Alternative Histories: Two New Books on Music
Richard King How Soon Is Now?: The Madmen and Mavericks Who Made Independent Music 1975–2005 (Faber, 2012)
Mark Yarm Everybody Loves Our Town: A History of Grunge (Faber, 2011)
Two monumental music history tomes from Faber. Everyone Loves Our Town collates interviews with hundreds of musicians, writers, producers and hangers-on associated with the history of grunge music, the 1990s Seattle-born movement which brought Soundgarden, L7, Nirvana, Mudhoney and dozens of other bands to prominence worldwide. In their own words, the luminaries of the movement describe its formation, its leap to worldwide prominence, and the gradual disintegration of the scene as — a progression which How Soon Is Now shows us is almost inevitable — the cutting edge loses territory to watered-down copycat bands, the mainstream imposed certain tropes on an ‘alternative’ movement in order to appropriate these signifiers (those flannel checked shirts!), and the inevitable point of no return when the bands themselves dissolve in interpersonal acrimony (Dinosuar Jr.), ill-health, or tragedy (Nirvana, most obviously, but several other cases too).
In How Soon Is Now?, Richard King sets out purports to tell the history of so-called ‘indie’ music, mostly from a British perspective but of course bringing in several of the bands mentioned in Everyone Loves Our Town, with particular emphasis on the huge knock-on effect caused by Nirvana’s mainstream success with Nevermind, the point at which the traditional ‘independent’ and ‘mainstream’ distinction lost much of its meaning, as the big labels sought to cash in on the unexpectedly vast popularity of these ‘alternative’ acts. While Mark Yarm’s book is an oral history with no overt authorial contribution, King’s strikes a more uneven tone, pausing to praise or pillory several of the records mentioned — Nevermind is treated cursorily, but he inserts an authorial “rightly” when describing Loveless‘s reception as “an extraordinary and groundbreaking achievement”. Everyone has their favourites — I’m not going to disagree with that assessment of Loveless — but why slip in that personal view while remaining aloof from giving an opinion on, say, Definitely Maybe? Likewise, some bands’ formation or history is covered (this is important with regards to 4AD chief Ivo Watts-Russell’s beyond-professional involvement with the Cocteau Twins, for instance; less so when it comes to The Smiths, whose formation and early years must surely have been covered extensively elsewhere) while others, and I think this is appropriate for a book which can’t really give page-space to every band’s history, just sort of… turn up. Interested readers can find out all they care to about Nirvana’s formation from Everyone Loves Our Town, for instance.
It would be impossible, however, for any editorialising to detract from, or indeed improve upon, the chapter on Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty, whose shenanigans under their own names and a variety of recording names, most famously the KLF, make every other band mentioned in this book look po-faced and underachieving. (Though it hangs over their chapter, we don’t even get to the bit where Cauty and Drummond make good their promise to burn a million pounds in cash in front of a live audience.) While other chapters describe more vital, resonant or disastrous episodes in the thirty-year history of indie music (somewhat arbitrarily truncated at 2005′s success for Arctic Monkeys), none is quite as entertaining as this one.
As always, one reads a book like How Soon Is Now? with one eye on the omissions, or what one would have liked the book to be. I was saddened that there’s only the briefest mention of Royal Trux, whose misadventures with major-label fame (they were signed up by Virgin in the mid-1990s in what seemed that label’s attempt to replicate the major-gains-indie-credibility success Geffen had earlier enjoyed by signing Sonic Youth) are pretty instructive: the Trux made Thank You, perhaps their most accessible record, for Virgin, but the uncompromising follow-up Sweet Sixteen (which sounds like music made by two people who have melted the Rolling Stones down to a bituminous tar and then smoked them) put an end to the whole relationship, whereupon Trux slunk back to their original home, the US indie/alternative giant Drag City (which, oddly, isn’t mentioned, even in conjunction with Domino Records which seemed, at the latter’s outset, very much like the UK arm of the former). Likewise, the lack of any mention whatsoever of Belle & Sebastian’s Jeepster Records label, which took a lot of its cues from the 1980s Glasgow label Postcard and seemed at times almost a co-operative involving the band’s fans, seems odd. Readers lamenting this oversight are directed to Scott Plagenhoef’s book on their Tigermilk LP for the 33 1/3 series of books on individual records (Mike McGonigal’s book-length essay on My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless is another valuable entry in that series).
Other omissions are more problematic. I hadn’t been aware that M/A/R/R/S’s ‘Pump Up the Volume’ had been made by members of two indie groups, Colourbox and A.R. Kane (whose Sixty-Nine album I disinterred from the place it’d lain undisturbed in my record collection after my two attempts to listen to it upon purchase 15 years ago), which casts an interesting perspective on all concerned. When I mentioned this to the Monkey, he surprised me by telling me the song was the work of DJs CJ Mackintosh and Dave Dorrell. King and the Monkey are both right, but King’s book entirely skips the salient fact that all the samples on (the UK version of) the single were put together by Mackintosh and Dorrell — and after all, no-one has ever listened to ‘Pump Up the Volume’ for the beat track and sampled guitar noise. Since ‘Pump Up’ is, as well as a deathlessly exciting track quarter of a century after it first hit No.1, one of the earliest examples of indie music crossing over with dance/DJ/hip-hop culture, this makes King look a bit — to use a topical phrase — wilfully blind.
