leaving the parc? I'm in the darc

A couple of unstructured thoughts after returning from a long weekend at Center Parcs with the family.

Firstly that "with the family" is how most people choose to go to Center Parcs; there are doubtless reasons why as a couple or small group of child-free adults you might choose to take a holiday at Center Parcs, but it's not completely clear to me what they are. That is in no way a criticism of either Center Parcs as a place or those people as people, it's just that a lot of the stuff is clearly targeted at people who have kids: the pool with its many exciting slides and rapids, the easy access to various kinds of food, the boating lake with various relatively sedate and low-speed child-friendly boat adventures. Yes, you'll be saying, but you can take the bikes and go and do lots of healthy bike stuff on your bikes. To which I would say, well, sort of. We'll come back to this.

Secondly, a word on spelling: "Center" in the American style with the "er" instead of the "re", and Parcs in the European style with the "c". These things reflect the organisation's Dutch origins, although following a split in 2001 the UK and Ireland operation is now a wholly separate organisation, though (presumably) retaining the spelling for continuity and brand recognition and stuff like that.

Center Parcs is not the only game in town when it comes to village-style experiences with centralised food and entertainment facilities, and we have previously gone (three or four times, I think) to Bluestone, which is over near Narberth in west Wales, and generally had a lovely time each time, If my records are correct the last time we were there was in December 2018, so the kids were a lot smaller then. One thing that affects is the kids' desire for more gnarly pool adventures now they're a bit older, and it must be said that the rapids at Center Parcs are a good deal more adrenaline-fuelled than anything Bluestone has to offer, as nice as the Blue Lagoon is. It should also be said that adults of adult height and weight being cajoled by their kids into traversing the rapids upwards of 30 times over the course of a long weekend will come home with a substantial collection of bruises to ankles, hips, etc. and in my case one ear filled with a lethal cocktail of earwax, pool water, cryptosporidium and child's piss which seems reluctant to unbung itself. I'm sure it'll be fine though. Anyway, more objective analyses of alternatives to Center Parcs, including Bluestone, can be found here. 

One thing I definitely can say about Bluestone is that, as lovely as cycling around the site is, it's also possible to seamlessly incorporate a trip off-site if you want to do a longer ride. I know this because we did it in 2014 as part of our first visit, when we hired a couple of bikes and one of those little trailers which we put Nia in (she'd have been two at the time).

The photo shows me and Nia heading around one of the paths at the northern edge of the resort which eventually leads up into the western end of Canaston Woods and joins the Knights Way. We did a fairly unambitious route up here, over to the bridge by Blackpool Mill and back again, with a few stops for exploring in between, all without at any point having to pass through a gate, an airlock or any other security barrier or being stopped by any sinister uniformed individuals slapping us across the face with a leather gauntlet and demanding to see our papers. The mill, by the way, was pretty much abandoned in 2014 but has since (under Bluestone's management, though it's outside the resort) been transformed into quite a ritzy-looking restaurant.

Anyway, when we planned our Center Parcs trip I noticed that the site (the first UK Center Parcs site, opened in 1987) was right next to the much larger Sherwood Pines Forest Park, a place with lots of cycle trails. Excellent, I thought, since now Nia has graduated from being a two-year-old in a trailer to a terrifyingly fit and active thirteen-year-old with her own bike, we could do with somewhere to go that offers longer rides than the Center Parcs site, which is fairly small. A quick look at an OS map shows that there is a big junction of paths right by the top left corner of the Center Parcs site; surely, you might think, an ingress/egress point for those wanting to do some longer cycling routes. Not so, as it happens, or not that we could find, anyway. Google Maps suggests that there is an egress point along the western boundary of the site but Nia and I cycled out there and had a look without finding it, and taking the route marked in red to the corner of the site doesn't yield an escape route either, there being a high fence on your left all the way round. 

The charitable view here is that this is more about keeping non-residents out than keeping residents in, especially important, one would imagine, at the Longleat site where non-residents who might want to get in include ACTUAL FREAKIN' LIONS, but there is a suspicion that it is a bit of the latter as well. Given that residents are issued with wristbands with some sort of RFID device which controls access to your lodge, swimming pool lockers etc., it's not impossible to imagine some sort of gate system controlled by the same device. Or they could just be less uptight and take the more easy-going approach that Bluestone take; don't signpost the route either internally or externally but make it available for those enterprising enough to want to take it. My personal inclination is to be irritated by cycling down a track that I expected to lead to freedom and adventure and personal autonomy and choice and be confronted with this:

In the end we found plenty to do without getting out into the wider forest area, and it is clearly physically possible to leave the site by the main entrance and loop round back into the Sherwood Pines site, albeit at the cost of 3-4 kilometres of extra distance. The whole thing is a little vexing, though, and does conjure up memories of the delightful public relations disaster that the Center Parcs organisation endured when trying to appear sufficiently reverent in the wake of the Queen's death in 2022. 

DO NOT ATTEMPT TO LEAVE YOUR LODGE https://t.co/FvuMjS2HRy pic.twitter.com/YVjRaC1fcP

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) September 14, 2022

A couple of footnotes: firstly anyone planning a visit to Bluestone and noticing its convenient next-door proximity to the Oakwood theme park should be aware that Oakwood has now, as of earlier this year, closed down permanently.

Secondly, this trip was actually my third visit to Center Parcs (all of them to the same Sherwood Forest site), this one and our previous family visit in 2023 but also a trip waaaaaay back in what would have probably been either 1992 or 1993 with my then-girlfriend Posy and her family during the course of which this absolutely splendid photo was taken of me. 

My principal recollection of that trip is of me and Posy's younger sister's boyfriend (who I suppose would have been about 18) spending most of the week leaving the girls to do their own thing and disappearing off to the sports hall for a ferociously-competitive series of bouts of various racket sports, bouts from which I have chosen to recall I emerged triumphant.

the last book I read

Kudos by Rachel Cusk.

