Saturday, April 28, 2018

the last book I read

On The Beach by Nevil Shute.

It's 1963. We're in Melbourne. Melbourne's nice, isn't it? The sea, the cricket, the Royal Exhibition Building, all that stuff. Plus, that whole thing about southern Australia being the last place on Earth not ravaged by nuclear firestorms and lethal radioactive fallout. That stuff really puts a damper on your holidays, let me tell you.

Let's step back for a moment. There's been a nuclear war, centred mainly in the northern hemisphere. As far as anyone can tell, it was started, not by any of the major powers kicking off at each other, but by a combination of actions by Albania and Egypt. Sounds implausible, you might say, but don't forget World War I was caused by some Serbian nutter plugging an Austrian prince. Anyway, gradually the major powers are drawn into the conflict and eventually just empty their nuclear arsenals at each other in an orgy of mutually assured destruction. And these aren't the nice cuddly nuclear bombs either, the ones that just scour the earth flat and then bid you good day, no, these are the really nasty dirty ones that produce a shroud of radioactive filth that circles the entire earth for decades.

The trouble with radioactive fallout is that the darn stuff just won't stay where it's put, and the natural cycles of wind and weather carry it inexorably south into all the southern hemisphere countries that have just been sitting there minding their own business.

So this is where we come in. Australian naval officer Peter Holmes has been seconded as a liaison officer to what remains of the US Navy fleet, which has divided itself between South America and Australia. The submarine that's stationed in Melbourne is under the command of Dwight Towers and he and Peter strike up a good relationship, good enough for Peter to invite Dwight up to stay at his house and meet his wife Mary, baby daughter Jennifer and their friend Moira Davidson.

So in many ways life is going on as normal. But there are certain practical problems like a lack of fuel, and some slightly different ones, like: what are acceptable topics of conversation? It's well-known that the radioactive cloud is on the way south, and that in no more than a few months everyone will be dead, but you don't really want to spend the whole evening talking about that. Also, with Dwight around, do you ask after his wife and children, knowing as you do that they were probably all turned into pork scratchings a while back?

Dwight and Peter are called in to be briefed for a mission: take the submarine across the Pacific to Seattle, from where an intermittent radio signal has been picked up. There almost certainly can't be anyone left alive, but it'll be an opportunity for a reconnaissance mission, and it'll keep the Navy boys busy for a month or so. Just be sure to stay submerged the whole time once you're in the contaminated zone and just snoop around via the periscope. So they trek northwards and send a man ashore in Seattle (in full protective gear) to find the source of the radio signal, which turns out to be a broken window frame intermittently banging on some old radio equipment which is connected to a still-working generator. It's not possible to see much from sea level, still less periscope level, but the conclusions are clear enough: everyone's dead.

So the submarine returns to Melbourne, and everyone gets busy with the important business of waiting to be turned inside out by nuclear radiation. Some take up dangerous hobbies like driving cars at unsafe speeds and getting messily killed, some drink themselves into a stupor, some do the more palatable bucket-list stuff like going hiking and fishing, some decide not to wait and check out early by using the suicide pills that the Australian government has made available to everyone. Peter goes home to his family and, as they all start to succumb to radiation sickness, has to make the unthinkable decision to give his baby daughter a lethal injection before he and the wife chomp down on the suicide pills. Meanwhile Moira is sitting in her car watching Dwight take his submarine out into the bay to scuttle it, while munching on her own pill.

The end of the human race and most other life on Earth is, you won't need me to tell you, a pretty heavy downer, and it's clear pretty early on here that there's not going to be a miracle cure or an alien intervention or anything like that: everyone we meet in the early pages of the novel is going to be dead by the end, after only a few months of novelistic timeline have elapsed. But, as in Never Let Me Go, this just serves as a sly reminder that we're all going to die, and the frantic attempt to cram everything else you want to do into the time you've got left is just a more compressed version of what everyone has to do with their lives anyway.

There are a few fairly obvious criticisms that could be made here: everyone's stoical and stiff-upper-lip to an almost comical degree, society continues to function despite everyone being under imminent sentence of death and there doesn't seem to have been any descent into lawlessness and looting and violence. In reality you suspect things might have got a little bit more Lord Of The Flies by the end. I mean, Peter does take a garden bench from a shop in the last few days without paying for it, but it's a very middle-class sort of looting. The interlude where top boffin John Osborne races his Ferrari and ends up winning the Australian Grand Prix is a bit odd as well and seems to have been pasted in from a completely different novel, presumably just because Shute liked cars and wanted to put some racing sequences in.