Maybe he’s been literally blinded, too, since if this was my book I’d be round to my publisher asking for the copy-editor’s head on a pike. On p.203, a bad decision is attributed to “the fact the Rob had been in the pub since 3 p.m.” (that’s an error: “the Rob” is not some indie-rock giant you’ve never heard of). Over the page, someone fails to take “a cursory look a [sic] the Factory finances”. On p.344, Alan McGhee declares “‘I want to a start dance label’.” Apostrophes introduce themselves where they’re not wanted, and there’s a general attitude to punctuation that suggests the writer feared he’d be docked part of his advance for every comma he used. The index, too, is littered with irritating little errors: a Mazzy Star record is wrongly attributed to Galaxie 500 (when you look back at the reference, it’s a line describing “a purple patch of critical approval and strong sales as Galaxie 500′s Today and She Hangs Brightly, Mazzy Star’s debut, were both rapturously received” and therefore the index error is very obviously the work of sloppy reading). The entry on PJ Harvey suggests she’s mentioned on p.96, which she isn’t: Mick Harvey is, however, suggesting a strange parallel universe in which Polly and Mick are one and the same entity. Mick Harvey, incidentally, receives no index entry of his own. Fair’s fair, this is a big book, and it’s understandable that errors might creep in, but this has the feel of a rush-job that’s been skimmingly copy-edited by someone with no interest in or knowledge of the subject matter, which is galling as Faber is engaged in an ongoing project of overhauling its line of music books, putting out books angling to be definitive: sloppinesses like this really hamstring a reference book. (I’m happy to offer my services to re-do the index for the paperback, if anyone’s interested.) And one shouldn’t lay all the blame at the door of the copy-editor, of course: Mr. King’s writing is often inelegant, as evidenced by the very first sentence of his book, which begins: “Today the word ‘indie’ has a myriad of meanings…” As any Britpop ‘Sleeperbloke’ would attest, you’re only as good as your front(wo)man.
Better by far is Everybody Loves Our Town. Foreword aside, author Mark Yarm absents himself from the text, letting the movers and shakers of grunge (is there a less grunge phrase than “movers or shakers”? Sorry) tell their own stories. Admission: I’m by no means a huge fan of grunge, owning records by all of about four of the bands mentioned. That notwithstanding, I found Yarm’s book fascinating, perhaps because a large number of the names who appear don’t have those tribalish nostalgic associations for me that, from King’s book, such figures as Alan McGee or Bill Drummond do. It’s not King’s fault that I’m more familiar with the characters in his book than in Yarm’s, but the way the grunge cast is allowed to present itself directly to the reader makes for a fresher, more engaging read. (The fact we don’t learn Yarm’s opinion of the records referred to is no bad thing either.)
What interested me was how moving I found the deaths in this book. The sad tale of Kurt Cobain’s suicide, of course, has been written and overwritten many times already; by contrast, the sorrow that surrounds the deaths of Stefanie Sargent of 7 Year Bitch, Mia Zapata from The Gits and Andy Wood of Mother Love Bone retains a rawness, in their respective bandmates’ telling, that hasn’t dimmed two decades on. Since (as an ingenue who’d never consciously heard a Mother Love Bone track, for instance) I’d followed the band’s formation, triumphs and tragedies in these interviews’ chronological order, her death came as a genuinely moving and saddening blow.
Inevitably, Courtney Love’s contributions are among those that stick in the mind (I shan’t spoil her version of what sort of music Cobain and co were playing before she set them straight, but it’s classic Courtney); other highlights include a somewhat unexpected appearance by fashion designer Marc Jacobs, defending fashion’s co-option of that grunge ‘outline’ for Perry Ellis, andthe occasional irruption into the text of such seemingly antithetical-to-grunge acts as Lou Barlow, Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore, and, perhaps strangest of all, Heart. These sidesteps serve to anchor grunge in a wider context of ‘alternative’ or ‘indie’ music (Sebadoh, Sonic Youth, producer Steve Albini, and of course Nirvana all appear in How Soon is Now?), which could otherwise seem a sort of insular closed shop of North West-area bands, production personnel and venues.