We are back in the company of our nearly-anonymous narrator from Outline and Transit. I say "nearly" because her name is Faye (indeed the three-book sequence is informally known is some quarters as the "Faye trilogy"); we know this because it's (slightly archly) mentioned exactly once in each book (page 227 of 232 in my copy of this one).

Kudos opens pretty much exactly as Outline did; our narrator (a novelist) is on an aeroplane on her way to some literary event and strikes up a conversation with the man sitting next to her. Well, I say "conversation", but that implies some sort of reciprocal two-way thing, and in fact, in common with most of the conversations in all three books, this is largely one-way, the anonymous stranger telling a story after minimal prompting from our narrator, this story being a convoluted tale of woe involving his wife and daughter and a dead dog.

On arrival in Berlin for the literary event our narrator checks into her hotel and meets with her publisher, a couple of other authors, of varying ages and degrees of career development and success, and an interviewer. A similar process occurs with the ensuing conversations - with minimal encouragement people expound at some length on a variety of topics, usually centered around some event in their own lives but with plenty of more general philosophical musing on the side. Then there is an organised walking tour of Berlin, with the narrator and the guide, Hermann, striding purposefully off ahead of the group and finding that the subsequent waiting around for everyone to catch up offers further opportunities for conversation. Back at the hotel canteen the various authors struggle to negotiate the complex coupon system that enables them to get food, and we meet a couple of other authors, Gerta and Ryan. Ryan is the same guy as we met early in Outline, but now transformed from easy-going guy doing a casual teaching gig to terrifyingly driven, highly successful, gaunt, Fitbit-obsessed exercise fanatic.

We then move on to a barely-distinguishable literary event in a slightly warmer coastal location, probably Spain or Portugal, and more authors, in particular Sophia and her taciturn friend Luis, part of a group who go out to a restaurant, talk gloomily about their various divorces and push mysterious oily fish round their plates for a couple of hours. Then there are more interviews, and a meeting in a restaurant with the narrator's editor and translator wherein wine is drunk and further talk is talked. Going for a walk to clear her head, the narrator takes a phone call from her son, and, having talked him down from the grip of some minor crisis, wanders onto a nudist beach, strips off and takes a dip in the sea.

We can probably get the griping out of the way first: this is the third novel in this vein and so the novelty of Outline's structure and narrative voice has worn off a bit (not that it was as unprecedented as some seemed to think anyway), the business of most of the characters being either writers or critics or interviewers (i.e. people who either write, write about writers or talk to writers about writing) runs the risk of the whole thing disappearing up its own fundament, and the central character's own passivity and humourlessness grate a bit after a while. It's all very white and middle-class as well; I'm not well-versed enough in Marxist literary theory to feel emboldened enough to call a novel "bourgeois", but if I were this is the sort of novel I might do it for. The other obvious point to make is that in a novel supposedly populated by actual human beings who resemble in at least some respects the ones you and I know who populate planet Earth, nobody speaks in a way that at all resembles how actual people speak. This is just a structural problem with any novel that wants to articulate complex philosophical ideas and doesn't have an omniscient narrative voice that can just dump great big tracts onto the page: at least one of your characters has to articulate those ideas in a way that sounds like a series of things someone might plausibly actually say, which is inherently tricky. The gimmick of having the narrator's name be uttered only once, usually right at the end of the book, comes across as just that (i.e. a gimmick), particularly in Kudos where it's uttered by her son, slightly jarringly as he's just referred to his father as "Dad".

Tish and pish to all that, though, because this is still intensely readable (helped by being quite short), a brave and interesting formal and structural experiment, and there's nothing wrong with a book that makes some demands on the intelligence of its readers. It's easy, but dangerous, to make assumptions about how much events here are meant to mirror the author's own life: recently-divorced fortysomething novelist, mother of two teenage children, etc. etc., but what does seem pretty clear is that Cusk herself is fiercely intelligent, slightly intense and a bit humourless, rather like her narrator here. 

Previous series of at least three books where all of them feature on this blog are Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet, Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy and William Gibson's Bridge trilogy. Only one book to go for Patricia Highsmith's Ripley series to join that list: watch this space.

the last book I read

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the last book I read

Light Perpetual by Francis Spufford.

We're in Woolworth's. I mean, back when Woolworth's was a thing, and therefore being in one was a thing you might possibly do. That actually only rules out dates later than about 2008, but we're much earlier here; in fact we're in 1944, during the Second World War. And here are our five main characters: Jo, Val, Ben, Alec and Vern, all small children aged about five. But why have we chosen this moment to meet them? Well, something significant is about to happen, but we'll circle back to it at the end, if you don't mind. 

So now we commence a series of flash-forwards, first by five years to 1949, and then in a series of fifteen-year jumps to 1964, 1979, 1994 and finally 2009, when each of the main cast of characters is around seventy. All five start out in the (fictional) London borough of Bexford but then take different paths through life.

Alec goes from wise-cracking schoolkid to cocky twentysomething looking for a break in the newspaper business, which he gets as a typesetter. His natural bolshiness and interest in left-wing politics also make him ideal as a union representative. The fact that his job is in jeopardy by the late 1970s isn't any reflection on his skill at it, but just a reflection of the changing times and the development of computers that will eventually make his entire job obsolete. Alec fights against the inevitable, and leads his colleagues in a lengthy strike, but eventually finds himself out of a job and takes a swerve into the teaching profession. 

Vern, a big, ungainly kid, matures into a big, formidable adult making a slightly dodgy living in the property rental business and nursing a slightly incongruous love for opera on the quiet when no-one else is listening. Eventually the business climate takes a downturn and he is back to square one (not to mention being booted out on the street by his wife), but gradually puts his business back together so successfully that he's able to afford lavish trips to indulge his love of opera; the full black tie and quail's eggs extravaganza. But a change of fortune is always just round the corner, and if you spend your life pissing everyone off in pursuit of your aims, including your own family, you may find that they are disinclined to help out when you really need them.

