Your personal last word...

At a certain point, even if you keep up-to-date with new releases (books, records, films), even if you keep broadening your horizons, even if you manage to keep up with the latest things, you realise that these latest things can never be more than that, that they stand almost no chance of being the last word, because you actually heard - or saw or read - your personal last word years earlier.

Geoff Dyer, Zona

It has been said, cynically, that the golden age of sf is 14.

The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, ed. John Clute & Peter Nicholls

Oh, yes, I used to keep a blog, didn't I? Since I started writing this blog, such as it is, there have been other periods where, for whatever reason, I have lacked either the time or the inclination to write anything for it, but this is certainly the longest stretch of time where that's been the case. Which is not to say that there haven't been things I've wanted to write about in the last few months. But then it's always been the case that I've wanted to write more for this blog than I've been able to. I appear to be a much slower writer than some of the bloggers who first inspired me. And partly, of course, it's no longer the novelty it once was. In retrospect, I'm dissatisfied with a substantial chunk of what I've written for this blog, but based purely on the number of posts from that time, I clearly had more motivation to engage with my shiny new toy in the first few months of keeping it.

So what inspires me now, now that life crowds in in one way or another, and the polish has clearly faded on this toy? In my head at least, these two quotations chime together. I'm sure that I've written more than enough about Geoff Dyer's work by this point, but I did enjoy his rumination on Tarkovsky's masterpiece. A page or two before the quotation above he mentions Where Eagles Dare, the only other film he could conceive of writing such a book about, and The Italian Job, beloved favourites from childhood and his early teens which also formulated his initial taste and interest in films. Their appeal is simply that they were seen repeatedly in childhood, so that they become impossible to criticise, because on some level they're such an important part of the person he now is: "To try to disentangle their individual merits or shortcomings, to see them as a disinterested adult, is like trying to come to a definitive assessment of your own childhood: impossible because what you are contemplating and trying to gauge is a formative part of the person attempting the assessment."

Which is close to the point Clute and Nicholls are making above, that those of us who love science fiction only do so because it was first encountered at such a formative stage. Of course, there are formative stages which come after childhood, and I also don't see why we have to see it as cynical necessarily. It's inevitable that the things (books, records, films) we first encounter in childhood or as young teenagers will stay with us in a way that nothing else does is simply because we encounter them at an age where we don't have nearly as much context to place them within. As Dyer puts it, we haven't yet encountered our personal last word.

You could, if you like, describe this dilemma as something of a middle class or first world problem if you wanted. But since I generally loath such currently fashionable terms, I won't. In any case, I'm not sure it's much of a problem. No doubt Bourdieu was correct to describe taste as a form of social positioning, but surely it has other uses as well. One can't after all, love and appreciate everything. There's too much stuff out there, especially these days. Taste, our own personal unique taste, which for most people encompasses both works which are masterpieces of their respective forms, as well as works which are popular crap, also has a very useful, practical function. It limits what we're interested in so that the mass of books, music and films which are more and more available to us these days, become manageable. As somebody who has sometimes struggled with the feeling that I'm interested in too much, to many conflicting ideas, fictions, etc., that actually provides some comfort. Inevitably, part of that is the person I was at 14, whilst another part of it is the person I am now, gradually finding the limits of what I'm interested in. I don't believe that there's anything unusual in this.

Amit Chaudhuri quotes

It was before history was born, and he himself became who he was, studying in a city that is always pre-natal, pre-nascent....It is as if my father came into being from fantasy, like an image, in 1923. Yet it is an image full of truth, to think of him studying in Calcutta, or taking a tram-ride, one of the marginal, anonymous people who were neighbours with history, one of millions, studying, discussing politics, listening to songs, living in hostel rooms, eating in the 'cabins' of North Calcuttam who were bypassed and yet changed, without their names or the quality of those moments ever being known, by independence and partition. So India took on a new shape, and another story began, with homelands becoming fantasies, never to be returned to or remembered. 

Afternoon Raag (1993)

History is not the annals; it's what happens around us when we're unaware it's history.

Calcutta: Two Years in the City (2013) 

Joseph Roth quote

...I believe that my observations have always led me to find that the so-called realist moves about the world with a closed mind, ringed as it were with concrete and cement, and that the so-called romantic is like an unfenced garden in and out of which truth can wander at will...

Joseph Roth, The Emperor's Tomb 

P.G. Wodehouse quote

The Grammar School at Market Snodsbury had, I understood, been built somewhere in the year 1416, and, as with so many of these ancient foundations, there still seemed to brood over its Great Hall, where the afternoon's festivities were to take place not a little of the fug of centuries. It was the hottest day of the summer, and though somebody had opened a tentative window or two, the atmosphere remained distinctive and individual. 

