untraceable (sergei lebedev, tr antonina w. bouis)

Untraceable has a name like an eighties pop song (by Alison Moyet or T’Pau?). It’s a novel which connects the bombast of Soviet Russia with the clinical nature of Putin’s Russia highly effectively, tracing the way in which chemical weapons were developed and used as part of a covet armoury. The results of this policy has bee seen in the UK, in those cases we know about, at Salisbury and in the murder of Litvinenko. The maguffin in the book is a lethal potion known as Neophyte, developed by a Soviet scientist who then defected to the West. Now, decades later, two Russian agents are sent to finish him off with a dose of his own medicine. The novel is short but sweeping in scope, incorporating events from the Second World War, the Chechnyan war and the present day. There’s a hint of Sorokin in the author’s occasionally forays into a more lyrical register, a poeticism which adds a garnish to the thriller-esque territory the novel adopts as a narrative mechanism. Will the defector survive or will the hapless agents get to him before he can escape? However, because the novel incorporates so much historical and poetic material, it never really feels like a thriller. It’s more a meditation on the nature of an evil that seeks to create an untraceable poison. What kind of society would require this tool? And what does it say about the connection between Putin’s Russia and Stalin’s that both seek to employ it? 

sea state (tabitha lasley)

I’m not entirely sure what to make of Lasley’s work of auto-ficción. The book tells the tale of the author’s mission to explore masculinity in the North Sea oil fields. Her London life going nowhere, she heads to Aberdeen in order to interview men who work on the rigs. At the end of the book we learn she interviewed 103 men, some of whose testimonies are inserted between the eight chapters. What’s evident is that the vast majority of this material doesn’t make it into the book. Instead, the book becomes something else, an account of female desire and frustration. She begins an affair with a married oil worker, which has a predictably short shelf life and becomes the centrepiece of the book, before he returns to his wife. It feels slightly like therapy at times, a chance for the writer to reconnect with her northern roots, to engage with a working class Britain that has been left behind. That she ends up working in a fast food joint in an undisclosed Northern city in the final chapter feels like the most authentic aspect of the book, in so far as it seems clear that the affair with the oil rig worker was always going to be a doomed mismatch. One wonders how it would have gone down if a male writer had gone into a predominantly female world for the benefit of research and ended up with a fetching partner, then writing about their sex life and the inevitable failure of the relationship. Whilst the book might be more fictional than it pretends to be, there’s still something slightly unsettling about Lasley’s project, which ends up telling us more about class than gender. 

equinox (w&d alan rudolph)

Rudolph was one of those maverick North Americans, like John Sayles, whose films attracted stars but never broke out. Fine directors who, had their careers occurred at another point in time, or perhaps in another country, might have been feted more than they ever were. I remember watching a film of his back in the eighties with Keith Carradine as a laconic outsider who had once published a volume of poetry amongst other unheralded achievements and thinking that could be me in a couple of decades. At its best there’s a romanticism to his work which offers a more mannered vision of the world than cinema’s typical social realist bent. 

Equinox is a tale of twins separated at birth, yin to each other’s yan, destined to meet one day, which they do. The film is set in a futuristic city beset by social upheaval and petty crime, offering hints of Blade Runner without the design bravura. It feels as though its striving for a kind of transcendence it never quite achieves and in truth, it’s not Rudolph’s greatest film, rather one that suggests where he might have gone had he had the budgets to indulge his imagination further. Which perhaps might not have been for the best, as it’s his low-key, intimate films which allow him to dwell on his oddball characters that felt most distinctive. (Interesting to note that Rudolph was another one of those directors who built up his own stable of actors.)