Jo and Val, the twins, take different paths through life: Val falls in with a group of ne'er-do-wells led by the charismatic Mike, whose slightly cool and exciting rocker rebelliousness has by the late 1970s curdled into skinhead ultra-nationalism. But at least if he slakes his thirst for a bit of the old ultraviolence out on the streets then he won't feel the need to come home and take it out on the missus, right? Eventually the inevitable happens and Mike administers a beating to a young Asian bloke that tips over into murder and he gets put away for a long stretch. After Mike eventually dies in prison Val gets a job as a volunteer for the Samaritans, dispensing some of her hard-earned life experience. Meanwhile Jo has spent an entertaining couple of decades in California as musical sidekick and occasional lover to Ricky, a fellow Londoner who has become a proper massive rock star. Eventually that comes to an end, as all things do, and she returns to England and a job as a teacher in a secondary school.

Finally there's Ben, already by his twenties in the grip of some fairly serious mental illness and on a pretty heavy prescribed drug regime. a few years later and he appears to be off the prescription drugs but self-medicating fairly heavily with brain-numbing quantities of weed while just about holding down a job as a bus conductor. After another fifteen years his life appears to have taken a miraculous turn for the better after a chance meeting with Martha, the Nigerian proprietor of a café where he's got a part-time job - she straightens him out by marching him off to the GP for a proper prescription of anti-depressants, and once he's sorted out in the old noggin department promotes him to full-time employee and eventually husband. 

So by the last instalment in 2009 everyone's had their fair share of triumph and disaster, marriage and divorce, birth and death, tears and laughter, light and shade, etc. Has anyone changed the world, become Prime Minister, found a cure for athlete's foot or anything like that? Well, no, but who is to judge the value of an individual life? And who knows what small barely-noticeable ripple that one of us might make during our time here might eventually accumulate into something momentous after we've gone?

Well, I hope you're comfy on that rug, because prepare to have it pulled from under you: the event described in the first chapter is the V2 rocket impact on Woolworth's in New Cross in November 1944 in which 168 people died, including many children. In the fictionalised version of it that features our five protagonists, they are all, with various parents, directly under the point of impact and it is made very clear that they are all pretty much vaporised into their component molecules by the ensuing blast. So what follows is a possible alternative future if some part of the preceding few minutes had played out differently and the rocket's trajectory had altered by a fraction of a degree and it had pancaked harmlessly into the Thames, or possibly slaughtered a different 168 people in a different building.

So how do we feel about this? We'll have to be self-aware enough to realise that any responses like "well, that's rubbish then, none of it was real" are a bit problematic; after all, none of it was real anyway, it's a novel, literally made up by someone. I think my problems with it, to the extent that I have any, are as follows: firstly, if you skip the first chapter what you have left is an interesting but not wholly remarkable set of occasionally intertwining stories about five kids from London and their various adventures in life. That's fine, but pasting the framing device on the front almost looks like an attempt to imbue the stories that follow with a sort of poignancy and significance that they haven't really earned. Secondly (and this is really just the first criticism again in a slightly different form), the first chapter is so brilliantly written, with its Nicholson Baker-esque slowing of time to a nanosecond crawl to describe the rocket's arrival through the roof of the building and the impossibly violent chemical reaction happening inside it, that it raises expectations that the rest of the book can't possibly live up to. The other example that springs to mind of an opening chapter so perfect that the rest of the book was a bit of a let-down in comparison is Ian McEwan's Enduring Love. 

To be clear, there's absolutely nothing wrong with this, but it just felt to me like the structure didn't quite knit together properly, or, to put it another way, the carrot of something bold and structurally experimental was dangled and then never quite followed through on. It is worth pointing out that quite a lot of people disagreed with me, though. 

A couple of footnotes: some of the fragility-and-preciousness-of-life stuff, particularly towards the end, is fairly explicitly Goddy, but not in a way that I found annoying, or perhaps my mild annoyance at the book's structure distracted me. The other thing that struck me was how similar Ben's intrusive thoughts were - particularly during his weed-addled on-the-buses episode - to the borderline personality disorder stuff described by Joe Tracini in his various videos and books. 

incidental music spot of the day

Hey, we haven't done one of these for a while (three-and-a-half years or so in fact), but I was struck by the loose yet funky tune that plays over the latest Haven Holidays advert, as it was highly recognisable to me as Can You Get To That by Funkadelic. My recollection is that I discovered Funkadelic off the back of some sort of Greatest Guitar Solos Of All Time article in a music magazine that pointed me to Maggot Brain, which certainly fits the bill as it is essentially a ten-minute guitar solo courtesy of guitarist Eddie Hazel.

That in turn led me to the album of the same name, and thence a few of the other albums from their early/mid-1970s heyday, including my favourite one Standing On The Verge Of Getting It On which not only was a fixture in the CD player in the RV we hired for our honeymoon in Canada in 2011, but also provided, in Sexy Ways, the first dance song at our wedding in June 2011, a choice I absolutely stand by 14 years later, even as I largely disown the improvised dance moves I came up with to accompany it.

As an aside, if the Stone Roses hadn't heard the title track of Standing On The Verge Of Getting It On before they wrote the lengthy funky stop-start outro to I Am The Resurrection then I'll eat my hat. 

the last book I read

Tokyo Express by Seicho Matsumoto.

A man is dead, on a beach. Suspicious? I should bally well say so. Suicide? Yes, but how? Well, surely he simply shot himself and then hid the gun? Well, no, actually it looks as if he died by cyanide poisoning, as did the young lady found beside him. A classic lovers' suicide, then, by the look of it; an open and shut case. Well, just a minute there, you're forgetting rumpled detective Jutaro Torigai: kare wa kisoku ni shitagawanai ippikiōkami no keikandaga, kekka wa dashite iru.

The suicidal couple are quickly identified as Kenichi Sayama, an assistant section chief at a government ministry, and Hideko Kuwayama, known to everyone as Toki, a waitress at a Tokyo restaurant. So what were they doing at a beach near Fukuoka, many miles south-west of Tokyo and indeed on a whole different island?