In this hall the youth of Market Snodsbury had been eating its daily lunch for a matter of five hundred years, and the flavour lingered. The air was sort of heavy and languorous, if you know what I mean, with the scent of young England and boiled beef and carrots.

P.G. Wodehouse, Right Ho, Jeeves

A minor play?

Another review originally written for amazon. Bennett is something of a hero:

Alan Bennett, The History Boys

A minor play?

Not quite forty years on from Forty Years On, Alan Bennett returned to the subject of a school and education in a play that seems to have acquired a great deal of affection from its audience. Where the school in his earlier play was an unreal place, a model for the wider English society Bennett was mocking, The History Boys takes a more realistic approach to its subject(s). Personally, I’ve always regarded The History Boys as a minor work. Against that, I must admit that I also believe the strength and emotional power of much of Alan Bennett’s work derives from the fact that it is so often in a minor key, frequently focussing on apparently mundane and constricted lives. In contrast, the film of The History Boys (which I enjoyed) seems all to ready to settle for sentimentality. Bennett’s wit and humanity is much in evidence, as in all his work, but it seems marred by a sentimentality he avoids elsewhere. This might in part be simply down to the mechanics of film. Matched with appropriately wistful music, Richard Griffiths’ delivery of the line “Pass it on, boys, pass it on” can’t help but raise a tear. And the central argument around which the narrative is constructed, that the kindness and teaching methods represented by Hector are under threat from the more utilitarian and aggressive approach favoured by Irwin and the Headmaster is a difficult one to make in terms of a play without falling prey to sentimentality, for all that Bennett consciously avows any nostalgia for his own schooldays in his typically lengthy introduction to the playtext.

Reading the play text, it’s particularly interesting to see what was cut, and what was changed. The film elides the flash forwards to Irwin’s later career, leaving it as simply a rueful acknowledgement of where he went after his teaching, which is probably a change for the better. Also improved is (ironically, given my comments about the sentimentality of the film) the happier ending granted to Posner. The play is harsher, but oddly less convincing. It’s also a very gay play, which is again slightly unconvincing, but also rather sweet. It doesn’t quite ring true for me. Dakin seems largely unconcerned about Posner’s obvious desire for him, whilst they all seem to regard Hector’s indiscretions as little more than a minor inconvenience. I went to a relatively liberal school in the 1990s, and I don’t believe the sixth formers I knew would have been so accepting of either an obviously gay teacher or homosexuality in general. On the other hand, an American friend has described his own school experiences to me as “We were a very gay year!”, so who knows. In the context of the work of a writer who, on the evidence of his autobiographical writing and occasional public remarks has apparently struggled somewhat with publicly acknowledging his sexuality, now appears happy to write a play which is so openly concerned with both a gay man and a gay teenager is rather moving. The play’s treatment of some of its homosexual characters feels freer and more open than any of his past work.

Is it a bad play? I find that I don’t care. Whatever its faults of sentimentality and nostalgia, the play is still angry about many of the right things, funny, and despite it all, intensely moving. Minor work or not, I love this play.

Lorna Sage, again

Lorna Sage, Good As Her Word: Selected Journalism (ed. Sharon Sage & Vic Sage)

Can a collection of book reviews ever be moving? Obviously, I don't mean to doubt that an individual piece can't be moving in it's own particular way, but can the book as a whole? In any case, corralling a series of ephemeral reviews into a coherent book is already a somewhat quixotic task to start with, made doubly so if, as in this case, it's posthumous. Since it's the person of the author which is the only thing which conveys any kind of coherence on the book in the first place. It's for this very reason, I imagine, that so many such collections subdivide their reviews into sections organised by theme. We have six sections here, but since they included the dates of original publication I decided to read the book against itself, starting in the early 70s and finishing with the final few posthumously published reviews. Whichever way you read it, there's a sense of anticlimax involved. It's just another review, the author cut off in mid flow.

The only collection of this sort which I can remember working as a coherent book is Salman Rushdie's Imaginary Homelands, which works by placing his initial reactions to the fatwa in the final section. In this way it creates a sense of narrative, the fatwa marking an end to a particular period in both Rushdie's life and the wider culture of which he was a part. Which, in retrospect, it clearly did.

There's a few book reviews, a few encounters with the canon, but most of Lorna Sage's reviews were of academic works, or else, particularly later in her life, obituaries. Her attention, consequently, is often focused on ideas and theory. Reading it in chronological order, you do get a sense of the change and shifts in academic fashions, particularly in regards to feminist theory. If I find the book moving, it's probably because of this partly hidden narrative that I found within the text. Because it does chart a movement away from the certainties of the world of post-war England that Lorna Sage memorialised so eloquently in Bad Blood. A considerable amount of her work was on Angela Carter's writing. Like her, Lorna Sage died too young (57 to Carter's 52), and their reviews share a sense of humour. Humour used strategically, to make an important point.

