land of the snowmen (norman lock)

Land of the Snowmen is said to be written by George Belden, who participated on Scott’s disastrous 1905 mission to Antarctica. Belden and his fellow explorers go quietly mad in the icy wastes. They have visions and are visited by ghosts. Belden documents all this with a wry, tragic charm. It’s not going to end well. However, despite being attributed to Belden, the book is clearly a capricious work of fiction. Belden is an invention and the whole account is a work of the imagination of the writer Norman Lock, attributed as editor. This is a winsome project, steeped in the myths of the explorers, albeit a wispy, snowy thing. 

no country for old men (cormac mccarthy)

This is an almost Manichean novel. The author includes an ersatz narrator, Sheriff Bell, whose thoughts are presented in italics. Sheriff Bell is an old-school boy, with old-school values. He doesn’t like hippies, probably dislikes Nietzsche, is wary of people with their hair died green. He’s also sheriff in a Texas border region which is suffering an epidemic of drug-related violence. Sheriff Bell is conservative, presumably Republican. He harks back to a world he and his parents grew up in, where common values of decency were instilled in society. As soon as those values, (which presumably include not dying your hair), were lost, things started to go to hell in a handcart. Sheriff Bell is set up as a sympathetic character in a world of mindless sociopaths. He loves his wife and serves his community. His values go beyond the performative - he knows that a medal is just a piece of metal, and that wealth and consumption are part of the problem.

On the other hand there is the mercurial, charismatic, and sociopathic villain, Chigurh, so brilliantly played in the film by Javier Badem. (So brilliantly that it’s hard to read the novel without thinking of Bardem’s lanky hair and awkward physique.) Chigurh is a  monster who kills without mercy or regret, and believes himself to exist on another moral plain altogether.

The complexity of the novel, and McCarthy’s approach, comes from the fact that the dramatic epicentre of the novel, that which propels the action and ensures the reader’s undivided attention, is not the worthy Sheriff Bell, but the unworthy Chigurh. His actions and cod-philosophy drive the narrative and lend the novel its gothic splendour. When he dies, the bottom drops out of the book. It’s a paradox which, for all of McCarthy’s benediction of Bell, feels unresolved. Bell’s goodness functions in response to Chigurh’s evil. They might be two sides of the same coin that the killer spins to decide people’s fates.

Perhaps there’s something about the way in which the USA functions at work here. Just as the myth of the west required the myth of the savage (touched upon in the novel and much of McCarthy’s writing), a myth that was still hyperactive in my youth, contemporary USA needs to construct it’s antithesis courtesy of a ‘savage’ enemy. Be that communism or islam or even, as is the case of Trump and co now, the immigrants, supposedly illegal, who infiltrate the purity of the nation through a porous border. Which brings us back round to Cormac McCarthy. The strength of his writing is contingent on the idea of the other, which lurks across the border, waiting to poison the homespun decency of small-town America. 

caché (w&d haneke)

Watching Caché on the big screen reminded me of how important his film was in the development of our film, Censor. No-one really believes us when we reference Haneke, or they think we’re being pretentious, because UK films aren’t supposed to do that kind of thing, but the director’s use of video has echoes in ours, the rewinding of tape, the whirr of the video machine, the hidden messages that may or may not lurk. This is not to compare the films, just to note its influence. After watching Caché, C & I met up with Santiago and Flamia in the Imperial, and Flamia noted that in the first interview I gave him, a decade ago, I referenced the Austrian. I am not sure if that strand has sustained itself in my personal creative process, which seems disappointingly slight when measured against the achievements of Haneke and his ilk. How, one wonders, watching Caché for the umpteenth time, did he get to make this film? Although the answer is that once you have succeeded in convincing the right people of your genius, you can start to control your destiny, (only don’t tell Orson), and make the films you want to make. Caché is remarkable in so many ways. On the one hand, it is a taught psychological thriller. The film sets up a mystery with its opening shot, one that the viewer and the characters will seek to resolve as the film goes on. It’s reminiscent, in this sense, of Bolaño’s love of cheap detective thrillers. Secondly, it is a coruscating slap across the cheeks of the bourgeois literati. Auteuil’s character, Georges, hosts a literature program where guests slag of Rimbaud’s girlfriend. In a lovely little scene, Binoche’s Anne speaks on the phone at a literary soiree whilst a figure who never reappears just barks names in the background: “Baudrillard, Wittgenstein…” The couple’s lives collapse under the stress of an unknown truth. Thirdly, Haneke’s use of the camera is forensic. Just like the camera of whoever is making the videos which upset Auteuil and Binoche’s apple cart, it is an inert, threatening presence, allowing the viewer to analyse the image for clues. The very opening shot, for example, of their home, shows a pretty little house, screened by an unlikely hedge, set against a backdrop of highrises which rear up behind. The house wants to cut itself off from the outside world, turn its back on the poor dwellings that are a stone’s throw away, but the camera doesn’t permit the viewer to forget. Perhaps I am over-reading the image, but the director’s use of the camera invites this kind of engagement from its viewer, compels one to be active, rather than passive. You could easily write a thesis on the detail which is disclosed in each and every shot, so much so that I found myself wondering about the art direction and how much Haneke himself would have participated in this. Lastly, for now, as I could evidently spend hours writing about Caché, but have work to do, the script itself, in spite of what might otherwise have been a languid pacing, is brilliantly constructed, fuelled by the dramatic tension of the mystery. The film contains key narrative beats: the appearance of the tapes themselves, the tape in the door, the disappearance of the son, and of course, its one moment of shocking violence. (The effectiveness of this was apparent in the cinema, as one or two who had clearly never seen the film before cried out in dismay when it occurred.) In this sense, it feels as though Haneke is engaging with a classical script diagnostic, as determined by the gurus and the quacks. His mastery of the rhythm of filmmaking ensures that the viewer remains constantly hooked (to use a word), whilst never permitting him or her to become passive. 