Questioning the locals in the vicinity of the beach doesn't reveal much, apart from a couple of sightings of a couple walking in the vicinity of the local railway stations, though the timings of the sightings don't really add up properly. More information is forthcoming back in Tokyo, where it transpires that Sayama and Toki were spotted boarding the express to Fukuoka by a couple of Toki's fellow waitresses from the restaurant, in the company of one of their regular customers, prominent businessman Mr. Yasuda. Meanwhile it is revealed that the ministry that Sayama worked for was embroiled in a corruption scandal - maybe Sayama knew some inconvenient things? Could he have been rubbed out? But how could someone have engineered not only his suicide (or apparent suicide) but that of his clandestine lover as well?

Torigai and his Tokyo counterpart Kiichi Mihara start with the obvious stuff: what were the lovers doing for the few days between being sighted at the railway station in Tokyo and being found on the beach, and what do the waitresses and Mr. Yasuda know? Mihara, a diligent and slightly obsessive guy, soon comes across an oddity: Yasuda and the waitresses could only have had a clear view across the railway lines to the platform from which the express departed during a specific four-minute interval a few minutes before the departure of Yasuda's train. Is this too much of a coincidence? Could Yasuda have engineered things in some way? Was he concerned about revelations of corruption affecting some of his lucrative business dealings with the ministry?

All of this speculation is a bit pointless, though, since the actual murders (if they were murders) happened several days later and several hundred miles away, and it turns out Yasuda has a cast-iron alibi for that period, as he was in Hokkaido for a business trip, a trip also involving a lengthy rail journey from Tokyo. Or was he? Isn't just happening to be right at the far end of the country a bit too convenient? Mihara begins picking away at every aspect of Yasuda's seemingly painstakingly-constructed alibi and sees it start to unravel: no-one actually saw him on the train until a few stops from its final destination, Sapporo, the telegram he supposedly sent earlier from the train was sent by someone else, and his bed-ridden wife Ryoko just happens to be an authority on the minutiae of rail timetabling. Coincidence? OR IS IT?

Anyway, Mihara's persistence eventually cracks the case (SPOILER ALERT from here on, naturally): Yasuda really was at the beach on the night in question and then travelled to Hokkaido by plane in time to hop on the train a couple of stops from Sapporo and make it look as if he'd been on it the whole way. Not only was Ryoko - genuinely incapacitated by chronic tuberculosis, but not, as it turns out, completely bed-ridden - instrumental in concocting the railway scheduling ruse that enabled Yasuda to establish the pretence of Toki and Sayama being lovers (they knew each other, but that was it), but she also was at the beach on the night of the murders and helped her husband do the deed - in the process revenging herself on Toki whom she knew to have been actually her husband's lover, not Sayama's. Her husband's primary motive, as the detectives had already surmised, was eliminating a potential whistle-blower in the corruption investigation who might have jeopardised some lucrative business arrangements, and as a handy by-product offing an erstwhile lover whom he'd got a bit bored with.

Like most murder mysteries the solution here doesn't really stand up to being thought about too much, but the unpicking of the mystery is very satisfying. The shift in viewpoint about a third of the way through from Torigai, who you'd assumed would drive the investigation, to Mihara is a bit jarring - Torigai only popping up thereafter to exchange a couple of letters with Mihara and be the recipient of Mihara's summing-up at the end wherein it is revealed that the Yasudas conveniently offed themselves in their own lovers' suicide pact when they felt the investigative net closing in on them. The minute dissection of rail timetables may not be for everyone, but the whole thing is only 149 pages in my nice new Penguin Classics edition. The original English translations had the title Points And Lines, which I think is probably better.

Previous novels on this list to have been translated from the original Japanese are The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea and the two Murakamis, Norwegian Wood and Dance Dance Dance.

Postscript: I meant to add that this is another book on this list to feature a map, two in this case, the first just a general map of Japan presumably included to illustrate how Tokyo is pretty much in the middle of the country and Fukuoka and Sapporo at opposite ends, and the second to make a bit of sense of the murder location and the maze of train lines that cross and intersect near there.

celebrity lookeylikey of the day

Today's pair are author Harlan Coben and actor, author, amateur chef and mixologist Stanley Tucci.

The only Harlan Coben book I have ever read is Tell No One, which I read a copy of owned by my then-girlfriend shortly after its 2001 publication in a desperate holiday running-out-of-books frenzy, something I would obviously never allow to happen nowadays. I would describe it as enjoyable, gripping and utterly ludicrous, which is all absolutely fine for a fairly pulpy thriller. Like many primarily plot-driven things it and its many successors in Coben's oeuvre are prime material for film and TV adaptations, and sure enough there have been a whole raft of them, most recently the Netflix series adapted from Run Away, which seems to feature a cast of mainly British actors.

Stanley Tucci, meanwhile, is probably right now deep in some method-acting preparation for the plum role of me in the movie of my life. For him to be a perfect fit appearance-wise I probably need to get slightly balder, something which I'm pretty sure will happen all too imminently. 

did an icebreaker at a work meeting the other day where the question was "who would play you in a movie of your life". panicked slightly trying to think of bespectacled bald fiftysomethings and said Stanley Tucci. increasingly convinced of the genius of the idea

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) July 17, 2023

is she sleeping? I don't think so

Clearly I need to be careful about even alluding tangentially to the very existence of The Curse Of Electric Halibut, since my doing so in the last book review has almost immediately resulted (with a bit of time-travel involved, admittedly) in my learning of the death of Jennifer Johnston, novelist, playwright and specifically for the purposes of this list author of The Illusionist, which I read back in July 2012 and mentioned in passing much more recently in my post about The Prestige. 

You will notice that I didn't mention her in any of the various posts where I break my supposed rule regarding not speculating luridly about future deaths; I think my mental picture of the author of The Illusionist would have been of someone quite a bit younger than the 65 that she was at the time. Anyway, she was 95 when she died, which makes her the oldest curse victim, beating by around ten months a record held since relatively recently by Milan Kundera. 

