the past [w. alan pauls]

I'm going to have to come back to this one.

Some books are so mighty one feels as though one has a cheek even talking about them. Carting The Past around, as one does, a big beefy hardback with an alluring picture of lines on the cover, people have looked at it with curiosity, asked me what its about, and I've tried to avoid the question, whilst highlighting the book. Don't listen to me. Go and read it.

I could and perhaps ought to digress. Because that's the way of The Past. A couple of days ago I was reading one of the countless texts I've read over the course of this year. Another sitcom, set in a university. Again. Two kids, contemporary, arrive at their halls of residence. Which triggered, as writing does, a memory of my own arrival at the halls of residence, twenty odd years ago. The trick with the two characters in the sitcom is that they're both hooked on all things eighties. They're re-living the time I lived through. The quality of the writing did not reflect the poignancy of the idea, in this case.

The Past has also taken me back into my own past. It's a literary trick of which the erudite Mr Pauls will be aware. Reading Rimini and Sofia's chaotic attempts to live both with and without each other, has triggered memories of my own relationship with my wife, which lasted a similar length of time to their marriage. Of course one thinks about these things all the time, every day, in one form or another, but The Past introduced new aspects of memory, a physicality, a sense of aura, a notion of us-ness and un-us-ness.

The skill of a novel, Mr Pauls reveals, is not so much how much it takes us into its narrative, but how far it succeeds in riffing of the reader's. Which it does not know for sure, but about which certain assumptions might be made. If you have ever been in love; if you have ever separated; if you ever wept at what has been; if you have repressed what has been; if you have found yourself trapped in what has been; then this book should be worth your while reading.

Of course it is not everyone's cup of tea. Cocaine and sex and the sickest art you could imagine. And there may be flaws in the novel. As with at least two of the finest books I've ever read (which suggests a pattern), the final section of the book felt less satisfying than what had preceeded, as though having reached a summit at some point which the reader and perhaps even the writer was not aware of, the narrative cannot help but lose itself a little on the way down, as it staggers towards rest. A review I've read comments on the elusiveness of politics within the text, and there's no doubt that the time scale is more like a rubber band being stretched than a step ladder being climbed. But that's the point. The writer is looking at both the ways we change between the ages of youth and middle age; but also, and more importantly perhaps, the ways in which we do not change, we remain unalterable, no matter what has occured in between, sometimes like reality, at others like a dream of the life we must have lead.

As I said at the beginning, I'll have to come back to this one. There are whole treatises waiting to be written and read on The Past. The movie will come out, I hope, stripping the thing to narrative, trying to cling to the writer's caustic humour. Trying to please an audience whom the writer doesn't give a fuck about. Not in the worst sense of that phrase, but in the best. This doesn't read like a writer trying to please anyone in particular, save perhaps a few people he knows, or knew, along the way. This reads like a writer who's going to start a sentence and get to the end no matter what that sentence contains. Sometimes words of distressing insight, sometimes an image too crude to be printed, sometime a laugh-out-loud joke. Writing that doesn't aim to please, which contains a wealth of pleasure, and pain.

I would like to write far more about The Past. I finished it last night. But rather than read me, which at the moment seems unlikely anyway, read the book and let it talk to you. The Past and the past.