*

So it's also a narrative that I'm imposing on the text from without. Post-war England, I'm coming to realise, really is my personal land of lost content. The arcadia I only just missed out on through the misfortune to have been born just a little too late. Of course I might know intellectually that it was far from a perfect moment in our history, as no era is ever perfect, and in any case it contained within it the seeds for it's own dissolution. This is a wholly emotional pull, although the recent documentary The Spirit of '45 (which I've not actually seen) perhaps shows that I'm not alone in feeling this.

Mount Olympus

'From here issue the only known infallible bulls for the guidance of British souls and bodies. This little court is the Vatican of England. Here reigns a pope, self-nominated, self-consecrated - ay, and much stranger too - self-believing! - a pope whom, if you cannot obey him, I would advise you to disobey as silently as possible; a pope hitherto afraid of no Luther; a pope who manages his own inquisition, who punishes unbelievers as no most skillful inquisitor of Spain ever dreamt of doing - one who can excomunicate thoroughly, fearfully, radically; put you beyond the pale of men's charity; make you odious to your dearest friends, and turn you into a monster to be pointed at by the finger!' 

Oh heavens! and this is Mount Olympus!

Anthony Trollope, The Warden

A rather naughty book cover...

Is it wrong for me to like this cover as much as I do? Yes, I know that it's objectifying the girl in the picture, but something about the way in which she's looking back at us over her shoulder with a little half smile cuts against that somewhat. Whilst the story which the cover explicitly illustrates, 'Love, Your Magic Spell is Everywhere' is hardly free from such issues, it's conclusion does at least undercut some of the narrator's assumptions. The girl with the most attractive figure is, predictably perhaps, the one who cares least about her appearance, and who finally catches him with a geniune love potion to match his X-Ray Specs.

Really, whatever issues I might have with the gender relations present in Finney's stories, they seem so much of the time in which they were written, as to feel almost harmless. Boyish, really. And the most problematic story in this respect, 'The Coin Collector', contains something which is certainly relevant to my suposedly more enlightened self, with it's narrator whose wife complains that he enjoys reading rather too much. Redolent of a nostalgia that I recognise from Ray Bradbury as well as from the author of Time and Again, Finney finds a number of variations on the idea of travelling through time, with the 1880s appearing most frequently as the Eden that his characters most long for. Other stories feature a prisoner on death row managing to free himself through the magic of painting an opening door on his cell wall ('Prison Legend'), or a mysterious balloon ride through night time San Francisco which unleashes something hidden within the two protagonists ('The Intrepid Aeronaut'). The most moving story is probably the last, 'The Love Letter', in which lovers communicate across time through letters, but are never able to meet until the modern New Yorker finds the grave of the women from 1882 he fell in love with through a few letters.

I remember that day and all those long ago, deep-summer days in Galesburg, Illinois, with a terrible nostalgia. Already the sky was a hard hot blue, the air shimmering with sun. The grass under our bare feet was faded and dry and the tree locusts were sawing their wings for yards and blocks and miles around us.

'A Possible Candidate for the Presidency'

Zadie Smith, White Teeth

Zadie Smith, White Teeth

Possibly the hype with which it's publication was accompanied is one of the reasons why I avoided White Teeth at the time, although friends lived near to the area of London in which it's set. Finally getting around to reading it all these years later, I'm reading it from another vantage point again, from the other side of the barrier that it confronts in it's narrative of the intertwined histories of three families of different racial backgrounds in post-war Britain. I'm married to a woman who grew up in a different country, whose skin is a different colour to mine, part of an Indian family which stretches half way around the world, just as she is now part of an English family which is stretched across England and Wales. I'm part of the 'multicultural Britain' of which lazy journalists claimed the book was a celebration. Not that I ever walk around thinking about myself in such terms, because how ridiculously pretentious would that be? If I ever reflect on my marriage, it's first and foremost to acknowledge how lucky I am to be married to such a wonderful person. Where she was born, where I was born, are irrelevancies.

