Describe it

A well-written biography of an old-school Yakuza, providing an unvarnished account of the underworld and the underclass in early 20th century Japan.

What I loved

A lot of history focuses on leaders or the elite, whose names are committed to the ages by circumstance, ability or privilege.   Confessions of a Yakuza provides a window into the lives of the other half: the poor, the outcasts and the criminals, who inhabit a world where the importance of guts and luck are less veiled, and where it is harder to hold illusions about human nature.

It is the biography of Ichiji Eiji, as told to a country doctor, Junichi Saga.  Eiji is not an overly complicated character: he is tough, amoral and self-serving.  He upholds a sense of yakuza honour, but mostly out of self-interest.  At the age he recounts his tale, he is unconflicted about his past and given to only occasional reflection.  He also has a weakness for woman, which, throughout his storied career, causes him to lop off a few fingers in penance, as per the yakuza code.

What I loved about this book were the everyday details.  Eiji starts out poor, first working at a coal merchant, then on an illegal river taxi.  This brings him into contact with people from the same rung of society.

In early 20th century Japan, if you were a poor man without family connections, you relied on cheap day labour that was barely enough to subsist on.  If you were a woman in the same circumstances, you were a prostitute.  You slept in a slum with open sewerage in the streets.  If you died of illness, as one of Eiji’s friends does, your body would be stripped of all valuables, even your clothes, and your body would be tossed out onto the street.  If that wasn’t enough, the police might move your body to a different district in what would become a macabre game of cadaver ping pong, to avoid the paperwork your inconvenient corpse would generate.  It was no fun being poor.

Eiji becomes a yakuza when a gang boss thinks he has the right look.  In those days, the yakuza were not involved in drugs or prostitution, only illegal gambling rackets, dice games.  They had arrangements with the police and other gangs, and were willing to fight and kill for their territory, although Eiji plays down the violence.  They maintained good relationships with the businesses in the area they operated in, and apparently did not take advantage of gambling addicts.  The way Eiji tells it, you believe him.  He rises through the ranks because he learns loyalty and can take a beating form the cops.

He is full of stories, his own and other people’s, that only those on the periphery of history could share.

Stories like:

Walking the streets of Tokyo after a miraculous escape from the 1923 Tokyo earthquake and fire, Eiji and a friend come upon the charred body of a mother and two children, so badly burned that they are at first mistaken for monkeys.  Eiji’s friend wrenches the burned limbs of the children from their mother to get at a wad of money.

And:

The man who knows how to cut off arms because, as a soldier in the war, he had cut the arms off his fallen comrade’s bodies, because they were the easiest part to carry, and it would give them something to burn later, to send the ashes home to the families.

And:

The crazy kind-of-bravery that has Eiji and his customers continue playing dice as a fleet of American battleships shell the world around them, knowing they have no control over where the bombs fall.

What I learned about writing

About a thief, Eiji says: “he was the kind of man, in fact, who makes you want to take your hat off to the whole human race.  I mean, they won’t let anything keep them down for long.”  Eiji’s world view is shaped around survival.

The amoral can see people’s motivations and report their actions more truthfully, because they do not need to maintain their illusions.

The details of everyday life and work are fascinating.  The world will never run out of stories.

What didn’t work

That horrible cliché title.

Eiji has so many women on the go as an old man that it becomes hard to keep up with them.

The sloppy editing in the final chapter.  Not happy, Kodansha International.

image courtesy of The Guardian

Describe it

The late, great contrarian Christopher Hitchens’ informed and impassioned attack on religion.

What I loved

Hitchens is at his most likable when he is gushing over his political, scientific and literary heroes and their legacies.

“We [Atheists] are not immune to the lure of wonder and mystery and awe: we have music and art and literature, and find that the serious ethical dilemmas are better handled by Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Schiller and Dostoyevsky and George Eliot than in the mythical morality tales of the holy books.  Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and – since there is no other metaphor – also the soul.”

The breadth of knowledge that he brings to bear on his argument is impressive and exhilarating.

His most convincing argument is that societies have become more just and equal due to secular reforms.  In times and places where religious institutions hold significant power, there is greater repression, especially of minorities, and more atrocities are committed to supress the diversity of human nature.  The more tolerant approach displayed by religious institutions in developed cultures is a strategic reaction to their diminished influence.

He also makes a strong cases against the contradictory nature of Christian teaching, the historical legitimacy of the Bible and the Koran, and the barbarity of some stories that supposedly demonstrate exemplary godly behaviour.

He convinced me that freedom of the press is too precious to bow to religiously justified hysteria and intimidation.   And I felt palpably angry when I read about how the church has impeded medicine, and of practices that are excused on religious grounds, especially female circumcision.  Some things should never be justified by cultural relativism.