Author	Date of first book	Date of death	Age	Curse length
Michael Dibdin	31st January 2007	30th March 2007	60	0y 59d
José Saramago	9th May 2009	18th June 2010	87	1y 40d
Beryl Bainbridge	14th May 2008	2nd July 2010	77	2y 50d
Russell Hoban	23rd August 2010	13th December 2011	86	1y 113d
Richard Matheson	7th September 2011	23rd June 2013	87	1y 291d
Iain Banks	6th November 2006	9th June 2013	59	6y 218d
Elmore Leonard	April 16th 2009	20th August 2013	87	4y 128d
Doris Lessing	8th May 2007	17th November 2013	94	6y 196d
Gabriel García Márquez	10th July 2007	17th April 2014	87	6y 284d
Ruth Rendell	23rd December 2009	2nd May 2015	85	5y 132d
James Salter	4th February 2014	19th June 2015	90	1y 136d
David Cook	24th February 2009	16th September 2015	74	6y 205d
Henning Mankell	6th May 2013	5th October 2015	67	2y 152d
William McIlvanney	7th September 2010	5th December 2015	79	5y 90d
Umberto Eco	30th June 2012	19th February 2016	84	3y 234d
Anita Brookner	15th July 2011	10th March 2016	87	4y 240d
William Trevor	29th May 2010	20th November 2016	88	6y 177d
John Berger	10th November 2009	2nd January 2017	90	7y 55d
Nicholas Mosley	24th September 2011	28th February 2017	93	5y 159d
Helen Dunmore	10th March 2008	5th June 2017	64	9y 89d
JP Donleavy	21st May 2015	11th September 2017	91	2y 114d
Ursula Le Guin	6th December 2015	22nd January 2018	88	2y 49d
Anita Shreve	2nd September 2006	29th March 2018	71	11y 211d
Philip Roth	23rd December 2017	22nd May 2018	85	0y 150d
Justin Cartwright	7th September 2008	3rd December 2018	75	10y 89d
Toni Morrison	18th July 2010	5th August 2019	88	9y 20d
Charles Portis	3rd April 2018	17th February 2020	86	1y 320d
Alison Lurie	24th March 2007	3rd December 2020	94	13y 254d
John le Carré	21st February 2008	12th December 2020	89	12y 295d
Joan Didion	14th December 2010	23rd December 2021	87	11y 12d
Hilary Mantel	22nd October 2010	22nd September 2022	70	11y 338d
Greg Bear	4th October 2021	19th November 2022	71	1y 48d
Russell Banks	4th December 2018	7th January 2023	82	4y 35d
Isabel Colegate	24th October 2009	12th March 2023	91	13y 140d
Cormac McCarthy	22nd September 2009	13th June 2023	89	13y 265d
Milan Kundera	27th March 2008	11th July 2023	94	15y 105d
Christopher Priest	6th January 2015	4th February 2024	80	9y 26d
Paul Auster	22nd April 2012	30th April 2024	77	12y 8d
Kinky Friedman	19th December 2007	27th June 2024	79	16y 191d
David Lodge	4th March 2008	1st January 2025	89	16y 301d
Jennifer Johnston	23rd July 2012	25th February 2025	95	12y 215d

the last book I read

The Lay Of The Land by Richard Ford.

So this is Frank Bascombe. You guys have met before, actually - you might remember, a few years back. Frank is working as a realtor, or an estate agent as you Brits would have it, and has made a pretty nice living out of it. So much so, in fact, that he now runs his own company, Realty-Wise. He's moved out of the town of Haddam where he lived in the previous two books in which he features, The Sportswriter and Independence Day, and now lives not far away in the quiet New Jersey coastal resort of Sea-Clift. 

Frank is in his mid-fifties now (it's late 2000 when the book opens, in the controversial aftermath of the Bush-Gore presidential election) and, while he keeps himself in pretty trim shape, has had to make certain accommodations to middle age, not least in coming to terms with a recent diagnosis of prostate cancer, a (depressingly) quintessentially middle- and even old-aged man's disease. Any worries about how this, and its accompanying radiotherapy treatment regime, might affect regular combat operations in the bedroom department, if you know what I mean, and I think you do, are rendered sadly academic, at least for the moment, by Frank's second wife Sally recently upping and leaving him in a somewhat bizarre sequence of events.

Basically while Frank and his first wife Ann just got divorced in a fairly mundane way, Sally's first husband Wally disappeared, apparently in a fairly permanent way, shortly after returning from a tour of duty in Vietnam in about 1970. Well, OK, a bit weird, but these things happen, and Sally has put it behind her. Except it turns out it isn't behind her after all, as one day Wally just turns up out of the blue at his parents' place and announces he's been scraping a living in some sort of commune on the Isle of Mull for the last couple of decades. Frank isn't sure how to react to this news, nor how he expects Sally to react (still less what the legal ramifications are for his marriage to her). What he probably isn't expecting is for her to head off back to Mull with Wally - not necessarily permanently, so she says, but to try and resolve some unfinished business.

So Frank finds himself on his own in the run-up to Thanksgiving. Well, not quite on his own, as plans gradually come together to reunite what remains of his family for the day. His daughter Clarissa has been spending some time with him anyway as she's decided to take charge of the situation regarding his cancer treatment. Clarissa is herself navigating some life changes though - previously in a fairly stable relationship with her girlfriend Cookie, she has recently split up with her and is now back on solids with new boyfriend Thom. Frank's son Paul, meanwhile, of a slightly more challenging personality type but seemingly making a decent living as a slogan writer for Hallmark cards, is also due to arrive with his new girlfriend Jill. Finally, in a rash moment, Frank invites his ex-wife Ann (who, to be fair, is also Clarissa and Paul's mother) who seems to be going through a bit of a personal crisis following the death of her second husband.