The oral biography gets, as Yarm remarks at the outset, a bit of stick — by what rubric does he call himself the author of this book, as opposed to its editor or (even lower down the chain) compiler? Everyone Loves Our Town is an instant rebuttal of that criticism, though, and one of the most engrossing music books I’ve read. While I was immersed in one chapter, Mudhoney’s ‘Touch Me I’m Sick’ came on Radio 6 and just for a moment I felt transported to the ferocious excitement of the scene Yarm describes. Weirdly, though I was (ahem) an indie kid throughout the nineties and early 200s, How Soon Is Now?, though it fills in a lot of the backstory I didn’t pick up (Primal Scream’s XTRMNTR as the final Creation Records release, the rollercoastering rise, fall, rise again of Rough Trade as a shop, label and distributor), it didn’t inspire me quite as much as Yarm’s book to go and (re)listen to the records it describes.
Films I Didn’t Sit Through #1
An occasional series
#1: Ultrasuede: In Search of Halston (dir. Whitney Smith)
It’s not often that one feels moved to offer the praise, ‘Nicely underplayed, Liza Minnelli.’ Yet such is the reaction when watching the first scene of Ultrasuede, a film purporting to be the story of singular 1970s fashion designer Halston but which, it swiftly transpires, is a 89-minute mirror held up by filmmaker Whitney Smith to himself. He kicks off by interviewing Minnelli, Halston’s closest friend, in a manner which — because of Smith’s amateurishness, his peculiar Jason Bateman-esque hairpiece and the presence of Ms Minnelli — has the air of a spoof cut from Arrested Development. “What did you sing at [Halston's] funeral?” he asks Minnelli, who is immediately outraged: “No, I didn’t sing! It wasn’t about me, it was about Halston.” “It was very moving,” Smith mumblingly affirms, which confuses things further. If he knew enough to know the funeral was “moving” why did he believe Liza sang? Did he do any research?
We cut then to a handicammed scene in which Whitney — whose whole appearance has changed, such that he now resembles a pound-store employee desperately trying to convince himself he’s the spitting image of Ryan Gosling — interviews his mother about his own obsession with Halston. This was where the Monkey and I lunged for the remote control, understanding we’d learn little to nothing about an iconic fashion designer and far more than anyone needs to about our bargain-basement auteur. I love the idea of Smith watching back a rough cut of his film and failing to see that by opening with Minelli’s tacit warning to him — ‘Don’t make it all about you’ — would ensure that his project would, from the outset, look as egotistical and damned as possible.
#2: Unhappy Birthday (dir. Mike Matthews & Mark Harriott)
Fascinating fact: I once attended a dinner party where David Paisley, star of… um, indie horror film Unhappy Birthday was also a guest. This doesn’t have any bearing on the film in question, which is some sort of ghost-story/road-trip/horrible family revelations/soft porn mishmash, except that on the evidence of Paisley’s receiving top billing, I was lucky to escape said party without being dragooned into participating. Alongside Paisley — who, like anyone who has lived in Glasgow for more than five years, has appeared in Weegie soap River City — we find a hapless actress made up, for no apparent reason, as Marmalade Atkins; a male human being — let’s not devalue the word ‘actor’ — who, called upon to deliver the deathless porn-classic line “It’s getting hot in here” (followed by his removing his t-shirt), inexplicably did not storm off-set; and various bit-parts clearly played by friends (former friends, perhaps) of the duo co-wrote and co-directed this… thing. One of these bit-part actors, “Suspicious landlady”, manages to do something one might hitherto have thought impossible: opening a door without making it convincing.
Not to be total slaves cliché, but the Monkey and I did fast-forward to the so-called titillating bit of the film, which unsurprisingly follows on from the shirt-removing scene above, and which intercuts, to numbing effect, a reasonably explicit gay sex scene and Marmalade Atkins’s own, um, self-exploration. Much of these two scenes focus on the nipples of those involved, which had the unfortunate, if unanticipated, effect of putting me off the midget gems I was eating at the time. In its favour, Unhappy Birthday does have some atmospheric establishing shots of the Scottish landscape, which it’s pretty difficult to get wrong, and its own website sensibly discloses the fact it was made for less than the price of my packet of sweets.
52 Books #34: A Single Man
Reissued as a Vintage Classic complete with new jacket artwork by someone who clearly hates Christopher Isherwood comes his 1964 short novel A Single Man. I’ve been reading (wading through) Isherwood’s Sixties diaries, in which he makes some — not terribly many — remarks about the genesis, composition and publication of this novel, and, it having been some time since I’d read any of his fiction, I went for this one.
I’d remembered Isherwood as a fairly stately, reserved kind of a writer. Not so, going by A Single Man. This is an overwrought daydream of a novel — or novelette, to use his preferred term, though it does suggest something absorbent in a bad way — in which recently bereaved English professor George Falconer tries to get over the death of his lover Jim, partly by seeking to get under one of his students, Kenny. This is a flippant summary, but something about this book demands hoots of laughter from the reader, so po-faced is it. Suddenly the 2009 film adaptation — directed by fashion’s Tom Ford and starring, as you will recall, a pair of glasses, an angora sweater and Julianne Moore on full scenery-chewing overdrive — seems to be almost restrained compared to the straining metaphor and overweening symbolism that afflicts the book.