I also loved that he is not just tearing things down, but offering a more attractive, secular alternative.

What didn’t work

Hitchens is preaching to the choir.  It’s fist pumping stuff for fellow Atheists, but his tone is so contemptuous and arrogant that religious readers will erect their defences and shut themselves off from his more reasonable points.

His arguments are mainly against religious institutions, and not people’s personal faiths.  Most of his targets – the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Catholic Church’s facilitation of child sex abuse, Islamic extremism – are too easy.  His handpicked examples can be so extreme that they border on a straw man argument.

He also uses religion as a scapegoat.  I don’t have enough knowledge of history to refute his points directly, but it often seems that he’s too willing to ignore the complex causes of events, such as the Croatia-Serbia genocide, and reduce the issues down to religious hatred.

Similarly, religion gets all of the blame and none of the credit: because he admires people such as Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, he tries to play down their faiths.

Hitchens’s weakest moment comes when he tries to pre-empt the argument that secular regimes, such as the Nazis, Stalinist Russia and North Korea, have committed worse atrocities than their religious counterparts.  His assertions, that religious institutions colluded with these regimes, and that totalitarianism uses the same tools as religion, are unconvincing in that they don’t mitigate the fact that these regimes were secular, and that history suggests that fanatical adherence to any ideology, faith-based or secular, breeds horrors.

His attacks on everyday spirituality are less substantive.  While he makes sound arguments against the irrationality and hypocrisy of the Christian cannon in particular, he never addresses the broad and varied nature of people’s personal faiths (see below).

What I learned about writing

Extreme points of view are entertaining and exhilarating in the short term, but less convincing on reflection, and begin to wear thin after 200 pages.

Stray thoughts

I’m an atheist, so in the interest of getting a counter argument, I tried out some of the arguments from God Is Not Great on my Mum, who’s an Uniting Church Minister.  None of them gained traction.

See, she is of the view that “God is love”.  I’ve heard this interpretation once before from someone I respect, and it seems to be a view that is flexible enough to accommodate modern scientific discoveries and values.  Mum agreed that the barbarity and ignorance in the Old Testament is a product of its times, and that the Catholic church has a lot to answer for.  But she gains strength and comfort from the traditions and teaching in the Bible.

True, I wasn’t satisfied with all her answers.  If you can disregard some parts of the Bible, why not all of it?  Even if you conceive of love as being embodied by a God, why does that need to be linked with the Christian tradition?

But she obviously finds that faith improves her life.  Christianity doesn’t speak to me, and I’ve never heard satisfactory, rational answers to the big questions.  But humans aren’t rational creatures, and if people find that religion has a positive effect on their lives, who am I to say otherwise?

Describe it

The first Nick Adams short story from In Our Time, in which Nick’s father, a doctor, takes him to an Indian camp to see a complicated birth.  Described by one critic as the “master key” to Hemingway’s writing.

What I loved

It all rings true.  One of my favourite Hemingway quotes from The Green Hills of Africa goes:

“First, there must be talent, much talent. Talent such as Kipling had. Then there must be discipline. The discipline of Flaubert. Then there must be the conception of what it can be and absolute conscience as unchanging as the standard meter in Paris, to prevent faking. Then the writer must be intelligent and disinterested and above all he must survive.”

Perhaps the most striking word in this quote is “disinterested”, which seems a strange trait to encourage in writers.  By this, I believe that Hemingway meant that a good writer must have the ability to take a step back and observe life, dispassionately, unblinkered by dogma or fear, never turning away from notions that society deems unacceptable.

In Indian Camp, Hemingway’s commitment to truthfulness can be seen in his exploration of masculinity, one of his chief preoccupations.  Men’s boundaries are defined by a collage of details: the Indian men fleeing the woman’s cries; Nick’s fathers ability to shut out the cries to perform the task at hand (“her screams are unimportant.  I don’t hear them because they’re unimportant”); his sportsman-like reaction to the success of the operation; the suicide; Nick’s father’s reluctance to explain it; and Nick’s feeling of immortality.

In contrast, the Indian woman is dominated, yet strong; deprived of dialogue, yet able to make the male characters deeply uncomfortable with her voice.  It is noteworthy that more detail is given of the man cutting his throat than the birth process.

I loved the ambiguity, too.  Nick’s father wants to educate him.  It is not a lesson that is communicated in words, but in actions.  Grace under pressure, perhaps, and stoicism.  But there are limits to that education.  Nick’s father wants him to see birth, blood, suffering, and  struggle, but not death.  At least, not suicide.