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I note that this is the first film that has been written about twice on this blog. Normally if I see a film for a second time, a rare event, I don’t get round to writing anything, but in this instance, the urge would have appeared to have overtaken me.

the power of the dog (don winslow)

Back before this blog existed, so many years ago, I read James Elroy’s novels American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand. It could be argued that his novels did more to document and reveal the realities of US post-war history than any other source of information. Elroy achieved this by taking actual and frequently unreported events and inserting them into a fictional framework. He was writing crime thrillers which were also history texts. He also wrote with a succinct effective style, which kept a complex narrative moving whilst retaining a literary ambition.

Elroy’s historical novels have dried up. History has not. Winslow has taken up the baton with this novel, the first in a trilogy. The areas the novel treads, connecting US foreign policy with the War on Drugs and the submerged wars of Central and Southern America, is terrain that demands the Elroy treatment. Winslow makes the necessary connections, putting the pieces of the jigsaw together, from Putamayo to Hell’s Kitchen. History tends to belong to the victors, and the only ones who can mitigate against this are the writers.

Unfortunately, in this early novel, much of the subliminal messaging of the characterisation works against the writer’s central thesis. His central thesis is that the USA is a rogue state which will do anything, get into bed with anyone, in order to sustain its primacy. However, within the novel, the only characters endowed with any kind of heroism are those who come from the USA. Those who come from south of the border are all, with the exception of a priest who will be sacrificed for his goodness, deranged psychopaths. The North Americans are valiant pursuers of justice, who even in their most ambivalent moral moments (because even good men have to go to bad places) exude a craggy nobility. The South Americans are dashing criminals. There’s a touch of the Cormac McCarthy’s about all this and as the novel unfolds it starts to grate, precisely because it seems to go against the writer’s stated historical agenda.

Nevertheless, I am sure I shall read at least one more novel from this trilogy. Because, even if the execution is shoddy, the value of literature as a medium of recalibrating the effects of power is one that cannot be underestimated. 

1491 (charles c mann)

1491 is a book that ought to change the way that history is taught forever. It won’t, because the narrative it is confronting, that of European civilisation triumphing over the indigenous peoples of the americas, is so engrained that it will perhaps, never change. The book might have been sub-headed the decline and fall of the pre-Colombian empires. The multiple empires that grew, thrived, tamed the land, and then faded away, or in the case of those which were still extant upon the arrival of the Europeans, were decimated by plague and war. Mann’s theory is clear: the major factor in the European conquest of the Americas was biological. Only today, perhaps, for the first time in three generations, can we start to understand that germs are far more powerful than steel or gunpowder. However, 1491 is about far more than just the imminent pre-Colombian era. He is also exacting on the scale of both population and urban development of the americas before the arrival of the Europeans, a scale that history, written by the ‘victors’ has failed to either recognise or understand. The book exudes a range of scholarship that is impressive, going into archaeological, ethnological, seismological detail about the history of both continents, North and South, disarming the division that is so frequently drawn between them. It’s hard to say quite how impressive this book is, both in terms of its articulation and defence of its own thesis, and in terms of the radical implications of that thesis for our interpretation of the course of human history, no less. 

battle in heaven (w&d reygadas)

It took a few days to process Reygadas’ second film, which provoked much debate in the Fénix bar on a Saturday night before the world changed. Debate focussed as I recall on the breach between Reygadas’ undeniable distinctiveness as a filmmaker as against the coherence of the story his film was setting out to tell. On the one hand, it’s not often that I feel so baffled by a film’s plot. Who’s kidnapping who? Why is the boss’s daughter shagging the driver/ odd-job-man? Why does he do what he does (to refrain from a spoiler). Who the hell is that little police chief and whose side is he on? Not to mention the family that get out of the car in the posh neighbourhood. However, even as I write these questions, I realise that this scene is a mirror image of the quite brilliant scene in the petrol station when an entire indigenous family, at least 20 of them (including Magdalena Flores from Japón) emerge from a car, one by one. This is one of many remarkable scenes in the film, including the march of the penitents. In an ordinary narrative film, the hook that keeps you watching is wanting got know what is going to happen next. In a Reygadas film, the hook is what you’re going to see next. Sometimes the two overlap, but there’s a sly difference. Narrative is normally primary; with Reygadas it’s secondary. We’re closer to the territory of Cocteau or Parajanov. The tension between a cinema of the image and a cinema of the literary is so strong in Reygadas’ work. It makes for an absorbing dialectic.

