aged blogger smells rat, headline meaning

Here's an interesting headline from Rolling Stone which I spotted the other day. Nothing so weird about that one, you'll probably be saying, it's just confirming that Steve Howe really did sue someone (it's not clear who) for some sort of copyright infringement over a song.

The key to smelling a rat and subsequently the real meaning of the headline here is actually knowing who Steve Howe is, something which probably divides sharply along lines of musical preference and, depressingly, age. Anyway, Howe is the guitarist with British progressive rock band Yes, who, rather remarkably, are still a going concern, albeit with only Howe as an "original" member. I say "original" as even Howe wasn't in the very early incarnations of the group, only coming on board for the making of their breakthrough album The Yes Album in 1970. I suppose what I mean is he's the only member from their "classic" period which ran from about 1970 to about 1974.

Anyway, despite what the surface reading of the headline might suggest, it is in fact Howe and the current incarnation of Yes who are being sued for copyright infringement by a guy called Riz Story. To be fair the sub-headline makes that reasonably clear.

Have I heard any of the songs in question? No. Do I, in fact, give a fuck? Not really. The point is the headline, and some odd American conventions regarding headline structure, in particular the use of a comma to splice words together in place of the word "and". This is jarring to the uninitiated and highly satirisable even to the presumably initiated (both the fictional headlines below are from The Onion). 

the last book I read

The Prestige by Christopher Priest.

Pick a card; any card: wrong! But seriously, I mean, we all love a magician, right? Rabbits out of hats, card tricks, watermelon piercing, firing a series of crossbow bolts at your own head, it's all good. 

So here are two magicians, in late-19th-century England: Alfred Borden and Rupert Angier. Bit of a golden age for stage magic and cabaret stuff, you'll be saying, plenty of room for two magicians to operate without conflicting with each other, no reason for them to be trying to eat each other's lunch, still less do more nefarious acts of mutual sabotage. Well, yes, you'd think, but that wouldn't make for much of  a story, so here we are.

They first come into conflict when both are just starting their careers and Borden, something of a purist in matters of the prestidigitative arts, becomes aware that Angier is making his living doing séances in the homes of paying customers, complete with spooky banging on the table, rattling of curtains and maybe a bit of the old ectoplasm on special occasions, all of course produced by some pretty straightforward techniques available to the illusionist. Borden objects to the deception implicitly involved here and infiltrates one of Angier's engagements with the intention of unmasking and debunking his trickery. In doing so, and subsequently being thrown out on his ear, there is a scuffle during the course of which Angier's wife is knocked to the floor, which results in her losing the baby she is carrying. And so a feud is initiated which will eventually persist beyond the lifetimes of its protagonists.

We are invited to infer that Borden, of relatively humble origins, is a more naturally talented and instinctive illusionist than Angier, who is from an aristocratic family, but that Angier is nonetheless a man of great determination and persistence. Borden is the talk of London with a trick called The New Transported Man wherein he appears to disappear and reappear almost instantaneously on the other side of the stage with no means of getting from one place to the other. Angier secretes himself in the audience but can't work out how Borden achieves the illusion. Well, says Angier's assistant, that's because you're missing something that's right under your nose: Borden must use a double, someone who looks like him. Impossible, says Angier, it's literally the same guy. And so Angier devises a scheme to uncover the truth: have his assistant (and clandestine lover), Olivia, "defect" and go and work as Borden's assistant and gain access to his secrets. This plan partly backfires when Olivia falls in love with Borden, but as a last favour to Angier gets Borden to write a note explaining the trick, which is revealed to contain a single word: TESLA.

And so Angier heads off to Nikola Tesla's laboratory in Colorado Springs to persuade him to give up the secret of whatever he had done for Borden. Two things become apparent fairly quickly - firstly that Borden's note was a red herring, as he and Tesla have never met, and secondly that Tesla may be able to help, as long as Angier can cough up a substantial wedge to finance the work. And indeed it turns out that he can, after a long period of development and experimentation, although the finished product doesn't quite work as Angier had envisaged: instead of some sort of teleportation device, it seems to be some sort of duplication device capable of producing an exact copy at a pre-defined distance away from the apparatus. But, hey, a few minor considerations aside, it works for the purposes of an illusion that will surpass Borden's, so we'll take it. 

Angier arranges for the transportation of the disassembled device back to England and soon, after a lengthy period of rehearsal, starts performing his own Transported Man illusion around the country, to great acclaim and profit. This one outdoes Borden's because in addition to all the exciting electrical arcs and sparks (especially thrilling to a Victorian audience just getting to grips with the idea of mains electricity) Angier's miraculous reappearance is at a much greater distance than Borden's - all the way at the back of the theatre, or up in the stalls, whichever provides the most dramatic effect. 