And why does the husband kill himself?  Is it because he cannot bear the woman’s suffering, or her screams, or the impending birth, or the white men helping her?

And I loved the idea of birth and death being all twisted together.

What I learned about writing

Everything that is superfluous to the theme is removed.  This means that the passage of time is not realistically communicated, but that the key events are highlighted.

The theme is explored not by having preconceived conclusion, or a message, but by juxtaposing observations and reactions to the same event.

The sparseness of the description of the operation and Nick’s reactions makes a stronger impression than if more graphic details were included.

What didn’t work

Hemingway had not yet fully developed his writing style.  The sentences are shorter, it is even more minimal than his later works, he hasn’t started his love affair with the word “and”.  There were a few times when the reader was given too much space to inhabit, when they were left floundering.  Later, Hemingway becomes more skilled at balancing detail and focus.  Still, the prose is beautiful for its simplicity.

Stray thoughts

Hemingway’s father, Clarence, was also a doctor.  It made me wonder to what degree this is an autobiographical work.  Considering the story’s focusing on suicide, it is also interesting that both Hemingway and his father both ended up committing suicide.

It was a different time, wasn’t it?  I can’t imagine many fathers now taking their sons to see a backyard c-section to give them a bit of life experience.

Yoyogi Park

25 December 2011

On the Narita Express (N’Ex!) to Tokyo.  It’s a clear winter day.  Bare trees raise their feathery branches towards the sky.  Rice paddy fields, their harvest exhausted for the year, give way to neat little houses, then uniform apartment blocks that crowd either side of the tracks, so that when we cross a bridge we are surprised by the sudden horizon, the clouds, a river, and a wheat-coloured baseball field where kids are doing early morning sprints.

M asks if I thought it was ugly the first time I saw it.  I say I don’t remember.  It’s not ugly now.  I’m comfortably numb from the wear of the flight.  There aren’t many people in the streets and the traffic still eases along.

Tokyo from Aoyama-I-Chome

26 December 2011

You’re never alone on the streets of Tokyo.  Even on the latest drunken stumble home, you always happen upon someone on their own night errands.  Now, I’m sitting in the sun on another clear winter day, at a cafe on a side-street t-junction, watching the steady stream of people.  They speak in quiet, regular tones, moving around each other and the slow intermittent cars.  They are impeccably dressed.  There are many beautiful looking people.  In groups, the women laugh and chat in high clear voices.  The men are mostly alone, but even in groups they barely talk.

Christmas in Japan is a commercial holiday.  Somehow, through clever marketing, I guess, Kentucky Fried Chicken has positioned itself as a traditional Christmas food.  Colonel Santa?

Aoyama dori with Christmas lights

I put the green handpiece back on the hook of the public phone.  “Thank you.  Please be careful not to forget anything,” it says.

The next one steals my change.

29 December 2011

Spent the whole day walking around Harajuku looking for dress shoes, until I hated shoes and everything they stand for.

Met M’s former boss at the Park Hyatt in Tokyo Midtown.  Took the lift up to the restaurant and bar on the 45th floor, and felt like I was on the set of Lost in Translation.  The restaurant lounge had high ceilings, caramel wood block columns and views from the Imperial Palace to the new Sky Tree digital broadcasting tower, all the way out to Tokyo bay.  There was some nice modern art – colourful dynamic and uncontroversial – and a large water feature incorporating rose coloured stone and bamboo.  As we eat our tasteful portions, I thought, “I could get used to this.”

That night we met M’s friend, Eri*, at Shinagawa, a station I used to transfer through every day on my way to work.  It was just as I remembered it.  She lead us off the main street and through the back alleys, full of small bars and restaurants, packed with the after work crowd.  We settled on a busy little sea food place with buckets of mussels and oysters out the front.  We could only get a small table by door, me on a stool with a steady stream of people squeezing past behind me.  The waiter, a skinny guy in a bandanna, made a joke of saying that everything was Japanese – Japanese beeru, Japanese hotake, Japanese potato sarad.  The staff had a call and response routine going, and when I said that the sashimi was delicious, our waiter yelled it out to the whole bar.  Eri eat little but drank alot, and I had to drink quickly to keep up with her.  Pretty soon I had the Asian flush.

30 December 2011

Chain coffee stores are good for writing because everyone treats them like they’re disposable.

Sunrise over Kamogawa

1 January 2012

In Japan, every year on New Year’s Eve there is a singing contest called Kohaku Uta Gassen, literally red and white song battle.  The red team, girls, and the white team, guys, compete for votes from the audience and a panel of random celebrity judges – this year there was a fashion designer, the guy from the Norwegian Wood movie, and a sumo wrestler, amongst others.  The winner gains nothing but streamers and tears of joy.  The contestants are a mix of enka singers, soft rock bands and manufactured pop groups.  They are expected by the conservative national broadcaster to be squeaky clean -  a not-so-minor national scandal occurred when a member of a popular boy band was found drunk and naked outside his own house.

