To Be Read...

In Praise of Simon Raven (Alms for Oblivion)

Writers from Balzac and Zola to Proust and Powell have distinguished themselves by creating their own worlds, in which characters appear and reappear in different combinations through a number of novels. Whereas Proust and Powell use a narrator as the thread running through work which follows a linear chronological sequence, Balzac and Zola tell many different stories with a variety of central characters.

With Arms for Oblivion, Simon Raven follows the latter model, with few playing a major role in more than couple of his ten novel collection. Alms takes place across just three decades, beginning just after the war, and ending with  The Survivors, set in 1973 and published three years later.

As in Anthony Powell's twelve Dance to the Music of Time novels, many of Raven's characters are upper class, and shaped by military service. Raven is a more direct writer, not quite as industrial in his output as Balzac, but with fewer pretensions than Powell (and is the better for it).

Whereas Powell was a snob, and the reader suffers for this, Raven was a cad, and the reader gains (even if those around him didn't; he once sent a telegram to the wife he married out of duty, saying "Sorry no money, suggest eat baby"). 

He may not have created a character as memorable, and memorably unpleasant as Widmerpool, but Raven's world is vibrant, witty, engaging and disturbing.

In May, Vintage Classics is republishing Alms in three volumes, which goes some way to helping those new to Raven decide in which order to read the sequence. The first to be published, The Rich Pay Late, opens the collection, but the events it describes take place in the mid-Fifties, so is the fourth in a chronological seqence.

I have just finished Sound the Retreat, which follows on from Fielding Grey, our introduction some of the main characters as (public) schoolboys; it appears as the seventh story of the Vintage collected volumes.

Retreat is well constructed but its account of British officers in the last days of Raj makes for uncomfortable reading forty years on. No doubt, the casual racism and sheer contempt for 'wogs' rings true, but when seen through the filter of a Seventies sensibility it jars, as does the ribaldry which also very much of its time.

Instructively, the blurb for my 1984 Panther edition has the recommendation "Literate, racily erotic ... compulsive reading"... from The Listener! The passage this presumably refers to involves a duel in which the slighted combatants race to pleasure three women in less than 20 minutes, watched by their colleagues; Benny Hill with added vitriol.

For now, I can't decide which to read next, but I welcome the reissue. And I am looking forward to tracking Hugh Watson's The World of Simon Raven. 

The Guardian's 2001 obituary began: "The death of Simon Raven, at the age of 73 after suffering a stroke, is proof that the devil looks after his own. He ought, by rights, to have died of shame at 30, or of drink at 50. "

It goes on to remind us that Raven's Shadows On The Grass is "the filthiest book on cricket ever written."  

I might not like cricket, but I am intrigued...   

The Song Before it is Sung, by Justin Cartwright

For nearly three years, Conrad has been thinking about Axel von Gottberg. Von Gottberg was garrotted on the orders of Hitler in August 1944. He was thirty-five years old, and looked, although not in profile, like him, with thinning hair and a longish, northern-European face. Northern-European hair is inclined to throw in the towel early. Thoughts of von Gottberg visit him at any hour of the day, without warning.

Inspired by the friendship between Isaiah Berlin and Adam von Trott, who was executed for his part in the 'generals' plot'. Conrad is a rather wayward freelance journlaist, who develops a fascination with an Oxford don, Elya Mendel and a German aristocrat,von Gottberg. He thinks there is book to be written, and believes he must track down a film, made for Hitler's entertainment, of Gottberg's execution.

Interwoven in this complex narrative is the breakdown of Conrad's relationship with Francine. She is a doctor, and their tensions seem to reflect a divide between art and science. 

Once upon a time they had discussed films and books and ideas; she had been charmed by his inchoate eagerness. What charmed her then now seems infantile to her. The scientific life has got to her, as though all those chemicals and miserable people and - let's face it - death, have somehow driven her into the arms of the superior class who deal with the real world, who have the power of life and death and who know folly and self-indulgence when they see it.

She tells him:

"Underneath all that airy-fairy charm you are just a vicious little prick. People like you who sneer at honest endeavour and science and actually doing something for people, while reading the fucking Guardian and having an opinion on everything, from politics to football."

Ouch!

Then again, Francine is also someone who "Demanded a regular cull of books as though there was a limit to the number of books you needed at any one time. Anything over that limit, for example, books you were never likely to read again, was an indulgence."

This is a powerful and brave novel, but I shared some of the reservations voiced by Adam Mars-Jones in his review for The Guardian. 

The Steel Spring, by Per Wahlöö

Per Wahlöö's Murder on the Thirty-First Floor was one of my five-star reads of 2011 but The Steel Spring is not so impressive.

In Thirty-First Floor, Wahlöö imagines a society shaped by The Accord, where people are healthy and content, but have been dehumansied by 'progress'. They turn to alcohol, and the police spend most of their time arresting and incarcerating drunks, many of whom end up in vast intoxification units, many of whom commit suicide

We rejoin Inspector Jensen -  'a man of normal build and ordinary appearance with short grey hair and an impassive expression' - as he about to return to this unnamed homeland after travelling abroad for a liver transplant. During his confinement, something terrible has happened to the country and it is somehow cut off from the rest of the world.