Borden is aware of Angier's new celebrity, of course, and soon devises a way of sabotaging the act - show up in disguise, get invited on stage as one of the people who inspect the apparatus before it's used, and then slip off backstage and cut the power halfway through. What Borden has failed to realise, though, is that there's no illusion here: the Tesla device really does duplicate living things across distances, and cutting the process off part-way through has catastrophic effects: the original Angier is left in a weakened state, and there is a partially-materialised Angier roaming the corridors of the theatre like a ghost.

Borden's understandable assumption that the whole thing was an illusion, it should be added here, derives partly from the nature of how his own illusion was achieved: there really are two Bordens, a pair of identical twins, who, by an act of remarkable discipline and deception, manage to live as if there were only one of them and take turns being "Alfred Borden". 

Angier (or the non-ghostly part of him, anyway) heads off to his ancestral home in Yorkshire to recuperate, and it soon becomes clear that he will never perform again. The spectral Angier left behind spends a bit of time scaring people, including Borden himself, one of whom he scares enough to induce a fatal heart attack, before heading north to be reunited with his other self and attempt one last use of the Tesla apparatus to resolve their separation.

We now zoom back out to the framing device, in some version of the present day, where Andrew Westley, born Nicky Borden before being adopted, visits Kate Angier in the ancestral Angier home, ostensibly as part of some journalistic assignment but actually to satisfy his curiosity about the backstory of their respective families, and the historical feud initiated by their respective ancestors. Andrew has always had the odd feeling that he has a twin somewhere, with all the odd telepathic communication that twins are reputed to have. This isn't quite true, as it turns out, but it transpires that Andrew and Kate's respective parents met at the house when Andrew (then Nicky) was very young and during some argument Nicky was flung into the Tesla apparatus, with inevitable results. Andrew ventures down to the cellar and finds a gigantic carved-out cavern containing all of what Angier referred to euphemistically as the "prestige materials" - shelves and shelves of Angier's inanimate bodies, emptied of consciousness at the point when they were put into the Tesla machine, but still "alive" in some weird way. There is also the body, in a similar state, of a small boy, Andrew's childhood self. He decides to take this away with him (though it's extremely unclear what he's going to do with it) but then also becomes aware of something moving around at the end of the cavern. Has Angier's divided and possibly reunited self lived on in some way?

The Prestige is probably most famous for its 2006 film adaptation, directed by Christopher Nolan and featuring Hugh Jackman as Angier, Christian Bale as Borden and a stellar supporting cast. This retains most of the central plot but diverges in a few key ways:

• the thing that initiates the feud is a botched bit of knot-tying by Borden (while he is acting as Angier's assistant) which results in the drowning of Angier's wife
• the present-day framing device is dispensed with completely
• the Angier that goes into the Tesla device comes out completely normal (rather than as a consciousness-free shell) and has to be killed off each time, generally by drowning
• the ending is different: instead of Angier being partly split in half the trick proceeds normally and Angier engineers Borden being framed for his murder, for which he is subsequently hanged (or, rather, if you've been paying attention, one of him is)

The book was the recipient of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize on its publication in 1995; there is a list of previous blog featurees in the review of Harvest (though I note that that list omits Master Georgie which won in 1998). It also picked up a couple of major fantasy fiction awards, including the World Fantasy Award; like the only other recipient on this list, The City & The City, I would say it fits rather awkwardly into that genre, if at all. 

This is the third Christopher Priest novel to appear on this list after Inverted World and The Affirmation (and the first since his death in February of this year), and it's quite different from either: Inverted World was fairly hard sci-fi (though set on Earth and with minimal technology) and The Affirmation was a strange dream-like fantasy. The Prestige is much more of a "normal" non-genre narrative than either, although of course there is the whole duplication/teleportation thing which is arguably a science-fiction device. Anyway, it's extremely good and I recommend it, whether or not you've seen the film (which, to be clear, is also excellent). It's also the second book since August (and fourth overall in this list) to be adapted into a film starring Christian Bale, following American Psycho. As far as I can recall the only other book in this series which features magicians and stage illusions as a major theme is, erm, The Illusionist. 

celebrity lookeylikey of the day

I experienced a jarring moment while reading about the upcoming change in presenter on the Radio 2 breakfast show. I should make it clear that while I do listen to the show, in very specific circumstances that we'll come to in a second or two, I don't really care who presents it, and I find both Zoe Ball and Scott Mills fairly uninspiring as radio presenters. The reason I listen to it at all is that it's the noise that my alarm clock/radio is programmed to make at the appointed hour in the morning, on weekdays anyway. I can't say I actually pay much attention to the show's contents, but instead generally whack the snooze button once and then when it goes off again heave myself out of bed, mostly drowning out the radio with a cacophony of groaning and creaking and farting noises. 