This doesn't really matter, though, as the central story is so compelling. It's oddly reminiscent of Stephen King's The Langoliers in some ways: everything playing out against the backdrop of some Really Bad Stuff approaching relentlessly and unstoppably, although in that story there turned out to be an escape route after all. It doesn't flinch from some of the more unpalatable business like having to euthanise your own one-year-old child, although Shute enables the reader to maintain some emotional distance by referring to baby Jennifer as "it" throughout, which may just have been how people (or, more specifically, men) referred to small children in the 1950s (the novel was published in 1957) but seems a bit odd to modern eyes.

Anyway, it's very good, and though Shute isn't as hugely popular or fashionable these days as he was in the 1950s and 1960s, it's well worth reading. It's natural film material and was pounced upon almost immediately for an adaptation in 1959, and then again in 2000.

Friday, April 20, 2018

the last book I read

Pig by Andrew Cowan.

Danny is in his mid-teens, probably 15 or 16, and lives with his parents and slobbish elder brother Richard in some unspecified run-down edge-of-town location. His grandmother and grandfather live nearby, or at least they do until the first couple of pages of the books, wherein Granny ups and dies, leaving Grandad all alone in the house. Not all alone in the garden, though, as the couple are the improbable custodians of a fucking enormous pig.

Grandad is judged unable to cope on his own in the house (not to mention incapable of heavy-duty pig management) and is shunted off to an old folks' home where Danny visits him regularly (no-one else seems to bother much). Danny also volunteers to look after the pig, which basically involves boiling up malodorous vats of vegetable leftovers and redistributing pigshit across the vegetable patch.

Danny is a considerate and helpful boy, but he also has some ulterior motives for wanting to spend time over at his grandparents' old place. Firstly it provides a respite from his family: Mum, brother Richard but also his Dad, intermittently drunk and punchy and permanently grouchy from working on the night shift. Secondly Danny has struck up a fledgling relationship with Surinder, an Asian girl from his school whose family run a local mini-mart, and is keen to get her alone in an undisturbed location so he can get to know her on a deep and personal level, and then get her knickers off.

This is all peachy for a while but no matter how much fun Danny, Surinder and the pig are having, there are certain realities that must be faced up to. Firstly, Danny's grandparents didn't own the house so at some point the council are going to want it back, either to rent out to someone else or to sell off to the group of property developers who are sniffing around the area. Secondly, pigs need care and maintenance and occasionally get sick and need veterinary attention. Thirdly, certain elements of the community aren't very happy about having Asians in their midst and certainly wouldn't be very happy about discovering fraternising of this sort going on.

So, inevitably, things come to a head and Danny and Surinder are left to contemplate their futures, which are probably going to be lived separately. As for the pig, well, I don't want to ruin it for you, but chances are the pig doesn't have a future, guys.

So we're in That Last Golden Summer territory, with just a bit of quirky weirdness and uneasiness on the side. Danny and Surinder's relationship is sweetly convincing, comprising, as most teenage relationships do, equal parts a) mooching around together not saying anything b) bickering and c) fucking. That said, once the initial plot elements have been put in place - the family, the pig, Surinder, the cottage - the plot meanders a bit until the slightly low-key All Is Revealed moment, whereupon the book pretty much ends.

The novel this most reminded me of was Ian McEwan's The Cement Garden: adolescent kids alone in a house, some slightly transgressive sexy sexy times, things decaying ripely around the central characters until eventually someone notices and All Is Revealed. There are some elements of Peter Benson's The Levels as well: local boy meets slightly exotic non-local girl, she grants him access to her chamber of magical secrets for a glorious season before buggering off to bigger and better things leaving him to stay.....local.

It's perfectly good in its unstartling way, and won all sorts of First Novel awards when it was published in 1994, most notably the Betty Trask Award and The Authors Club First Novel Award, both of which The Levels also won in 1987. Other Betty Trask Award winners on this list are The Hunter, The Dark Room and My Summer Of Love.