Frank has a few things to sort out before he and the family can settle in to some serious troughing down into the old brined and deep-fried turkey and a couple of hundredweight of candied yams, creamed corn and similar incomprehensible American Thanksgiving cuisine. Firstly he has to go and facilitate the sale of a chalet with his Realty-Wise protégé, Mike, something he manages to fuck up after insisting the prospective client view the inside of the property, thereby inadvertently facilitating a mildly terrifying encounter with a feral fox. Then he has an encounter with Detective Marinara, who has transcended being named after a pasta sauce to rise through the police ranks and has been put in charge of investigating an explosion at Haddam hospital resulting in the death of a member of staff, as it happens someone known personally to Frank. No suggestion that Frank is a suspect, but Marinara wants to tie up a few loose ends. Finally, and most bizarrely of all, and putting a pretty comprehensive spanner in the Thanksgiving works, the Feensters, Frank's generally irritating and awful neighbours, are held up by a couple of heavily-armed feral youths who want to steal their cars (a couple of flashy and ostentatious Corvettes), and in the front-yard confrontation which follows both Feensters are comprehensively ventilated and Frank is shot in the chest - non-fatally as it turns out. 

A wibbly-wobbly dissolve now to a few months later - Frank is out of hospital having recovered from his gunshot woulds, and is on his way to another hospital to have his prostate investigated to see how the radiotherapy has gone. Accompanying him on the plane trip is Sally, returned from Mull and tentatively reunited with Frank. 

As I said above, this is the third novel in what a lot of people at the time referred to as the "Bascombe trilogy", presumably in the expectation that Richard Ford was getting on a bit, there was quite a gap between books and that that might be all of them. I think Ford himself may also have dropped some hints that that was likely to be it. Not a bit of it, in fact, as there have subsequently been two further books: the punderfully-titled Let Me Be Frank With You, a collection of loosely-linked short stories, in 2014, and then the novel Be Mine in 2023, which, as if to prove that people never learn, Ford's Wikipedia page confidently refers to as the "presumably final" novel in the series. I mean, maybe it is - if nothing else Ford is now 81, and this list exists, so, well, you do the math.

Never mind all that, though: is it any good? Well, yes, I would say it is, although it must also be said that standard sequelitis applies as much here as it does to lower forms of art such as, say, the Police Academy movies. The alert reader who's read the first two books will certainly observe fairly early on that the general structure here is very similar to that of Independence Day, just substituting in Thanksgiving as the significant event that the novel's events meander their way towards. And meander they certainly do, as the entire timeline of the novel's 700+ pages (more on this in a bit) occupies only about three days, and moreover the assumed climax of the book, the Thanksgiving dinner at which certain uncomfortable family discussions may occur, grievances will be aired, revelations, erm, revelated, etc. etc., never actually occurs, Frank's near-murder putting a stop to it (again, something quite similar occurs in Independence Day). So while the writing style is very smooth and digestible and Frank is an appealing middle-class everyman - bright, basically decent, occasionally mercurial and still haunted by the premature death of his son Ralph back in the early 1980s and the subsequent collapse of his first marriage - there are moments where the reader wishes the characters and their author would just GET ON WITH IT a bit. 

That general low-key meandery-ness and the general polo-and-chino-clad white middle-class-ness of it all makes the lurid purple-lycra-clad vulgarity of the Feensters even more jarring, and their subsequent messy demise doubly so, although I guess messy multiple murder in a quiet suburban setting - clearly a thing that does happen, especially in the USA - is inherently jarring and weird. 

The thing that resonated specifically with me was that The Lay Of The Land just happens to capture a snapshot of Frank Bascombe when he is exactly the same age that I am now. It's sobering, since if I were to be somehow rendered not constantly, painfully, conscious of how unbelievably old I am and obliged to work just from the description of Frank offered here and my own physical sensations I'd say: well, this old geezer is clearly quite a bit older than me: prostate cancer, occasional dizzy spells, bladder trouble (admittedly mostly a side-effect of the cancer treatment), while I, tragic male pattern baldness aside, am a fit and active guy, weigh no more than I did twenty years ago, still irrepressibly and priapically horny, etc. That sounds like a brag, and I suppose it partly is, but the main point is that this stuff happens to everyone sooner or later, and, also, I suppose, that one's own residual self-image isn't the best guide to objective external reality as observed by others.

The timelines, incidentally, assuming that my assertions about Frank's son Paul's age in the Independence Day post are accurate, go something like this:

• The Sportswriter
• Published: 1986
• Set: 1983
• My reading: ??late 1990s/early 2000s??
• Independence Day
• Published: 1995
• Set: 1988
• My reading: 2009
• The Lay Of The Land
• Published: 2006
• Set: 2000
• My reading: 2025

Finally, my paperback copy of The Lay Of The Land is not only an intimidating 726 pages, but is also printed on incredibly thin paper, so that it's a lot thinner than you'd expect. To illustrate this, here it is with my copy of Independence Day, which is 451 pages but about the same thickness, and my ancient copy of Stephen King's The Stand, which at 734 pages is almost exactly the same length but nearly twice as thick.

I assume the legend printed on the publisher information page and reproduced below is relevant here, though what it actually means is unclear to me. Conversely and contrariwise the print is quite large and widely-spaced at only 28 lines per page (Independence Day has 39), so if it were printed differently it'd be a lot shorter. This Guardian review, presumably of a differently-formatted hardback edition, lists it as 487 pages. 

Lastly, and more importantly, my copy is missing some pages around the middle of the book, in particular pages 361-362, 375-378 and 391-392 (i.e. four physical sheets of paper in total). The nature of the book being what it is we can be reasonably confident that no alien invasions, bukkake dungeon sex orgies or hideously-botched scientific experiments involving cloning Hitler happen on those pages, but it's a bit annoying nonetheless. The only other time I recall this happening was when I read Bluesman, though that was only one sheet (i.e. two pages). I see from searching for that link that something similar (a printing error rather than a binding error in this case) happened with my copy of Lolita as well. 

the last book I read

Fragrant Harbour by John Lanchester.