But why Radio 2? The rudimentary reasoning goes as follows: Radio 4 might either be not loud enough to wake me up, or the topics discussed on the Today programme might distract me into shouting at the radio or something and make me late. Radio 1, on the other hand, is probably a bit brash and noisy and inclined to Young People's Music which, honestly, is just shouting with a beat. What about craftsmanship? Ballads? Anyway, Radio 2 it is. The added advantage of Zoe Ball's show in its current form is that she does a sort of version of Thought For The Day (called, if you please, Pause For Thought) just after the first snooze interval elapses, so that gives me a good incentive to get up and turn the radio off before Kate Bottley or someone similar comes on and tells us all about how if Jesus were here today (and of course he is, in a very real but also not actually real sense) he'd be down at the local multi-storey car park doing some sick parkour in baggy shorts and a hoody, or something.

Anyway, I seem to have gone on a bit, but no harm done. The point is that the article on the BBC News website included a picture of what appeared to be a crude and slightly cruel effigy of Scott Mills hewn from shiny pinky-orange wax and then left in a room that was slightly too warm for a couple of hours, but was in fact, it turns out, the actual Scott Mills. The first thought I had was that he looked a bit like those two guys who'd had their chins extended (among various other procedures) so that they ended up looking a bit like Vic & Bob's The Ponderers, only with more terrifying hair and teeth. The trouble was, I had no idea of their names. Luckily I am pleased to be able to report that a Google search for "weird plastic surgery guys" proved instantly fruitful and revealed their identity: Grichka and Igor Bogdanoff, both of whom died within a week of each other of COVID-19 in early 2022. That's Grichka in the photo below, or so the internet tells me, but it doesn't really make much difference.

the last book I read

Who's Sorry Now? by Howard Jacobson.

Marvin Kreitman and Charlie Merriweather are old friends, despite being very different characters, which creates some occasional friction between them but on the other hand provides some rich material for a comic novel. Charlie is a slightly posh, tall, bumbling, generally pleasant sort of chap, who makes a fairly comfortable living from writing children's books in collaboration with his wife, confusingly also called Charlie. Marvin, on the other hand, is shorter, chronically and serially unfaithful to his wife Hazel, extravagantly Jewish (as befits a fairly transparent authorial alter ego) and also the pretty successful owner of a handbag and general leather goods business.

Charlie is experiencing a bit of middle-aged restlessness after twenty years of marriage to Charlie (who people seem to call Chas to distinguish her from her husband) and the raising of two grown-up children. He's still in love with his wife, and they still have nice albeit occasional sex, but he craves something a bit more...exciting? transgressive? dangerous? Moreover he feels like his old friend Marvin is a bit of an authority on excitement, transgression, danger, and (to put it more bluntly) facilitating sex with people whom you're not married to. 

The conversation has just taken a bit of a left turn into Charlie suggesting that Marvin let him have a go on Hazel when, as they stagger out into the Soho night, Marvin is run down and hospitalised by a cycle messenger.

No permanent physical damage, fortunately, but Kreitman has doctor's orders to do a bit of rest and recuperation and so arranges some time off in a hotel on the edge of Dartmoor, where he and Hazel are soon joined by the Charlies. Strange things soon start to happen - Kreitman's cycling assailant, Nyman, an odd and enigmatic character who seems to exert a strange pull on everyone, also turns up and soon has Chas exerting a "strange pull" on him by giving him a furtive handjob in the hotel garden. Meanwhile Hazel and Charlie seem to have disappeared. Where can they be?

And so a new routine is settled into - Charlie and Hazel blissfully entwined while Kreitman, after a period of solitary moping, manages to persuade Chas into some sort of reciprocal arrangement. So after a bit of a lumpy period facilitating the swap and getting used to the new normal, everyone's happy, right? Weeeeeelll, up to a point: once Charlie's initial transgressive thrill has worn off he finds himself settling into the same routine of occasional nice sex with Hazel but without the satisfying working relationship and the twenty-odd years of shared experience that he had with Chas. So, perhaps she'd like to swap back? But where does this leave Kreitman and Hazel? 

As I said here and here I read a few of Howard Jacobson's early novels (in particular Coming From Behind, Peeping Tom and Redback) quite a long time ago and remain of the opinion that they are his best work, for all that Who's Sorry Now? is fine and has some sly things to say about male-female relations in general and long-standing marriages in particular. There are some odd things, though: the Nyman character's odd sexual fascination to everyone is never adequately explained, and his sudden turn into an abusive girlfriend-beater at the end of the book is a bit jarring. It's nice that the novel avoids the easy way out of having Kreitman and Hazel get back together, but the specific circumstances are a bit odd: first the thing with Nyman beating up Kreitman's daughter Juliet, and then the even more bizarre business in the last chapter where Kreitman punishes himself by visiting a dominatrix and having his balls squeezed. It's as if the novel is hijacked by a different author for the last couple of chapters who just stomps on the gas and drives it wildly off the rails. There does also seem to be a dearth of characters who behave like actual real humans in a way that might make you warm to them; Hazel comes closest, which I suppose is what makes her defiant rejection of a nice cosy reconciliation with Kreitman at the end quite pleasing.