Whether that actually has much effect on my reading experience I'm not really sure. In fact, White Teeth rather took me back to the time it was published. Even the RRP (£6.99) on the back of the edition I picked up from a charity shop reminds me of an earlier time in the history of the British publishing industry, when I began buying books rather than getting them from the library, when books weren't so expensive. That period towards the end of the nineties for a few years when it was somehow 'cool' to be Indian. As though that was something which counts as a choice. More accurate perhaps to say that it was a moment when certain TV programs, films, books and music were considered to be cool because they could be defined as 'Indian'. Bollywood was filtering through into popular conciousness, even if most people still hadn't actually seen a Bollywood film. We got the stereotype though. We had a generation of British Asians who'd grown up in this country, some of whom, like anyone else, were now producing culture which reflected their experiences. Actually, you could say that it was part of a trend which started earlier, as far back as the early eighties. And of course, this was a very muddled sense of what 'Indian' actually means, since alongside such things as Bend It Like Beckham, Goodness Gracious Me and Cornershop's 'Brimful of Asha', it included East is East, a film about a British Pakistani family living in Bradford in the seventies. It's not wrong exactly, since 'India' is a name for both the country and the sub continent of which that country is the largest part, but it does feel entirely in keeping with that old British assumption, 'Oh, they're all the same!' Zadie Smith makes a joke out of this general confusion with her book's Asian family coming from Bangladesh (formerly East Pakistan, formerly India, formerly Bengal), part of the novel's general theme of the indeterminacy of national or cultural roots, their unreliability as a guide for the present.

White Teeth was definitely positioned by cultural commentators as being a part of that moment, the author herself rapidly placed on a pedestal, and the book quickly adapted into a TV series I never watched. It's perhaps no surprise that her follow up was a novel about the culture of modern celebrity and then after that she moved to America both literally and metaphorically (her third novel, On Beauty which transplants Howard's End to the American Midwest). And of course, none of these things were exactly 'Indian'. Goodness Gracious Me flopped when it was shown in India, because it was essentially British humour. Many of the jokes depended on the negotiation with the dominant white British culture.

Of course, Zadie Smith isn't Indian either, born to a Jamaican mother and white British father (and as far as I can tell from the interviews I've read, she identifies herself as black and British). Perhaps my memory is somewhat at fault here, but if commentators did position the book within a narrative where it might not quite belong, you can see why, when the character who comes to dominate the novel's multiracial cast is the 'Bangledeshi' Samad Iqbal. A genuinely moving portrait of an immigrant to Britain who is terrified of being swamped by the people and the culture of his new country, a neat reversal of the common complaint often heard from this country's white racism. Both stylistically and in terms of subject matter with a focus on immigration, Zadie Smith is obviously stepping somewhat in the footsteps of Salman Rushdie, which will no doubt also have helped the identification, although her style is equally indebted to Martin Amis. But it's also obviously, confidently her. Never swamped by any obvious influence.

Reading Zadie Smith's interviews I found I really warmed to her as a person. She comes across as very likable, also curious and detirmined. All admirable qualities of course, but part of it may also simply be my age. I'm in my early 30s now, and so far I've read nothing by an author younger than me (Gwendoline Riley was born the same year, so is probably a few months younger); little enough by authors who might be just a few years older. So Zadie Smith is (almost) my contemporary. The viewpoint the novel has on the 80s - a decade I both grew up in, and of which I have read a good many fictional representations - especially the scenes set in school, is one I recognise more than any other. It's an odd way to judge a novel's success, especially since I went to very different schools at the opposite end of the country, but there's a personal closeness here at times. White Teeth is hardly an autobiographical text, but she's clearly used some of her own memories for the texture of the world as the narrative comes nearer to the present. Obviously Irie Jones isn't Zadie Smith, but she shares the author's heritage. What I've read Zadie Smith describe as her desire to possess an English literary culture from which she felt excluded is metamorphosed into her character Irie Jones' desire for the middle class culture of the Chalfens, the characters who are the novel's broadest caricatures. She's hardly the first writer to reflect how intimately bound up this country's literary culture is with class. Nor is it an anxiety which is exclusively felt by working class individuals.

*

Whilst I was reading it, my wife kept asking me why the book was called White Teeth. I couldn't answer her really, and the novel never really gives us a clear answer, beyond using it as a metaphor for chapter titles. If I had to guess I'd say that put crudely our teeth are the one bit of us which is the same colour no matter what the colour of our skin. More interesting is the way it's employed as a metaphor for exploring the personal histories of several of her characters, and the intersections of those histories with larger national histories. Christening these chapters the 'root canal' for the character concerned makes an obvious point. I've never experienced a root canal, but I understand they're supposed to be painful, and so it proves here. History is always something traumatic, something which the novel's ending, flashing forward to the eve of the millenium, seems to offer some hope for a respite from. The ending feels rather rushed (oddly, given the novel's length!), appearing to suggest that finally we can escape our personal and national histories, and might be the least satisfactory part of the book. Not that Zadie Smith suggests such an 'escape' is at all easy, given the traumas her characters are subject to, but it's a hope which seems peculiarly typical of the nineties to me.

By which I mean, the culture of the nineties in Britain, as I'm coming to understand it, was one marked by a deep anxiety about the past. The past became something which was both recycled endlessly in popular culture, largely as pastiche, and also something to be feared. We were a culture which had successfully triumphed over History, which may help to explain why towards the end of the decade we elected a reactionary government which was in constant denial of its past as a left wing political party.

