of the hissing snake.

With breath indrawn, and every nerve alert,

As at the brink of some profound abyss,

I love on my bare arm, capricious flirt,

To feel the chilly and incisive kiss

Of your lithe tongue that forks its swift caress

Between the folded slumber of your fangs,

And half reveals the nacreous recess

Where death upon those dainty hinges hangs.

Have you ever hauled on a rope?  The "r" sounds in the opening words of "Choosing a Mast" echo the whirr of a rope being pulled through an opening before being fixed in position as  part of the standing rigging of a boat. 

This mast through which I rive the rope... 

Have you ever seen a diver touch down on the sea floor?  In Campbell's astounding   The Flaming Terrapin he describes a diver who

Along the shaft of his own shadow slides

With knife in grinning jaws; and as he glides.

Nearing the twilight of the nether sands,

Under him swings his body deft and slow,

Gathers his knees up, reaches down his hands

And settles on his shadow like a crow.

I suppose hardly anybody reads The Flaming Terrapin these days. According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica it 

exalts the instinctive vital force that brings forth intelligent human effort out of apathy and disillusionment. 

Well, maybe. I've read it several times over the last half-century or so and I'm still not sure what it's about . The words are so vigorous, the images so original that I sometimes find myself gawping at those individual components and losing track of the overall conception.

A couple of Campbell's poems are still deservedly anthologised: "The Zulu Girl" (a prophecy about racial conflict in South Africa which may yet prove to be not only eloquent but true);  "The Zebras" (which, I was delighted to discover in Campbell's Collected Poems, was dedicated to Chips Rafferty) and "The Serf" (which exalts poor people in pre-industrial societies). 

Campbell's abrasive personality led him to sneer at his fellow-citizens of South Africa and to admire the disenfranchised non-European population. I've no reason to doubt his sincerity in these matters.  Returning to South Africa after his first literary successes in England (the Wikepedia article about Campbell, from which the following quotation is taken, is comprehensive and fair):

Campbell was at first enthusiastically received. However, he then courted outrage in the literary magazine Voorslag by accusing his fellow white South Africans of racism, parasitism, and cultural backwardness as well as calling for granting racial equality to black South Africans. In response, Campbell lost his job as editor and was subjected to social ostracism, even by his own family. Before returning to England ..., Campbell retaliated by writing The Wayzgoose, a mock epic in the style of Alexander Pope and John Dryden, which skewered the racism and cultural backwardness of colonial South Africa

. 

His long satirical poems, though,  whether about Afrikaner farmers, South African dilettantes  or Bloomsbury intellectuals  have amusing passages but are far from Campbell's  best work.  Personally, I like his epigram "The Land Grabber: on a poet who offered his heart for a handful of South African soil."

The bargain is fair and the bard is no robber;

A handful of dirt for a heartful of slobber.

Most of his poems, even the best of them, have  annoying elements of self-dramatization. Whether he is describing a snake or Mazeppa's ride on the wild horse (his version of this story is as good as Byron's) or the isolated South Atlantic island of Tristan da Cunha he can't resist saying "I'm a bit like that, too". Undoubtedly this tendency detracts from the overall impact of the poems but, even allowing for that flaw, individual lines and passages have an impact like Mike Tyson in his prime.

Consistent with the general trend of Campbell's attitudes was his belief in the essential unity of all things and all processes

Clouds, crystals, ferns - the ecstasies of matter,

All the fixed forms of beauty whereunto

Habituated atoms, when they scatter,

By rays and showers are builded up anew -

All these are rhythms woven from the joy 

With which live atoms touch, and kiss, and chime,

Yet through the silent chemistry of time,

Weaving smooth harmonies from change and storm,

Come hankering back to their appointed form

As waves to rhythm, or as words to rhyme.

Campbell's translations (from French, Spanish and Portuguese) have been highly praised by people skilled in  those languages. My only personal basis for assessing them is that I remember as a schoolboy being required to translate a poem by Baudelaire which Campbell had also attempted. I think his version is better than mine.

I despise people who automatically dismiss artists with whose politics or religion they disagree. What sort of fool would stop reading Yeats just because he flirted with Theosophy and absurd  cyclical theories of history?  Should I never listen to Bach on the grounds that he was not only a Christian but (horror of horrors!) a Protestant?   Is   "Five Bells" a bad poem  because Kenneth Slessor used to write editorials for Frank Packer?  Tom Cruise is undoubtedly a dingbat but does that make Rain Man  a bad film?.  Roy Campbell is one of the finest poets of the twentieth century. You don't have to like him: just read the poems. Read the fucking poems.

Need You Dead (novel) Peter James

 Number thirteen in this series of police procedurals featuring Roy Grace. There are some clever plot twists, enhanced by the author's use of interior monologue. Characters from earlier books are reintroduced and the turmoil of Roy's personal history keeps churning away.  The reader is more apprehensive about some of these developments  than Roy is.

The Redeemed (novel) Tim Pears

This is the third novel in Tim Pears' West Country Trilogy. It's been some years since I read a work of fiction  that moved me so much. The world  before 1914, meticulously recreated in the earlier volumes, is now being stalked by the twentieth century.  

