Now You See Him by Eli Gottlieb
This is a fascinating novel by Eli Gottlieb. Nick Framingham is coming to terms with the death of his best friend, Rob Castor, who had seemed to have a stellar career in New York as an author. Not only has Rob committed suicide, but he also murdered his ex-girlfriend Kate Pierce. That would be traumatic for anyone, but Rob’s death is just the first in the series of dominoes that shatters Nick’s life. Lucy, Nick’s wife, has problems with the fact that Nick seems to be absenting himself away from her and the children in the wake of his grief, and is none too impressed when he meets Belinda again, since Belinda was Nick’s first love, as well as Rob’s sister. As his marriage disintegrates, Nick tries to engage with his children, but seems unable to loosen their bond to their mother in any way. This stokes up memories of the distant relationship that he had with his own father. The decline of Nick’s marriage is superbly dealt with by Eli Gottlieb as he takes Nick and Lucy on an all-too familiar journey. As painful as their imminent separation is to Nick, this is nothing compared to the ghosts that rise up from his childhood, as old family secrets seem to threaten his whole concept of identity… This is a beautifully related narrative, although one would have thought that one of the secrets concerning Nick’s past would have been revealed when he first started dating Belinda. There’s much drama to be had in this novel from the death of the prudish conventions that were observed by the previous generation. I found the scene that depicted Kate’s murder to be suitably poetic (since it involved writers as both assailant and victim). Now You See Him is a very compelling novel that never fails to surprise in its relation of Nick’s deepest dark secrets…
Daniel Davies’ The Isle of Dogs V. Denis Robert’s Happiness
Daniel Davies’ The Isle of Dogs is a brilliant debut novel that looks at the relatively new British phenomenon that is dogging. Denis Robert’s Happiness concerns the affair between a writer and a young arts graduate, which depicts similar scenes of seedy sex. In tone, it’s quite similar to a recent episode of the French crime drama Spiral II that looked at Paris’s swinging clubs, and maybe this novel was the inspiration for the episode. Happiness’s press release states the belief that this novel reclaims erotic fiction for men, but I’m afraid that it left me cold. Its structure, which involves the man and woman relating their point of view on opposing pages, is innovative, but I’m not sure that it really works here, since both protagonists are hardly strong characters and are quite anonymous. Denis Robert probably did this on purpose, but it means that the reader has little invested in either of the characters, and doesn’t really care what happens to them. Although Happiness runs to 200 pages, it’s more of a novella in length rather than a novel, since many of the passages don’t fill a page. Since the man is the writer, it feels very much as though he’s in charge, and it’s he who controls and perhaps edit the narrative that his lover writes, as he purloins the notebook from her bag towards the end. Since her narrative continues after this, her thoughts towards the end must be constructed by the writer as they were at the beginning. Although I only recently read this short book recently, I really can’t remember all that much about Happiness, as it didn’t leave much of an impression on me at all.
Daniel Davies’ The Isle of Dogs is similarly structured, as Jeremy Shepherd’s narrative is framed by another writer, and it also involves the seedier side of sex. This is where the similarities end, for where the tone of Happiness is quite draining, The Isle of Dogs is very fresh and raring to go in comparison. It helps that the Shep’s first person narrative is far more engaging than those found in Happiness, probably due to the fact that his thoughts and feelings are more fully reported, and his story is far less disjointed. As well as dogging, The Isle of Dogs concerns the preponderance of CCTV in the current British surveillance culture. Of course, the irony is that one of the main points of dogging is to watch other people having sex, yet Shep and his colleagues always have to be on the watch out for the police that are out to spoil their fun. Arranging liaisons on the internet is convenient, but it does lead to some surprising encounters, such as that between Shep and one of his work colleagues. The Isle of Dogs, as the title perhaps suggests, goes beyond this to become a state of the nation novel, as it also deals with the fractious issue of immigration. Despite the many sex scenes, Daniel Davies would never win the Bad Sex Award, as there is nothing that cloys in his depictions of these liaisons. The Isle of Dogs also contains some wry, arch humour. The only fault that I could find with the novel is that it does veer slightly towards melodrama in the end, but this really does not detract from this fantastic novel too much.
Stonehenge by Rosemary Hill
This is a fascinating account of Stonehenge’s grip on the public imagination. Having recently wandered into The Circus, the circular street designed by John Wood in Bath, I was fascinated to discover that it had been influenced by the ancient monument, and that Wood’s work in turn influenced Oxford Circus and Piccadilly Circus. In addition to this, after recently reading Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol (which explores Freemasonry in depth), I was intrigued to read that Inigo Jones believed that all classical architecture (such as Stonehenge) was derived from King Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem, since this is the building that Freemasons venerate above all others. Since I also lived in Milton Keynes for a few years, I was amazed to find out just how much the building of this new city was influenced by Stonehenge. There are a great many other fascinating revelations to be found within the pages of Rosemary Hill’s Stonehenge, such as the fact that many previous commentators on the site mistakenly came to the conclusion that the momument must have been post Roman, simply because the Romans never mentioned it! Or at least, the Romans never mentioned Stonehenge as far as we know, as they may have written about it in an account which was lost, in the same way that the name of Boudicca was lost in the annals of British history until the rediscovery of Roman accounts during the Renaissance. Rosemary Hill also relates how the story of the Wicker Man became entwined with Stonehenge’s history, along with the Druids. The story of how modern man has tried and failed to replicate the transportation of the stones is most amusing! Rosemary Hill’s Stonehenge is a really great exposition of the monument, and very much stands comparison with Mary Beard’s recent account of Pompeii.
