Review: Bounce (Matthew Syed)

 

Full disclosure: the picture above is from MumsNet. Now I know how my dad felt when he started agreeing with Billy Bragg on Question Time.

Sharing common ground with a website for surfing mums wasn't the only eyebrow-raising moment for me when it came to Bounce. In journalist and ex-table tennis World Champion Matthew Syed's analysis of contemporary sporting culture, quotes from Dragon's Den's Duncan Bannatyne and literary novelist Howard Jacobsen  feature on the same cover.

 

What's next? I thought, thumbing through pages. Roy Keane, secret football managerial genius? Gillette are the root cause of Roger Federer's superlative tennis career? Drugs should be made legal in sport?

Actually that last one is in the book.

I read much of this with varying degrees of surprise. Syed gleefully informs his audience as early as possible - i.e. the opening chapter - that much of his world-conquering status was predicated on living in a suburb in Reading, and his efforts since that point can be traced back to that single street.

 

Success, says Syed, is predominantly based on equality of opportunity - even now something of a controversial idea, until you realise how far off many institutions are from the things he is talking about. His assertion is that simply providing the right facilities, open to all, is enough - in his case, a shed where any member of his table tennis club could practice. The rest, as Syed's life illustrates, comes down to regular practice and enjoyment of whatever it is you're doing.
 

Some of the ideas, such as the oft-quoted 10,000 hours theory (courtesy of Outliers' Malcolm Gladwell), are backed up with compelling rhetoric and excellent examples. The most successful debunking occurs with Syed analysing the young years of Wolfgang Mozart and finds that, contrary to the found opinion that he was a 'born genius', he was the product of an intensely driven father who trained the young Mozart from his baby years. As for genius, Mozart had been writing music since the age of 5, when he created Andante in C - nothing more profound than 15 solid years of practice.

 

But it's the less fashionable stuff that really creates an impression. Syed discusses at length the career of minister Norman Peale, a New Yorker who is widely credited with creating the world's first self-help book which claimed belief in almost anything can both reduce stress and improve performance.

 

One of the best, and most refreshing elements of Bounce is the author's unapologetically open outlook to all manner of ideas, even the stuff generally perceived as weird or uncool. The terms 'self help' and  'life coaches' are deservedly treated with contempt by many not due to their spiritually empty nature, but their clear lack of evidence-based reasoning, with little recognition of the historical precedents. Amongst many, the profession ranks alongside televangelism for all-out nonsense, and appears outmoded in thought.

 

And so he deserves great credit for including a man like Peale, not only for the historical precedent but for the ripple effects felt throughout professional sport today. It's fair to say Peale's theories enabled a greater scientific understanding of what affects sportsmen, and after Glenn Hoddle's dalliance with Eileen Drewery, later derided as a crackpot, it should escape no-one's attention that England manager Roy Hodgson has returned to the well (albeit for professional, rather than amateur, assistance) to employ professional sports psychologist Steve Peters for England's World Cup 2014 campaign.   

 

Arguably best of all, is the manner in which Syed makes the theory flesh in all sorts of fascinating ways. On an investigation into Kenyan genes and their effects on long distance running, the former Olympic champion is found living a humble lifestyle in a tent with his wife - quite the unconscious comment on sporting contemporaries such as Lewis Hamilton and Wayne Rooney. Such eye for detail belies his second career as a sports journalist. And in one of the book's more sombre episodes, Syed goes to visit a former East German athlete whose life changes - literally - following her indoctrination into the East German Olympic training program as a young woman.

 

He balances this genuine tragedy alongside another of his counterintuitive questions with emotional good sense and some panache - should all drugs be made safe and legal to use in athletics? The success of the chapter can be found in the sensitive way Syed handles the anonymous brutality of a Cold War state with a more contemporary flavour. Unlike many in his field, he's an excellent moralist - ironically because it forms no part of his outlook, becoming invisible in his conclusions. 

 

The foundation for this book's success can be found in one of Syed's own anecdotes, retelling his unfortunate thrashing in the first round at the 2008 Olympics. Afterwards, he's informed he focused on the event and the outcome too much. It makes no grand statements, seeks no unassailable positions; it has a frankly terrible front cover. But in focusing on the details, the conclusion takes care of itself - and that has broader repercussions for all of us.

 

 

Gabriel Garcia Marquez 1927 - 2014 

 

During the latter stages of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's masterpiece One Hundred Years of Solitude, a character returns from the dead. His reason? Loneliness. 

 

Whilst that in itself is a funny and sharply insightful remark, it almost feels like a sleight of hand trick to deceive the most intelligent of readers. Ignoring the metaphorical intent for a moment, consider: a man returns from death, and no one really bats an eyelid when he provides an explanation.