We slept for an hour then piled into the old Mitsuaoka, the four of us, and drove down to the docks to see the squid fishing boats getting ready to go out. When we got there, it was dark and empty, except for some stray cats scrounging in the nets. The boats were moored and bare except for New Year’s decorations made from rope and bamboo, with giant flags planted in the middle.  So we went to a small sea-side bar run by a young escapee from the salary man life, and drank chilled red wine, and eat potato chips and sausages and edamame.

Who she is

ABC’s chief online political writer. She is insightful, informed and frank, but her greatest asset is her wit, which makes the dry stuff of politics accessible and fun. Also brings her warmth and enthusiasm to TV on Insiders and The Drum.  Read her columns here.

What I love (feel the need to add “about her writing and commentary” before this gets creepy)

Her conversational style and bitingly funny, deadly-accurate pop-culture similes lay bare the absurdities, hypocrisies, challenges and, very occasionally, triumphs of the Australian Democratic system. On Julia Gillard:

“Where her predecessor ached to be popular, this prime minister has made unpopularity into something of a personal art form. There’s a compelling, almost cinematic quality to her determination; it’s like watching a slalom downhill skier deliberately hitting every peg.”

Tells it like it is. Keeps it real. Straight up OG (Observer of Government). Her style brings politics down a peg to a more engaging, honest level:

“that [the mining tax] did not apply to ordinary activity but only to the whoopingly, hilariously over-profitable kind, was not fully understood during the Mining Tax Massacre of 2010.”

And being such a clear communicator, one of her chief hates is obfuscation. As she puts it, “give me a clanger-dropper over a fudger any day.”

She is non-partisan. She loves the game, not the teams. This means she is free to recognise skills and stuff ups on both sides, and to take obvious glee at the gladiatorial spectacle.

But she has ideals. She appreciates good policy – well-executed, well sold, and in the public interest. And she strives to be objective. Maybe her best article everwas a clear-eyed reflection on the changing media environment.

She’s not a cynic. She believes that politicians have genuinely good intentions and sympathiseswith them, while recognising what a dirty game it is. It’s a refreshing change from the Andrew Bolt/Alan Jones I-could-run-this-country-better-than-that-pack-of-flamin-idjits-in-Can’berra bluster.

Her nerdish enthusiasm revives even the terribly serious regulars on Insiders. My favourite combo was Crabb – Megalogenis – Bolt for insight, conflict and LOLs (although Piers Ackerman and David Marr are also a hilarious comedy duo).

She boycotted lazy, hysterical commenting on the polls following the train-wreck that was the 2010 Federal election.

And she has shiny hair. Okay, now it’s getting creepy.

What I learned about writing

Clear, honest, accessible writing is a weapon against the dissembling language used by politicians and institutions.

Good political commentators – perhaps commentators on any topic – are more interested in understanding and communicating the complexities of their art than pushing an agenda.

The right simile illuminates, entertains, and boils an issue down to its ideological essence.

She attains humour by being overly-casual, blunt, or just plain inappropriate. She’s not above using nicknames: before being elevated to leadership of the Liberal Party, she branded Tony Abbott “People Skills” due to a moment of unguarded hubris. Now he is “the Budgie Smuggler”. But her she somehow manages to stay within the (admittedly generous Australian) boundaries of respect.

Stray thoughts

People who leave comments under her articles often accuse her of having a left bias. Now, getting reasonable analysis from the comments section is like asking an irate, drunk goat for financial advice, but there’s some truth in this. Her assessment of the leaders of the two major parties seems to be that Tony Abbott is a relentlessly negative hollow-man with no policy ideas, and Julia Gillard doesn’t receive credit for what she has achieved but leads a government that keeps kicking own-goals. If you think these assessments are not balanced, then you’d probably agree that she has a bias.

Ms Crabb’s collection of columns, Rise of the Ruddbot, was an unfortunate victim of the recent chaos of Australian politics when it was released at almost the exact time that Kevin Rudd was unseated, causing it to suffer a case or terminal ironic title syndrome. Typical selfish politicians putting the leadership of the nation above my favourite columnist’s book launch.

You can see that she’s something of an optimist and progressive, and her disappointment at the current state of politics seeps through. Reading some of her previous columns has reaffirmed my belief that, since Rudd’s unseating, politics has steadily descended into trivia and politics-over-policy.

