Offmessage

I’d heard about this book in about a million places, all of them highly recommending it, so it was with some expectations that I finally got it home and dug in. There are two narratives running through this novel, told in two starkly different voices. Alex is a Ukranian youth stuck at home wishing for a better life. His story is told in fabulously distorted English, with any and every possible alternative selected from the thesaurus apparently at random. Intertwined with this is the novel written by the other main character, Jonathan.

It’s a complex narrative structure, but one that works well. Alex’s story is about Jonathan’s trip to the Ukraine to find the woman that saved his Grandfather from the holocaust, while Jonathan’s novel is the story of the village he and Alex are trying to find, starting way back in the mists of time. Slowly and inexorably they move to a shared endpoint, one that is revealed as inevitable and unavoidable.

Alex’s story is pretty tough to get into, primarily because of the language - like Riddley Walker, Trainspotting or A Clockwork Orange it takes a long time to pick up his use of words and make easy sense of what he’s saying. It’s a neat trick though; it hides Alex’s insight - initially making him appear naive and simple. It’s also laugh-out-loud funny - mangled it may be but to a native English speaker it frequently makes you actually have to put the book down through laughing. Slowly throughout the novel though, through his exchanges with Jonathan, Alex’s language becomes clearer and his character, his complexity and the reality of his tale all start to come through. As the novel drives forward and the two tales get closer together we begin to realise that it’s not the all-American Jewish novelist who has all the smarts and that Alex, not Jonathan, is really the storyteller of the two.

The counterpoint to Alex’s tale is Jonathan’s novel, revealed in stages as he sends it to Alex for him to read and review. It’s easy to call this story Marquez-lite; so easy in fact that I’m going to. It’s a simple tale of village folk, spanning hundreds of years of the village’s life. Highly reminiscent of the tales told in One Hundred Years of Solitude it has all the trappings - weird fables, strange religion and magical characters. There’s nothing particularly original in it but, that said, its development and narrative is vital to the power of the ending of the book.

This is one of those books that you start very slowly but after about half way through you can’t put it down. Everything comes to a head as Jonathan’s novel reaches the recent past and Alex’s story leads them to a village that could be the one they’re looking for…

I don’t really want to say much about the end of the book. It becomes very clear fairly early on that the shared endpoint of the stories will be the armies of the Third Reich reaching the Ukraine. Suffice to say that the reader is treated to an incredibly sensitive and incredibly powerful final act. One that left me moved for days afterwards. This book literally has it all; it makes you laugh, it makes you cry and it makes you wait. I absolutely loved it and not one review I read or heard beforehand did it justice. True quality.

Aha! Stumbling around my local Borders as I was, looking for something to while away the dead spots during a family Christmas my eye was drawn to a stark modern cover design with blurb that pressed all the right buttons. “Stunning debut” it said (10 points); “he’s in danger of doing for his generation what I did for mine (Hunter S Thompson)” it said (15 points); “the bright lights of acid and the ferocity of speed” it said (another 15 points). Twelve is a novel that completely satisfied my criteria for random book selection. You can see why I took it home.

Set in New York over the 5 days leading up to New Year it’s the story of a bunch of late teens looking for a party. It spans the classes from the ghettos of the Bronx to the brownstones on Park Avenue, telling the story of a group of kids all loosely connected by the same desire for a big New Year’s bash and all destined to end up at the same house for the big night.

It uses the neat narrative trick of telling the story from many character’s point of view. White Mike is our main protagonist - a small time dealer in weed and coke who never touches his own supply. Other characters include the rich geek who’s brother used to be a coke addict, the unencumbered prom queen and the drug addled mess of self consciousness that is the party girl. Each one tells their story over the 5 days, and each one gives us an insight into their own peculiar brand of teenage angst.

You can tell from that precis that this is going to be a difficult novel to carry off; there’s not an awful lot to work with, let alone a lot of originality, and unfortunately Twelve doesn’t manage it. This is another one of those desperate to shock novels. Apparently we should be shocked that kids in their late teens smoke weed. We should be shocked that they take cocaine. We should be shocked that drugs make up so much of their lives, and that they overstep boundaries because of them.