So it's funny, occasionally perceptive and highly readable throughout, but I still maintain that the first few books are the best. John Crace's Digested Reads version can be found here. 

stinky diedman

So obviously that last post prompted a more general review of the list and an attempt to come up with some sort of shortlist of potential future victims, not in a who's next Dead Pool kind of way, but just as a reminder for names to look out for in the obituaries, while wishing each and every one of them a long and happy life on an individual basis; I mean, I am not a monster.

Even this isn't exhaustive, as I eyeballed the list for people to check up on and may have missed people who are either a) older than I think they are and/or b) already dead in a way that makes them eligible for this list. 

Anyway, rather than list individual ages in a tedious and time-consuming way I've grouped everyone over 80 (at the time of writing) into three groups:

• 90 and over: Alan Garner, Penelope Lively, Frederic Raphael, Michael Frayn, David Malouf
• 85-89: Renata Adler, Margaret Drabble, E Annie Proulx, Frederick Forsyth, Thomas Keneally, Don DeLillo, Joyce Carol Oates, David Lodge, Mario Vargas Llosa
• 80-84: Marilynne Robinson, Barbara Trapido, Isabel Allende, Anne Tyler, John Irving, Paul Theroux, Margaret Atwood, Susan Hill, JM Coetzee, Peter Carey, Howard Jacobson, Richard Ford, Michael Ondaatje

Frederic Raphael at 93 is the oldest person in that list. What I also discovered is that I missed another authorial demise, this one much more recent - mystery novelist and country music artist Kinky Friedman, who died in June of this year at the age of 79. This requires another addition to the list, as below: note that Friedman claims the longest curse length title from Milan Kundera at around sixteen and a half years. The two Friedman books to feature here were Spanking Watson all the way back in December 2007 and A Case Of Lone Star in July 2011. 

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

colegate: a brush with death

While I do my best to keep up with the steady snuffing out of the lives of novelists wreaked by this blog on an ongoing basis, I'm a busy man and I will occasionally miss one. It's happened a couple of times before that I've had to retrospectively insert a couple of lines in the list, here in 2019 for instance, and again here in 2021. 

Anyway, it came to my attention during some random perusing of the internet (definitely not for porn, I deny that completely) that Isabel Colegate died back in March 2023. She was a double featuree here with 1981's The Shooting Party (her most celebrated novel) in 2009 and again in 2016 with 1964's Statues In A Garden, which (as I see I sort of said at the time) reads as an earlier and slightly less brilliant draft of the later book.

Colegate was 91, which is towards the higher end of the scale in terms of people featured on this list (Milan Kundera remains the oldest victim). The curse length is one of the longest ones (Kundera holds the record here too); to move the needle significantly on the average age of death (which remains around 82, or, if you prefer a median, 86) at this stage - there are 38 names on the list, all between 59 and 94 - a novelist would either have to die while still in the womb, or live to about 500. Not saying it can't happen, but it's unlikely.

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

wordy num num

I was reminded by seeing Freedom juxtaposed with its immediate predecessor Candide that I'd done a post a while back about one-word book tiles. Here it is, and at the time (i.e. in early 2018) there had been 54 one-word book titles in this list; Freedom takes the current running total to 84. You may also recall (or just get off your arse and go and read the post now) that I also mentioned that the run of three consecutive one-word titles was unique; well, so it was, and so was the eventual run of four (Stick, Matter, Exposure, Nausea). I can tell you, without giving too much away, that the current run will end at two, so that record will stand for a while yet. 

Here's a more general survey of book title length over the lifetime of this blog:

• 84 one-word titles as described above;
• 114 two-word titles, most recently Feersum Endjinn;
• 91 three-word titles, most recently The Devil's Star;
• 53 four-word titles, most recently Strange Fits Of Passion;
• 42 five-word titles, most recently The Tiger In The Smoke;
• 12 six-word titles, most recently The Bridge Of San Luis Rey back in May 2017;
• 3 seven-word titles, most recently The Folks That Live On The Hill in February 2020;
• 2 eight-word titles, most recently One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich way back in November 2008;
• finally, a single solitary nine-word title, The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea in January 2019.

Some way to go to crack the world record for greatest number of words in a book title, though, as this apparently stands at 4,558. Maybe next year. 

the last book I read

Freedom by Jonathan Franzen.

Berglunds, meet the Berglunds, they're a Minnesotan family. In the town of St. Paul, they're about to be in this story. So there's Walter and Patty and their teenage kids Jessica and Joey. Walter is a lawyer, Patty is a former teenage star basketball player, now a "homemaker". We meet them just as some destabilising changes are afoot, mainly prompted by Joey's involvement with Connie, the girl down the road. The friction this creates causes Joey to eventually move out of the family home and into Connie's home, where he comes into the orbit of Connie's Mum's new boyfriend Blake, a man of robustly Republican political leanings, another thing that doesn't sit well with the Berglunds, who are classic middle-class liberals. Eventually, with Joey seemingly moved out for good and both kids coming up to college age anyway, Walter and Patty decide to up sticks and move to Washington.