In itself though, the desire to escape from the suffocation of the past is one with which it is easy to feel sympathetic. The suspicion towards history which the novel articulates at various points is not a wholesale rejection of history, but it does suggest that it is generally untrustworthy. It's hard though to see as it were, what comes next, to see the point we might reach supposing we can escape our histories. Which is perhaps one of the reasons why we need fiction. So the ending feels a little rushed and unsatisfactory, but otherwise this is a magnificent romp through post-war British history. I'm glad I finally got around to reading it!

"You see, the whole country of the system is juxtaposition by the haemoglobin in the atmosphere because you are a sophisticated rhetorician intoxicated by the exuberance of your own verbosity…"

 

from Amar, Ackbar, Anthony (1977)

Missing Margate

In London the meetings never end; the curiously stylised self-importance that patinas the fundamental banality of their careerist participants must be endlessly serviced by ritual, an egomania masquerading as the exchange of information.

Michael Bracewell, Missing Margate

Michael Hoffmann - Twentieth century German Poetry: An Anthology

Another review I wrote for amazon. I can remember being reasonably pleased with how this one turned out.

Michael Hofmann – Twentieth Century German Poetry: An Anthology

Poetry/History

An interesting choice of cover, especially given the editor and translator Michael Hofmann's praise for German poetry in his introduction on the grounds that so much of it addresses the world outside rather than being confined to the ivory tower. Certainly the twentieth century has marked German history in a number of ways, of which the Berlin Wall is one of the clearest symbols. Being one of those many English people who are mono-lingual and therefore dependant on translators, Michael Hofmann has become a translator I feel I can trust (although here he also reprints translations by other hands), one who possesses both the skill and taste for the works he translates, as is evident from his nicely polemical introduction. 

If I have one criticism of this volume, it would be that that's all we get in the way of critical apparatus. Some of the poets I've encountered before, but many are previously unknown, and a little more biographical information on each poet than just their dates would have been a real help, especially in the later part of the book when Germany was divided (there's that wall again!). It's usually not too difficult to work out which side of the divide individual poets found themselves, but especially with poets represented sometimes by only a single poem, it can sometimes feel as if they are emerging from a void, with only Hofmann's introduction for guidance. 

That aside, this is a magnificent collection, which whets one's appetite for more, especially of those poets who are sometimes sparsely represented. Surely evidence of a task successfully achieved. And it provides plenty of justification for Hofmann's provocative claim that Germany was one of *the* places for poetry in the twentieth century. I wonder if that is a claim which will stand up over the course of the twenty-first. It is of course very difficult to surmise from such a brief survey, and even the best critic is going to miss important work, especially when it is that published nearest to one's own time, but I couldn't help feeling the weakest, or perhaps just the least significant, work in this collection came from the most recent poets. Which connects with that interesting choice of cover. Perhaps that wall, that history, was an important spur to great work which is now past.

Geoff Dyer, Working the Room

Always back up. Always back up. I wasn't entirely happy with a few posts, I'd ended up taking too long over them, and had saved them to a memory stick. This was probably about 6 months ago, you understand. And now I find I've managed to delete them by mistake. Always back up.

It's not like they were the greatest things ever written anyway. I really need to stop agonising so much over writing this blog, if I'm ever to get something written for it.

So, can I try and reconstruct this from memory? It'll probably end up as a bunch of notes, which is maybe how it should have been written in the first place.

- The cover to my paperback edition of Geoff Dyer's second collection of essays and reviews places the author at it's centre, holding a map and gazing out at us. Surrounding him is a drawing of a maze, with a thin red line running through it, ending at Dyer's casually held map. I mention the cover, because it seems to perfectly captured representation of Dyer's idealised self image which I've encountered in a number of places now. Essentially, in his own words, he is a 'literary gatecrasher', unconcerned with formal boundaries between different kinds of writing, his own work ranges across a variety of fictional and non-fictional forms, as he blithely follows his interests wherever they may take him. Becoming intensely interested in a new subject is only a way to stave off the boredom now inspired by the subject he previously enjoyed so intensely, a means of staving off boredom and depression.

- Anglo-English Attitudes, his first collection of reviews and other pieces, must be the first place I encountered this self image of his. It probably wasn't the first book of Geoff Dyer's I read, but it was certainly the first one I encountered in what I remember were several admiring reviews. The feeling it inspired in me was an opening of horizons. It felt liberating, as though a person really could be interested in everything. It made me aware of things and writers I'd previously been unaware of, or even dismissed: photography, Roland Barthes, Milan Kundera, Cormac McCarthy, Don Delillo, Ryszard Kapuscinski, Boa Ninh's The Sorrow of War, and most importantly of all, the writer he mentions more than any other, John Berger.