So, this is mostly regurgitated pap. He’s trying to be make an East Coast version of Brett Easton Ellis’ Less Than Zero and he really doesn’t succeed. On top of that it’s made all the more disappointing by the overt privilege and ego of the author. Never have I read a book before where the author so desperately wants us to think that the book is autobiographical because he’s made the character he wants us to think is him so cool.

Add to that a set of completely vacuous two dimensional characters, a plot so weak it couldn’t snap spaghetti, a fictional device clumsily created and then never actually used and a denoument that smacks of the last role playing game the author played and what you get left with is a completely disatisfying 2 hour read.

Shame on the publishers for publishing it, shame on the parents for funding the little twat through school and letting him live out his desire to be a novelist. I’m sure he got a good education. Hopefully he learned a trade. He’ll need it.

Having read everyone else’s reviews of the year I thought I may as well throw in my twopenn’orth. Top 5 books of the year (in my opinion anyway).

1. Hey Nostradamus (Douglas Coupland) (buy it)
offmessage review here - I still think it was the best fiction published last year. Some people will say that Coupland’s sometimes knowing, sometimes saccharine prose isn’t for them, but this is seriously Coupland’s best book. And that makes it very good indeed.

2. Tokyo Doesn’t Love Us Anymore (Ray Loriga) (buy it)
offmessage review here. Absolutely stunning hyper-real trip through the nature of memory, drugs, conscience and love. Consistently shocking and illuminating. A superb, all consuming read.

3. Everything is Illuminated (Jonathan Safran Foer) (buy it)
No offmessage review (yet). 2 narrative strands move inexorably (one back in time, one forward) towards the holocaust. Doesn’t sound like a bundle of laughs? This is one of the funniest and most moving books I’ve ever read. It takes a long time to get into and one of the narrative strands is pretty simple Marquez-lite, but the way this book is woven together and the power of the ending make this a tremendous book. Read it.

4. Pattern Recognition (William Gibson) (buy it)
No offmessage review (yet). I don’t think many people were expecting Gibson’s first ‘real’ (i.e. non-SciFi) novel to be so… well… Real. His response to 9/11 - this is an enthralling (if rather time sensitive) book that really uses, even anchors, today’s technologies in a global Internet thriller. It’s the first novel I’ve read that makes search engines, ISPs, bulletin boards and cellphones integral to the plot yet invisible. Along with Tokyo Doesn’t Love Us Anymore this is a real 21st century novel. Let there be more like them.

5. Dorian (Will Self) (buy it)
No offmessage review (yet). A retelling of Oscar Wilde’s “Picture of Dorian Gray” through the AIDS epidemic of the 80s. Self would like us to believe that this is his roman a clef. Is it? Do we actually care? It’s a completely outrageous read either way. As with much of Self’s work it’s frequently over intellectual but it’s daring, startling, funny and shocking. Blows the cobwebs away, without a doubt.

Michel Faber’s second full novel is, well, a full novel. It chronicles the rise of Sugar, an alluring teenage prostitute in late Victorian London, as she attempts to better her lot through the seduction and retention of one of her clients. This is a massive novel in every sense of the word - my hardback copy runs to 864 dense pages and there was no way that I could take it on my regular commute… It’s had to wait until a break from work for me to read it. The amazing thing is that although the sheer size seems initially daunting the book is incredibly welcoming, easy to read and utterly enthralling. The attention to detail throughout the book is fantastic. From the fashions of the time, through the varying religious attitudes and on to the sexual mores this book draws the reader in to the most realistic of worlds.

We first meet Sugar in a rundown brothel in the underbelly of London. Soon after we meet the man destined to make her his mistress, one William Rackham. He is dissolute, with a permanently unwell wife and the demands of his father for him to run the family business weighing heavily on him and his household. His first meeting with Sugar is to change all that…

It is impossible to get across the scale of this book, or the attention to detail. Faber has clearly spent a considerable amount of time researching every aspect of Victorian life in tremendous detail, and it is a sign of his skill as an author that he manages to include all of these details in the book without it becoming disjointed or turgid. The prose is simple yet beguiling, the detail is easily digestible and the characters are easy to identify with and (mostly) likeable, or at least understandable. Despite its size I ripped through it at a fair rate of knots and was sad to see it finish. The clarity and detail of the world that he creates is such that I really did find myself wandering the streets of 1870s London, slipping from the slums of St Giles through to the villages of Kensington and Ladbroke Grove.