And so ends the first section of the book. The next section takes the form of an autobiographical memoir written by Patty Berglund, apparently at the prompting of her therapist as some sort of act of catharsis or exorcism. It details her early life, her brief years of sporting stardom, the knee injury that ended them, and her meeting with Walter and his charismatic friend Richard Katz. It also includes some details about her that are not commonly known, even by Walter, such as her being raped at a party when she was seventeen, or the on-and-off affair she's been conducting with Richard Katz at various times during her marriage to Walter.

Speaking of Walter, he has jacked in the old lawyering game for a job doing something closer to his heart - nature conservancy and eco-activism. Not something you'd think there'd be a ton of money in, but Walter has found a super-rich benefactor whose methods are a bit, erm, unconventional, but who is prepared to throw a large wedge at some of Walter's pet projects. He has also provided Walter with an assistant, the young and super-efficient Lalitha, who also appears to be in love with Walter, much to Patty's chagrin. 

Walter and Lalitha are tasked with facilitating the purchase of a large area of mountain country in West Virginia in order for it to be turned into a bird sanctuary by the unorthodox method of mining it down to the bedrock, trousering the profits and then re-landscaping it, planting a few trees, and designating it a haven for the cerulean warbler, whereupon those guys will presumably move in and warble away to their hearts' content. Needless to say among those who aren't sure about the whole idea are the current occupants of the land and the local and national media, who are further riled by Walter's rather blunt approach to public relations.

Joey, meanwhile, is at college, still in a relationship with Connie despite adopting a fairly lax attitude to fidelity, and, while disdaining much contact with Walter, regularly accepting cash gifts from Patty, much to Walter's annoyance. Richard has become a minor rock star off the back of an album of songs inspired by his fling with Patty. Richard also has some involvement as a figurehead for some of Walter and Lalitha's eco-work and notices their obvious attraction to each other. Eventually, pissed off at Patty's avoidance of his attempts to rekindle their relationship, he leaves some of Patty's confessional writings where Walter can find and read them, which results in Walter throwing Patty out. 

Patty moves in with Richard for a while but quickly realises it isn't going to work out. Freed of any obligation to Patty, Walter and Lalitha quickly start going at it like knives, also finding some time to expand their eco-activism into population control, in particular trying to persuade people to voluntarily stop having kids. On her way to do some setup work for an upcoming charity concert Lalitha's car is involved in an accident on a mountain road and she is killed.

Six years pass, with no contact between Walter and Patty. Patty, after moving out of Richard's place, has got a teaching job in New York, while Walter lives a reclusive and irascible life in his family's old lakeside cabin, formerly gloriously isolated but now just down the road from a new housing development whose inhabitants' cats wreak havoc upon the local bird life and whom Walter soon comes into conflict with. Patty unexpectedly runs into Richard in New York and he suggests that she get over herself and make contact with Walter, and so she takes herself off to Minnesota and parks herself on his doorstep in the cold until he lets her in. Eventually Walter relents and a reconciliation is effected, helped by another section of confessional memoir from Patty which Walter reads while she is thawing out.

You might recall I read The Corrections back in the fairly early days of this blog - that was Franzen's big breakthrough novel and he took nine years to follow it up, probably being a bit busy raking in the royalties and having pointless feuds with (and subsequently making up with) Oprah. For what it's worth, despite Freedom being a bit less garlanded with awards (and with the caveat that I read The Corrections 17 years ago) I enjoyed it more. Some of Franzen's discomfort about the whopping success of The Corrections was connected to the whole balancing act between wanting a large readership (which novelists, with very few exceptions, do) and the purity of your Art. If you don't want to get into a pointless discussion about the distinction between Important Literature and Just Books then you might just observe that both The Corrections and Freedom tick the boxes of being highly readable multi-generational family sagas with characters you care about while also being smart, occasionally funny and engaging with some topical issues of the day while (mostly) avoiding shoehorning stuff in in an obvious and clunky way.

The topicality in Freedom is around ecological issues like deforestation and population growth, which oddly echoes some of the main topics in The Overstory (though it's worth pointing out that Freedom was published eight years earlier), but with perhaps slightly less of a manic evangelical gleam in the eye. Besides, Freedom has other fish to fry as well, like the main family saga - love, aging, betrayal, the mutual delights and disappointments that parents and children inflict upon each other. There is the usual tricky balance to be struck when large sections of the narrative are supposedly written by one of the characters - Patty's memoir(s) in this case - i.e. they've got to be readable but not displaying a totally implausible level of literary merit. I think Patty's voice comes across pretty convincingly in these bits, as befits the most rounded and interesting character in the book.