This is a shame, because there are a couple of points where this book really hits the mark. I found the way George goes along with Jim’s parents efforts to cut him out of their late son’s life a moving and cleverly layered bit of psychological insight, and the relationship between George and his lush friend Charlotte is well-drawn, even if she does seem another iteration of Isherwood’s beloved Jean Ross/Sally Bowles from Christopher and His Kind and Goodbye to Berlin. (It’s hardly the book’s fault, too, that I found myself feeling the absence of Julianne Moore — by far the best thing about the Ford film — staggering around, beehived hair in a constant state of collapse.)
But the subtlety and acuteness Isherwood brings to these elements are overwhelmed by his inability to let a spade be a spade. George spends much of the book trying not to dwell on Kenny, understanding that a relationship with a student is not in his best interests, until towards the end he gives in somewhat to the boy’s advances. After they meet one night in what seems to be a cruising bar, Kenny dares Geore to join him for a spot of skinny dipping, and is delighted when his professor agrees: we see, therefore, the spark of spontaneity and fun returning to the mourning George: “I thought you were bluffing,” Kenny says in surprise, “about being silly.” There follows a scene in which your reviewer felt like cowering from the hammer-blows of Symbolism besetting him: there’s a railing they have to jump over to get onto the beach, and while Kenny easily vaults it, George is “clambering over the rail, rather stiffly”. Off they scamper into the vast “barely visible” black waves, and just in case you hadn’t picked up on the nuances, “Their relationship, whatever it now is,” Isherwood intones solemnly, “is no longer symbolic.” All these quotes are from p.132; p.133 is given over to George’s “rite of purification” in the black waves, which of course seem overwhelming and terrifying but soon wash him clean of “thought, speech, mood, desire”, and we see him and his student disporting themselves in this wonderful darkness, their mutual attraction never overtly expressed, while a couple of hundred yards away are the lights of cars and “dry homes”, going about their business entirely unawares of this delihtful jiggery-pokery in the waves: “George and Kenny are refugees from dryness; they have escaped across the border into the water-world” (p.134).
Well, quite.
Isherwood was sixty when he published this book, reasonably happily partnered, an author of note. What this book reminded me of was that other peculiar short novel by a senior man of letters, Philip Roth’s The Humbling (which I reviewed a couple of years ago): like Roth’s misstep, A Single Man reads like an overt fantasy rather than a fully worked-throuh novel. Unlike the Roth, however, Isherwood seems here to be aiming for a fable-like profundity that really doesn’t sit well with the fairly slight plot. We lose sight of the emotional centre of the book — and while that isn’t something I always feel the lack of, this book is overtly set up to be the story of what we’d call these days, horribly, the “emotional journey” of George Falconer. Instead of profundity, we get a self-parodically portentous brand of unrelenting symbolism. I hope I haven’t misremembered, but it seems to me that Isherwood is a much better author than this.
Other reading in Week #34:
Thierry Jonquet Tarantula (Serpent’s Tail)
Progress Report: Doctor Who Series 6 (Part 2)
This year’s ‘split’ run of Doctor Who was very arc-heavy in its first half. With some of the series’ ongoing mysteries resolved with great brio in ‘Let’s Kill Hitler’, the opener of this second half, the episodes that followed have sometimes felt rather like elements of a different season altogether. Sometimes that has worked rather well, sometimes it hasn’t.
For instance, there’s ‘Closing Time’. Gareth Roberts’s sequel to last year’s hugely entertaining ‘The Lodger’ capers along quite winningly for most of its duration, replaying its antecedent’s laughs and scrapes with, this time, added baby, added pathos, and added Cybermen. As is common in their new series appearances, the Cybermen are a bit rubbish here, though their guest spot is aided by their more beaten-up appearance and their by now seriously addled priorities. Picking affable, loyal, stay-at-home James Corden — reprising his role as Craig Owens, the only person Doctor Who has ever addressed as ‘mate’ — to be their new Cyberleader is a new low for the race even the Doctor notes are “metal morons” — itself continuing a long line of putdowns from their enemy: as early as 1975′s ‘Revenge of the Cybermen’ they were being taunted as “a pathetic bunch of tin soldiers skulking around the galaxy in an ancient spaceship” (sad fan admission: googling afterwards confirmed I can quote this line verbatim from memory). In the end, of course, Craig breaks free from the Cybermen’s bonds, saved from having his emotions scrubbed by the sound of his baby Alfie’s crying. It’s no sillier than the resolution of many other stories, and while schmaltzy in the extreme is at least at home in a very charming episode, full of lovely lines and details, and a ‘gay agenda’ subplot which will, I’m sure, have Daily Mail readers frothing while their children are roaring with delighted laughter. Making its own return to the show is one lone Cybermat, a sort of diminutive Cyber-pet last seen in ‘Revenge’, and here gnashing its way around a department store for no terribly good reason. (The Doctor stifling his whoop of joy when he catches the little silver fellow in a net is my favourite Matt Smith gag of the episode — try to imagine any of the other Doctors doing that.) In some of the spin-off media, Cybermats are revealed as Cyber-converted stray pets or even (did I imagine this?) babies, which would have lent ‘Closing Time’ more horror than its scenario could really have borne, especially as Craig puffs about with his own baby son in a papoose throughout the episode.