 

The novel is stuffed with clever allusions which are partly illusory in this way - how Garcia Marquez managed to build a state of normality out of the strangest happenings is the book's foundation, and was probably created from two founts - his grandmother, whose deadpan style is recounted in Saldivar Dasso's Garcia Marquez: Journey From The Seeds.

 

The second comes from history itself and there's no doubt a man of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's wit noticed that the fuenta of his novel could be taken from numerous streams of life. The banana massacre, one of the very few episodes laced with anger venomous wit, actually happened in 1928 in Ciénaga, Colombia.  

 

In this novel, death, like everything else, is treated simply as an event in a circular existence, and it feels now as though, particularly with regards to mortality, Garcia Marquez was writing about the novel itself as well as the history of his country and its inhabitants. David Nicholson's 1970 review makes clear how the novel was considered to be on its uppers in the in the decade, and there's a revealing chapter in Gore Vidal's Selected Essays which reveals the newly created chasms in reading habits of east coast Americans via the NY Times bestseller list.

In short, a very rapid advancement in media, television had done for much of contemporary literature - or so it was thought. It's particularly ironic that the autocratic governments popping up all over South America contrived to produce some of the most joyous and freethinking writing seen in the 20th century, including the Kerouacs et al of the 50s.

Marquez had been at the forefront of that vanguard, working as a journalist in Barranquilla and then Caracas, Venezuela as a columnist and the principal reason for the near-airless gap between him and his characters throughout his career is surely down to these formative years. Through sheer practice, Marquez had become the writer's writer.

 

One Hundred Years is the only Nobel-winning book I've read more than once. On a sliding scale of 'chore' to 'joy to read', the latter is definitely the permanent resting place for this book. I first read the book before going to university and at the time enjoyed the stories for their ridiculous natures.

 

I read it again aged 21 after graduating and then I enjoyed the subtexts; having three years of looking at the ingredients, not the cake, had really changed my outlook to all sorts of literature, and I became a bit of a snob for it.

 

Describing my thoughts now, I still love the same things about the book but age - I'm 30 this year - has helped me marry the dual elements above through reading a larger array of books, from pop culture through to inscrutably weird. That cyclical journey, that on the face has no overtly changed from 12 years ago - is an enduring reason of my love for Marquez's finest work; because, at the end, I can relate to what he is saying, and why he is saying it.

Picture thanks to PicLab

NW

Zadie Smith

I'm listening to a guy called Kanda Bongo Man on Spotify right now and he's made me think. How many people from the DRC are likely to read a book review written by a white British guy on the internet? If everyone had access to the internet, a PC/laptop, tablet or phone, would my review of Zadie Smith's NW make it into their daily lives? If not why not?

 

More generally who reads book reviews? What does this charming branch of arts journalism exist for (I am not doing arts journalism FYI)? Are those readers black or white? Are they educated? Europeans, East Asians, Africans? Who is interested in this stuff? Is it relevant and why?

 

I suggest an amazing paradox is at work here. A medium that is both ignorant of human existence yet created for and by humans to interact with, opening up preserves to all sorts of visitors. To me, arts literature is vital. It informs me when I walk through the Ancient City in Rome or watch a Brecht play with friends in Salford. But, returning to my original point, I'm the sort of guy that I imagine ingesting this stuff. What about Kanda Bongo Man?  

 

I'd be fascinated to see the average hour on the internet from a guy working in a souk in Algiers for example. Equally, I'd be curious to see if the 30 year old Sydney businesswoman looks at the pages I think she'll look at when she gets back from her day at work. Guess there's interesting cultural perks for those guys checking your emails at GCHQ after all.

     

Humans, like every other species with a brain, are after all creatures of habit, and there is a natural and easy tendency to go for what we know, as long as that does not cause us emotional or physical pain. I'm still not sure that advances in technology will ultimately broaden many worldviews; instead, they will only give us easier access to the things we love already.

 

And that's why I loved reading NW. I've been a fan of Zadie Smith's style for some time now since reading her first novel White Teeth, and that's mainly down to her, in my eyes, exceptional skill at prying open complex cultural habits and transactions with the delicacy of a pearl fisherman, and documenting what's to be found inside. Information is Smith's stock and trade, and she wields it with a precision that I haven't found in many other writers.

 

It's present in her ear for her fellow Londoners dialects, so ripe that its pungency assails your nostrils, and in her topographical mastery of her city, tugging your sleeve as you navigate a place you (I) have never been to or seen. It's there in her cultural bookmarks; the trick is helping you understand an alien gesture, like buying a tabloid and broadsheet, and then revealing the thought processes deftly, like a street magician plying all of his best tricks before your eyes. 