Describe it

In its story of the idle, hedonistic elite, it expresses the anxieties of the modern age – the passing of the old world, the new roles of the sexes, and man’s loss of faith in God, in ideals, in himself. Read it.

What I loved

The spare beauty and vigour of Hemingway’s prose. The strength of an active sentence, the power of that perfect verb.

It made me want to dance and drink whisky in Paris, and fish and drink wine chilled in a mountain stream in the mountains of Spain, and see a bullfight and drink from a wine skin in Pamploma. To say damn this and damn that, and “What a lot of rot” and “To hell with you, Lady Ashley.”

I was always right there with the characters when they were drunk on life, and when things soured, and when they were sick of it all. They were weak but they kept going.

The last line: ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Isn’t it pretty to think so?’ Have Jake’s feelings for Brett changed? Have they been through all this before?

What I learned about writing

Obviously, it made me want to steal Hemingway’s style and repeat myself a lot.

The iceberg method. Show a thing’s importance by writing around it, writing in its negative space. Show a character’s passions by never writing about their emotions, but by writing about what holds their attention. Show yearning by, out of place, glancing over what one cannot have.

What didn’t work

Everything worked. The number of characters in Paris confused me, but that was intentional. The start of Book Three when the fiesta was winding down and Jake was alone bored me, but that was intentional, too.

Stray thoughts

I had a hankering for Hemingway after seeing Mindnight in Paris, but because I was halfway through another book and have a rule of only reading one novel at a time, I took The Sun Also Rises off the shelf and started dipping into it. Before I knew it, it had sucked me in, knocked the other book out of my mind and was finished, like some literary pack of Pringles that left me covered in the greasy, shameful crumbs of broken discipline.

Midnight in Paris also inspired me to read up on modernism, and this, along with whatever I’ve learned from two years worth of reading and living, gave me an understanding of Fiesta that I didn’t have the first time around.

I was clicking around the always excellent Guardian Books page, source of many a mid-work literature fix, when I came across this interview with Hannu Rajaniemi.  He seemed endearingly down to earth, is a fellow Murakami fan and his novel, The Quantum Thief, sounded like an interesting concept, so I followed the link to the first piece he had published, Shibuya No Love. 

I enjoyed the story, but it’s clearly the work of an inexperienced, though talented, writer.  It can be instructive to read the work of less polished authors, though, because the visible seams make it easier to understand what works, and what doesn’t.

Without ruining too much of the central mystery, the story revolves around a little gadget called a “quantum lovegety” which helps the protagonist, Riina, find a boyfriend. The Murakami influence is obvious from the start, not only in the modern Japanese setting but the conversational language and use of magic realism.  There’s even an obvious nod to Murakami in one character’s love of jazz and cats.

I was immediately struck by the fetishisation of Japanese culture.  Whereas Murakami is famously global in his references, so that it sometimes seems like his stories could be set in any modern city, Rajaniemi makes the setting conspicuous.  Within the first few paragraphs, Hachiko, takoyaki and Hello Kitty are all held up like a host of glowing neon signs announcing “THIS IS MODERN JAPAN”.

It’s a balancing act to communicate a foreign country without overdoing the cultural references. Here, the sheer volume of references to Japan distracts from the overall story. While Riina’s status as a foreigner explains her ignorance of the quantum lovegety, IMHO the story might have been better if she was a just a naïve Japanese girl.

Similarly, using the original language is best for untranslatable concepts, such as otaku or neo-jinrui, but using “kawaii” where cute would have sufficed was a step too far. Because of the frequency of Japanese words, I was glad that the author didn’t opt for the convention of putting foreign words in italics, as it would have made them even more conspicuous.

That being said, Raianiemi’s depiction of Shibuya is spot on. “Shibuya was like a graffiti: clashing, bright, screaming colors over a drab concrete surface, the clothes shops and holograms and neon signs and rainbow crowds a stark contrast to the utilitarian 90s architecture .“ I also liked the description of Japanese culture as having “labyrinths of the new and the old”.

Another less than effective element was establishing the sci-fi world. In fantasy or speculative fiction, it’s important to quickly communicate that you’re in a different world, and what its boundaries are. It wasn’t until more than halfway through the story, when Riina begins to interface with the quantum lovegety, that I was sure that the people in the story had some kind of technological enhancements, and that I was dealing with a futuristic Japan. On the second read through, I noted that early on it states that Riina’s father has “good protocol/etiquette software”, but I originally thought that this was just an artful, modern way of saying that he had good social habits.

The dialogue demonstrates a common beginner problem (that I also have): it’s naturalistic and functional, but no-one speaks for long, or says anything particularly interesting.  This problem can be overcome when you realise that good authors write dialogue that could never be spoken in real life.