Of course, this is called ‘Closing Time’, and sees the Doctor visiting an old friend just before his own impending death. It’s a lot more fun than when his predecessor stood around in the snow for forty minutes looking sadly at Rose, and Matt Smith shows how good he is as he confides his fears to the baby. Off he goes for “one last trip” at the end — and suddenly we’re jolted to where newly-qualified Dr River Song is hoisted into a spacesuit by villainous Mme Kovarian and two slimy, rattling Silence henchmen. Frances Barber has evidently watched some old Blake’s 7 episodes and is trying to outdo SF’s last great eyepatch-wearing villainess Servalan — if she doesn’t shout ‘Maximum power!’ at some point in Episode 13, I’ll be terribly disappointed. This scene, which brings so many Who threads together to set up the finale, should come as a terrible shock, but instead makes what’s gone before look far more frivolous than it deserves.
Likewise, Toby Whithouse’s thougtful, clever ‘The God Complex’ is banjaxxed somewhat by its own coda, in which the Doctor drops Amy and Rory off, having decided it’s simply too dangerous for them to travel with him any more. Amy, the trollop, is distracted by the nice new house and car the Time Lord has given them (“How’re they going to pay the insurance on that on a nurse’s and a stripper’s income?” wondered a friend), while in a recent interview Arthur Darvill shows he understands his character of Rory far better than anyone actually writing him, saying that his Rory would never come pottering out with champagne glasses but instead watch his wife’s final goodbye to her best friend through the window, staying out of it one last time. Of course, no-one who’s been watching Who the last few years will be conned into thinking this is Amy and Rory’s actual final goodbye; their cameo in ‘Closing Time’ seemed an unnecessarily prompt reminder they’ll be back.
What precedes all this is, as they say, a story you won’t find any other television show doing (okay, maybe Whithouse’s own Being Human), a meditation on faith and fear, set in a chintzy, muzaky haunted hotel with worst nightmares lurking behind every door. This promised a lot in trails — the ventriloquists’ dolls, the mysterious silent clown — and in execution worked thrillingly until, I felt, Star Trek-like explanations started to materialise for the hotel’s surreal horrors. The Doctor also supplies answers without really showing his working: he correctly, through no obvious deductions whatsoever, realises that the hotel feeds on faith rather than, as we have expected, on fear; a clearer alignment with the revelation that mole-like alien Gibbis’s people have survived so long through cowardice might have helped this dozy audience member follow the otherwise improbable leap. As they did by casting James Corden as Craig, the production team still picks its higher-profile guest stars well; David Walliams, virtually unrecognisable as Gibbis, is perfect casting. There’s also an even more latex-covered creature around, a minotaur pacing the labyrinthine corridors of the hotel. Doctor Who has never had great luck with minotaurs (‘The Time Monster’, ‘The Mind Robber’) and this one doesn’t buck that trend terribly: it’s far better partially glimpsed or in distorted close-up than when it lumbers, blue-eyed and mouth agape, into full view. Like the Ood, this chap has to have the potential to be sympathetic as well as monstrous, and maybe errs a little on the side of the former. But then, ‘The God Complex’ is a story about monsters and, in some ways, the suspension of disbelief, so maybe it’s apt that it looks that way.
No such monsters in the preceding story, Tom McRae’s ‘The Girl Who Waited’: the blank corridors of the Two Streams medical facility are patrolled instead by the handbots, featureless white droids whose hidden guns and white void surroundings occasioned great nerd-forum excitement: were we in for a sequel to ‘The Mind Robber’? (For those unfamiliar with that 1968 Patrick Troughton oddball classic, in which the Doctor becomes trapped in a world of fiction, the unsurpassable Adventures with the Wife in Space blog is currently hosting a hilarious ‘commentary’ on the story.) Instead we got a story only New Who could tell, focusing on the companions while the Doctor was written out the script on a McGuffin technicality. Arthur Darvill always quietly impresses; here, Karen Gillen, playing two versions of Amy, demonstrated at last there’s more to her than an ability to quip and pout. I didn’t completely buy the gravelly older Amy, though visually well-realised with some subtle makeup, since the keystone attitude that she would come to hate the Doctor when he failed to rescue her didn’t, for me, really ring true, and seemed to be called upon to stand in place of the more nuanced exploration of what she’d been up to all these decades. (In forty-odd minutes, this isn’t practical, of course.) And while the denouement, giving Rory an impossible choice between two versions of his wife, was well-played and emotionally engaging, I didn’t find it moving, exactly. This is a story which seems to have been reverse-engineered from the final act. It has an intriguing beginning, but the wait for the pieces to be slotted into place to allow that ending is more than a little boring, not helped by the generic white-void backdrop where much of it takes place. (I also didn’t quite believe Amy would find a garden, of all things, so exciting she’d decide she was happy staying indefinitely there with only handbots and Imelda Staunton’s disembodied voice for company.)