 

That escape from a culture, a series of habits, is also present in much of Smith's work, and in Natalie/ Keisha Blake she finds the best foil yet to tease out the darkest desires of a historical people. I liked her handling of On Beauty's Howard Belsey - his innate fallibility was revealed with a chastening lack of respect for its subject, and it's easy to feel Smith is closer, although ultimately no less clinical, with her subjects here. 

 

Blake's arc starts in the Eighties in a high-rise in NW London, goes on a brief sojourn to Manchester for her formative years, and returns to the nest for the beginning of her professional career, her marriage and the birth of her children. Throughout a spiritual unrest pervades the post-it note chapters; their brevity and layering of detail upon detail lends a restless, anxious air that Leah's story, Keisha's best friend, does not have. 

 

And as the tower of details becomes ever higher, some inevitably fall off, floating past their antecedents, and a connective loop is established between the actions of a woman apparently rent in two by career, family (her son and daughter, and then her mother, sisters and brothers) and locale. And all of it delivered in a hovering indirect third person that observes its subjects anguishes and desires with a delicacy that saw her compared to Dickens. It's a 'performance' in the theatrical sense, and I think it deserved all the plaudits it received.

 

Suffice to say I was equally taken with Smith's rendition of skinny white girl Leah and the unfortunates Nathan and Felix - although unfortunate in different ways. But this is getting pretty long. The source of my admiration for this book, though, is ever-present in small details; in the bus stop outside Felix's dad's house, in Nathan selling a Tube ticket outside his local station, and in the herky-jerky opening chapters of Leah's encounter with Shar. 

 

There's a sense of being there. Of touching and dealing with things that exist, and an invitation to observe the things described from your own home and background. This book stands up to every perspective, regardless of background or set of interests. It exudes so much confidence that it could only have been written by someone at the peak of their abilities, which is exactly where I believe Zadie Smith can be located right now.

 

Thanks for the book London Fictions

Twenty fourteen (2014) will be EXCITING. If you want it to be. I want it to be. Here's what I'm excited about.

Lord of the Flies - in ballet

 

That's right. Matthew Bourne, him of the winningly solid pudgeface (not a word but it ought to be) and sixth form gelled fringe brings Golding's societal piece to the stage. I know almost nothing about ballet, besides watching a very impressive Natalie Portman performance in the very impressive Black Swan back in 2011, but I've caught snippets of Bourne's version of that (check out the trailer here) which I wish I'd seen live as it looks excellent.

Equally LotF was never one of the books I got to read at school but I've since atoned for that criminal gap in my formal education and am 'intrigued' to say the least what he will do with characters like Piggy. Extra incentive, if needed: it starts round the corner from me at the Lowry Theatre in Salford.

The Premier League

 

Being a Manchester City fan, I've enormously enjoyed the first half of this English season, watching a renascent side destroy opposition defences (my highlights, since you asked, were the 6-3 v Arsenal, the 3-2 v Bayern away, and of course that first Davey Moyes derby) at home.

But it's no real wonder the Premier League managed to blow even its own astonishing rights deals out of the water when there is finally some sporting drama on Saturdays again. Who's going down? Who will win the league? Will Levy keep Sherwood? What is going on with Mata? Will Thud go to the World Cup? And will Luis Suarez ever just bundle one in off his arse? The quality's great, but the stories are many, varied and seemingly endless. We might not see another one like it for a bit, so catch it if you can.

Dave Eggers does Bill Bryson

One of my favourite ever books a historical collection of food writing, in all of its literary forms, in The New Yorker magazine. Composed of pieces by writers, not cooks or chefs, I quickly realised that you don't need to know your subject as much as needing to know how to write - but some subject knowledge is important.

I'm guessing 'some' is precisely the right amount for Dave Eggers. The novelist formally collects his memoirs of his trips to Thailand, the Sudan and the northeastern states of America amongst many, many others into Visitations, a piece of work I will presume to contain more than its fair share of breezy metaphysical rhetoric slung around  'some' interesting perspectives on, say, mini shrines on the street corners of Bangkok.

Obviously Eggers is known for his forays into parts of the world untouched by much of the professional writing class, and his sharp eye and goofy wit will undoubtedly bring to life much of a planet still perused through the 'World' section of broadsheet newspapers.

Visitations is out in November 2014

The Men Are Back In Town

 

To misquote Thin Lizzy, but it sort of feels like they never left. The hardest woikin' band 'n sho'bidness has got to be these guys right now, who are on for their fifth album in as many years in between tours. Anybody can knock an album together in under a fortnight - several bands made it sound like a skill in the early noughties - but The Men's range has broadened in parallel with their ever-longer tours, and New Moon is a soulful echo of Neil Young's early years, without losing their belt and braces steely punk sound around the fringes. For a band that appears hellbent on challenging normal concepts of time, the record's title - Tomorrow's Hits - feels entirely appropriate.