On the instruction of an exiled Minister, Jensen crosses the border and tries to piece together what has happened. People are dying from a mysterious epidemic, and the institutions of state seem to have been taken over by paramilitary medics. 

The landscape is familiar, the country vaguely Scandinavian, or Baltic. The political edge is sharp, exposing a consensual dictatorship that allows Wahlöö, a Marxist and a Swede, to stretch the weaknesses of social democracy to breaking point.

In recent years the city had turned increasingly into one huge traffic flow system, an apparent jumble of flyovers and criss-crossing motorways. Virtually all the older buildings had been pulled down to make more living space for automobiles, a planning solution that has resulted in a city centre apparently consisting of glass, steel and concrete.....

Many years earlier, when this city plan was being implemented critical voices had been raised to say that the system would make the city inhuman and uninhabitable. The experts had brushed off the criticism. They argued that a modern city should be built not for pedestrians and horse drawn carriages but for cars. As on so many other issues, both had subsequently been proved right. This was entirely in the spirit of the Accord.

The style, as translated by Sarah Death, remains crisp and direct. 

"Let's just stick to facts," Jensen said, amiably. "Plain and simple facts." 

"Facts. There are no plain and simple facts."

"What your job is, for instance?"

"I am a sociologist. Used to work at the alcohol research unit."

It is a tough interrogation as the crippled and pain-wracked man keeps needing sedatives that knock him out for an hour at a time

"We collated figures that came in from the alcohol retailers, the police and the detox clinics. Our statistical tables were sent on to higher authorities, where they were worked over. That's to say they were put through the mill, over and over again, and sent from one authority to another. When they finally got to whoever they were meant for, they were distorted beyond all recognition. Improved, if you like." 

Part of the challenge with Steel Spring is that there is not much detection involved, rather the narrative comes in longish expositions, arising from often chance encounters. It was published four years after Thirty First Floor, by which time after Wahlöö and partner Maj Sjöwall had delivered three exceptional Martin Beck novels, and his dystopian vision had become much darker, still less credible, and it has to be said, rather less satisfying. 

March Was Made of Yarn, Various

It is a year since an earthquake brought unimaginable devastation to northern Japan. 

March Was Made of Yarn brings together short stories, some poetry and a manga strip, by 18 writers, each reflecting on the lasting impacts of the catastrophe. Some are delicate and discursive, others bring the horror of the earthquake, the tsunami and the nuclear poisoning from the stricken Fukushima plant into sharp focus.  

They range from Yoko Towada's The Island of Eternal Life, which imagines a future where post-industrial Japan is cut off from the rest of the world by nuclear accidents, through to Hiromi Kawakami's gentle but jarring God Bless You, 2011, a clever rewrite which takes her 1993 fantasy about a girl walking into a forest with a bear, forward to a time of radiation fallout and ticking Geiger counters.

The bear was a massive full grown male who had just moved into apartment 305, three doors down the hall from me. As a gesture of goodwill, he had presented the three of us who remained in the building with "moving in noodles" and packets of postcards, a level of formality you don't often see nowadays.

In  Sixteen Years Later In The Same Place, Ideo Furukawa is set, strikingly, in the here and now.

How do you convey what roof tiles are like to someone from a culture witthout roof tiles? (They are) a standard element in the traditional Japanese house. In other words they're just up there, on buildings. And now they are in a pile on the ground at my feet. A miniature mountain at the edge of the garden, covered by a plastic sheet. Damn, who'd have thought id ever find myself looking down at roof tiles?

The narrator is visiting his parents in the home in which he grew up.

I knew the town authorities had declared the house half destroyed and my parents had told me over the phone about the fallen walls, but it had never occured to me that it would look like this, that here in a still habitable house there might be gaping holes, emptiness. not just one wall, but two, gone. 

In Hiyoriyasma, by Kazumi Saeki, we meet Beppu:

Quite different from his usual "smooth cool" look - he was a fan of Eikichi Yazawa and Tom Waits - Beppu was somberly dressed in jeans and a gray-and-black-checked work shirt... "They are all donations, these clothes."

He lives in a gymnasium with 300 other people.

"This is my house now," said Beppu, indicating the boundaries of a space toward the front of the gym, in the middle of a row close to the stage.

"Yeah, funny isn't? Even in a place like this, people make these neat walkways, dividing the space into sections. See, I'm in District One, Parcel Three."

In Pieces, by Mitsuyo Kakuta, Yuko meets the much younger women with whom her husband was having an affiar on the night disaster struck. Following the earthquake, Tokyo was plunged into darkness by power cuts, and Yuko was thinking about another tragedy that changed her life, which happened long ago, in the year her husband's lover was born...

As she looked out over a city lit up again as if nothing had happened, it finally struck her. In the same way happiness could not be reduced to acquiring, neither could unhappiness be reduced to loss. Loss might sometimes bring unhappiness, but the two were not synonymous.  