narcoland [annabel hernandez] & toro negro (d. carlos armella, pedro gonzález rubio)

Narcoland and Toro Negro

Mexico is a bewitching country which also happens to be in a state of disarray. To use British understatement. Annabel Hernandez' book is like reading an account of a messy operation. Surgical, but far from clean. She bravely deconstructs the chaos of her country, tracing links bewteen governments and drugs dealers, laying bare a cynical manipulation of power and wealth. It's a sometimes confusing read, as a blizzard of names from over thirty years are assembled to construct the patchwork quilt which is that same nation carved up by the various cartels and their government allies. The war on drugs is once again shown to be the war for drugs, with the book scratching at the surface of the ties that link events in Mexico to the politics of its Northern neighbour. For those that know about this sort of thing, there's a beguiling reference to Daniel Hopsicker, hinting at those other conspiracies which go hand in hand with the sheer volume of financial gain the drugs industry generates.

Toro Negro is a little-known documentary which has nothing to do with the drugs trade. Instead it tells the tale of a petty bullfighter, whose kamikaze courage outtflanks his skill and whose life is bathed in poverty. His battles with his girlfriend are as fiercely contested as those with the bulls. It's a vivid, hands-on doc, so intimate that at times it seems almost voyeuristic. The director acknowledges his own presence with one revealing shadow shot; there are moments when it seems as though he cannot help but cross the line from being the passive eye to becoming an active participant in the bullfighter's personal dramas. Toro Negro prowls the breeze block houses and shanty bars where its impoverished characters live, in the process lending the documentary the detailed pathos of a novel by Zola or Dickens. It's a great film, and it's also a fine counterpoint to Hernandez' book: the micro to its macro. It documents the desperation that drives young men and women to flirt with violence and death. The bullfighter may have found another way, but his spectacular, foolhardy courage makes him a blood-brother to those who choose to take the narco-path. Many of the leading narcos detailed in Narcoland started off poor, desperate, ready to do anything to get a step up; ready to ride the horns of the bull if that is what it takes. 

1599 [james shapiro]

Shapiro's text achieves several objectives.

It reveals how the writer's work was shaped by his interaction with society. Thereby revealing a figure fully engaged with the complications, complicities and dangers of his age. A political figure, with a small p. It sets out to demystify the reputation of the writer as a romantic, mysterious figure and to a certain extent succeeds. At the very least it  contextualises him.

It also offers a telling vision of Elizabethan society. Just as in today's Britain, it shows a political body which had few qualms in manipulating its people with scare stories. Apocalypse was always around the corner. The intrigues of power like something out of House of Cards. With Shakespeare participating in the debate through his plays. 

This book, which is not a biography, rather a portrait of an era seen through the lens of four of the writer's plays, is already considered a classic and with good reason. The writer, according to Shapiro's vision, becomes a weather vane or tuning fork, plugged in to the nuances of his society's agenda, an agenda which will always possess its metaphysical or spiritual values, alongside base ambition and earthly glory. 

One finishes the book longing for him to write the sequel, and the sequel that comes after that, and those that would follow. 1066 and all that. 

hypothermia [alvaro enrigue]

Enrigue’s quasi-novel is a smart, cold stab at puncturing the balloon of globalisation. A series of delicately connected short stories range across the Americas, from Peru to Washington DC, related by a succession of first person narrators. Through a process of osmosis the text skips from Lima to North Carolina, from DC to DF. Many of the stories address the issues surrounding the word ‘gringo’, (which might have made for an alternative title), as the narrator, more often than not a Mexican male, adapts to life in the US. How many years, the book seems to ask, does it take for a Mexican living in the States to transform himself into a gringo?

This globalised vision is constructed from small, domestic tales of loss or betrayal. There are stories about affairs, about domestic tragedy, about blue-collar life. Some of the stories are less than a page long, others developed in far greater depth. It’s never made overtly clear when a story will connect with another – there’s a touch of Cortazar’s Hopscotch in the way the book skips, elliptically, between its various narrative threads. Hypothermia is a pot-pourri of modern life. Albeit one that seems, perhaps, more adept at pinpointing the zones of contemporary tension than getting under their skin. Another point of reference might be Iñárritu and Arriaga’s artful global fable, Babel. Both texts suggesting that Mexico, a country on the hinge of first and third worlds, makes for an ideal vantage point from which to observe the contradictions of modernity, where the poor want what the rich have and the rich are never sure what price they have paid in the obtaining of their wealth…or how much it costs to obtain the things the poor still possess which they no longer have. 

broken glass [alain mabanckou]

How does a writer come to prominence? Why is one selected and another not? The issue of ambition is one that underpins the history of literature, whether we like or not. There is, of course, a romantic notion that the cream always rises to the top. That greatness will out. However, the history of “great” literature is littered with figures whose worth was never appreciated in their day, from Clare to Kafka. On the other hand, it is also riddled with figures who convinced their contemporaries of their worth, only to find their stocks diminishing year by year with the passing of history.