Finally, the ending doesn’t work. “The statue seemed to be looking at her sadly with its bronze dog eyes, and she knew that it was still waiting, waiting for love in Shibuya.”  The repetition and echoes of the story’s title are cheesy.  The story would be better off without the last paragraph.

All of which sounds negative, but like I said at the beginning: I enjoyed it.  The idea of the quantum lovegety was engaging, because it captures the way that technology allows us to live proxy lives, but even more timelessly, it captures the shallowness and unreliability of memory, the rush or youth, and the fleeting nature of relationships.

Shibuya No Love is a good beginner’s story.  The link is at the top of the page. What do you think?

I tore through About a Boy in a couple of days, even staying up late into the night to finish it, which I haven’t done in ages.  This isn’t to say that it’s the best book I’ve read in the past year, but it is the most readable, largely thanks to its very British sense of humour.  I haven’t read a lot of books whose priority is to be funny, but those that I have, such as The Finkler Question, seem to use the same kind of humour, full of understatement, overstatement and comically frank descriptions.  And like The Finkler Question, About A Boy isn’t just aiming to make you laugh: it also has something to say about some pretty dark themes, and late 20th Century England.

It does this by focusing on the unlikely friendship between Marcus, a socially awkward twelve year old burdened with a chronically depressed mother, and Will, a thirty-six year old man-child who lives a care-free life on the royalties of a Christmas pop-song written by his father.  The two meet at a picnic for single parents: Marcus is there with one of his mum’s friends; Will is there because he has fabricated a son to pick-up single mothers.

At first, as you’d expect of such opposite personalities, they hate each other.  But they are quickly and irrevocably bonded, first, when Will uses his talent for lying to conceal Marcus’s accidental killing of a duck, and second, when they return to Marcus’s house to find that his mother, Fiona, has attempted suicide.

Afterwards, Will is struck by one of his momentary feelings of charity, and decides to take Marcus under his wing.  He soon regrets this decision when he realises that Marcus and Fiona are the kind of earnest crazy people that stand around a piano and sing Joni Mitchell with their eyes closed.  But he loses his say in the matter when Marcus starts turning up at his door every day to escape the harsh realities of his school and home life.

SPOILERS BELOW

As you’d expect, the two learn from each other in what what is a slightly unusual coming of age story.  Will is repeatedly struck by Marcus’s vulnerability and innate goodness, and develops a genuine affection for the boy.  It is not until he falls in love, however, that he reflects on his lack of achievement and connection, and begins to form deeper emotional bonds with the people that have stumbled into his life.  Will, as an astoundingly shallow cad, is a more entertaining character, but his arc is less significant.

It is Marcus who undergoes the more profound transformation.  In part, he does this by drawing on his considerable intelligence and inner fortitude, but he must also conform to the cynical values of the society around him.  Marcus’s mother, Fiona, has effectively crippled him socially through well-meaning but naive advice such as not being a “sheep” and following social trends.  Will provides him with not only a window into popular culture, but also a more realistic perspective.  Thanks to his influence, Marcus realises that his home and school life are “shit”, and he learns how to express his anger.  He also realises that his mother may not know best, and he uses his reasoning to develop his own value system.

By the end of the novel, he surpasses both his mother and Will terms of maturity, but his maturation is bittersweet: he has gained even greater strength and is more likely to survive into adulthood, but he also loses much of what makes him unique, becoming a more typical surly teenager.  He is no longer innocent, and perfectly capable of exploiting his mother’s emotional weakness if it will get him what he wants.

About a Boy reads as a light book, but it does deal with the very serious theme of suicide.  And while it occasionally suffers from sitcom emotional spectrum syndrome (having to continually tell jokes, even during moments where it is detracts from the story), there are some genuinely poignant moments in which Hornby’s simple language works really well, such Fiona’s suicide note to Marcus:

“And it isn’t that I’m so unhappy that I don’t want to live anymore.  That’s not what it feels like.  It feels more like I’m tired and bored and the party’s gone on too long and I want to go home.”

Fiona, though doesn’t come off well as a character, although culpability for her attempted suicide is somewhat confused by a brief observation in the last chapter linking Marcus’ character change with her improved mental health.

The novel’s title is partially a reference to the Nirvana song About a Girl, and its climax revolves around Kurt Cobain’s suicide.  It is a less than satisfying conclusion to an otherwise enjoyable novel.  Fiona’s depression is resolved without fireworks and the other plot lines addressed are underdeveloped, making it feel as if Hornby ran out of things to say with the characters.  Perhaps in recognition of this, the ending to the Hugh Grant starring film version was significantly altered, and although it’s extremely unrealistic, it is more fulfilling.

video courtesy of YouTube. Which is obvious from the bloody big YouTube logo in the corner.