Wednesday, April 18, 2018

the great british lake-off

We had a week's family holiday in the Lake District last week. As you can imagine if you know me at all, this will have comprised lots of wholesome fun with the kids at various family-friendly locations, plus occasional escapes to go and conquer big spiky mountainous bits of rock. I'll get to the mountain stuff later, but here's a brief summary of the rest of the activities, including links for those who might be in a similar situation (i.e. young kids to keep entertained).
  • We stayed in a couple of cottages at Low Briery, a self-catering holiday park on the north-eastern outskirts of Keswick. "Holiday park" makes it sound a lot more Butlins-y than it actually is, and the main buildings are actually the remnants of an old bobbin mill, with various static caravans and some cute "pods" having been added to increase the size of the accommodation available. There's precious little information about the site's former use on the Low Briery website, but there are some information boards at the site of the former railway halt on the old line that runs along the southern edge of the site, one of which yields the snippet that the mill ceased production in 1958.
  • The railway path probably warrants a few words in its own right as it's a well-known and widely-used route that we've made use of on previous holidays to get to, among other places, the Horse & Farrier at Threlkeld. Anyone wanting to make use of it should be aware, though, that two of the bridges over the River Greta were washed away in some heavy flooding at the end of 2015, and have not yet been replaced, and that a third is structurally unsound and closed. This means quite a considerable detour to get anywhere east of Keswick by this route, though thankfully you can still get into Keswick from Low Briery down the path (it's just over a mile). Plans are afoot for renovations, including re-opening the tunnel buried under the A66 bridge whose bypassing currently adds a rather unsatisfactory hump in the otherwise nice friendly gradient. There is even a project afoot to try to lobby for the route to be re-opened as a proper railway, though (while I can see the argument that there'd be a market for it) it all sounds a bit pie-in-the-sky to me.
  • Wray Castle - on the western shore of Windermere, England's longest and largest lake. This is really a Victorian house built in the style of a castle, and as such doesn't have all the exciting historical stuff that proper castles have - portcullis mechanisms, lots of old armour and halberds lying around, that sort of thing - and so has to work a bit harder to provide interest. They've made a reasonable job of it although you do get the impression that they've had to work to stretch the content they have been able to produce over the entire house. There's some stuff about the house's original female owner and the general shittiness of being a woman in early Victorian times, and a lot is made of the fact that Beatrix Potter stayed here while on a family holiday in the 1880s, including a whole section of the house given over to recreations of parts of the Peter Rabbit universe; Mr. MacGregor's garden, Peter's burrow and the like. We made use of the launches operated by Windermere Lake Cruises to get to and from the castle; these make a round trip from Ambleside via Brockhole on the eastern shore of the lake which has more kid-friendly outdoor fun stuff but which we didn't have time to stop off and visit. We did also get some good views from the lake of what is now the ritzy Pullwood Bay holiday apartment complex but which we used to know as Huyton Hill when it was a slightly more downmarket group of holiday lets which we used for several family holidays back in the 1970s and 1980s, though strictly Huyton Hill was the name of the preparatory school which occupied the site between 1939 and 1969. 
  • Mirehouse - just out of Keswick on the shores of Bassenthwaite Lake (note: the only Lake District lake to legitimately include the word "lake" in its name, all the others having a "mere" or "water" instead which renders the addition of "lake" superfluous, nay indeed pleonasmic), this is a more orthodox country house with some grounds which include some woods and streams to keep the kids amused. I didn't actually go here as I was doing mountain stuff at the time; more on this later.
  • Lakes Aquarium - this is down at Newby Bridge on the skinny southern tail of Windermere, so it was a convenient place to stop in on our way home. Is it the most amazing aquarium in the world, with a lavish selection of eye-poppingly astonishing wonders of the deep? Well, no, not really, but it's well-set-up and keeps the kids amused, even if most of the inhabitants are ducks and fish rather than giant squid and hippopotamuses. They haven't even got a megalodon
Tune in next time for some links to photos plus details of exciting mountain adventures. THRILL as I climb the two highest mountains in England IN A SINGLE DAY!!!! RECOIL in AWE as I GO UP some OTHER mountains!! CRINGE as I consume TWO SPICY PEPERAMIS and a PORK PIE!!! ET CETERA!

Tuesday, April 03, 2018

the last book I read

True Grit by Charles Portis.

Life isn't easy in the old West. The rule of law is a tenuous thing and often the manner of its application depends on whose jurisdiction you happen to be in that day. So if you've got a bunch of no-good rootin' tootin' varmints riding into town and shooting up the sheriff, you'd better hope that you've got recourse to a lawman who'll get the job done.

Mattie Ross has a host of problems. Her father Frank has been shot dead by a man, Tom Chaney, who took advantage of Frank's good nature, got him to give him a job and a roof over his head, and then shot him in cold blood, stole some gold from his cold dead hands and scarpered. Mattie wants Tom brought to justice, and why wouldn't she, but there's a problem: she's a fourteen-year-old girl. And while these days we're all groovy and inclusive and let fourteen-year-old girls be astronauts and Prime Minister and everything, back in the old West things were a little more traditional.

So the first thing Mattie has to do is find someone to agree to bring Tom Chaney to justice. This turns out to be reasonably easy, as Marshal Reuben J "Rooster" Cogburn is in town and is just the sort of man for the job, if he can stay off the sauce long enough. The second thing she has to do is persuade Rooster that part of the deal is her coming along on the trip, as she is a girl of unusual determination and wants to see justice done with her own eyes. Needless to say Rooster isn't particularly keen, as there's bound to be a lot of high-speed galloping, punching, drinking and farting involved and Mattie is likely to cramp his style.