That this issue should be raised in the context of  Mabanckou’s novel might seem unlikely. The novel adopts tropes associated with the African novel (episodic/ stream of consciousness) to weave a circuitous narrative around the figure of the book’s fictional author, the eponymous Broken Glass. The novel is in fact his notebook, as he documents the figures who people a downtown Congolese bar, Credit Gone West. These portraits are unsympathetic, even crude, composed in a relentless prose laden with scatological imagery. In the second part of the book, the narrator turns the spotlight on himself, revealing his own sorry story and descent into an alcoholic stupor.

Much of this, for anyone who has read any twentieth/ twenty first century African literature is rudimentary. In interviews, the author acknowledges a debt to Amos Tutuola, Ngũgĩ' and others. However, the author adopts a particular device of his own for his protagonist. His narrator is a disgraced teacher, an educated man. This education peppers the text, with direct and ongoing references to the history of literature, from Marquez to Zola. At times the novel becomes almost an intra-textual crossword, an act of bricollage, if one wanted to push the academic context further.

Which is where we come back to the theme of ambition. Mabanckou’s extravagant use of textual references, (as well as the somewhat self-conscious decision to dispense with the full stop), seems redolent of a writer proclaiming his presence upon the stage. There are various ways this could be interpreted. Firstly: the work of African literature sits within a context of the history of the novel which is all too often negated. Secondly: you might fail to take me seriously because of my origins (a justifiable complaint) but my erudition will demand your respect. Thirdly: mine is an African voice which the “western” reader can connect with.

Whichever is the right interpretation, this intertexuality would also seem to reveal the author’s ambition, an ambition that has propelled him to the forefront of the contemporary African literary scene. As the reader might have gleaned, the reviewer is unsure exactly what to make of Broken Glass, a novel which perhaps flatters to deceive, which at times seems to be more concerned with positioning itself than going about the business of being a novel. But at the same time, this is a writer with a serious intent, and it will be intriguing to see how Mabanckou’s literary career evolves.  

caché (w&d haneke)

Don’t trust what your eyes are telling you. Look beneath the surface. The title tells us this. The opening sequence spells it out. And the closing sequence repeats the message with a dose of painstaking subtlety.

Auteuil’s Georges and Binoche’s Anne inhabit a strange, attractive Parisian property. Most of their life seems to take place in the sitting room/ diner downstairs. This contains hundreds of books, a mighty television set, the desk at which Auteuil works and some comfy sofas. This is the vortex of the family home, although the family rarely congregate here. Instead, it becomes the space of anxiety where Georges and Anne watch the mysterious videos which document their lives. Then there’s upstairs, the bedrooms. Their son’s bedroom is normal. Posters for Eminem. A computer with a games console attached. But his parent’s bedroom is like a cave. Dark, bare, sparse. It’s a space dedicated to sleep. No hint of pleasure. The seeming normality of their lives is not sustained in the bedroom. Instead, the room reveals the emptiness of their marriage.

When Caché came out the world and his wife revelled in the film’s blend of Hitchcockian mystery and rigorous austerity. Overlooking the way the filmmaker offers moments where he foregoes subtlety in favour of a broader satirical tone. As Georges edits his TV discussion about Rimbaud, he urges the editor to skip the conceptual stuff and get to the bit about his homosexuality. His colleagues are congenial media types who tell outlandish stories and exude a breezy self-confidence. These are the taste-makers, the very people who are no doubt lauding Haneke’s work to the skies, praising his rarefied critique of modern morals. At the same time, the TV shows Italian troops in Iraq, as though to emphasise the way in which the real barbarities of Western ‘Civilisation’ continue to occur under our noses. Will history judge the intervention in Iraq any differently from the French misadventures in Algeria? The ironies lurk beneath the surface in a world where the comfort of those-who-have shrouds the suffering of those-who-do-not.

Watching the film a second time, nearly ten years later, the shock effect of Majid’s suicide is no longer present. Instead, perhaps, it becomes easier to dwell on the curious intimacy of his relationship with Georges. A friendship formed at the age of 5 retains more power than any created in adulthood. The two men have already learnt almost all the lessons that life will have to teach them when still in childhood. The cliff that divides people from different social and political backgrounds as well as, one assumes, the pain of loss. Perhaps it’s because he’s sought to repress so much of his childhood that Georges cannot relate to his own child. Georges emerges as a pathetic figure, metropolitan man stripped bare. For all his intelligence he has no idea how to cope when the going gets tough, he’s soon out of his league. Which puts him in the same category as the father in Funny Games and the other in Time of the Wolf, whose good natured intentions are blown away before he can even start the negotiations. There’s something Nietzchean about Haneke’s critique of modern masculinity (which recurs again with the White Ribbon’s narrator). Apart from its commentary on the value he places on life, Majid’s suicide is the kind of carnal act of which Georges would be incapable. Modern Europeans might wear black but beneath the pseudo-existential veneer there’s pastel-coloured underwear. They don’t know how to kill goats and their primary response to any kind of threat is to get stressed out and discuss it with their partners.