- What was most exciting was his way of looking for literary worth in all kinds of writing. His main quarrel with our dominant literary culture is its tendency to privilege the novel as the most important literary form, whereas Dyer finds it in letters and diaries, essays and travel books. Even writers who are best known for their novels, D.H. Lawrence for instance (another writer I would missed if not for Dyer's praise), wrote the work that Dyer loves the most in such 'extra-literary' forms.

- He's a romantic essentially. Interested in fragments and ruins, deserts and drugs. For all his repeated use of his own experience and the privileging of his writerly 'I', his oft-expressed impatience with the world around him, Dyer often seems to be most drawn to experiences which represent a temporary release from the self. Boredom is very important in his literary world (whether fictional and non-fictional), both for the stimulation it provides and for the relief from concern it occasions.

- I admit it, I envied him his life, or at least the way in which he represents it. I wanted to just like him, interested in everything, following my interests wherever they lead, living life on my own terms. That really is the promise what we might define as Bohemianism (a slightly archaic notion, as Dyer acknowledges in one piece) has long held for me. I may never have managed to live such a life, never even really tried to, but it is one that I have always envied. Goodness knows where I picked up the notion first, but it's a life which I know almost entirely through books rather than experience, and I'm old enough now to know that one shouldn't trust literary representations as guides for living. Or rather you can, the insights of the authors you love the most enrich your life and who you are as a person, but life continues on regardless.

- So why did I feel so dissatisfied with this newest collection? It's not just that I've come across some these pieces already; Geoff Dyer is a name I know to look out for in review sections now. There's just an awful lot of repetition. The pieces on photography feel like little more than off cuts from his great book on the subject The Ongoing Moment (admittedly those in the earlier book where the first things I'd read on the subject); the introductions from two of D.H. Lawrence's novels add little to his book on the author; he's a good close reader of texts, but the reviews included here feel more perfunctory than included in Anglo-English Attitudes.

- The clue may be in the title: Working the room. It comes from a sentence by Susan Sontag, and Dyer tells us in the book's introduction that Jonathan Letham, who had intended to use it for a book of his own, loaned it to him. Dyer may claim that he still writes only about what interests him, but to me here it feels more like a job of Work, as the title suggests.

- Despite his boasts of a variety of interests, what I actually found was a certain narrowness. Dyer has written about so much of this before, in Anglo-English Attitudes and elsewhere. The earlier collection had a review of a novel by Richard Ford, the newest book does too. And I still don't feel inclined to read anything by him.

- The inclusion of Ford leads me to another complaint: the excessive praise of American writing. Of course, we are entitled to allow our literary taste to run wherever it may. What irritates me about this, whenever English writers or critics praise American writing, is that it always seems to come at the expense at their own literary scene. It's not a new phenomenon either. Peter Ackroyd was making the case against such a attitude in the late 70s, in a piece included in The Collection, so it's clearly not a new notion, or unique to Geoff Dyer. We appear to have several generations of writers in this country who instinctively dismiss English (and it is always English) writing. Perhaps we could see it as a literary equivalent of the famous stereotypical English self-deprecation, but it's clearly more than that. It's a reaction against a dominent English literary culture, a reaction which seems to be largely derived from arguments about class.

- Geoff Dyer though, tries to justify his literary preference through an attention to language. Here he is from that first review of Richard Ford:

Lucky American writers for whom the dominant narrative voice of literature so close to the lives of the people within the narrative!...Think of the hoops James Kelman has had to wedge himself through to close the gap between narrative and dialogue; then think of Ford and that all-accommodating, middle-of-the-road that is equally at home either side of inverted commas.

'Richard Ford'

Here he is again, comparing the particular qualities of American and English journalism written about the Iraq War:

...American journalists writing about the US military are the beneficiaries of the all-round flexibility of and versatility of American English...Officers and non-coms share a common idiom which is varied and animated by the racial and cultural make up of the army.

'The Moral Art of War'

Well, perhaps. It certainly wouldn't surprise me if the British army were class ridden, as he claims. It's interesting that Dyer, who - like most English people - is easily able to discern class within British society, seems to elide it when he looks at American writing. Ford's narrative voice for example is surely that of a middle-class white man, which is fine if that's the subject of his work, but it's still a voice which excludes as much as it includes. I recently read one of Walter Mosely's Easy Rawlins novels. What's fantastic about Mosely's writing is the way it embodies black American speech (on either side of the inverted commas!), a language that is clearly distinct from the speech of the white world with which Rawlins repeatedly comes into contact. I'm suspicious of that 'all-encompassing'.