The Dirty South by Alex Wheatle
This is an excellent novel by Alex Wheatle. Dennis Huggins lives in one of the more bourgeois streets of Brixton, and his parents, unlike many of his peers’, are still together. His parents also have good jobs, especially his mother, who works as a legal secretary. However, his father is crippled due to a violent incident from his youth, and Dennis is fascinated by the idea that his father may have been a gangster. Although Dennis’s home background has set him far in advance of his peers at school, he does get bored very quickly by the very limited lessons that are provided at his school, and mucks around while the other students struggle. Dennis’s father has ambitions of him becoming a professor, although Dennis is put off by his nagging, but it appears that his sister Davinia has picked up the academic gene. Not sharing his father’s vision, Dennis leaves school to become a drug dealer, although he does also work in a garage. He and his best friend, Noel, shun hard drugs, and learn to avoid selling to other black men, as this is too risky. However, it’s not all doom and gloom for Dennis, as he sets his heart on the beautiful and articulate Akeisha. Yet the pervading ghetto culture that surrounds him very much influences the way that he treats women, to detrimental effect… Although Dennis would appear to have more choices than his best friend Noel, he doesn’t choose to leave the path that he has always followed, despite being on the receiving end of a violent beating due to it. One of the main themes in the novel is how the culture in Brixton is very much changing, as the local community gradually transforms from being West Indian in character, to African Muslim. Dennis is amazed to see how many Christian peers from his schooldays have taken up Islam, seemingly as a way of rebelling, even although they don’t appear to be all that popular within the local Muslim culture either. Despite their religious conversions, Dennis’s Muslim peers are just as in thrall to the power of money as he, which sets them on course for a very violent confrontation… Alex Wheatle is a very accomplished writer indeed, although it was a bit cheeky of him to include his MC alter ego, Yardman Irie, in the novel! All in all, The Dirty South is a truly brilliant novel told in the Brixton vernacular. The Dirty South very much makes me want to hunt down Wheatle’s previous books, especially since the events of East of Acre Lane seem to have been referred to.
Pompeii by Mary Beard
Mary Beard’s exposition of Pompeii was undoubtedly one of the best books that I read last year. Indeed, so enamoured was my father of the book that he bought 3 copies, as he’d recently been on a field trip to Pompeii, and knew that my uncle and I are also greatly enthused by classical history. I very much love Mary Beard’s sublime narrative style, so it did not take me long to consume Pompeii at all. So I was already very familiar with the text before Profile sent me a review copy of the paperback.
Mary Beard skilfully dispels many of the myths that have built up around the destruction of the city, and casts a shrewd eye on how the surviving evidence may have been corrupted by restoration attempts. For example, there is the famous example of the bodies of a family found trapped in a house, one of whom was a heavily pregnant woman: one of the bodies had its lower premolars incorrectly glued into the sockets of its upper incisors during restoration, which other observers could have mistaken as botched Latin dentistry. Skeletons found on the site may well have been later looters trying to break into buried houses, rather than their owners perishing in an attempt to escape. The fact that there was so much decorating going on the city at the time of the eruption may have been due to tremors in the days leading up to the volcanic explosion, rather than a hangover from the large earthquake recorded in Pompeii 17 years earlier. Even the actual date of the eruption, and the closeness of Pompeii to the sea at the time still seem to be up for debate. There’s also the fact that much of the site was devastated by Allied bombing in 1943, so many of the ‘remains’ we see today have effectively been rebuilt. Indeed, many of the remains originally discovered in the mid 18th century have now given way to entropy, so what’s left is gradually being lost. A lot of the houses were named after their supposed inhabitants, but some of the evidence, such as the discovery of signet rings inside them, forms quite flimsy evidence.
One thing is for sure though: that Mary Beard has brilliantly brought the city and its inhabitants back to life. Pompeii is also superbly presented by Profile: there are many lavish colour plates along with grayscale illustrations of art and artefacts from the city. Mary Beard’s Pompeii is undoubtedly one of the best books of this or any other year.
Violence by Slavoj Zizek
This is a fantastic treatise on the subject of violence, very much aided by the fact that Slavoj Zizek’s prose is always very lively and informative. Zizek also employs examples from popular cinema to illustrate his work, which very much adds to its readability. You can’t really argue against a book that draws sublime parallels with Hitchcock’s Psycho, and Walter Benjamin’s famous interpretation of Paul Klee’s painting Angelus Novus. My favourite section of Violence was Antinomies of Tolerant Reason, which very ably deals with the intricacies of the Israeli/Palestinian debate, and which should, in my opinion, be read by all parties in this dispute. Zizek also discusses the concept of violence in reference to the current wave of terrorist attacks, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and the demonstrations held to protest against the caricactures of Muhammad in a Danish newspaper. Zizek believes that violence originates in the fear of the Neighbour, and that violence is inherent in language itself, ironically the tool we use most to dispel violence. Thankfully, one of Zizek’s conclusions is that it is difficult to be really violent.
Whenever I read a book, I put a slip of paper into pages that I thought were very important – needless, to say, my copy of Violence is now filled with said slips of paper.