This isn’t for the faint hearted though. While in some ways this is a very accurate take on the literature of the time it also makes the most of it’s modern readership and doesn’t shy away from the sexual relationships between the characters, or any of the other grimmer aspects of Victorian life. The sly nods in the narrative to the reader’s time and place are repeatedly backed up by slips away from the style or content of the time, making for a frequently very, erm, earthy book.

I’m still thinking about the book now, even though I finished it about two weeks ago. The scale and detail of it means that only a calendar year passes within the book. In that year William and Sugar meet, William decides to take on the family business (to provide him enough money to keep Sugar for himself), Sugar becomes William’s mistress…. While the attention to detail is quite amazing each of the major events is in fact very ambiguous. The reader finds themself devouring every little detail of “The Season” one minute and the minutiae of a whore’s life the next, yet each major plot event is never fully explained or resolved. Even the ending is strangled, limp, deliberately inconclusive.

One of the characters is asked near the end of the book “you wouldn’t want to read a thousand pages, would you?” to which the answer comes back “I’d read a thousand million pages if the words were simple enough”. And here, I think, is the rub. This is reading for reading’s sake, words for words’ sake… Faber takes us on a fantastic journey through Victorian London, that swoops across the rooftops and takes brief looks at the lives of the inhabitants of the houses below. There is quite deliberately no point, no message, no moral - simply a very enjoyable read. If you have a long trip coming I suggest that you fit the paperback in your luggage, safe in the knowledge that you are carrying one of the most involving books you’ll read in a while…

Hey Nostradamus is a truly striking book. Written in 4 voices over 15 years - Cheryl, a student killed in a highschool massacre, Jason, her sweetheart - irreperably damaged by events, Hazel, the girl who tries to love Jason years later, and Reg, Jason’s zealot father. Cheryl’s section of the book is calmy horrifying as she describes the events that lead up to and follow her death hiding under a table in the cafeteria. Jason’s struggle with his reaction to the events and the effect that they had on his life is ultimately darker and less naive, leading us further into the psychology of trauma. The book turns as we meet Hazel, where we see the possibility of redemption and recovery and then finally Reg’s story, where we’re presented with the final uplifting sweep of the book.

Coupland has tried to write this book a number of times before - Life After God in 1993 was his first proper treatment of his soon to become recurring themes of family, religion, love and redemption. Girlfriend in a Coma in 1997 hit the spot again bringing a more whimsical and almost magical realist take on the same themes. Miss Wyoming didn�t sell as well as other novels but is another master work in the same vein. But it is Hey Nostradamus that it is going to really stick as the culmination of his efforts.

Over his career he has consistently shown his class simply through the fact that hardcore fans often recommend his most recent book as his best. Through the continuing development of similar ideas, through his desire to keep approaching the nut of the problem from ever differing angles his ideas have achieved greater clarity, meaning that each novel brings up something new for the reader.

It is clear that the subject of the Columbine shootings has dramatically affected Coupland. On his web site there is an image with soundtrack of Tropical Birds, an installation he has done about that very subject. It shows a destroyed school cafeteria, while the eerie soundtrack is made up of the ringing of a hundred unanswered mobile phones and pagers. This is an image that every modern disaster brings � the Paddington rail crash brought something very similar; I remember being horrified by the shots on the News at 10 of the empty carriage full of ringing mobile phones. That simple question � �are you alright� � going unanswered� The knowledge that we, the voyeurs, the media consumers, know the answer. Disturbing, shocking and thoroughly modern.

Having such a powerful subject around which to wrap his latest work has given it a greater depth than many of his other works. In this book his key themes are beautifully and tightly interwoven around a rock solid emotional backbone. The seemingly whimsical narrative style that he has employed so many times before has real hidden depth this time around, with subtly masked and menacing creatures swimming just under the surface of the sometimes almost saccharine prose.