And so to ‘Night Terrors’, Mark Gatiss’s fourth script for Doctor Who, and a sight better than his last, ‘Victory of the Daleks’. It’s strangely retro, the council-block setting being something we used to see fairly regularly in Russell T. Davies-era Who, but with a Moffat-era child-centric plot bolted onto that. Moved from the first half of Series 6, it perhaps suffers from proximity to ‘Closing Time’, which again would feature a dad’s love for his son saving the day. In ‘Night Terrors’ there’s a fairly overt gay subtext I found rather touching: when troubled dad Alex clutches his not-quite-son to him and declares he’ll love him no matter his real nature, it releases all from the confines of the wardrobe or, if you will, the closet. As well as being the most gorgeous-looking episode of this batch — stunningly coloured, creepy and filmic — ‘Night Terrors’ also boasts the best monsters we’ve seen in a while, a clutch of blundering, giant ‘peg dolls’ (was I really the only person never to have heard of peg dolls before?) with tiny features crushed into the centres of their bobbing, oversized heads, ratty ropey hair trailing lankly down their soiled costumes. Amy’s transformation into one of these, too, was a great body-horror moment.
Emotion saves the day in all these stories, and it runs the risk of becoming just as predictable an outcome as reversing the polarity of the neutron flow, or ending the story with a big explosion. I appreciate that Doctor Who has got where it is today by appealing to the hearts of its audience and not just dazzling them with monsters and effects — a worthy and forward-thinking thing to do in an era of vanishing BBC budgets. But there must be other ways to solve problems than by emoting at them, and there is still a place for spectacle. Memorable new monsters have been thin on the ground this year, the Silents aside; returning baddies the Cybermen aren’t terribly well-served by ‘Closing Time’ (I’d have loved it if the Cybermats had been the chief monsters, desperate to find a suitable human to convert into a proper Cyberman to give them some sort of direction, like the Dalek in ‘Dalek’ who doesn’t know how to behave without a superior giving him orders.)
These four episodes have a problem. They’re standalone stories of the sort Doctor Who has always been about, a variety of new adventures (even if their respective conclusions are strangely repetitive). But sandwiched between the insane ‘Let’s Kill Hitler’ and the slightly more restrained but very arc-heavy ‘The Wedding of River Song’ (which hadn’t aired when I started writing this post, but had by the time I reached this conclusion), they seem like they’re treading water while we wait to get to the Big Events again. This is a failing, I suppose, of lots of series which have arcs or mythology: it’s what led to people giving up on The X-Files. If you remind viewers regularly that the ongoing storyline is the ‘important’ bit, it inevitably diminishes those stories which don’t contribute to that strand. That’s why the coda to ‘Closing Time’ is annoying (and now, having seen Episode 13, since this is a show which fastidiously over explains some points while totally neglecting others, I wonder if we did really need to see Kovarian, River and the Silents at the end of Episode 12), and it’s why I feel irked to have felt these episodes were lesser Doctor Who — when in fact it’s the now baffling and overlong ‘River Song arc’ that’s really the least Whoish material we’ve seen this year.
52 Books #32: Open City
Arriving garlanded with praise, Teju Cole’s novel Open City (Faber) tells the story of Julius, a psychologist who grew up in Nigeria and now lives in Manhattan. Julius walks a trail blazed by Leopold Bloom and other literary flaneurs, seeking to alleviate the pressures of his personal and professional life by walking his home city, observing, cataloguing, thinking.
Open City is structured as a novel, and there are some recurring characters and low-key revelations to be found in the last fifty or so pages; up until then, the book’s 21 chapters seem so self-contained and meditative that they could almost be read in random order — their sometimes oddly abrupt conclusions are matched in the final chapter, which ends with what I suspect is a very deeply considered and densely allusive final scene describing the numbers of birds which used to die flying into the flaming torch held in the Statue of Liberty’s hand. A wonderful metaphoric image anyway, it comes at the end of a book which is about identity and belonging, and is given to us by a character among whose many interests is birdwatching: so why is it that it doesn’t seem like a beautiful end to the book?