*!* Tomorrow's Hits is released on Sacred Bones Records *!*

An Oscars Worthy of an Academy Award

 

For those complaining that the Academy Awards is getting carried away with populism, the decision to drop the aforementioned name last year and replace it with the catchier and more vacuous 'Oscars' was the proverbial red rag. OK so: I enjoyed Silver Linings and Bradley Cooper is deceptively good at this acting stuff. I admit it.

Anyone still out there?

Anyway, onto the American mantel goes Oscar next to buddies Tony and Emmy (what's up with a Golden Lion guy?) and does the debate over whether this is an awards or an entertainment product intensify? Who knows and it's probably a silly argument anyway - the irony won't be lost on anyone when the inevitable drama ensues from some no-hoper claiming the Oscars 'has lost its allure'. All except the Americans of course, who we all know have never understood irony, as long as Woody Allen and Jerry Seinfeld have lived. 

But! What is this garbage, I hear you mumble. Fair point. And now I'll come to it: this year, more than any I can ever remember, I'm sort of excited. Alright, another David O. Russell film (see above for my swooning heart). BUT. What about Steve McQueen, riding into the postmodern American West, hat not on head, cardie round shoulders, shorts above knees, with a film so deserving of superlatives that you can actually use them without fear of unintentional hilarity. Tremendous. Magnificent. Etc. 12 Years A Slave looks rich with promise - and who doesn't want to hear a Steve McQueen acceptance speech?

Elsewhere another of my favourite guys - Alfonso Cuaron - might win something for Gravity (and Sandra Bullock could win another Oscar. Yeah.) And what of films like Blue Is The Warmest Colour, Blue Jasmine, and All Is Lost? Not to mention interesting curios like Upstream Color and Only God Forgives. You can probably count the last two out, sadly. Nevertheless there is - finally - justification for that furious Monday morning scowl and four espressos from your local café after an all nighter getting passionate, alone, with Mr Oscar. About damn time.

Pix thanx to Douban, Style Weekly, The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian and Sky Sports.

Review: Richer Than God (David Conn)

David Conn's portrait of a club, city and sport transformed by money is required reading for any fan

When reading David Conn's odyssey as a fan of football and Manchester City on my flight out to Rome, I recalled an article I read almost by accident one freezing Saturday afternoon whilst Googling my stream of conscience. I'd suddenly realised I had no idea how my cat knew who I was. Or how any other animal knew what its family consisted of, and what it could mate with. The same day, I watched all 12 rounds of Joe Calzaghe vs Roy Jones Jr without really meaning to.

I didn't get a definitive answer, but I did stumble across an interesting New Scientist piece about kin recognition, which theoretically seeks to explain how a family of animals essentially recognise each other as their own, even if they have never met. There's some, largely inconclusive evidence that it definitely exists.

That faintly primal sensation struck a chord with me when reading the book. This is not the same as identifying with a Haruki Murakami character, in an intuitive, sensual way. It's like I was the person writing this book. Everything described about the club, its tumults, its highs and lows, its wild successes and unbelievable farces, of which there are many; I experienced everything in exactly the same way.

It's somewhat fitting that City started life at a church in Gorton under the direction of Anna Connell, both in spirit and form, as leaving aside the puerile contemporary 'cathedral' metaphors garnered by Sky Sports and the like, support does mean a community of people held fast by steadfast belief in one thing.

It also provides a neat jumping off point for analysing the slow disintegration of the more Corinthian aspects of the game. Conn's forays into the grimy world of early Premier League club policy, and their machinations to slip the grips of an amateurish, complacent Football Association to glean enormous profits for small groups of very wealthy men (and women in the case of Nina Bracewell-Smith) make for revelatory and deeply troubling reading.

Conn's forensic style is well tailored to the broader, less personal elements of the story; how a sport became a business, how whole demographics were priced out of a game they loved and grew up on. The lens pulls back for a wider picture of economic malaise in late 20th century Britain, and how its northern English cities were cut to ribbons by a Conservative government hellbent on implementing economic ideology over pragmatic, means-tested solutions to age old problems.

Walking through east Manchester on the way to the Etihad, newly named and spruced up with Arab money, Conn's nuanced points on wealth distribution jar. How does a local government win finance for a one-off sporting event, as Manchester did with the Commonwealth Games in 2002, and the funds to build an enormous stadium, but it cannot win the same funds to regenerate an area classed as the fifth poorest in the entire country?

Conn's bafflement at the impossibility of City winning the biggest every lottery resonates in every fan of the club, and its this sense of emotional contradiction that really made the book mine personally. Much derided, and infamously coined by that footballing blunderbuss Kevin Keegan, is the City fan's belief in their club's ever-present status as one of the movers and shakers; that, under the heaving weights of debt, inept administration and such essentials as a working gym (Conn's interviews show just bare the cupboard was before the coming of Mansour), a massive club was waiting to take its rightful place at the top table of the league.