If you�ve read Coupland before you know that all he�s ever wanted to do was ask the big questions. This book is no different, but this time he�s got the closest ever to answering them. This is an amazing journey through life, death, love and redemption. Read It.

Rilke is an auctioneer for a low rent auction house in Glasgow, who’s offered the job of a lifetime in clearing an old lady’s house. Things like this are always too good to be true however and this particular job is no different. In clearing one of the rooms of the house he comes across what appears to be very old snuff pornography. Through a combination of sentiment and uncontrollable curiousity he makes it his mission to discover if the photographs are real, and if so, who took them… What follows is a slow trip through the sexual underbelly of Glasgow, from fetish shops and private photo clubs to the weekly transvestite coffee morning; all with Rilke as our guide.

The Cutting Room is one of Canongate’s new wave of crime fiction. Quite a lot is made of Louise Welsh’s novel about this ageing and seedy auctioneer from the lower end of Glasgow’s antiques trade. Among other rather over effusive bits of blurb on the cover we’re told that “Crime fiction has finally found it’s award winner”; Canongate themselves are (even for them) unusually noisy about the book, and the film rights are already sold.

Welsh’s language and narrative style creates a lazy, languid yet ultimately disturbing world which the main characters slip through with all too consumate ease. That combined with a complex plot should make for a gripping read, and initially it does. You find yourself drawn in to the story as a number of interesting characters begin to develop within the story.

Something hit me pretty quickly though… They never develop fully - in fact you lose interest in them as the story continues. It’s difficult to empathise with Rilke, or in fact any of the other characters - as the story winds on they become less likeable and more two-dimensional. It is clearly Welsh’s intention that we shouldn’t like her protagonist - what I didn’t get is why it should be so hard to understand exactly why he’s doing what he’s doing. He’s a sad old man, yes, but is that enough to explain the lengths to which he takes his investigations? There’s never quite enough of him exposed for you to see his reasoning and unfortunately none of the other characters are any more revealing (or ultimately less stereotypical) than Rilke becomes by the end.

My problems came when I found my interest starting to slip and the plot becoming increasingly more confusing. It’s not that there are particularly many twists and turns, or that even the grand denoument is that surprising… It’s just that by the end I really couldn’t care who’d done it, and in fact I could scarcely remember what it was they were supposed to have done.

All in all this was a diverting few hours, but it hasn’t opened my eyes to a new side of Glasgow, nor has it opened my ears to a new Scottish voice… It’s not a bad book, but I’m afraid I can’t get excited about it…

This is a book ostensibly about the nature of memory. An unamed protagonist tells
his story in a loose and louche first person, providing us with an insight into the lives
of those that sell Chemical for The Company. Chemical modifies peoples memory, makes
them forget. It’s legal, and the narrator tells his story from a near-future where
mood- (and mind-) enhancers are common place; a society where drugs with names like Sparkle
and Needles are taken every day and where memories are commodities, where it’s possible to
forget the night before, the week before, the month or the even the years before. Trading
on the fact that guilt only comes with the memory of the deed The Company sells you back a
clean conscience, regardless of your actions.

We follow the narrator through an undefined amount of time, through which he is constantly
sampling his own stock, making him a less and less reliable witness to the events that
unfold. Loriga deliberately creates a sense of confusion within his characters while also
creating the same for us, the readers. References are made to acronyms that have never been
defined and characters that have never been met in a seemingly deliberate attempt to get the
reader to question his or her own memory. All the way through we are left unsure as to what
really happened as the characters succumb to recreational drugs at the beginning of an episode
and memory erasing ones at the end � leaving no single shred of evidence guaranteed to be true.

I don’t want you to think that this is some kind of literary
Memento, playing
cheap tricks on the reader; but this is primarily a book about memory. It’s about the power of
memories. And the effect of memories. About how you remember the things you left unfinished better
than the things you completed. And it’s about love. How you remember love. How you remember those
that hurt you better than those that you hurt. It’s a book about how scars itch, even when they’re
fully healed. Over the course of the book we’re led through the narrator’s ever diminishing memory,
and yet we’re also slowly introduced to the fact that one memory sticks with him, regardless of the
damage he does. Alongside him the incidental characters weave their own unsteady way through their
own incomplete and slipping memories - grasping at some and desperatly trying to shake off others.