Anyway, it's certainly not perfect but I enjoyed it very much, and it's pretty easy to scoot through despite being only a couple of pages short of 600 in length. By an odd coincidence I read The Corrections (which was itself 600+ pages) immediately before a very short book (Bonjour Tristesse) and here I'm reading Freedom immediately after an even shorter book (Candide). Life, oh life, etc.

celebrity lookeylikey of the day

Special recently deceased sporting celebrity slash dreadful 1980s music throwback edition today, as we see recently deceased former Olympic shot putter, World's Strongest Man and budgie enthusiast Geoff Capes face off against Joe Fagin, singer of various songs soundtracking the hit TV series Auf Wiedersehen, Pet (a show I should say I have never seen even a single minute of) one of which, That's Livin' Alright, gave him his solitary chart hit in early 1984. 

Despite the one-off nature of this brush with the charts, Fagin had the barefaced chutzpah to entitle his 1996 compilation album All The Hits Plus More. The cover images available on the internet for his earlier album Time Is A Thief reveal an amusing typo in the title of the song Love Hangs By A Thread which puts a whole new Berlin leather bar spin on it:

all right, smart alec

You might recall that when I reviewed Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy here a while ago I mentioned that I'd seen the highly-regarded 2011 film (starring Gary Oldman as George Smiley) in the cinema when it came out, and furthermore that I'd never seen the 1979 TV series, which famously starred Alec Guinness as Smiley. 

Well I'm just checking in here to tell you not only that the full seven-part series is now available on BBC iPlayer, but that I have spent a few days, as I believe the kids say, binge-watching it. I mean, a proper binge-watch would have done the full thing in a single five-hour sitting breaking only to occasionally go for a wee and buy more Pringles, whereas I managed about an episode a day for a week.

Anyway, you'll be wanting a verdict, I imagine. It's worth making the point first that order is important here, and mine is: 2011 film, book, 1979 TV series. Obviously the TV series, occupying over twice the screen time of the film, has a bit more space to stretch out and luxuriate in the detail, and even include some stuff from the book that the film didn't have time for. As far as the actors go I'd say Mark Strong is a better fit for Jim Prideaux, Ian Bannen being a bit too old and not physically imposing enough, and Colin Firth's Bill Haydon has a slightly more brittle and less reptilian charm than Ian Richardson's. Yes, yes, but what about Smiley? Well, Alec Guinness is slightly more twinkly and charming than Gary Oldman, and you get more of a sense of his penetrating intelligence. Oldman's Smiley is grey and cold almost to the point of anonymity, which of course is what makes him such a dangerous adversary. That said, and with the caveat that Smiley's age in the various books he appears in is a bit elastic, Guinness was probably a bit older than the book's version of Smiley. Of course both versions can exist without either detracting from the other, or there having to be a definitive verdict about which one is better. On the other hand, this is the internet, so people will of course get all aerated about it. 

The other Alec Guinness series, 1982's Smiley's People, is also available on iPlayer. They missed out the second book in the loose trilogy, The Honourable Schoolboy, apparently for cost reasons, presumably because it features some exotic overseas locations that they couldn't afford to film in. I have some tentative aspirations to read all three books so I may defer watching that series until I've done so. 

celebrity lookeylikey of the day

MP for Ashton-under-Lyne and our current deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner, and, hem hem, adult entertainment performer Lauren Phillips (that link is safe, search for anything else and you're on your own). I mean, obviously it's mainly the hair. Anyway, one of them has regular encounters with Black Rod, and the other is a British politician; I expect you can make up your own jokes.

Leaving aside the knob jokes for a moment, I suspect Ashton-under-Lyne is one of the most commonly mis-spelt British place names, in that many people will assume it mirrors the form of the slightly better-known Newcastle-under-Lyme and therefore put an "m" in it. Ironically both suffixes seem to derive from words meaning "elm", in this case presumably elms on a hill, since the "under" conjunction usually (as you might expect) denotes that the thing after it is either the name of a nearby hill or a prominent thing on a nearby hill. 

There are quite a few place names of this type in Britain, some hyphenated, some not, including the splendidly named Weston-under-Lizard, which, like Newcastle-under-Lyme, is in Staffordshire, and not, as you might imagine, Cornwall. 

Anyway, other easily mis-rendered place names include Mevagissey (which is in Cornwall this time) which I genuinely spent a good chunk of my life assuming was called Megavissey, which not only rolls off the tongue more easily but also allows me to adapt the joke I made here and here and suggest that you get there by going through Millivissey and Kilovissey; if you get as far as Gigavissey you've gone too far. There is also the strange case of the Scottish town of Dumbarton (with an "m") being in the county of Dunbartonshire (with an "n") which can only be a cruel joke designed to catch people out. 

the last book I read

Candide by Voltaire. 

So there's this chap, erm ... *checks notes* ... Candide. A minor relative of the Baron of Thunder-ten-Tronckh, living happily as a minor member of the household at their castle in Westphalia until he contrives to piss on his Spätzle by getting a little too friendly with the Baron's winsome daughter Cunégonde. Before she can get fully acquainted with his Bratwurst the Baron rumbles them and banishes Candide from the castle. 