In this way the story brings home a familial element; Conn's descriptions of his trips to see City destroy the genuinely great AC Milan and Manchester United 4-0 in the 1970s are stories I've heard from my dad, and thus the emotional connection is given form by bricks, cement, boots and mud.

To his great credit Conn does not tread lightly on history. Former players like Bell, Book and Summerbee are rightly held as the heroes City fans revere them as, but he decimates the myth of the latter-day Franny Lee, a darling in the Championship-winning Sixties but a ruthless corporate man come to oil City's wheels for the slippery rails of the London Stock Exchange in the Nineties. The interview with Lee feels like a watershed moment in Conn's, and the club's, life, and subsequently paints Lee's predecessor, the miserly, scrimping Peter Swales in slightly less darker hues than many fans held him in their hearts. Former owner Thaksin Shinawatra, the disgraced Thai Prime Minister, by turns appears a deeply cynical and perhaps dishonest individual, and becomes another nail in the coffin of Conn's unwavering belief.

To the modern day then, and perhaps Sheikh Mansour provided Conn with the last nudge he needed to annotate his odyssey in the shadow of his god football club. He is no less objective in assessing the merits of a man living thousands of miles, literally and figuratively, from the destitute slums of east Manchester.

And here Conn's assessment is again eerily close to that of thousands; four years in, with an FA Cup, a Premier League title, almost £1 billion spent on footballers, a wholesale renovation of a sagging administrative structure, the greatest irony is that this distant billionaire is both competent and caring of the history he has bought. It feels too good to be true and, given City's former laughable travails (given sharp form by the songs Conn relays - and fans still sing to a title-winning team - about love, death and nothing in between), the emotional schism is again laid bare; a massive club's continuous success should not be blinked at by its own fans, and yet it still is.

In the final pages Conn returns to the roots of football, and visits Andy Walsh of FC United, those disenfranchised, debased fans of City's greatest rivals, and the yardstick which the blue half beat itself half to death with in the darkest days. Walsh talks about the diminished role of fans in the modern game; the idea of shareholder power and a club owned by its fans (as is the case in Germany and Spain). Even with one of the world's oldest and best supported clubs, only 2,000 attended FC United's first meeting at the Manchester Apollo, more befitting of punk than prawn sandwiches.

In a circular fashion the game now returns to its roots; made by normal working people for those people, but with the skyline now dominated not by the factories of Victorian England but the skyscrapers and towers of a country weaned off manufacturing and onto financial services. Earlier in the book Conn makes the point that Germany, still an EU powerhouse, places manufacturing at the heart of its economy, with banks providing the oil to smooth the gears. Manchester, football and Britain now occupy the inverse position, with actual oil now helping turn the gears on a once-great football club with little left to give to its unwavering supporters.

'At a football club, there's a holy trinity - the players, the manager and the supporters. Directors don't come into it. They are only there to sign the cheques,' said Bill Shankly, born a century ago. David Conn's book captures a culture that is older than the oldest club, that gives rise to ancient urges that ripple through Shankly's unflinching assessment, and answers with an admirable lack of grandeur, what happened to a game once described as 'beautiful'.

Picture courtesy of Without A Dream In Our Hearts

The Prague Cemetery - Review

Umberto Eco returns to the scene of his crimes to charming (and exhausting) effect

In a typically brief foreword to his critically acclaimed first trio of short stories, the Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges once claimed that 'it is a laborious madness and an impoverishing one, the madness of composing vast books - setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes.'

True to form, he never wrote in fiction anything longer than a short story, and some of these were bracingly quick reads - four or five pages. Often I'll read something and think of that quote, which is surely the ultimate litmus test of any serious writer, but it seems an uncanny critique of Umberto Eco's work - ironic, as his style strongly derives from him.

The Prague Cemetery is more than 400 pages, and was hailed as a return to form when it was first released. It quickly sold over a million copies in - guess what - South America and Europe. And I enjoyed it a lot, but probably for precisely the reasons a few have suggested it slightly flabby and supported by its sense of self-importance, rather than anything traditional like character.

Eco is a semiotician, and a world-renowned one at that, so you can expect some gymnastics in vocabulary, some loose unravelling of a thread that dangles pointlessly but prettily. It's a little unfortunate however that this story has already been told - by Eco himself, in a previous novel.

A tale of conspiracies abound in fin-de-siècle Europe, Eco weaves a charming tapestry of real-life characters around the fictional creation of Simone Simonini and his alter ego Abbe Dalla Piccola. Simonini is the grandson of the (real) Italian soldier and captain of the same name who becomes the spider at the centre of a pulsating web of intrigue, a master forger who sells his trade to Italian generals, French spies and Russians who use his gifts for fabrication to influence real life events.