On another note, this was seen on the Monday and by Wednesday, Cinemateca had once again shut its doors, for a third time, due to the pandemic. This time, in Montevideo, it feels as though the threat is far closer than it ever has been before. The great war of Cinema vs Plague continues. (Not to mention theatre, dance, art and so on.) On the streets of Ciudad Vieja, hundreds of film crews jockey for position, sent from all over South America, but the net is closing in. Maybe the vaccines will save us. Maybe the equinox has passed. The question then remains: which equinox?

vanity fair (william makepeace thackeray)

Say what you like about Vanity Fair, but it cannot be denied that this is a big beast.  It instructed me to remember there are other ways of reading. The long haul read. We do indeed lived in a disposable society, where there is always something new to consume. The list of novels to be read is as long, not as your arm, but your unimpeded view towards an undisclosed horizon. Consumption is all, and it starts to feel like an obligation of the novel to recognise this and to ensure that what it lacks in brevity it makes up for in efficiency. Vanity Fair belongs to a different epoch and was written with a different reading regimen in mind. For a start, it was serialised over the course of twenty months. Something which allows for a myriad of fluvial meanderings and overflows. There are chapters which feel almost entirely superfluous, but which are not, because they too are telling us something. Indeed, one of the most telling chapters for a modern reader, is one which is so laden with description that it feels like a detour through a botanical garden. Vanity Fair reminded me of the value of the novel as a backdrop to one’s life, as a persistent authorial chirping, like a season of newborn birds in a nest under the eaves of your stately mansion. They will chatter and sometimes sing and at times they will charm and at others grate and one day they will fly away and you will miss them without realising it. This is another form of reading, one we are on the point of discarding, or one that has been supplanted by the two dimensions of soap opera, which lacks the dimension of author, the glue that holds the book, if not the narrative together. 

Given all this, a few comments of a more discursive nature.

Thackeray’s cruelty towards Miss Rebecca Sharp. In many ways, Becky Sharp feels like a predecessor to another character traduced by her author, Emma Bovary. Becky comes from a bohemian part of the world, her father a Soho painter. (If there was any regret in the reading of this novel it was that the author never ventured into Soho and its Bohemia, these places exist on the fringes of the book.) She is a resourceful young woman who does everything in her power to rise through the social ranks, with mixed results. At times she flares like a Catherine Wheel, at others she hurtles towards social disgrace. By a long chalk the most modern of the novel’s characters, by which one means, the one least accepting of the anti-diluvian social structures she finds herself born into, Becky has energy, wit and oodles of charm, for which she ends up being castigated by her author, but without which his book would be a damp squib. She is another in the line, along with Lady Macbeth and Bovary, and surely many more, of great female characters who challenge their authors. Thackeray clearly adores Becky, just like so many do, but he’s wary of the way in which his adoration or libido threatens the social order, and as a result feels the need to constantly pull the rug from under her feet. 

Colonialism. It’s so long since I read Said that I don’t remember if he wrote about Vanity Fair, and as I wouldn’t have read the novel at that stage, perhaps it would have passed me by if he did. But the novel is a great guide as to the way in which the colonies were so ingrained in British society by the early 1800s. India and the West Indies both play key roles in the novel, with several Dobbin chapters set there. All the younger masculine characters find themselves abroad at some time or another. The dramatic playlets in which Rebecca stars, dragging her unfortunate husband into the spotlight with her, are a wonderful testament to the impact of what we might nowadays call Orientalism on British society as one could hope to find (even though these do nothing to forward the plot). A warped fascination with ‘the other’, which involves both caricature and wonder is at large and Thackeray captures this brilliantly. There is a similar relationship with Europe, which is primarily a playground for more military adventures. Two hundred years after publication, the same themes are still playing themselves out. 

the last picture show (w&d peter bogdanovich, w larry mcmurtry)