But Mattie is relentless, and her offer of money is persuasive. They set off, accompanied by a Texas Ranger called LaBoeuf (pronounced "La Beef" and not to be confused with either the correctly spelled version of that surname sported by footballer Frank Leboeuf or the utterly bonkers version sported by Shia LaBeouf) who has his own reasons for wanting to catch up with Chaney. It appears that Chaney has taken up with a band of outlaws led by notorious wrong'un "Lucky" Ned Pepper and has fled into some remote part of what is now Oklahoma.

The trio head off in pursuit of the outlaws and Rooster cooks up a scheme to ambush them at a hideout they're known to have made use of before. All goes according to plan until LaBoeuf starts loosing off his gun before the outlaws are in position - a gun battle ensues during the course of which several outlaws are killed, but not Tom Chaney or Ned Pepper, who escape. So the pursuit continues until they catch up with the outlaws again when Mattie has an unexpected encounter with none other than Tom Chaney when collecting water at a stream near their overnight camping spot. Mattie manages to pull her gun and shoot him, but not fatally, and he grabs her and drags her back to the Pepper gang's hilltop camp with Rooster and LaBoeuf in hot pursuit.

There then follows a brief stand-off wherein Chaney and Pepper threaten to throw Mattie into a rattlesnake pit unless Rooster and LaBoeuf beat a retreat. This they do...OR DO THEY? When Pepper and a couple of his henchmen leave Chaney in charge of Mattie and ride off, they are ambushed by Rooster who charges at them kamikaze stylee with guns a-blazin'. This tactic is surprisingly successful until Pepper shoots Rooster's horse out from under him and moves in for the kill, only to be picked off by a long shot from LaBoeuf's rifle. The day is not yet saved, though, as Chaney bashes LaBoeuf over the head with a rock, whereupon Mattie shoots him, but the recoil sends her tumbling into the rattlesnake pit, whereupon it further turns out that Chaney isn't quite dead after all. Fortunately Rooster has freed himself from under a dead horse and arrives in the nick of time to apply a bit of lethal competence to the situation by dispatching Chaney properly and, with a bit of help from LaBoeuf and Mattie's horse, rescuing Mattie from the pit. The day is not yet saved, though, as Mattie has a broken arm and has been bitten on the hand by a rattlesnake, so Rooster sets off at breakneck speed to deliver her to a doctor and save her life.

I'd imagine most people's reaction to discovering that there is a book called True Grit would be, like me, to start by assuming it's a novelisation of the celebrated 1969 film (for which John Wayne won an Oscar for his portrayal of Rooster Cogburn), and then, on discovering that the novel came first, to assume that it therefore must be some forgotten 1890s relic that was dug up by an astute Hollywood researcher, and then finally to be rather surprised that it was actually published in 1968, the year before the film was released. It's a book that has the feel of oldness without actually being old, a bit like the song Long Black Veil as mentioned here. The 1969 version is still the definitive movie, despite the 2010 Coen Brothers remake being a better film in just about every way - Jeff Bridges is closer to Cogburn as written (John Wayne essentially just plays a grumpier John Wayne in an eyepatch), Hailee Steinfeld gives a remarkable performance as Mattie Ross (all the more remarkable for being thirteen at the time, unlike Kim Darby who was twenty-one when the original film was released), and (from my recollection anyway) the film keeps Mattie as its focus more than the earlier film did, and rightly, since the story in the novel is told in her voice.

Like Winter's Bone this is a book that succeeds by making you like and care about its young female protagonist - Mattie is relentless in her pursuit of justice, determined not to be taken advantage of, scathingly puritanical about adult vices and generally un-self-aware to a wryly amusing degree. It is a sad reflection of the times she lives in that being an intelligent, independent woman not prepared to take any shit from useless feckless drunken men lends a sort of inevitability to the framing device which depicts Mattie as an elderly spinster recounting her exciting youthful exploits.

As revisionist Western novels go this is slyly subversive rather than brutally so (in the manner of, say, Blood Meridian) but it makes very clear that the nominal "good guys", Rooster Cogburn in particular, are morally compromised to some degree, and moreover that this is inevitable. It's slyly amusing, too, it a deadpan sort of way.

A more obscure connection to some earlier entries in this list is provided by the foreword to my 2005 paperback edition: as with The Queen's Gambit and Stoner this is written by a different previous featuree here, in this case Donna Tartt.