And so we gallivant round Europe with young Simonini as he sinks fleets, helps imprison the elites and kills the innocent. Europe becomes a brothel with everyone screwing everyone, from the Freemasons to the Jesuits to the 19th century's favourite villain, the Jews. There is an exceptionally black mass that may be the high(low)light of the book, depending on your taste.

It's all in a day's work for an antihero but we've been here before. Eco's fascination with the invented influencing the everyday popped up in 1988 under the name Foucault's Pendulum, when a conspiracy theory propagated by three publishers infatuates the wrong sort of people, leading to murder and dizzying levels of mystery.

It's a shame that this isn't quite as good as that book but this is both a clever and educating read. Eco suggested in an interview in 2012 that people were 'bored' and 'wanted to be challenged' in their lives, hence the prevailing popularity of conspiracies.

For the same reasons, you can easily become bored with this book. If you're not a fan of late 19th century European history this will really drag, saturated as it is with both the events and characters of the time. It's occasionally difficult to discern what is relevant to the story and what isn't and some of the recipes propagated by characters like Alexandre Dumas have more flavour than the numerous villains who flit in and out of the shadows. Much like the corkscrew nature of the plot, you might have difficult keeping their names straight.

The Prague Cemetery is a lovely wind-up toy and, depending on your appreciation (I'm a fan) you'll indulge the author to keep winding long after the toy has run down its gears. It would certainly make a fascinating five minute conversation.

Picture courtesy of Non Modern Blog

The Complete Stories by Truman Capote: A Review

I nearly called this The Truman Show. I just couldn't go through with it. Sorry everyone.
 
Reynolds Price's introduction to the Modern Classic version of Truman Capote's Complete stories thrusts the diminutive Southern gentleman alongside the globetrotting bar-room aficionado and occasional war correspondent Ernest Hemingway. When I think of what I know about Hemingway and how busy he seemed, all the damn time, Capote is not a comparative figure in my mind's eye. He's just a very intelligent guy who had a fine eye for detail and character and spun woozily evocative yarns around his upbringing and New York living.

And yet I hugely prefer his careful, refined style, not effete as such but deeply interested in a feminine way for me. Capote's style seems perverse in streaks; never asexual but capable of occupying both genders in back to back tales.

The cover is a charmer; a precious young Truman stares intensely into a camera, wispy fringe combed across freckled brow and his clear blue eyes fix you in your place as a cigarette stub dangles from fingers that it feels insulting to describe as lithe, because it's a lazy term and this man would never appreciate slothliness in word or wit.

Twenty vignettes set all over America make up this collection, ranging as far south as Texas and as far north as New York. He's a writer I've always seen in New York thanks to his toothy personality, a fetish for etiquette and an alleged amphetamine habit that would stop Hemingway's bull in Pamplona. And indeed most of my favourite tales, including the exquisitely sinister Miriam and the famous Headless Hawk, are set in that snowflaked city.

As a Southerner, his taste and touch for gothic is refined and seems to possess an ancient wisdom. Elmore Leonard once advised aspiring writers never to describe the weather 'just because it's there': sound advice, and Capote's landscapes creep around their subjects almost tenderly. He has a particular talent for the night. 'Tall trees, misty, painted pale by malicious moonshine towered steep on either side without a break or clearing', make for an oppressive backdrop in A Tree Of Night, a sinister story of a lonely young woman travelling alongside a freak show compere and her savant partner, (relationship never clarified).

Like the sticky Southern heat Capote grew up in, the writing is regularly uncomfortably close to the skin. A surgical knife seems to hovers over each character, trimming and distilling a cast of dozens with a few short, sharp strokes. His brutal treatment of Walter Ranney in Shut A Final Door would be shocking if it weren't so unconcerned with itself, instead annotating his pain with merciless aestheticism via a silent hand. And it seems no background, age or indeed culture is beyond his tender grip. The writing feels amazingly tactile, like it had shook hands with its creations and perhaps sat down for coffee before committing their existence to paper.

Preacher's Legend depicts a decrepit Negro in semi-glorious senility, having finally made his peace with his unseen God in the woods near his shack home. Capote's forensic style lifts the tale off the page here - -it's commonplace to point out the inherent hazards involved with a creation of this broadness and contemporary whims would doubtless cause a younger writer to ironically stretch further than Capote probably did in his depiction. Instead what's captured is almost bitterly honest and gently funny in its exposure of loneliness and the beliefs that gather, like dust, in the spaces between living.