The thing that really struck me when reading this was the power of the mental state that it created.
Through the power of the prose and the little tricks used to confuse I frequently found myself inside
the narrator’s head � involved not only in the book’s plot, but deeply involved in his plot (or lack
thereof)… It’s a tremendously powerful book. It’s also an extraordinarily emotive book. Anyone
who spent the 90s in a recreational chemical haze will know how this book makes you feel. It reminded
me of how I felt in the summer of 2000, when the last 10 years had finally worn off, when I realised
that the party that we’d started in 1990 had finally ended and it was time to go home. Reading this
book made me feel like my first month without an E for 10 years. Slowly coming round to realise that
I remembered only a few of the important things that had happened and that I wasn’t entirely clear who
I was anymore.

I’d venture to say that this is partly Loriga’s point. I’m not sure that this is only a novel about
memory. This is also a novel about how in the last 15 years, even more than ever, we have come to rely
on powerful chemicals to run our lives. Not just the obvious culprits like Ecstasy and Cocaine, but
all the legal ones as well, from Prozac through Caffeine and Booze.

How life is when you are defined by the chemicals you take. It’s a truly modern problem � Coleridge,
De Quincy, Burroughs, Huxley and all the others may have had their time amongst the chemicals, but none
of them lived in a time when it was so difficult not to have one’s life run by them, recreational
or otherwise. A number of people have tackled this problem in the last few years � Douglas Coupland’s
Life After God is a
fantastic book, while Prozac
Nation is a shit one (IMHO) � but Tokyo
Doesn�t Love Us Anymore is the first one I’ve read that has a 21st Century take on it.

This is seriously one of the best books I’ve read in a few years. Buy it. Enjoy it. I can’t
recommend it highly enough.

Lester Bangs. It says on the cover, rather cheekily, that
he’s the star of Almost
Famous. In a way he is I suppose. If you’ve not seen the
film (and you should) Lester Bangs is the journalist that
gives the kid his first break. This is one of my favourite
films, about one of my favourite subjects (music) and set in
one of my favourite periods (late sixties, early seventies).
In it the character of Lester Bangs is used to epitomise the
times. His vicious, cynical treatment of the rock and roll
inudustry of the time is what grounds the film. Rather
embarrassingly I didn’t know he was real, so it was a bit of
a shock to find a book written by him… It’s a posthumous
collection of pieces, stretching from Velvet Underground and
The Stooges all the way through to The Troggs, The Stones and
any other act of the time that you may care to mention.

This is one of those books that actually makes you call
into question your own activities. This guy could really
write - the vitriolic outpourings and wild flights of fancy
that mesh so tightly with words that so clearly show his love
for the music about which he was writing make you (me) doubt
whether it’s actually worth me reviewing anything else. Sure
I can tell you that I like a thing, but to produce a piece of
the elegance, power and beauty of (say) his review of Van the
Man’s Astral Weeks
is, I’m afraid to say, beyond me.

While Hunter S Thompson was writing about sports and
politics, while Tom Wolfe was writing about art and while PJ
O’Rourke was writing about, well, whatever, Lester Bangs was
writing about Rock and Roll. This is a guy who saw The Who,
who saw Jefferson Airplane, who saw Creedence, The Stones,
The Beatles. In the introduction to the book Marcus Greil
(a friend of Lester’s who compiled the book) says that this
isn’t a compilation of his rock and roll reviews, more a book
that showed how Lester Bangs felt about life. He’s right - in
this book Lester manages to have an opinion about every band
you’ve ever heard of and a million you haven’t, but more
importantly he waxes lyrical about the very nature people,
life, things, and of course rock and roll. Greil goes on to
say that people can’t believe that one of America’s most
important writers was only writing record reviews. Well yeah,
they are record reviews, but then Hunter was ostensibly
writing about politics, wasn’t he..?