I've puzzled a little over why these novels affected me so deeply. I think there are four main reasons: 

•  the main two characters are human and fallible but I really, really like them;
• the transition from 19th to 20th Century is a part of history that fascinates me; 
• so much of the book is just so damned interesting; and
• the prose is beautiful.

The Wanderers (novel). Tim Pears

 This is the second volume in Tim Pears' West Country Trilogy. I read the first book (The Horseman) a couple of weeks ago and I mean to read the third one soon. At the end of The Horseman the central character - an adolescent boy named Leo Sercombe - has been severed from Lottie, his girl friend, by the ramifications of the English class system and driven into exile by his own family.

As this book opens Leo is making his solitary way across rural England in 1912, without a home, food or money. He falls in (and subsequently, out) with a party of gypsies whose idiosyncratic  life is exuberantly described. There are also vivid pictures of life in a struggling tin mine, on a bleak sheep farm and on the road with a kind but eccentric tramp. From time to time we get a glimpse of how things are progressing for Lottie and oblique hints from the outside world of certain movements and events that are more meaningful to us than they could be to Leo: suffragettes, the arms race between Britain and Germany, the belief that international trade would make war impossible. 

I realise that I've broken one of my own rules by giving away fragments of the plot but I couldn't see a way to avoid it in this case and I haven't spilled any more beans than would a glance at the dust jacket.  

Like its predecessor this is a beautifully written, heart-breaking novel.

Love You Dead (novel), Peter James

 This is the twelfth Roy Grace novel and, for me, the most enjoyable so far. I'm not sure why I found it so but possible reasons include:

• the circumstances of several murders are inherently interesting;
• the murder victims, if not all actually horrible, are at least irredeemably stupid;
• Roy comes clean to his friends and family about the secret in his past;
• a large component of the secret is revealed (though new problems are foreshadowed); and
• a number of bad eggs get their right whack.

The Sympathizer (novel). Viet Thanh Nguyen

 The central character of this novel is embroiled in many aspects of the Vietnam War and its aftermath, slipping uneasily from one role to another. There are  descriptive  passages of great power and convincing interior monologues that reflect the ambivalence of his position. This is a novel about duality:  political, national, emotional, racial,  religious and  cultural and the reader is never allowed to forget it. Only in the last section of the book did I feel that the author's grip on his subject was weakening and that may be explained by the fact that a sequel has since been published.

One constant is the narrator's sardonic contempt for America, often illustrated by smartarse asides that I can't resist quoting: "Journalists need editors; editors need beatings"....  "...the most dangerous animal in the world, a white man in a suit" ... "Happiness, for Americans, is a zero-sum game".

I enjoyed this book very much indeed, though in future I'll always feel awkward in Vietnamese restaurants.

One False Move (novel) Robert Goddard

 Can anybody define the difference between a thriller and a mystery story?  I can't and I doubt whether Robert Goddard can either.  I've read quite a lot of his books over the years and whether they should be categorised as mysterious thrillers or thrilling mysteries is still a (pardon the word) mystery to me. A typical Goddard plot is a dizzying switchback of betrayals, disappointments and unexpected conjunctions. The setting, always accurate and detailed,  may be anywhere in the world, at any time in the last couple of hundred years. You may have gathered that I like these books.

This particular specimen is about a young man  whose startling intellectual capacity leads to conflicting  demands for his services.  That much is on the back cover and I'll go no further with the plot.

Like most of Goddard's books this a bottler and I recommend it.

You Are Dead (novel) Peter James

 Another instalment of the Roy Grace series, this one featuring a particularly hideous villain who is, in the end, identified.  However there are still loose ends left, both in the current case and in the puzzle of Roy's family history.  At the end of the book Roy makes a momentous moral decision in the hope of finally resolving that puzzle. He may think he has succeeded but we know better, don't we, boys and girls?

Shuggie Bain (novel), Douglas Stuart

  Any day now I expect the title of the Man Booker Prize to be changed again because the current name not only sounds like a human with a penis but actually refers to a finance company of some description.  That's two strikes. The prize, under its various names and rules has been won by some fine novels and by plenty of duds. Shuggie Bain won the 2020 prize and is certainly one of the better ones. It's the story of a  childhood in the arse end of Glasgow in the good old days when everything was Margaret Thatcher's fault. Shuggie Bain, like most books, is longer than it needs to be but this is a powerful, deeply affecting novel, much of the power coming from the inevitability of disaster.  The characters  know that there is no avoiding their fate and the reader is a helpless spectator. Having finished it I feel the need to read something uplifting, something that conveys a sense of optimism and hope for the human condition.  King Lear, perhaps.  

Want You Dead (novel), Peter James

 This is the tenth novel in the Roy Grace series and is well up to the standard of the others. The villain is as horrible as ever, the plots as complicated and convincing, Roy as efficient but as fallible. The plot-behind-the-plot which is a thread through all the novels reaches a new intensity and may have come to a partial conclusion though, even if that turns out to be the case, there is still a guaranteed sadness in it. Oh, and the ending is a cracker.