The irony in all this is that Haneke is a man who makes intellectually provocative films. He values the intellect as a weapon with which he seeks to skewer the society he inhabits. And he does so successfully. The neurotic chattering classes lap up their medicine. March against the war or the dictaduras. Meanwhile, the men and women of action launch wars and dismiss art as a symptom of weakness. They would walk out of Caché before they had had the time to realise the director was subverting the artform with his opening shot. Which is why Haneke’s cinema is one of the the most definitive examplars of the crisis of Western society, intellectual or otherwise. Post-existentialism, we don’t know whether we should be reading Zizek, watching football, speculating on the stock exchange or the property market, or fighting for a cause we don’t believe in. Going to the cinema and watching a film by Haneke allows us to both indulge our Western decadence and suffer barbed criticisms for our indulgences at the same time. It’s a modern church, where our souls are allowed to engage in the struggle for meaning for a couple of hours before we head back towards our humdrum, DIY normality. Where risk is something that occurs on television, in a land far removed from our own.

ashes of the amazon [milton hatoum]

Hatoum’s novel falls between two stools. On the one hand it would appear to aspire towards the epic. The narrative is set primarily in Manaus, and the book charts the gradual transformation of the town through the latter part of the twentieth century from sleepy backwater towards tawdry metropolis. The more colourful waterfront barrios are torn down and replaced with anodyne housing estates. At the same time, the book’s anti-hero, Mundo, leaves Manaus, venturing first to Rio and then onto Berlin and finally, Brixton, in London.

However, alongside this overarching perspective, the writer seeks to create an intimate, off-key portrait of an artist. Mundo’s story is narrated by his friend, Lavo, to whom he might or might not be related. Born into wealth, Mundo is an innate rebel, who turns against his conservative father as he seeks to become an artist. (Intriguing the way in which the dissonant artist features so regularly as a figure in contemporary Latin American writing, Mundo taking his place alongside Alan Pauls’ maverick, amongst others.) Hatoum’s portrayal locates the roots of Mundo’s artistic urge in the desire to confront and reclaim something of the Amazon. His mother, Alicia, apparently emerged from the jungle alongside her mad sister, fully formed. His father has made his money from exploiting jute. Mundo aspires towards a connection with that which is being wiped out by modernity. His final demise occurs after he executes a piece of performance art in Rio, dressed as an Indian, carrying a canoe oar he’s kept hold of after being given it by an Indian boatman in the jungle, years before.

Mundo’s portrayal is intriguing, all the more so for being presented through the eyes of his poor friend who himself is gradually working his way up the social system by becoming a lawyer, a journey that will be the inverse of Mundo’s. However, the book’s intent to fulfil this duel role means that it sometimes feels that it’s neither fish nor foul. Mundo’s wanderings in Europe, for instance, are dealt with in a somewhat cursory fashion. In a way his story might be the obverse of Flyte’s in Brideshead. The wealthy heir who ends up slumming it in the first world, rather than the third. Perhaps because I might have known people like this, falling through the cracks in Europe, I hoped for more, but in spite of the book’s geographical detail (Atlantic Road/ Brixton Road etc), these passages feel skittish. Likewise the final post-dictatorship stages in the re-development of Manaus feel as though they are alluded to rather than fully conveyed. The book is much stronger at describing the world which has been lost, when Manaus still represented the hinge between the jungle and the immigrant.

Although this is perhaps ultimately a frustrating book, shining a light on a city which remains one of the great frontiers of modern man, as urbanity confronts the immemorial swathe of the Amazon, it still offers a fascinating insight into what Manaus used to be and what it has since become.

seconds out (martin kohan)

Seconds Out is a playful novel, reminiscent of the work of Cercas, which explores the nature of time, among other things. It's based around the 17 seconds that occurred between Jack Dempsey being knocked down and returning to the ring during a 1923 heavyweight boxing title fight by the Argentine challenger Luis Firpo. Even those with no interest in boxing will be aware that 17 seconds doesn't sound right. Standard procedure, which was not applied in this instance, is a count of ten seconds. Dempsey gets off the hook, returns to the fight and wins. This twist and the way in which the news is reported in Argentina has catastrophic effects. The book has a chapter for each of the 17 seconds, examining the incident from the perspective of Dempsey himself, a photographer and the referee. Extending the investigation of the moment, the book is framed by the device of two Patagonian journalists on a local paper who have to write an article fifty years afterwards on an event from 1923. Verani is writing about the fight whilst Ledesma, his colleague, writes about the simultaneous visit of Strauss' Viennese orchestra and their playing of a Mahler symphony.

Using disparate ingredients, Kohan stitches together a loose tapestry of information, bringing Mahler's biography and early 20th Century Argentine history together. It makes for a strange, breezy read. The presence of a mysterious narrator, who's trying to get to the bottom of a suicide which occurred at the time of the fight and used to be a junior to the two journalists, adds to the sense of a narrative which is always on the point of revealing a great secret. In truth, the revelations which do occur seem somehow underwhelming. There's something of a flawed conjuring trick about the book: it grips the attention with the anticipation of the trick to come; but the trick itself is less impressive than the set-up. However, it may be that that's part of the point. It's an anti-narrative. From the point of view of an Argentine, the wrong man wins and history forsakes the challenger. Argentina becomes a place where the likes of Strauss never visit. The clock runs backwards. Seventeen seconds that changed the perspective of a nation, Kohan might be suggesting.

the speed of light [javier cercas]

Having spent the past couple of weeks commuting to Enfield Lock, I've had plenty of city-bound reading time. Which is just about the only good thing to be said about commuting. However, I also feel somewhat guilty that I found myself finishing Cercas' novel on the Victoria Line, at 8.30 in the morning, somewhere between Kings Cross and Tottenham Hale.

