born slippy (tom lutz)

As much as I love literature for its ability to move me, for its capacity for transcendence, for its philosophical artistry, I also love literature as a means of being informed. Of knowing what’s going on in the world. Literature has the capacity to disembody history, to remove the limbs and put them back together again in a fashion which allows one to see it, history, anew. Or, to overdo the metaphor, to provide a bird’s eye view. To alert one to things that one didn’t know existed. Literature, no matter how recherché it might aspire to be, emerges from a culture, and a political-cultural perspective. I might suggest that in these feverish times, Anglo-Saxon literature seems too often to me to drift towards a neutral ground which does not exist. A means of avoiding and escaping the political realities that underpin Anglo-Saxon society. To put it simply, in order to get by in such an age of mass hypocrisy, it’s easier to look the other way, and it feels as though the publishing industry, which is a part of the socio-political culture, is far too often complicit in this. Particularly when it comes to the art of fiction. 

Which was part of the attraction for picking up Born Slippy, whose intentions appeared to be to tackle in part some of the banal hideousness of the wealth machines which make the world go round. A hideousness personified by Dmitry Heald, a Liverpudlian born trader who works for the big banks and sets up his own shadow scheme to rip off a percentage of the dark money which he manages. Names like Putin are bandied around. The story is told from the point of view of his distant friend, Frank, a North American builder whose fascination with Heald is akin to Faust’s fascination with Mephistopheles. Indeed, Frank makes his own Faustian pact, and one of the curious choices the book makes is that it allows Frank to sail off into the distance in the end, rich on the back of Heald’s depravity. The novel’s set-up is effective, flipping between timelines as it constructs the story of the two men’s friendship. But after Heald manufactures a fake death, one which Frank believes in although the reader doesn’t, the plausibility of the tale begins to wane. Frank is too much of a boludo to be a viable central character and it feels as though, for all its strong-minded intentions, the novel fails to address the issues it sets out to. Lutz has a crack at demarcating the socio-cultural hypocrisies of our times but seems reluctant to follow his own logic towards the kind of resolution it demands, one which Elroy, for example, whose praise appears on the cover, would not have shied away from. 

doña perfecta (benito pérez galdós)

Galdós is unknown in the UK I don’t think that’s an exaggeration. He’s in that bracket of being amongst Spain’s greatest modern writers, sin dudas, but in the Anglo-Saxon world I don’t remember his work ever being referenced. I was trying to think this through last night, on completing the novel. The UK is knowledgeable about French literature and Russian, perhaps the Germans get more of a look-in, but beyond those shores, there are few nineteenth century writers not writing in English who get a look-in.

It was with some trepidation that I started grappling with Galdós. What happens if the novel feels dated or irrelevant? Would a hundred years of Anglo-Saxon neglect be justified? The novel starts prosaically, with the engineer, Pepe Rey, visiting the provincial town of Orbajosa, where he is due to meet and possibly marry his cousin, Rosario, daughter of the book’s eponymous anti-heroine. It feels fairly mundane, until the narrative starts to take an unexpected and slightly gothic twist. Rey finds the whole town turning against him. Progressive Spain is confronted with the forces of regressive Catholicism. He is accused of being an atheist, thrown out of the cathedral when he visits and accosted by law suits as opportunistic town folks see him as a means of making money. Deep Spain makes a misery of his life. He would flee if it wasn’t for his newfound passion for the cousin. 

This passion is in some ways as instinctive, as primordial as the reaction of the citizens of Orbajosa to himself. As though a kernel of this superstitious, medieval way of seeing the world is boring deep into Rey’s progressive heart. In truth, Dona Perfecta is an early horror movie, which you could perhaps connect with Jordan Peele’s Get Out. We know Rey should listen to his head, but his heart is running the show. 

This makes for a sly novel which constantly takes the reader by surprise, even down to the formulation of its very final chapter. There are moments when it feels as though Galdós is veering off on a tangent, but the acuity of his representation of this cursed town is brilliantly achieved. The heartlands of Spain feel as though they could belong to another century, any time since the Moors were expelled, and Galdós steers us into these dark waters with glee. 

england’s dreaming (jon savage)

The country is going to the dogs. Young, semiotically charged, apolitical dissidents set out a campaign of national provocation. It all ends in tears.

A great “logline” for a feature. Reading Savage’s sometimes astonishing account of the rise of the Sex Pistols, it strikes one as how ignorant we are about the emergence of punk. The realities of the movement. The Sex Pistols remain one of the most famous bands on the planet. Anywhere you go in the world, you will find people of indeterminate ages who know the lines: “I am an anarchist, I am an anti-christ”. Yet, unlike the Beatles and the Stones, for example, the true story of the Pistols remains opaque. They were, indeed a shooting star. Their legacy, punk, (and it does feel on reading Savage’s book that this is the legacy of McLaren, Lydon, Jones, Cook, Matlock and Vicious), is immense. The punk (a name derived from Elizabethan slang) became as identifiable a signifier of Britishness as the Queen. The semiotics of this initial transgression subsequently transformed into marketing.  

Savage’s book, which deals with the broader movement of punk, but revolves around the narrative of the Pistols, shows how the pieces came together. McLaren and Westwood’s odd-couple marriage, which spawned the image; Jones and Cook’s neo-cockney ingenuity, is the quasi-Dickensian strand which roots the movement in working class London values; Lydon’s neurasthenic charisma; Sid Vicious’ post-adolescent nihilism. The book traces how all of these factors stirred together in the pot, at a time of national decay, lead to the great counter-cultural movement. There’s a sense of the way in which, unlike so many British cultural movements, which tend to be insular, navel-gazing, punk embraced a cultural cosmopolitanism. A smattering of Debord and situationism coupled with a strong dosage of USA/ New York individualism, forged by the likes of Iggy and New York Dolls. Even a strong hint of mental European Dadaism. Perhaps this helps to explain how Punk evolved into something that imposed itself as a global movement, not just musically, but semiotically. 

As the logline states, it all ends in tears, but then it was the very volatility of the movement, a Molotov cocktail, which meant that it burned so bright, and was destined to bun out so quickly. Savage was there and his diary entries, allied to the extensive interviews mean it really feels as though we are getting the inside story on something that went from a few oddballs rehearsing in any old corner of London to global stardom in the space of two years. He’s also very good on the early days of McLaren and Westwood, with their chameleon shops, Sex, and Seditionaries. This is the only strand of the story which feels as though it isn’t followed through. With hindsight it seems obvious that the true victor of the punk movement, the one who reaped the most eventual success (in terms of prestige, finance etcetera) was Vivienne Westwood, who succeeded in maintaining the uneasy balance between edginess and commercial viability for decades. Her shop at World’s End was still, when I worked on the King’s Road in the early nineties, a beacon of counter-cultural chic, which you entered with heart in mouth, like an outsider intruding on a clandestine world. 

Savage’s  book should really be on the school syllabus. At a time when the notion of Englishness is once again in a state a crisis, when the need to assert a national identity seems to have overwhelmed all common sense, it dissects that curious anti-establishment strand of Englishness which can lead to the most astonishing creativity. The Sex Pistols were a product of disenchantment (Chant Chant Chant) which flowered for a day, before withering, only to be adopted by British mercantilism as it lay dying, resurrected as a stock image in the panoply of English eccentrism. We remain caught on the horns of the clash between establishment and anti-establishment, struggling to impose an identity on the conflict, trapped in bondage trousers and the discordant violence of disaffection.