Partly it’s because the book is both very densely written and loosely structured. Julius’s nighttime walks round Manhattan are enlivened by no special events; when there is incident — as in a mugging which seems to stem partly from our narrator’s own naivety, his smiling greeting seeming to turn two passersby into assailants — it’s rendered in the same daydreamy way as his musings and meditations on art and his own past. It’s difficult to maintain this tone for a whole book, but Open City‘s great success is that the reader never fails to believe in this unworldly, wide-eyed, intriguing and frustrating character. Unlike some reviewers, I took Julius’s pronouncements more or less at face value — they can be fatuous and rather po-faced, but Cole didn’t seem to me to be inviting us to mock Julius.
It’s a strange, beguiling, sometimes frustrating novel, reminiscent both in its good and bad aspects of Saul Bellow, whose work I sometimes enjoy but never really love. Likewise Open City, a little too open, is easy to admire, hard to take fully to heart.
Other reading in Week #32:
Francis Spufford Red Plenty (Faber)
52 Books #31: Waterline
Ross Raisin’s second novel Waterline (Penguin Viking) is an exceptionally ambitious enterprise modestly delivered. No showboating here: this is a confident, quiet, wide-ranging novel that tackles the biggest of topics without being pompous or self-aggrandising. It’s by no means flawless, but there’s an awful lot to admire here.
It’s the story of Mick, a middle-aged former shipbuilder from Clydebank, whose beloved wife Cathy has died just prior to the start of the book. Mick has long since been laid off from the defunct shipyards; after losing his spouse as well as his job he goes swiftly, irrevocably off the rails. Added to this is his conviction that since his work at Clydebank brought him into contact with asbestos, he is indirectly responsible for Cathy’s death from cancer.
Grief makes Mick churlish, impetuous and devil-may-care: to evade the ministrations of his (well-meaning but, he feels, overbearing) family he hops on a coach to London where he takes a room in a B&B which doesn’t serve breakfast — a Bed — and is briefly employed in a few dead-end jobs before, succumbing to a drink habit, he becomes homeless. After that it’s a succession of dubious allies, refuges and hostels, soup kitchens, scraps and forever being moved on.
Much of the book is told in the present tense over, as it were, Mick’s shoulder. This creates a couple of problems. Firstly, while Raisin’s handling of Weegie demotic is an impressive act of ventriloquism, I felt sometimes that it had an outsider’s insistence on utilising Scots ‘patter’ at sometimes unnecessary junctures, as though to show off learning, or at least to make gleeful use of ‘the patter’. There’s one too many “tollies” for my liking, for instance. Another misgiving — very highly subjective — comes via the ‘I never heard that’ test; while Raisin’s mangling of past tenses (“I’d have went,” “that’s what I seen”) is spot-on, I’ve never in all my years heard anyone conclude a sentence with “well” (e.g., “She doesn’t understand what he means. That makes two of them, well.”) in the way that to end on a “but” (“Mind there’s my programme on soon, but.”) is commonplace. Not saying it never happens — just that it rang false to me. And no Glaswegian — I am certain of this — has ever described a group of people doing something “theyselves”: “theirselves” is the correct incorrect term. On the other hand, a general Scots outlook on life is captured extremely well, notably an innate pride; I especially liked that for Mick, his family and his contemporaries, the idea of going on benefits — “the broo” — after being laid off is total anathema, an indignity worse than redundancy, the ultimate in humiliation.
At the start of a number of chapters we eavesdrop on other characters — a work colleague, a fellow-traveller on the Glasgow-to-London coach — and the effect of these short sidesteps is disorientating and irksome. Who is the woman at the start of Chapter 21 thinking about spreadsheets and emails in a bedroom in (I assume) the airport hotel where Mick’s been working as akitchen porter? getting ready for work to start her shift as a cleaner or maid? Why are we privy to the thoughts of a man sitting on a bench across the river from Battersea Power Station in Chapter 25? What links these bit-part characters — sometimes unnamed, more irritatingly sometimes given names, indicating (falsely) they will have some greater part to play beyond the couple of pararaphs in which they pass through Mick’s life — is their fixation on work, usually hated work, employment being the thing Mick most seems to miss. Are we meant to see these little thumbnails as his own interpretation, based on the blandest of visual clues, of what other people’s inner life is like? (The fact they’re usually written in standard English, rather than Scotticised, would indicate not.) If they are present simply to show how little these vignette characters think of the “tramp” they’re passing on the street, say (as seems to be the case in a coda which strongly hints that Mick has ceased to be alive, in any sense, to those around him), they smack faintly of the right-on. I don’t think a novel, however powerful, is going to jolt people out of that deliberate refusal to countenance what has got someone to the stage of begging next to a cash machine, or stealing alcohol from a supermarket; I’d venture, perhaps extremely unfairly, that the kind of people who read literary fiction of this sort already feel guilt about ignoring the homeless, and the little vignettes are therefore unlikely again to have any galvanising effect on those readers’ consciences.