Hong Kong? Phooey! No, really, it's true. Former British colony, business powerhouse, cultural melting pot, land of opportunity, hive of scum and villainy. And the people! Well. Let's meet some of them. 

Dawn Stone is a journalist, taking a pretty standard Glenda Slagg route through UK tabloid journalism, showbiz scandal, obsessive royal-watching and all, until an ex-colleague makes her an interesting offer: come and work for him on a new magazine he's starting up in Hong Kong. Bit of tabloidesque fluff required, naturally, but also a potential opportunity for some Proper Investigative Journalism, and, hey, maybe there's a book in it. Dawn is a bit bored of her current job, and of her current boyfriend, so she jumps at the chance.

It's all pretty fabulous at first - exciting new culture, lots of sipping gin while being whizzed around the harbour in luxury yachts, although there is a bit of shadiness about where some of the money is coming from, and how the slightly murky Wo family are pulling various strings and controlling various interests with a thin veneer of respectability but probably also involving a visit from some guys with meat cleavers if you get in their way.

After getting the go-ahead from her boss to do some digging into the local business set-up, with its murky links to the Triads, drugs and illegal gambling activities, Dawn works up an article she's pretty proud of, only for it to be made clear to her that it's going to be spiked, as the business pies that the Wos have fingers in include the magazine she's written the article for. The man delivering the message on behalf of the Wo family, Philip Oss, is very nice about it, though, and has a couple of alternative ideas for Dawn to consider: firstly a very lucrative executive position as a sort of PR person for the Wo business empire, and secondly a very lucrative SEXecutive SEX position as his mistress.

A change of viewpoint now: Tom Stewart, a simple country boy from Kent but with a restless urge to travel, sets out on a long boat journey to Hong Kong in 1935 without much clear idea of what he's going to do when he gets there. He meets a motley band of fellow travellers on the ship including Sister Maria, a Chinese nun who teaches him to speak Cantonese and who will feature intermittently but significantly in his life thereafter.

Tom is a bright, ambitious and hard-working chap and soon gets a good job at a prominent local hotel. A few years of making a nice peaceful living come to an end when World War II breaks out and the colony comes under threat of Japanese invasion. Tom's Cantonese skills make him highly valuable to the resistance effort and he slightly reluctantly becomes involved with some shady activities, until his group is inevitably betrayed and he is imprisoned by the Japanese invaders. 

Eventually the war ends, Hong Kong is liberated and Tom briefly returns to England to see his family, but soon chafes at domestic rural life and decides to return to Hong Kong permanently. He reunites with Sister Maria after some intermittent contact during the war - Maria has been helping with some translation work which has indirectly helped in the prosecution of a minor member of the Wo family, and - although it can never be proved - it is assumed, certainly by Tom, that the Wos are in some way responsible for her subsequent disappearance. 

Tom remains in Hong Kong and lives into relatively contented old age, making a nice comfortable living off the hotel. No romantic entanglements to speak of, and, well, yes, you'll be saying, that's because he was somewhat inappropriately IN LOVE with A NUN, i.e. Sister Maria, the whole time. A pity he couldn't, you know, do anything about it, but that's life. Hardest game in the world, the old nunning game. Well hold onto your wimples, because while Tom is having a grumpy-old-man-style altercation with some surly youths at a taxi rank a young man approaches him, sees off the youths with a spot of the old kung fu, and introduces himself as Tom's grandson. 

The young man, whose viewpoint we now switch to, goes by the (somewhat Anglicised) name of Matthew Ho and when we meet him in the mid-1990s he's a successful businessman running a company making air-conditioning units. Never mind all that hot air (well, cold air) though, what's the story with Tom having a child? Well, you've probably guessed, but it turns out that there was a particularly fraught period early in the Japanese occupation when Tom and Maria were holed up in an abandoned school in the New Territories hiding from the Japanese troops, and Tom decided that the best course of action would be for him to give himself up, Maria herself being just another local as far as they'd be concerned unless endangered by being seen to be harbouring Westerners. Maria attempted to persuade him otherwise by suggesting they get, hem hem, "holed up" in a slightly different way and evidently Tom jumped at the opportunity and then went ahead and gave himself up the next day anyway. 

Matthew delivers some letters from Maria that he'd been entrusted (including the whole explaining that she'd had his child thing) with to Tom and the two establish an affectionate relationship. Over the years his air-conditioning business becomes successful but the impending handover of Hong Kong to China introduces some uncertainty, to the extent that he decides he needs a Chinese backer to avoid the company going under. An opportunity is provided by an introduction to Dawn Stone, now a high-powered executive who's ascended the greasy pole of career advancement partly by her own talents and partly by also regularly ascending Philip Oss's greasy pole. Anyway, Dawn provides an introduction to the people she works for, who are of course the Wo family. Mr. Wo seems receptive and offers some terms that Matthew finds acceptable. Matthew is naturally delighted, but now has to travel to Hong Kong and broach the subject with his grandfather, notoriously not a big fan of the Wo family after their probable involvement with abducting and murdering the woman he loved. Tricky times.

The novel ends before Matthew and Tom meet to discuss the thorny issue of Matthew entering into a business relationship with Maria's probable murderers (or at least people who represent the same organisation), but it seems unlikely Tom will just shrug it off with a heeyyyy, whaddaya gonna do? But who knows? Maybe he's mellowed in his old age. The reader may also find themselves struggling a bit to care much about the fate of an air-conditioning company, at least in comparison to the compelling details of Tom and Maria's wartime adventures. Tom's story is the heart of the book, and the sections featuring Dawn and Matthew which bookend it are much shorter and, to be blunt, less interesting. The sections describing Tom's wartime captivity and the arbitrary indignities he is subjected to are, for obvious reasons, the most compelling bit of the book, and quite reminiscent of Empire Of The Sun. The other book on this list to have Hong Kong as its principal location is Kowloon Tong. 