I’ve fallen in love with this book, and with the notion of
who Lester Bangs was. I’ve always thought that I was born 30
years too late and this book (along with the Woodstock
DVD, Fear
and Loathing, Electric
Kool Aid Acid Test and Bless
Its Pointed Little Head) serves as a stark reminder that I was.
So much of what he was to say about the record industry, about
superstardom and about the raw facts of the great rock and
roll party still rings true today.

Lester, I salute you, and I salute your vision. Read this,
and find out why music just isn’t as good anymore.

Right then… This was the free book for members from Canongate when I ordered
Loriga’s other book (Tokyo Doesn’t Love Us
Anymore). What a shock. The subtitle says it all: “A Novel of Disposable
Lives, Immediate Fame and a Big Black Automatic”. The narrator’s older brother
finds a gun and uses it to kill a security guard in a local store. Thing is,
the family are attractive, and all of a sudden the narrator and his mother are
all over the telly…

It’s a real shocker this one… Amoral in a way that I haven’t read since
Brett Easton Ellis’ Less Than Zero or Guinzberg’s Beam Me Up, Scotty.

I read it as a story of a boy’s unquestioning love for his older brother…
The blurb says that it’s a “wickedly funny and breathtakingly lucid treatment of
media and the cult of celebrity.” It’s both really I guess - the narrator spends
most of the book almost justifying what his brother has done, finding ways to make
sense of the brutal actions and always seeing something cool in what happened. At
the same time he and his mother become media darlings, entirely due to their
looks.

I’m not sure I’m really the person to review this book - I like this kind of
novel, but I can’t really offer much intellectual wrapping for it. It’s a quick
read - it’s only 120 pages long, and these are sparsely populated pages. It’s
enjoyable, it’s linguistically elegant in its quite deliberate naivety, it’s bleak,
it’s all the things that books like this should be. It makes me think more of
films though - films like Bonny and Clyde or Natural Born Killers or Outlands. Or
Less Than Zero. Or Man Bites Dog. Or Henry, Portrait of a Serial Killer. I think
that may actually say it all. It’s a good book, but it’s not a great book. It
will probably make a very popular film.

I seriously recommend you read Michael Guinzberg’s
Beam Me Up, Scotty
before this. It’s a more intelligent, more shocking, more angry book than this.
If, after that, you still want another outsider novel this one is a bit less…
how shall I put it..? Challenging. Enjoyable, but I’m enjoying Tokyo Doesn’t Love Us
Anymore a lot more… Review to come…

Were you caught up in the hype surrounding White Teeth? Fair
enough, I was. I enjoyed that book. It was (as all the critics said) fresh, a new voice for
multicultural Britain, all those things. It dealt with the some of the same issues as the
hideously pompous and contrived Black Album in an entertaining way and it touched on many
others at the time. It was an East-is-East/Black Album/Miguel Street
for the 21st century, and it even adapted beautifully for TV. So… We all awaited Ms Smith’s
next novel with baited breath… In our heart of hearts we knew that White Teeth probably wasn’t
as good as it looked at the time, but it was her first book, and we’d bigged her up pretty big,
so we were more than willing to see what she could do second time around… And The Autograph
Man was what she did.

Alex Li-Tandem is a Jewish kid of half-British, half-Chinese descent with a very confusing
life. He’s an Autograph Man, buying and selling autographs of the rich and famous, and obsessed
by the holy grail of autograph hunters, one Kitty Alexander, an ageing film star. His social
life is a mixture of overtly Jewish childhood friends and weird drunken autograph friends. The
book begins with him coming down from a 3 day acid high which he can’t remember (one wonders
exactly what acid he’d been taking but I digress) but in which he appears to have crashed his
car, pissed off his girlfriend and friends, and forged a Kitty autograph. The rest of the book
is a chaotic run through the aftermath of these events.

I have to say that I really didn’t like this book. I didn’t hate it. It wasn’t too dense or
too clever or even too simplistic. It was just dull. I couldn’t give a monkeys about any of the
characters, half of them were really poorly formed and in the end I just didn’t understand the
point of the plot.

I actually worry about this reaction. I liked White Teeth. I know it probably won’t be a
classic in a few years, but it was the book of the year in 2000. Why then was I so bored by this
one?

Fundamentally the answer to that is, I’m afraid, that it’s shit. Oh well.