The slope of Mick’s life runs inevitable downward, punctuated by the occasional plateau when he finds an ally, or safe accommodation, or even a way to mourn his wife that is somehow constructive (he doesn’t quite accept that he is grieving, much of the times; calls it, rather, being “maunderly”). Raisin takes a major risk when he has Mick discover if not a fondness for the Barbara Taylor Bradford novels that Cathy used to read then, at least, some form of comfort in reading them. Three different BTB texts — fictive or real? — are precised within the last few chapters, and the risk Raisin runs is of luring the reader into seeking comparisons and parallels between his almost too grim story and the prosaic and predictable “Barbara” stories. There are certainly points where we sense that Mick’s eye is drawn to women he meets in passing; though he never acknowledges any romantic urge — never admits to more than finding the girl in question attractive in some objective way — there is the occasional sense that Raisin is over-intent on steering his book away from a scenario where Mick might be seen to find any sort of happiness. It’s certainly consistent with his character’s refusal to countenance the possibility of future happiness, but I felt that the authorial engineering could have been carried out with a slightly lighter touch.
Waterline feels to me something like the film Dancer in the Dark, where a single random tragedy sets off a series of ever-worsening events. Dancer in the Dark is viscerally terrible, a film you watch while trying to stuff your fist in your mouth, unable to look away but barely able to watch, but it depends somewhat on people behaving selfishly and giving the decent central character no chance to remedy her situation. Waterline is far less gruelling an experience; the horror and misery of Mick’s situation is sometimes held at arm’s length, and while similar circumstances push Mick lower and lower here, it’s sometimes hard to tell whether Raisin intends us to purely sympathise with Mick’s situation. I don’t think he quite does; as a comparison we have Mick’s sometime sidekick Beans, a far less sympathetic figure with a similar story (and who gets embroiled in a purely box-ticking plot incident to illustrate those Daily Mail-esque news stories about hooligans setting tramps on fire), and I think we’re meant to root for Mick, to feel he can and should climb out of the hole he’s found himself in.
But I felt manoeuvred towards this interpretation, somewhat against my will. The urge to tell Mick to pull himself together is strong at times in this book; he accepts the depredations visited on him with frustrating stoicism. I came away from this book faintly frustrated, and saddened — in more ways than one — about missed opportunities.
Other reading in Week #31:
Tim Burrows From CBGB to the Roundhouse: Music Venues Through the Years (Marion Boyars)
Greg Milner Perfecting Sound Forever: The Story of Recorded Music (Granta)
52 Books # 30: Fateless
Originally published as Fatelessness, but with a syllable lopped off for a film adaptation in 2006 (hence horrible tie-in cover; and believe me, I debated a long time in Foyles over whether I should buy this or the much handsomer Fiasco), this is Hungarian author Imre Kertész’s novel about a fourteen year-old Jewish boy, Gyuri, who is sent first to a labour camp and then to Auschwitz.
Gyuri is a curious creation — though not a curious character — and Kertész uses him to present an intriguing new take on a familiar genre, if one whose horrors never pall. Here are pointless labour-intensive tasks, trains filled with abducted Jewish families, the sadly familiar depictions of near-dead prisoners struggling to hold onto a life that has lost any meaning or appeal, simply because it’s life. All of this is coldly, meticulously recorded by Gyuri, an incurious observer, whose own experiences of the concentration camp are, except in a very literal way (there are a lot of medical incisions in this book), curiously bloodless. He’s rejected by his fellow Hungarians, and by his fellow Jews; he’s a man alone, and there is no sense of enduring solidarity with other prisoners. Gyuri’s progress from prisoner to sickbay patient feels dreamlike and detached, and has a strange tinge of inevitability about it; there isn’t much sense of personal risk, and so no sense that the irony of the book’s title (the argument between ‘fatelessness’ and ‘free will’) really has much bearing on the events on its pages.
This lack of subjective horror does not of course preclude the reader’s discomfort: I’ve yet to read any book about the holocaust which doesn’t move and terrify, and Fateless isn’t the exception. Gyuri’s affectlessness makes this book more uncomfortable; somehow one reads it feeling he’s more interested in the (internecine) structure of his sentences rather than what he’s describing with them. Reading them, you see that this coping mechanism, a form of denial, is more damaging than distancing.
And in the end, the true horror of Fateless is that, once freed, Gyuri will look back on his Auschwitz experience with something he describes as ‘happiness’. It’s a wrenching sort of twist, though again in some ways it comes out of nowhere. Similar territory is covered in György Faludy’s excellent gulag memoir My Happy Days in Hell, but in that case it was companionship and a healthy sense of the absurd, sharpened rather than quashed by imprisonment, which justified the title and conceit. While Gyuri sidesteps the horrors of Auschwitz, in no small part by failing (or refusing) to report, and thereby acknowledge, them, it is difficult to view his incarceration as positively as a period of happiness, unless happiness obtains in an enforced solitude — but the text doesn’t supply this interpretation. Despite his protestations, the reader doesn’t come away confident that Gyuri will resume anything approaching a normal life.