What really stands out is his almost tender appraisal of the most subtle of emotional changes in his characters throughout - I imagined him combing his delicate fingers through that fine hair as he stripped and planed for the depth and dimension that's so insistent in his style. The omniscient position he assumed at the hub of East Coast society in the Fifties and Sixties no doubt played into the development of his style and there's equally no doubt of the relationship each held throughout the author's professional life.

But the most fascinating aspect of all of this was considering where the man drew his abilities from; paradoxically his social nature, his known propensity for gossip and discussion of those around him enabled him to draw on deep wells of understanding of human character that a more reserved individual would never have access to. That alone is not a talent, but these stories feel as fresh today as they did fifty years ago. The man himself would surely tell you that that is a price worth paying.


Pictures courtesy of Penguin.com

The Rise and Rise of the Living Dead

Why an empty vessel makes a brilliant metaphor. Too blasé?

Hordes of people are mindlessly grazing all over the planet. In New York, in the Midwest, in fictional towns in the north of England. And those hordes of people are being watched by other hordes of people, mindlessly grazing, all over the planet.

Zombies (of course!) have always had a particularly strong bond with their human brethren. In the age of phablets, multi-purpose televisions and '3D' films (now you don't have to use your eyes' ability to perceive depth!) we're arguably closer than ever to becoming the walking dead.

But that's enough Romero chat. Why the popularity? The Walking Dead, one of the most successful non-cable shows ever in the US, attracts so many viewers Barack Obama's electoral boffs placed ads before, during and after it (could be a very tongue-in-cheek statement by Democrats but I doubt that). World War Z, Hollywood's filming of the exceptionally popular Max Brooks novel has almost twenty million views on YouTube. And in the space recently vacated by Being Human BBC3 recently aired In The Flesh, a rather creepy bit of work examining a small northern town's reaction to the homecoming of a 'cured' zombie teenager to his doting parents and sort-of militant, mostly confused sister.

Steve Ovett: great in everything. Watch him everyone!

The last of these shows presented an interesting picture of a town suffering under the indifference of a London government predominantly concerned with the nation's towns and cities, with its citizens clubbing together to form poorly-armed bands of guerrilla fighters in an effort to protect them from the undead.

For anybody that saw it, there was plenty of interesting 'metaphorical action' here but my favourite part was the more social element. Roarton was obviously based on towns in the north of Britain and readers of the likes of John Harris will be particularly interested in the clear allusion to towns and cities like Bradford, Burnley and Sunderland, who have been on the receiving end of, essentially, experiments in cuts in public sector employment alongside private regeneration, as well as new migrants coming to work (or occasionally not) from mainland Europe in recent years.
But the bigger efforts gnawed a different nerve - fears that many are understandably afraid to confront. Romero's Living Dead series was mainly concerned with (hold your breath, long archaic terms ahead) globalised capitalist society, able to get whatever it wanted whenever and subsequently falling into a dazed stupor (breathe).
World War Z is much more interested in more everyday concerns that tap into deep, unrealised fears about government complacency and general competency to do the right things well for their populations. Relationships between nations on lots of levels - diplomatic, economic and military are examples of things that author Max Brooks chews over. It feels contemporary and the zombie saturation provides a great conduit for terrible dangers through relentless demonstrations of mindless and chaotic behaviour.

It's obvious why World War Z is attracting so much interest when you look at the underlying themes and compare to real life. Looking at political engagement for example tells a story. In the UK voting habits have changed dramatically as many voters from all walks of life become disengaged from a crust of society that is perceived as both self-interested and satisfied. There's also less votes recorded year on year relative to population growth. That's the sort of comment Brooks etched deeply into Z.



One of the scariest endings you'll ever see on film.

But that's enough of the boring stuff. It's unsurprising that it's sold almost a million copies but the satisfaction's derived from an inquisitive tone that's dare I say... sensible. Which is weird really, when every other zombie effort falls into straight horror/gore or non-too-subtle grabs for an intellectualism for saps. Sadly, the film looks like being a Brad Pitt disaster movie. Take some sunglasses - messages concerning themes of the above are likely to be delivered 'with bombast'. 

I'm sure many other genre buffs lament over similar points, but the sheer puerility of much of what's delivered in contemporary horror is dispiriting. Which is why I'm (tentatively) excited about the recent streak of entertainment based around zombies. OK so prosthetics have got better, but that's not really why it's so exciting. The original Rec (above right), although now nearly five years old, presents a brilliant dissection of a bitter, isolated group of people in contemporary Spanish society who rely on hearsay and gossip all delivered through the medium of reality TV. A lovely piece of work and subtly smart.
Of course there's a great chance I'll be making the same point in another five years, except this time with... what? Meyer has successfully eviscerated vampirism, presenting their fractured selves in public as ancient versions of contemporary society. And we had ghosts for a bit (oh hi Takashi Shimizu, got any re-remakes coming up?) which were very scary when done in a particular way (Japanese, poorly conditioned hair, female) Forget their tiresome supernatural forebears - I want zombies to take over the world. You might enjoy it.