As always, write about what you know is sound advice, and it turns out John Lanchester grew up (up to the age of about ten) in Hong Kong, and has an evident love for the place. I myself briefly visited Hong Kong in late 1976 and have some hazy memories of it, including a trip on a junk across Hong Kong harbour, which is definitely real as I have photos, and the spectacular approach to Kai Tak airport which is definitely a real thing and where we definitely did fly into and out of, but I couldn't say whether the recollection I have of looking out of the window of the plane during the approach through the Kowloon apartment blocks is real or not.

Anyway, this is all very good, the slight reservations about structure aside. It's also the latest book in this series to carry a map at the front, reproduced below.

the last book I read

A Visit From The Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan.

Hey, how are you? Come on in, there's some people I want you to meet. So this is Sasha - she's, eh, I dunno, thirtysomething? She works for a record company, primarily for this guy over here, Bennie Salazar. We'll get to him in a minute. Anyway, Sasha has a nice little flat in New York, a job she likes, as long as she can gracefully swerve Bennie occasionally making a pass at her. Strictly entre nous she's got a few, if you will, issues of her own, though; main one is she's kind of a kleptomaniac. Wallets, purses, little trinkets, you name it. She's in therapy, though - I mean, like all of us, right? - trying to work it all through. Anyway, back to Bennie - big record company exec and talent finder; trouble with that is you're only as good as your recent talent finds, though, right? And Bennie is a bit worried he might have lost his golden touch after a couple of finds turn out to be screechily unlistenable. Or maybe he's just getting old?

So here's Bennie's music industry mentor from when he was much younger, Lou. They got to know each other when Lou was screwing one of Bennie's friends, Jocelyn. Later we'll meet a couple of Lou's kids, Charlie and Rolph, on a safari trip with Lou's girlfriend, Mindy. Mindy in turn is eyeing up the tour guide, Albert. 

OK, so ... this is Scotty, another of Bennie's friends from when he was younger. Scotty's a musician but he's gone off the rails a bit lately and he's kind of a hobo these days, hoicking mutant fish out of the East River to eat. 

So you can tell we're moving backward and forward in time, here, right? I mean the episodes involving young Bennie and Lou are obviously in the past, and you sort of assume by default that the early parts involving Sasha and Bennie are in the loose "present", but, well, just keep your wits about you. Anyway, here's Bennie's second wife, Stephanie, living with him in suburbia and trying to fit in with the tennis club set. And here's Stephanie's brother Jules, a writer, but fresh out of prison after some bizarre incident involving a young actress. And here's Stephanie's boss at her PR firm, Dolly aka La Doll, who turns up shortly after running some sort of publicity scheme for a Middle Eastern dictator to humanise his image a bit (after some unfortunate publicity about murder and torture and genocide and tiresome stuff like that). The actress Dolly chooses to employ to fake a celebrity romance with this guy turns out to be none other than Kitty Jackson, the actress Jules assaulted.

Back in time a bit now to meet Drew and Rob, boyfriend and unrequited admirer respectively of Sasha. They hang out a bit, then decide, for ill-defined reasons (but following a night of drink and drug ingestion), to go for a swim in the East River, whereupon Rob gets into difficulties and drowns.

Then we meet Ted, Sasha's uncle, sent by the family to Naples to look for Sasha, this being her last known location before she broke off all contact with her family two years before. Ted takes a leisurely approach to searching, though, preferring to warm up with some sightseeing first, and when he does run into Sasha it's largely by chance. She's keeping up with the petty thievery but with a bit of the old prostitution on the side just to supplement her income. She is not best pleased to see him at first but in his clumsy but persistent way he eventually persuades her to jack it in and come home.

And now we see that our judgment of where to draw the chalk mark denoting "now" was a bit off as we zoom a couple of decades into the future where Sasha and Drew are married (having reconnected on the internet) and have two children. We also meet Alex, a former one-night hookup of Sasha's, also now married with a small child, who's been tasked by Bennie with performing some magical social media influencing to drum up interest in an outdoor concert in New York featuring none other than Scotty, still a bit mental but just about keeping it together enough to make a triumphal musical return.

Some notes on structure first: as the paragraphs above suggest this is a novel told in short and discrete chunks, featuring a wide cast of characters and not in any sort of chronological order. Indeed were it not for the loose narrative thread and the shared cast you might say it's more of a short story collection. Personally I'm not that interested in categorisation arguments of that sort, and it's more of a novel than, say, Invisible Cities. As it happens the only other thing of Egan's that I'd read before was Emerald City, which definitely is a collection of short stories. 

Secondly, the Stuff That Is Like Other Stuff list: much of what's here is reminiscent of modern American authors like Douglas Coupland and Rick Moody, the minutely detailed account Jules gives of the events leading up to his assault of Kitty Jackson is slightly reminiscent of Nicholson Baker and the heavy use of footnotes which simultaneously explain and undercut the main narrative is a bit Dave Eggers and a bit David Foster Wallace. Another thing that's a bit Dave Eggers is the last chapter, since it's quite reminiscent of The Circle in its depiction of a society five minutes in the future and just a little bit further down the social media rabbit hole than our own. 

To be honest that last chapter works less well than some of the early ones, and there are a few episodes which don't work quite as well as the others, notably the bizarre episode with Dolly and the dictator she's taken on PR duties for. Perhaps this is because we've got attached to Sasha, who is the main character - to the extent that there is one - and are waiting to find out which part of her life we're going to shoot off to next. What the whole thing is about is more of a challenge: friendship, aging, how people simultaneously change and don't change as they get older, assuming they survive long enough to get the opportunity. It's very good, anyway, which is after all the most important thing. Various august bodies thought the same thing, as A Visit From The Goon Squad was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2011 (there's a list of previous featurees here) and the National Book Critics Circle Award the previous year (previous featurees are Ragtime, A Thousand Acres, Gilead, Wolf Hall and Lila). I therefore deduce that Gilead and A Thousand Acres are the only previous featurees to have won both.