Guilty, because The Speed of Light feels like too fine a book to be consumed in bite size morsels. It's a simple book, consisting of four distinct sections, featuring a narrator who also claims to be the writer, and for whom the act of writing is the only thing that would appear to be keeping him sane. The book shifts from Catalonia to the North American Midwest, to Vietnam. The subject matter includes war, ambition, death, being haunted, and, always, writing itself.

I came across the book via a recommendation on what should henceforth be known as Pelevin's Guardian Unlimited. Purchased and read it cold, so as yet I know nothing about its writer. Whether the Bolano/Amis-esque hints that the narrator offers (one of the books he is said to have written has the same title as one of Cercas' novellas), are anything more than playfulness, I don't know, and in the end, will never matter. What matters is that the book succeeds in convincing that the writer and narrator are one, and the narrator's struggle to write the book you're reading, a book which it takes him at least a decade and several tragedies to create, convinces. The play on authenticity which the use of the narrator engages in is one of the book's many charms. Much time is dedicated to the notion that we should care about the characters within a fictional world, and Cercas' clinical dissection of his narrator's failings, failings which lead to both tragedy and learning, with the unpredictable always around the corner, is surprisingly moving. So much so that the throwaway ending caught me out like a sucker punch, on the tube, made me want to hold the book close to me for a moment, as though it really were a person.

Reading is a complex habit. The Speed of Light itself refers to this, the way in which some authors somehow manage to reach out and grab you or kiss you or hold your hand. Creating books which stand as sentinels on the long journey we've all found ourselves embarked upon. So much of our reading is habitual, matter-of-fact, a way of filling time on trains, a diversionary tactic. It's only when you come across a book that really seduces you that you remember why you read. Not so that you can forget about who you are and what you're doing with your journey time. The book that will really blow your mind is the one that will coax you into remembering who you really are, and what you're choosing to do with the time allotted on your journey. Cercas achieves this, with the deft touch of a magician.

remainder (w. tom mccarthy)

The way in which a book is discovered is part of the potential joy (or disappointment) of being a reader. Books make their way towards their audience, (or prey), often through circuitous routes, both in the process of their writing and dissemination, and the reader's awareness of their existence and gradual drift towards them. After having read a book it always seems as though the connection, between book (writer) and reader was inevitable, but until the book has been opened and consumed, that inevitability has only been theoretical. The books that you will read are out there, wending their way towards you. Many of which you will have no knowing of; because they're still beyond your ken; or they have yet to be written; or even because their writers have yet to be born.

Remainder came to me thus. I was browsing through a website, written by a group of Americans, which I came across because they'd referenced Bolano. It's the same place where I found Zurn, and The Monks. There was a brief entry about McCarthy, who at first I took to be of the Cormac variety, but then learnt was actually called Tom, and was English. I'd never heard of Tom McCarthy, even though he was/ is closer to me than I realised, and was sufficiently intrigued to order the book.

This alone doesn't guarantee its reading. Over the course of the past eighteen months or so I have made attempts to read books by British writers without being able to complete them. I've managed to come up with a kind of reader's block, and it's been years since I read a British work of fiction, as the blog attests.

I started Remainder and once again couldn't get going with it. But something made me start again last week. Perhaps it was the lure of Brixton.

There may be thousands of books set in Brixton, but I've only read one other, many years ago. Remainder is now the second. It mentions many spots I know well. Although it's years since I lived there, Brixton still feels a bit like home when I've been away from London for a while. Apart from playing football there, various friends live in the vicinity. In fact, the day after starting Remainder, I found myself travelling to Brixton three days in a row. And back again. As I travelled, below ground, I read. And learnt that a journey from where I live, on the edge of Zone 1, is the perfect distance for reading one of McCarthy's chapters. I got on the tube to Brixton, reading about Brixton, to emerge in Brixton, a Brixton exactly the same as the one described in the book. But also different. Because the one described in the book is both slightly out of date, and also fictional. It's not real.

Authenticity is in a way the keynote of McCarthy's book. It's nameless narrator, having suffered an unspecified accident, and come into a remarkable sum of money, tries to re-enact moments in his life when he has felt most real, or alive. It's dizzying stuff, as layers of reality seem to collapse in on each other. There's the ghost of Baudrillard hovering around, but also that of Bishop Berkely. How can you re-create reality? But within an alienated world, why wouldn't you want to seek a moment of truth?