Still, you could do a lot worse than About a Boy.  It’s a fun, enjoyable, unpretentious read, perfect for a long plane flight or a holiday where you just want to relax and read about the humour that can be found in a mildly traumatised pre-teen, a shallow compulsive liar and suicide.

Franz Kafka is regarded as one of the best and most influential authors of the 20th Century, and is a major figure in existentialism and magic realism.  Like all of his novels, The Trial was left unfinished, but to me, it still read like a complete story.  This might be because Kafka blends the surreal and mundane, and you need to relax your logic to be carried along with it.  Or it might just be because, by the time I was three quarters of the way through the book, I was sick of it.

Like a lot of classics, once it’s stripped of its historical context and cultural significance, it doesn’t make for an enjoyable read.  Which isn’t to say that it doesn’t have merit – the atmosphere, lampooning of social conventions and central concept are all interesting.  But its seems like a short story ridden to exhaustion, a joke taken too far.

In The Trial, Joseph K. is woken on the day of his thirtieth birthday by two warders, who inform him that he is being charged with a crime.  What the nature of the crime is, and whether K. is guilty, is never revealed.  All that is certain is that he is now subject to the indecipherable bureaucratic tyranny of the Court.  Once a successful and well regarded bank official, his life and thoughts are consumed by hearings and submissions, and he becomes entangled with advocates, painters and priests who all claim to have some insight into how the Court works, but who seem to do nothing to advance his case.

Many critics laud Kafka for prefiguring the “banality of evil” in the 20th century, especially Nazism, a particularly cruel irony considering his three sisters and true love likely perished in the concentration camps.  In the Court, he captures how large bureaucratic systems dehumanise both those who enforce and suffer injustice.

But the impact of his prescience is lessened by something that is in no way the author’s fault – no human mind could, thankfully, imagine the scope of the horrors that occurred in the 20th century.  Only someone who had already heard of the industrialisation of murder that occurred under the Nazis, such as George Orwell in 1984, could write fiction that could match the terrible reality.

This makes a political reading of The Trial less compelling than a psychological one – that Joseph K.’s trial is a metaphor for the arbitrary, cruel nature of life.

The Court, with its unfathomable practices, inaccessible hierarchy and mundane cruelty, stands for an indifferent universe in which people are designed to suffer.  In this interpretation, K.’s ignorance of the charges against him, and his illogical compulsion to prove his innocence, is analogous to an existential search for worth.  The eventual judgement, and his compliance with it, suggest that both the world and himself are ultimately found wanting.

This is not to say that the events of the novel are some kind of psychosis on K.’s part.  Instead, like other magic realist novels, the fictional world of The Trial doesn’t seek to capture how life is, but how life feels, and uses surreal concepts to do it.  For example, the Court can use a room in K.’s office to exact (German stereotype-confirming kinky) punishment against the two warders because the trial is invading his life, and because the Court is omnipresent.

The psychological reading maintained my interest for a while, but after about fifty pages it all started to wear thin.  And while fifty pages might not sound like a lot, someone needs to hope in the DeLorean, get it up to 88 mp/h and tell Kafka that he has some formatting issues.  He has  an unholy love for page spanning paragraphs, with no line breaks to differentiate different speakers.  Not only that, but my Penguin Classics version has tiny text, so if you look away from the page, you need to spend thirty seconds searching for your place.  Maybe it was the convention at the time to write in this way, but I’m sure I’ve read older texts which are more reader friendly in this regard.  Formatting gripe over.

There are also huge tracts of the novel that are dedicated to explaining the Court’s bureaucracy, which, while relevant to the theme, had my eyes glazing over.  In addition, as a protagonist, K. isn’t particularly compelling or sympathetic.  He is arrogant and haughty, and none of his personal relationships make him more likeable.  None of the other characters are particularly engaging, either, being more vehicles for exploring the theme than fully developed and relatable people.

I’m not sorry that I read The Trial.  It’s good for literature nerds to have an understanding of influential writers.  But I don’t think I’d willingly subject myself to Kafka again, except maybe the short stories.

References

Sparknotes

Wikipedia

Near the end of Farewell, My Lovely, a beautiful woman gazes up at Chandler’s legendary shamus, Phillip Marlowe, and says:

“’You’re so marvellous… So brave, so determined, and you work for so little money.  Everybody bats you over the head and chokes you and smacks your jaw and fills you with morphine, but you just keep right on hitting between tackle and end until they’re all worn out.  What makes you so wonderful?’”