Candide immediately falls into the first of a series of adventures when he is press-ganged into army service, flogged and forced to fight. Escaping amid the carnage of battle, he makes his way to Holland where he encounters his old philosophical mentor Pangloss who tells him of the terrible fate that has befallen Thunder-ten-Tronckh (destroyed) and Cunégonde (raped and murdered) at the hands of the same people Candide has just been fighting for. 

Pangloss and Candide then head for Lisbon, where they are immediately shipwrecked and caught up in the aftermath of an earthquake, but manage to meet up with Cunégonde and her elderly lady-in-waiting, who are, it turns out, not dead after all. Pangloss, a little too free with the old philosophical discourse, is hanged for heresy and Candide and the ladies decide that a sharp exit is called for and board a ship for Buenos Aires. Unfortunately when they get there the local governor takes a fancy to Cunégonde and Candide is forced to flee when he is pursued by the local rozzers in relation to a couple of wholly regrettable but necessary killings he did back in Lisbon. 

Candide and his new sidekick Cacambo head off via Paraguay to El Dorado, a paradise of peace and tranquility where the streets are paved with precious stones, but rather than kicking back for a bit Candide decides that he is missing Cunégonde and they head off northwards towards Surinam with nothing more than a colossal stash of priceless diamonds to sustain them and pay for their passage back to Europe. 

After further adventures in England, Paris and Venice, during which he is reunited with Cacambo, and, more surprisingly, Pangloss (also not dead after all), Candide makes his way to Constantinople where Cacambo has located Cunégonde, sadly no longer the fresh-faced girl she once was but worn down by being raped and almost-murdered at the castle and then rented out to a series of men in Lisbon and Buenos Aires before being enslaved by a Transylvanian prince. Candide purchases everyone's freedom with the last of his diamonds, marries Cunégonde and they all set up home on a farm outside Constantinople and devote themselves to the simple life. 

There's a lot going on here, especially in a novel amounting to only about 95 pages (the various notes and appendices in my Penguin Classics edition mean the whole thing is about 190 pages), and just as with Gulliver's Travels (a novel Candide resembles quite closely) there's a sense that a lot of barbed satirical points are being made about specific people and that a full appreciation of them is probably lost on the modern reader 250+ years later. Probably the main thing being satirised here is the notion, espoused by Gottfried Leibniz in real life and by Pangloss in the novel, that the world in which we live is the best of all possible worlds. The extraordinary abuse and indignity Voltaire visits upon his characters is an attempt to refute this idea - where this involves the repeated rape of the principal female character it's quite reminiscent of The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman and Pilgermann.

Candide is the second book in this series to be the work of an author who went by just a single name - the first such author to feature here was Trevanian, only a few months ago. Needless to say Voltaire wasn't his real name; that was François-Marie Arouet, and while Candide is his most famous work he was a prolific writer and campaigner for civil liberties, freedom of religion and speech, and lots of other good and commendable stuff. 

Anyway, this is all highly enjoyable and very short, though if you keep a finger in the footnotes section at the end and consult it as you go you will find this slows you down a bit even as it keeps you in the know.

happy quadricentennial to me

So as I coyly alluded to in the previous post, the appearance of an Anita Shreve book in this list often marks a key moment in its history, an anitaversary if you will, and this one is no exception, being the 400th book to appear in this list since The Weight Of Water almost exactly 18 years ago. I see that last time (Sea Glass was the 300th book) I provided some stats, so I'll update them here:

Milestone	Date	Days	Pages	Pages/Day
100	15th September 2010	1474	28361	19.24
200	2nd February 2015	1601	30761	19.21
300	16th September 2020	2053	31782	15.48
400	30th September 2024	1474	33460	22.70

• Note that this was the joint-quickest century on record, oddly occupying the exact same number of elapsed days as the first one. Note also, however, that each century has involved longer and longer books, on average anyway, and so the last hundred were read at the highest pages-per-day rate of all. Note also that the first ever book review was in a September (2006), and then three of the subsequent milestones (all the ones involving an Anita Shreve book, as it happens) also took place in September (2010, 2020 and 2024). Coincidence? OR IS IT??!!
• Longest book in the fourth hundred was The Pope's Rhinoceros at 753 pages; shortest was The Thirty-Nine Steps at 119 pages. 
• Number of distinct authors for each hundred in chronological order: 93, 88, 92, 93.
• Number of authors who were new to me (generally, not just among books reviewed here) for each hundred in chronological order: 40, 36, 42, 55. The fourth hundred was therefore by a comfortable margin the most adventurous in terms of trying new stuff, which is interesting, but which I'm not aware of having been a conscious decision.
• Male/female split for each hundred in chronological order: 75:25, 72:28, 80:20, 71:29. So the fourth hundred was the most female-author-heavy yet, but only by one and still with a male to female ratio of well over two to one.