This is a very powerful collection, featuring some marvellous writing, with the power to make you see the world in a slightly different way.

• March was made of Yarn is edited by David James Karashima and Elmer Luke, who work for the Nippon Foundation's Read Japan programme. All royalties from the book will go to reconstruction charities in Japan. 

Kill the General, by Bogdan Hrib

This is terrible: a book editor killing his own author. These idiots have either seen to many or are trying to get inspiration from the Stieg Larsson model. An author who dies just before the book is published will sell better than a living author. But we know, or believe, that Larsson died of a weak heart, while, I, on the other hand, possess a Steyr-Manlicher sniper rifle which is waiting for me in Vienna...

As well as being a publisher, Stelian Munteanu is a good shot, one of the best marksmen in his army days. He also runs errands for a mysterious Russian called Misha, and one of those lucrative errands takes him on a deadly mission to the Austrian capital. Quite why, and quite where Stelian's loyalties lie, is hard to pin down. 

Kill the General isn't the easiest book to read as, for the first half at least, the chapters jump back and forth through the decades, and Hrib assumes some familiarity with characters who have appeared in previous stories. You have to concentrate.

(And it helps if you like footnotes. If you do, they will be one of the best bits of Kill the General, as there a 141 of them, mostly giving fascinating and necessary explanation of Romanian language and culture).  

 

Then comes a wholly unexpected plot turn and what had been a challenging mosiac of impressions from a very foreign country kicks into thriller mode. It works, but I found the playing out of the plot was rather a let-down.

As series editor Mike Phillips' introductory essay explains, the novel is not a simple record of events.

The important factor is the way that Stelian locates himself in the historical landscape. Stelian sees and understands no more and no less than would any other person in the same circumstances. This fact lends an outstanding credibility to his accounts, and immerses the reader in the matter of fact and routine reactions of the characters 

I have been to Bucharest a couple of times and enjoyed the city, but it still feels a lot closer to its past than, say, Berlin. Communism under Nikolai Ceaușescu was part tragedy, part farce and a rich thread of absurdity, suffering and black humour laces Hrib's crisp and entertaining delivery.

 

• Photographs: Top, monument in Revolution Square (known to locals, for obvious reasons, as Shit on a Stick); middle, the Palace of the Parliament, the second largest building in the world, built while Romanians starved as their food was sold to meet foreign debt, and bottom, the view from the Palace balcony, along Ceaușescu's Champs Elysee. 

 

I long to run away. I think I am longing to run away from myself and my memories. Memories from my past and, most of all, memories from my future. I am very afraid of the memories which are still to come.

In praise of John le Carré, a great British writer

I had never read John le Carré until last October. Technically, I still haven't, but I am convinced he is one of the top five British authors of the 20th Century.

Thanks to a splendid giveaway from The Guardian, I downloaded six unabridged novels, read by Michael Jayston, and have also watched the BBC's two Smiley series on DVD, featuring Sir Alec Guinness.

Jayston has been my constant companion on my fairly lengthy drive to work and it has been wonderful. I began, naturally I suppose, with Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974), a clear five star novel, faltered a little with Our Kind of Traitor (2010), which I fear showed a by then 79-year-old author struggling a little to capture authentic twenty-somethings,  moved on to Smiley's People (1979) and The Spy Who Came In From the Cold (1963). I am now quite a way into the hugely ambitious Perfect Spy (1986), which I am tempted to think is the best of the lot.

I will probably finish The Perfect Spy this week. My challenge then is to decide whether to start lsitening to The Honourable Schoolboy, or to finally read the paperback that has been on my TBR pile for three or four years?

Can I really bracket an author as a great when I have only heard his work? I have enjoyed my often incredibly dull and frustrating drives to work, but I am also concerned that it is not very easy to underline favourite passages in an audiobook. I could easily find myself buying all five books, just to note down the brilliantly observed descriptions of appearance and mannerisms, or the musings on the nature of loyalty and treachery that lift le Carré's work into the realms of true literary greatness.

So how did February go?

 

Well, for a start, I kept my no new books resolution! Sixty whole days now without troubling Amazon!

 

But I was helped by winning three Kate Grenville novels in a Reading Matters competition and much-anticipated  Cold, Cold Ground by Adrian McKinty in another contest!  

I spent a few days in Berlin, so read Hans Fallada's Alone in Berlin and reread Christopher Isherwood's Goodbye to Berlin. I thought Alone was a quite brilliant novel, well worth five stars.

And I read the first of my newly won Grenville trilogy. I am not sure I would have bought The Secret River but it turned out to be a riveting read, not least for the unflichingly way in which we must engage with 19th Century sensibilities and attitudes to native Australians.

My Walk to Zoo City Challenge took me through the Netherlands, with Simone van der Vlugt's The Reunion and on to Belgium with Jean-Philippe Toussaint's The Bathroom. 

• Best February Read: Alone in Berlin, by Hans Fallada (trans Michael Hofmann).