- Nor do I think it would be that difficult to find English writing which embodies speech just as effectively. I made just that point on this blog a while back when I described J.L. Carr's What Hetty Did in just such terms, and I had Dyer's argument in mind when I wrote that. I just think that Dyer has been looking in the wrong places, owing to his own prejudices. I doubt he's read Walter Mosely either, since he seems to be deaf to the attractions of genre. Nor is he interested in historical fiction (unless it's about a the World War I or the war in Vietnam), because Dyer's romanticism is centred on modernity, rather than any real interest in the past much before the late 19th century. But it's in the genre of historical fiction where a lot of interesting English writing has appeared in the last few decades. Or else in, perhaps - for want of a better term - the middlebrow novel, which interestingly some scholars now seem to be in the process of attempting to rescue from dismissal and snobbery. Or else in what still passes as the avant-grade. The point is that 'literature' for Geoff Dyer, seems to reside only within a rather narrow category of 'fine writing'.

- As the title of my blog probably indicates, I'm not so dismissive of the literature produced by this country. I'm not dismissing American literature here, since there is plenty I've enjoyed. I have a felling that the king of American writing I first encountered was very different from what Dyer did. If he or anyone else prefers American literature over English, I'm not going to say that they're wrong, or rather, I will respect their right to their opinion, but I am suspicious of the arguments I've seen which are used to bolster such claims.

- In contrast Anglo-English Attitudes, where the least interesting pieces are the last few, largely autobiographical pieces, Working the Room works the other way around. The most interesting pieces are the more personal ones, where Dyer reflects on being an only child and on what he seems to regard as the most important period of his life, where he enjoyed an idle existence for a few years after finishing university, living on the dole, reading critical theory and enjoying himself. He's frequently written about that time, even fictionalised it in The Colour of Memory, a book I love a great deal. The dissatisfaction which he describes as being almost the inevitable consequence of enjoying himself so much when he was younger feels like it could have been the outcome he desired all along. We're back to that slightly archaic notion of Bohemianism, a longing which I definitely share with him. He managed to live that life for a few years, and has arguably carried on doing just that, whereas I have only ever looked on with envy.

- I find I just don't envy him his life any more. This isn't a moral disapproval of the way in which Geoff Dyer describes his enjoyment of his early 20s. I largely agree with him: it does sound like an exemplary way to spend your early 20s. Although it's certainly not the only exemplary way, and it's certainly not the way I spent mine. I'm merely registering a change within myself here, something that I seem to be doing a lot of at the moment.

 ...I realise it was familiar to me back then, that the taste of ashes in the mouth was as much a generalised premonition as it was a particular reaction... Destiny, I think, is not what lies in store for you; it's what is already stored up inside you...

'On the Roof'

It's not the things of childhood, it's the things of adolescence I'd like to put behind me

No doubt I should have posted an end of year round up on favourites of the year just past, but we're a few days past the beginning of the year, have reached twelfth night in fact, with the tree and decorations coming down, so I think I'll dispense with that for this year and indulge in a little more rueful solipsism.

Two more reviews I wrote for amazon a while back, in lieu of actual content:

Frank Miller & Bill Sienkiewicz – Elektra: Assassin

This must be the stupidist, most tiresome comic I've read in a long time. Painted comics were something of a fashion from the late-80s through mid-90s, but few of them hold up now. Most come off as pretentious. Bill Sienkiewicz is better than many perhaps, but his exaggerated expressionistic figures and murky palette aren't to my taste. Also, he doesn't seem particularly capable at depicting action, which is rather unfortunate given this is a comic obsessed with action and violence. Perhaps that's just the paint, as his subsequent pen and ink work on the early issues of the late 80s Shadow comic is far more dynamic. Frank Miller drowns typically trite (g)libertarian politics and shallow satire with gonzo sci-fi ultra violence and disjointed storytelling to little effect. For years, ever since I read (and loved) The Dark Knight Returns I've been hearing how great this book is, but it really isn't. It felt like a chore to get through, which is really not what an over the top action epic about a psychic ninja should feel like.

I really didn't like this, did I? On Facebook a few days ago, I saw a friend of a friend criticising The Dark Knight Returns and other works by Miller for his art. Which is not the obvious criticism I would think of making about his work. His main failings surely are as a writer. The few times I've tried to read any of his Sin City work, I've found myself repelled by the awfulness of the poorly written hardboiled noir cliches. I don't even like The Dark Knight Returns anymore. It's currently up for sale on amazon, if anyone else wants it.

Ian Watson – Space Marine

It's difficult to imagine that Ian Watson didn't have tongue firmly in cheek when writing this gloriously trashy extravaganza. Reading like an amalgamation of different bits of the then current Warhammer 40,000 universe circa '91 (Necromunda, Space Marines, Tyranids, Squats etc.), the narrative seems to take a perverse delight in coming up with ever greater excess with which to confront its thuggish protagonists, climaxing with an absurd scene of self mutilation. 