The "most read authors" chart now looks like this:

Number of books	Author(s)
11	Iain (M) Banks
7	TC Boyle
6	Ian McEwan Russell Hoban William Boyd
5	William Gibson Jim Crace John le Carré
4	Lawrence Durrell Anita Shreve Beryl Bainbridge Robertson Davies Patricia Highsmith
3	Cormac McCarthy Stieg Larsson Hilary Mantel Alison Lurie Graham Swift Paul Theroux Anne Tyler Barbara Trapido Marilynne Robinson

the last book I read

Strange Fits Of Passion by Anita Shreve.

Mary Amesbury has just moved into a rented house up on the Maine coast with her baby daughter Caroline. Except she hasn't, because Mary Amesbury doesn't exist, and actually the woman who's rented the house is Maureen English, a journalist from New York, on the run from her alcoholic and physically abusive husband, Harrold.

Arriving after a hasty departure from the couple's New York apartment, Maureen/Mary has only her car, some baby stuff, and a limited supply of cash. She also has some very obvious facial bruising which prompts sympathy but also attention that she doesn't really want, and her attempts to pass it off as the result of a car accident don't really fool anyone.

Mary settles into her new home, a seaside cottage in the small community of St. Hilaire, where the main business is fishing and indeed the cottage (rented to her at minimal cost by a sympathetic local widow, Julia Strout) is right next to the main mooring-place for the local fishing boats. Inevitably a young and apparently single woman attracts some curiosity and attention and fairly soon Mary is having regular clandestine meetings with Jack Strout (a cousin of Julia's late husband) who pops in in the early hours of the morning on his way to his fishing boat to tickle her clam, pop his tackle in her box, and so on and so forth. Jack is married, though fairly unhappily, to a wife, Rebecca, crippled by some sort of depressive illness. But he has no thought of leaving her and soon isn't going to have an excuse to visit any more as he'll be mooring his boat up for the winter.

Jack and Mary's secret is partly revealed when Caroline contracts a sudden fever and they have to take her to the local hospital. More seriously, the visit also entails the doctor phoning the family doctor in New York to get details of which antibiotic Caroline is allergic to (Mary can't remember). Mary is frantic that this will provide a way for Harrold to track her down, and sure enough it's only a matter of days later that a stranger is seen in town asking questions - questions like: has anyone seen a young woman with a baby? Most people are wise to what's going on and remain tight-lipped on the subject but inevitably someone blabs and in no time at all Mary is awoken near dawn not by her expected visit from Jack but by Harrold, who gets her to come downstairs with the promise of a reasonable discussion about things but then attacks her with a fork, rapes her and passes out in a chair in a drunken stupor. Mary considers stabbing him but decides that she can't bring herself to do it, and so heads out to Jack's boat where she knows there is a gun. She arrives back just as Harrold is starting to stir and shoots him dead just as Jack arrives.

This is where the main section of the story (set in 1970 and 1971) ends, and we zoom back out to the framing device, which is this: twenty years or so later, fellow journalist Helen Scofield seeks out Caroline, now a college student, to hand over the various interview transcripts that she used to write a magazine article on the case not long after it happened and while the lengthy murder trial process was still in progress. The article attracted some considerable publicity and gave Helen a career boost that went on to make her a wealthy author of true-crime books, but she has come to feel some guilt for how she portrayed Maureen/Mary in the article and thinks that it may have swayed the judge into giving her a more punitive sentence than he might otherwise have done. 

Framing devices of this sort are tricky - too long and people get frustrated wanting to get through the wibbly-wobbly dissolve to the actual story, too short and it feels tacked-on and perfunctory. I can see why it was presented in this way; it allows the author to examine changing attitudes to domestic violence over a couple of decades, the original article playing up the angle of: maybe she asked for it, maybe it was just a bit of rough sex gone too far, maybe she and Jack cooked up the murder between them so they could continue their illicit relationship, etc. The device of having the main narrative be presented as a series of interview transcripts is slightly problematic as well: most of it is in Mary's voice and inevitably some of the more flowery descriptive passages read very much as something a novelist would write, but not necessarily something someone would say in an interview. 

So the structural scaffolding is a bit too visible to the reader, but the story being told here is compelling and plausible, and doesn't fall into the trap of making its protagonist too saintly. It's one of the earliest novels of Anita Shreve's long career (published in 1991; the other three Shreves on this list are from 1997, 2002 and 2004) and maybe that explains the tendency to structural tricksiness. It must also be noted that the central plot resembles a sort of gender-swapped version of The Shipping News, and resembles even more closely the plot of the 1991 Julia Roberts film Sleeping With The Enemy, itself based on a 1987 novel of the same name. There is also a reference towards the end of the novel (in the section that reproduces the notorious magazine article) to some aspects of Mary's life resembling Hester Prynne from Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter; that previous work is referenced much more explicitly in When She Woke. 

Seasoned blog-watchers will know that the appearance of an Anita Shreve novel often marks a milestone of some sort; more on this in a later post.