It’s a question that you could ask not only about the prototypical hard-boiled detective, but about the author himself.  What is it that elevates both the character and the writer into a league of their own?

It’s definitely not the novel’s plots, at least, not if it’s judged by the standards of a traditional mystery where everything is supposed to be wrapped up in a neat little package at the end.

At the start of the novel, Marlowe irrepressible curiosity lands him in the grip of a crook as big as a beer truck, Moose Malloy.  Malloy has just been released from prison, and he decides to celebrate his freedom by murdering a “nigro” who won’t help him track down an old flame, Velma.  Her whereabouts and identity serve as the central mystery, in that they open and close the story, but in Marlowe’s search for answers, he manages to find trouble of all kinds.  There’s a murdered Hollywood playboy; an unfaithful millionaire’s wife; a drug-dealing psychic with a pungent native American bodyguard; an earnest police chief’s daughter who shares Marlowe’s nose for trouble; and cops of all shapes and types: sharp and dim, tough and soft, earnest and crooked and everything in between.

Trying to figure out how it all ties together is tougher than Chandler’s protagonist (he wrote in a futile effort to mimic the author’s amazing similes).  The Big Sleep was so convoluted even its author lost track of all its plot threads; in comparison, Farewell, My Lovely’s central mystery provides less direction, more of the action turns out to be ancillary, and the resolution is even murkier: I had to read the “parlour room scene” three or four times to make sure it touched on everything.

Not that it matters: if anything, Chandler’s second novel is even more enjoyable than his first.

The character of Marlowe is a big reason for this, and while he hasn’t developed since he’s premier outing – he seems to have past the point of change – he is given greater depth.

Marlowe doesn’t solve mysteries Sherlock Holmes-style, using encyclopaedic knowledge or near supernatural powers of observation, although all play some part in his repertoire.  Instead, he watches people, and tries to push their buttons, and uses his hard-won knowledge of the dark side of human nature to make deductions.  More often than not, his deductions are wrong.  But, as the above quote suggests, he keeps following up leads and rattling cages until he lands the solution.

The most exceptional thing about Marlowe, the thing that draws the reader to him, is his wit.  He’s almost always ready with a quip, even if he has a gun pointed at him, and his narration is ruthless in taking the rich or corrupt down a peg.  If anything impresses or intimidates him, he usually understates its impact.

His indecipherable code of honour is another fascinating element of the character.  His dogged pursuit of answers seems less about justice, which he shows no belief in, and more about compulsion, driven by a restless intellect, pride, and some inexpressible searching.  These traits make him the perfect detective for the cynical, lost inter-war years.

But he’s a man who understands his limits, and they’re more apparent in this outing, which makes him more engaging.  I stumbled across an excellent essay on how his masculinity is constructed, and how his cool demeanour tends to break down around attractive women.  It also confirmed my impressions of his having an unexpected homoerotic attraction to a man, Red, whom he meets at the docks.  Read it here.

The same website also provided an equally fascinating essay which uses the notion of dialectics to analyse Chandler’s writing style, demonstrating how the relationship between two conflicting ideas gives his prose vitality.  To quote a quote:

“’the mixture of toughness and sentimentality, for instance; the anti-literary stance which coexisted with intense literary ambition; initially he seemed a ruthlessly modern writer… it took longer to see the underlying romanticism.’”

Read the full essay here.

Chandler gives away one of his major influences, which I should have picked up on, when Marlowe nicknames a bent cop Hemingway. Not being much of a reader, the cop asks, “Who is this Hemingway person at all?” Marlowe replies, “A guy that keeps saying the same thing over and over until you believe it must be good.” This joke sounds disrespectful, even mocking, unless you look at Chandler’s writing style. Hemingway’s signature use of declarative sentences with no subordinating conjunctions is especially obvious in Chandler’s descriptions of landscapes.

But where Chandler really excels is in his similes, which are both witty and excellent at establishing character.  Reading them is like taking a master-class avoiding cliches.  The only danger for wannabe writers is that they’re irresistibly imitable, explaining the legions of second-rate Chandler know-offs.

In the past, I’ve made the mistake of assuming that detective fiction was not literary.  I assumed because it was easy to read, and its conventions were so well established, that there couldn’t be much going on below the surface.  But bothering to research and reflect on Farewell, My Lovely has shown me how wrong I’ve been.  Wonderful.

References

Into the Heart of Marlowe: Masculinity and Romance in Raymond Chander’s The Big Sleep and Farewell, My Lovely - Cody Griggs

The Dialectic Aspect of Raymond Chandler’s Novels  - Ray Newman