 

We Need To Talk About Literary Fiction

The Bell Jar is coming to a coffee morning near you. But could Faber's 'repackaging' open the door to more classics being read?

The Bell Jar, a book I'd described as 'discombobulating', particularly the oft-quoted intro, was repackaged last week and released back into a world with its nose in a Kindle, reading Jackie Collins and thinking about who'd be the ideal presenter for Daybreak. Right?

And in probably less significant news that most likely only Guardian Culture section scourers will have observed, journalist Sam Jordison and his band of merry readers have decided on Proust as their next book for their online reading group. This part is devoid of sarcasm, by the way.

It seems to me that these topics interlock with each other and, I think, point to a great, positive future for the classics. I may be committing heresy here but if the Plath experiment goes well, maybe the publishers (Faber) could look at a few more of their untouchables and... well... touch them up a bit.

Regardless of the above however, the new cover is still horrendous. Based on the image to the right, I'm thinking Faber's design team works in a modern version of Frankenstein's lab, attaching jackets from middlebrow authors to more contentious work with all the insane zeal and panache of the eponymous doctor. Or should that be Dr Picoult? Perhaps these ladies will see a boost to their works on the back of Faber's decision to dress Plath's novel in such odd attire, but this new jacket is the equivalent of a Juicy Couture tracksuit.

It's fair to say that repackaging rings alarm bells for all the right reasons, usually. It's the literary equivalent of the 'reboot' that has recently pervaded cinema and particular the comic canon. Of course the bottom line in both industries is, um,  the bottom line and Faber have reported their new cultural positioning of the critically acclaimed proclamations of Esther Greenwood has gone down a storm. And that new Spiderman is way better than all the other ones.

Naturally enough the financial side here's perceived as a bit grubby - 'an increase in revenue', the most un-poetic language in the land. Yet everybody who claims reading as a hobby will have a conscious or unconscious interest in the future of books, and what can be done to refocus eyes and ears around them. Often the last thing of consideration is making the most money possible - and that's seems the right attitude for all sorts of practical reasons.

But all of the words I associate with a book - predominantly sensual terms - still represent the best foot forward vs the odourless, visually unobjectionable tablets gradually glazing eyes over and changing accounting practices in the optometry industry (maybe), and a book should make what it can of the visual element to attract itself to newer readers. Survival is, I guess, otherwise futile.

A lack of third dimension and more than a touch of dogma there, but hard to ignore. In that sense at least I agree with Faber. The other big reason I have for being the only guy in the 'mmm...maybe' camp relates to Jordison's on-going reading group who have made their way through some classics of the Western canon but, so far, nothing as big as Proust.

OK so they're only (only) reading Swann's Way, not the whole collection, but how many people have actually read Proust, Joyce, Eliot - and, for that matter, Plath? I've only read Joyce and Plath, and only one book by each. Here's a more general point; if that's what readers of the Guardian are reading, what about the rest of the country?

I admit something unconscious reared its head and just as quickly disappeared; that something felt sneering and a bit contemptuous. Basically prejudice - as if Proust should be for reading groups! But why? What do I know about reading groups? As soon as I gave this some basic consideration, I realised how foolish I'd been in not distinguishing principles from their practical applications, and perhaps there's an element of this behind the Plath debate.

Generally you don't appreciate a great by swaddling it in the pap Faber have dressed Bell Jar up in, and regardless of the marketing angle it's a strange decision to move a classic into middlebrow territory - yet it could an inspiring one, the bridge some would argue will join the worlds of genre and literary fiction.

OK, so the point is to sell more Bell Jar. But there's social utility here too - we're not talking collateral debt obligations (if anyone's a Michael Lewis fan I apologise for the plagiarism here, but it's an intelligent perspective). If in six months, those reading groups whom I sniffily dismissed are discussing a classic, Faber could justifiably point to a good deed done. It might put several comedians out of a job but would it be so terrible if Sophie Kinsella sold less and Stendhal, Lawrence (D.H), Yeats - i.e. the dark and sombre shelves of Waterstones marked 'classics' - sold relatively more?

Being reasonable, Kinsella, Vincenza et al are never going to go out of print, but a bigger share of readers' shelves claimed for literary fiction would still represent huge progress - and publishers would be back in business with a whole new range of books they could reintroduce to an intellectually starved climate. Plus, less Kindles. I just don't like them, OK?

Maybe it's snobbery or maybe it's protectiveness of what's rightly (my opinion) called a classic. It's a paradox, but it might be best for all, particularly those arguing the loudest, if this debate was parked on the shelf. It's beginning to look as fusty as some of the dust jackets on those works of literature Faber et al want to do something with.