It must be thirty years since I last saw The Last Picture Show. I remember it made an impact then and it still does now. The final scene must be one of the saddest Hollywood scenes ever made. The portrayal of a fading, duststrewn Texas community is as touching as ever. Perhaps more so in that it feels like a second elegy now, or a third or fourth. The first elegy was for the golden days of Hollywood, represented by the town’s local cinema, on the point of closing. A cinema that shows the classics over and over, the narratives that North Americans grew up with for generations, with all their flaws and their virtues. The second is for this small town America itself, seemingly in terminal decline, a decline which has in no way rescinded over the course of the past forty years. A decline which has lead to the vicissitudes of Trump and the slow hollowing out of North American power. Although in the images of the small town of Anarene, one can perhaps perceive a more universal image of America, because the fading town could be Uyuni in Bolivia or Uruapan in Mexico, or any one of a hundred thousand places which have sprung up and faded away since the americas were occupied. Thirdly, and most obviously, the film is an elegy to youth. The beauty and awkwardness of youth, factors which cannot be avoided. The fact that the film’s stars, Shepherd and Bridges in particular, have now aged, just adds another layer of piquancy to this elegy. Finally, an elegy that the film could only have surmised at the time, it’s also an elegy for the idea that Hollywood might produce films which sought to provoke thought, rather than thrills. I realise this is a generalisation, but to watch these film from the BBS stable now, to see the way in which the North American directors were using cinema as a tool to investigate and question their society, is to feel a sense of loss at the way this inflexion has been dulled, neutered. Few films have emerged from the USA’s 21st century conflicts to rival those of the epoch of Cimino, Scorcese, Coppola. Duane is setting off for the Korean war as the film ends. The challenges which lead to the founding of a town like Anarene, celebrated in the films of Hawks and Huston and co are seemingly done now. The USA lacks direction. Like all emerging empires, it will turn outwards, to foreign adventures, whilst its interior slowly fades towards a washed out, dusty two-tone insignificance. 

red dust (ma jian)

In times of Covid it is doubly enthralling to read travellers’ tales. We have all become the old peasants that he meets in remote corners of an awakening China, never moving more than ten miles from where we live. Red Dust is an account of the author’s travels through that country in the eighties. It opens in Beijing, where he works as a state photographer, separated from his wife and his daughter. Long-haired, reading Whitman, he belongs to a bohemian set which is under attack by the forces of law and order. His love life is a disaster, his professional life is a dangerous farce, he fears arrest, and given all this he sets off on his travels.

One of the earliest famous journeys, that of Marco Polo, was to China. It’s exoticism and sense of apartness remained intact over centuries. Ma Jian’s account of his travels around the country, his fascination with the lost tribes of China, and those who live on the edges of greater China, feel like the report of someone venturing to corners of the globe which even now remain obscure. He travels through desert, jungle and mountains, visiting the Mongolian, Burmese and Tibetan frontiers, as well as travelling down the Yellow River and then the coast. The book, split into nine chapters, is woozy. Time slips and slides. Towards the end he says that he’s been on the road for three years, but place supersedes time as he floats through geography. This is true in another sense: China of the eighties is on the brink of change. The economic transformation has already begun on the coast, near Hong Kong. Meanwhile, deep inland, poverty is still extreme. Ma Jian’s account gives a vivid portrayal of these contrasts. One wonders how much has changed in deepest Tibet, for example, where the book concludes with the spectacle of a Buddhist funeral of a 17 year old girl. 

It’s of note that the book was published in 2001, nearly two decades after the journey. These are recollections in tranquility, the writer returning to his younger self. The book is a remarkable blend of acute observation and adventure. Run-ins with the police, near drownings, encounters with an exotic poetess, dovetail with observations of poverty and ways of life that are struggling for survival. The vast quantity of ruins the writer visits (and one of the pleasures of reading this book in a digital form is the ability to look up images of places he visits), are testament to the way in which China has always been a crucible for the birth and death of entire cultures. It also contextualises the issue of cruelty and rights, from the way entire workforces of thousands were buried alive by an Emperor’s command to keep a secret, to the excesses of the Cultural Revolution and finally even the cruelties of Buddhism itself, where a Lama can blandly explain that the reasons for a punishment like cutting off an arm might be attributed to sins committed in a former life. Ma Jian’s book succeeds in giving an overview of the multiple histories, religions and ways of thinking that make up the idea of the country called China. It is also, in these straightened times, a wonderful escape. We need the travellers of this world to remind us that there are other ways of thinking, other ways of seeing, other ways, even, of dying.