Despite what we might believe when we're 13, the gothic future of total war and nihilistic fascism that is Warhammer 40,000 isn't especially profound, and Ian Watson's hyperbolic prose seems perfectly suited to simultaneously indulging and sending up the absurd machismo of its characters. Don't get me wrong, I did love this book! If I describe it as adolescent that's meant as a compliment! By the time it was originally published, I think I'd already lost whatever passing interest I'd had in the games it was inspired by, but the universe the games designers came up with within which to set their games was still fascinating. I never read this at the time, but picked it up recently in Oxfam. Reading it now, I can't help but take it mainly as a horrible black joke on the fictional Warhammer universe, and by extension on the adolescents who enjoyed it. It's as if it's saying, "This is the world you find such fun: And it's meaningless! And it's really stupid!"

With both of these reviews, I remember being somewhat out of step with what all the other reviewers on amazon were saying. Of course, we're all entitled to like things in our own ways, but it's still hard to imagine anyone missing the tone of Ian Watson's contribution to the world of Warhammer 40,000. In his own words, he apparently had 'enormous mad fun in broodingly, Gothically, luridly going over the top', when writing this and his Inquisition War books. Clearly though, within the context of the game world, there are readers who take the kind of fascistic machismo the Space Marines represent entirely at face value. Which is a little scary in some ways. To be fair, when I was 12, I'm sure that I didn't notice the extent to which Watson was non-too subtly just taking the piss out of the world he was being paid to write about, but that's ok. I was 12 at the time.

I'm currently just over 40 pages into Swastika Night, Katharine Burdekin's 'what if Hitler won the war' dystopia from 1937. The introduction makes great play of comparing her novel to Orwell's 1984, a reasonable comparison, but there are other useful comparisons we can make. Her medieval Nazi future history also reminds me of the childish world of Warhammer 40,000. The text draws a comparison with the militaristic world of Sparta, underlining the point that the critique contained in her novel is directed not only at Nazism, but at a larger culture of masculinity and violence. I don't think I'm the first to notice that at the heart of this game world - a world which after all was designed solely as a landscape within which there would be constant war, thus justifying the table top conflicts its consumers reenact - is something deeply unpleasant, redolent of many of the worst aspects of humanity.

*

...and here I'll continue to chart my disillusionment with the work of Grant Morrison

These fragments would appear to have themes in common.

In the recently published Batman, Inc. #6 our hero singlehandedly fights an entire building of his enemy's foot soldiers, whilst the voice Talia, his former lover and leader of the global terrorist organisation Leviathan gloats to him over a hidden microphone. There's a clear class argument being made. Bruce Wayne is criticised for his 'patronising attempts to elevate the poor', whilst Talia herself gives such people a 'purpose' through providing 'guns and slogans to chant'. The use of Talia and Leviathan has very obvious real world analogues. Talia is never given a clear ethnicity or religion, but it's clear that the character is descended from Sax Rohmer's villain Sumuru. Her villainy is elided with an identification with an ill defined 'East' as well as her femininity. It's not much of a stretch to compare her global criminal/terrorist empire Leviathan to the fantasies many commentators have indulged in about Al qaeda.

Talia's final threat presents Batman with a typical villain's dilemma, ordering him to choose between saving a city (Gotham), or his son, (Damian), but who cares about that. It's all part of the typical superhero narrative. What leaped out at me though was the language in which her threat to Gotham was framed: 'When the global economy shifts. The 21st century belongs to me. ...The U.S. economy will stagger and fall.' So, the threat is explicitly framed in economic terms, entirely in line with hysterical right wing fears about the so called decline of 'the West'. This is a superhero narrative explicitly in defence of Western hegemony and crudely defined economic power. Obviously, Morrison places this in the mouth of a villain, so perhaps his intention is to parody such hysterical rhetoric. Certainly, much of Morrison's work has displayed an ambivalence to established hierarchies and power structures. This isn't The Invisibles, though, and I'm finding little sense of irony here. For all his undoubted narrative flair, this is still a relatively straightforward superhero adventure, in which Talia has been labelled a villain in a largely uncomplicated manner. The threat to Gotham only really works if on some level we can take it seriously. Perhaps Morrison will complicate some of this as his extended run on the character seems to be finally reaching some kind of conclusion, but it strikes me that it is actually nothing more than yet more evidence for how Morrison's creative vision has been subsumed by modern corporate rhetoric and ideology. After more than 5 years, I'm not going to give up on his Batman story now, which has certainly had it's moments, but I think I will be glad when it's finally over.