It wouldn't be hard at this point to shuffle off into philosophical theorising. Which in itself is testament to the book's imaginative take on Brixton, and the world in general. What has puzzled me, however, is why, after years of finding any attempt to read the work of British writers similar to crossing the Gobi with a bottle of Evian and some M&S sandwiches in the backpack, this book succeeded in flying over (or under) the desert without my even breaking sweat. By way of explanation, I'd say that McCarthy does various things. Firstly, he conceives a remarkable story, and he tells it. He doesn't embellish it, or seek to make it appeal to a variety of selected demographics. He just tells it, in prose which, for the most part, is unadorned and functional. Secondly he's not scared of ideas. He doesn't try and make the ideas human, rather he's happy to twist his humans round his ideas. And the ideas sing for their supper far better than a whole host of carefully conceived characters ever could. Thirdly, he discovers a wicked swathe of humour in all this, which perhaps inevitably arises through the juxtaposition between the lunacy of ideas and their enactment in a given world.

Remainder isn't perfect, and probably wouldn't want to be. But it's a beautiful, dazzling work of fiction, that gives you a glimpse of what words are capable of. (As well as the benefits or risks of owning a coffee house loyalty card.) It's also set in Brixton and its chapters are ideally lengthed for a tube journey between the southernmost tip of the Victoria line and anywhere just beyond the boundary of Zone 1.

Lastly, a postscript on how the book reached this reader. As noted, it did so via a satellite and cables and a server or two, and some readers in the US (I think it's the South somewhere) who alerted me to its existence. It also got to me via an obscure publishers in Paris, who published the book after it had been rejected time after time in the UK. (Something I didn't learn until I had already been gripped by it.) I've also learnt that McCarthy is something of a star in the artworld firmament, which perhaps makes the book's success, and its ability to reach me, less surprising. However, on Thursday night, after playing football with a group of guys I know only through our connection with a small piece of sandy astroturf in Brixton, I placed the book on a wooden table in the Duke of Edinburgh, suggesting to my team-mate he might like it, and he said, oh yes, Tom's a mate of mine. I used to go out with his sister. I'm in his book about Prague. Only it's not me, he just used my song.

There had been a trace of Remainder swirling around in the patterns of the Ferndale Road sand all along.

the long emergency [w. james howard kunstler]

I am glad I've finished this book. Firstly I'm glad because the first half of it, to its credit, succeded in its pessimistic mission to scare the life out of its readers. Secondly, because this is a book which seems to take more pleasure from its prophesies of doom than the quality of its prose. Lastly, because, in spite of everything, I am pleased to be able to write this on my hangdog laptop, as fireworks flower on a glittering London skyline.

Kunstler's thesis is that the oil is going to run out sooner than we think, and when that happens, the lights are going to go out sooner than anyone is prepared to conceive. There will be no more blogging, he might well have written, with his penchant for emphatic statements. There will be no more lights, no more computers and probably far too many fireworks. The reason the first part of the book is so depressing is because the author is stringent in his arguments and they are convincing. The oil is on its way to running out. Maybe not as soon as he thinks, but even then, the peak oil argument he explains with forthright clarity means that an oil-addicted society will start to unravel long before the last drops are wrung from the planet. All the alternatives we assume are going to come riding to the rescue - nuclear, wind, solar etc - he dismisses as no real substitute for the role our black gold plays in lubricating every aspect of our society. He makes the point that if we don't have the means to transport materials, it's not going to be easy to keep nuclear power plants up and running.

As a consequence, this is a book one hopes politicians and other individuals who probably spend rather a lot of time in powerful cars or burning aviation fuel take note of, and soon. The kind of changes to the way our societies work, which the book implies we need to make sooner rather than later, will need to be initiated by those who control power in our society. Leadership is a commodity that seems to have lost its currency in the modern world, but it will need to be rediscovered if societies are not to implode at the same rate economies are doing at the moment.

As the book goes on, and Kunstler describes a projected breakdown of the United States with more and more relish, you know that he's secretly longing for the day his country returns to something rather closer to the one the Founding Fathers created. There is obviously an up-side to living a quiet, rural existance, with cottage industries making things local societies really need; rather than inhabiting a world where global industries ship products around the world that are far from being essential to our survival as a species. Kunstler's attack on a culture that has turned its land into a sprawling suburban mall complex seems eminently reasonable.

It's always been tempting to run off to the Uruguayan coast and grow my own vegetables, and the thesis of The Long Emergency suggests that this is probably now the wisest course of action. However, for some reason I can't always get my head around, it also feels like it would be a dereliction of duty. If the lights do go out, and the fireworks never stop, (they have just paused, having flourished over Kensington during the writing of this review), notions of society, in a world that has sometimes claimed to have moved beyond it, will become far more important than they are now in these oil-rich days of plenty.

kensington gardens [w. rodrigo fresán]

Sometimes at this point, the critic stares at his screen knowing there's a whole torrent of words waiting to reveal themselves, but he or she doesn't know how to access them. Every review is a little ballet of its own, a dance between the creator(s) of the piece reviewed and the reviewer. It's often when the piece is most affecting that the reviewer most wants to remain as a mere consumer, least wants to get on stage themselves. He or she needs kicking, they can't find the motivation, they're like a sulky child going, do I have to?

Children is as good a link as any. Fresán, an Argentinian, (this will be significant for reasons you would least expect) has written a book, called Kensington Gardens, which is about two childrens' writers. One is J.M. Barrie, creator of Peter Pan, inhabitant of West London, a late Victorian and a real person. The other is Peter Hook, creator of Jim Yang, a boy who possesses a chronocycle which allows him to move backwards and forwards through time. Peter Hook is also a resident of West London, a child of the sixties, but Peter Hook is a fictional character. Both authors make a fortune by inventing stories about a boy who will never grow old. Both lost a brother in their youth, and both feel that they were most at home in childhood, and spend their adulthood trying to return to that state through the act of writing.

I am conscious of the fact I am only scratching the surface. I may be on stage but I'm not exactly singing my heart out. Or whatever you do in a ballet. That's because I want to say.... and I'm not too sure how to get there.

Kensington Gardens is a book about childhood. It's also a book about writing. It's also a book about London. It's a book about fact and fiction. It's such a surprising book that in many ways it feels like the best way to describe its properties is just to list them. It tells the story of Barrie's life, in rapidfire, detailed, urgent prose, narrated by the book's other author, Peter Hook. Of course, one of the ways to make a book compelling is to find a compelling story to tell, and in Barrie's curious life, Fresán finds just that. At times the novel seems like a biography, a work of non-fiction, as it takes the reader from point to point in Barrie's career, and the way his doomed attempt to escape adulthood impacted on the lives of the five brothers he used as inspiration for his most famous creation. However, Fresán recognises that there are things that only fiction can reveal. He hunts down Barrie's touching yet ludicrous project, pursuing it to its bitter end, getting under the skin of a man who never adjusted to being a man. Though I should note that I only know Fresán's Barrie - and I'm sure Fresán would caution me not to believe everything he writes. The point, consolidated by the secondary fictional narrative of Peter Hook and Jim Yang is that Fresán isn't really writing about Barrie. He's writing about what it means to be a child; to cease to be a child; to grow older; to see our childhood dreams fade; to live with the meaning of that; unto the end.

The secondary story reaffirms this. Peter Hook (a pseudonym) is the son of a more-or-less forgotten sixties English rock star and his cut-glass wife, who died in a plane crash shortly after the death of their younger son, Baco. They are participants in that nostalgically venerated time, the swinging sixties, associates of Dylan and the Beatles and Julie Christie and Robert Fraser and everyone else you could care to mention who contributed to making London the kind of Neverland it briefly was. Fresán writes, in his notes, that he is a child of the sixties. In writing about that time, he's writing about the dreams that seeped across the Atlantic, found some underground stream to propagate themselves, conjuring a world which was always both real and fictional at the same time.

This is the stuff of Fresán's childhood dreams, or at least a part of them. In writing the story of Peter Hook and his bohemian parents, Fresán gives life to those dreams, just as Barrie, an extremist childhoodian, invented Peter Pan in order to give life to childhood dreams which otherwise, of biological neccessity, would wither on the vine.

Kensington Gardens is one of those books that takes a while to get into, but when you do it seizes you, refusing to let you put it down. In part this is down to the simple effectiveness of Fresán's storytelling, much of it in the present tense. In part it's because he conjures Barrie's world so effectively; and indeed London as a whole. It's a sweeping, convincing depiction of a city and its society. Remarkably, in the postscript notes, Fresán reveals that he's only once been to London. When he stayed for a few days in a cheap hotel on the edge of town. He knows London best as an airport (the airport where Hook is snatched as a child) he passes through. His meticulous depiction of my city is, in fact, a description of an imaginary city; the whole of London becomes his Neverland, and of course, it is all the more convincing as a result. We don't read books to see the world we can see with our own eyes, we read them to see what it looks like through someone else's imagination.

Fresán's notes at the end of the book mention his friend Alan Pauls, as well as Roberto Bolano, "with us forever". Kensington Gardens is not his first novel, but is the first to be translated (with supreme fluency by Natasha Wimmer) into English. It feels odd that he writes with such brilliance about the past, describing for example the way that Barrie (and Hook) always sat facing backwards in trains, as their fascination was in what lay behind them, not ahead. Reading Fresán, as well as his noted companions, I feel a little as though I'm reading the future. Or rather, to be more precise, I'm reading the books that shall be read in the future, that the future is waiting to catch up with. Perhaps it will happen sooner that I anticipate. There's a quotation on the back of Kensington Gardens written by Jonathan Lethem (who I've never read) praising the book and saying at last 'we pathetic English-only readers' can get a taste of Fresán's genius. I am glad it's him saying that, and not me. It feels odd that London, and Britishness (Barrie was after all a Scot) should be captured so much more vividly by an Argentinian than I've seen it captured by most of our own writers, an Argentine who's barely visited these shores. And then again, of course, it isn't odd, because what's required to capture these things (if capture is the right word) is not local knowledge, but a sense of vision, which is also known as imagination. A commodity which Fresán, Pauls, Bolano and co possess in frightening abundance.

There, I'll step back. The dance is over and I've finished my singing for now. Until the next time. I've succeeded in not mentioning Harry Potter (which I haven't read). I've also not explained, Patricia, why this book is also about you, and then, and all the rest. The only thing I'm left wondering is when we here shall start to assemble our childhood dreams, or at least a part of them, from over there. (Rather than over there.)