Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? - Philip K. Dick

I’ve only seen Blade Runner the once, about ten years ago, and living at home I watched it in stolen half hours. It didn’t impress me much, but I realised that I hadn’t really given it a fair shot, and perhaps should go back to it sometime. As yet, that hasn’t happened. It stars Harrison Ford; I’m in no rush. At first I resisted as I was scared that I wouldn’t like it enough – by comment consent, I would be wrong. My suspicion that it wasn’t for me remained, but I stopped worrying about it.

Do Androids Dream… is not like the bits I remember of Blade Runner. Where the film is sleek, the book is earthy - set in a dusty and dilapidated world, albeit one with flying cars. Decker is bald and dissatisfied in his marriage; the final confrontation with the replicants is anti-climactic, they are despatched easily, before a twenty page coda involving empathy machines and a new religion - altogether too much back story to explain here.

So, the book. The women are hastily sketched Madonna/whores (surprise!), and there are obvious flaws in the internal logic (why, if sexual contact between people and androids is forbidden, are the androids capable of sexual acts) in order to push on the thought experiments so beloved of science fiction (what if there was someone who looked exactly like… etc); yet he pulls it off. This is a novel of character and place, and is even funny here and there. The philosophy and paranoia does stray over the annoying-line, but it passed an important test: I kept reading as I walked home from the station.

The Immoralist - Andre Gide

Ah, you know how it is, you spend your life studiously, barely noticing as you sleepwalk into a loveless marriage to make your father happy; then, on your honeymoon you almost die of tuberculoses, and the sight of a lithe young arab boy, naked beneath his gandourah, turns your bookish head. Then it’s a different life you seek, one guided by the pursuit of pleasure.

And so our pederastic hero cruises around northern Africa, then Italy, neglecting his saintly wife. There are plenty of nice dichotomies here for the English student: Michel constantly attracted by ‘the other’, be it the East, the rural, the life of action. But that’s all so obvious it’s not really worth discussing. It was written in, like, 1901, so the deviancy is implied; still, his transgressions are hinted at clearly enough to feel an empathetic thrill as he wakes up to life. The destination is not particularly mind-blowing, but the journey is told beautifully, and the translator is invisible.

Popular Music - Mikael Niemi

It’s strange the way this book has been marketed. The publishers are trying to push this as a charming Hornby-esque novel of small town life and adolescence through pop music. That’s not completely wrong, but it is only one side of the thing.

So it’s about a boy growing up in the far north of Sweden in the ‘60s. You’re thinking “Heartbeat on ice”; stop thinking that. I mentioned before that Eastern Europe is this hemisphere’s Latin America. I was wrong - I should have looked to Scandinavia. They have an aural tradition, trolls, perpetual daylight in the summer and nighttime in the winter; a hard existence, and with the Northern Lights, a sense of magic. Frequently this novel takes a turn for the fantastic - whether or not you enjoy these diversions depends on your tolerance for this kind of thing. Generally I disapprove, too frequently they are deus ex machina, but the balance is about right here.

This is not the social democracy of liberal dreams. Pajala, where the novel is set, is near the Finnish border, and many of its inhabitants speak a Finnish dialect. They are also largely alcoholic, stoic, suspicious and above all, macho. Essential to male behaviour is an avoidance of knapsu, things-that-women-do, unmanly pursuits. Into this world comes pop music, enthusiastically embraced by at least some of the town’s youth (the description of the first time they hear the Beatles is fantastic - in all senses - making us feel again the shock of this now familiar, wallpaper music). There are structural problems to Popular Music - it is a little too episodic - but, there are fantastic moments. Here is a description of why singing in English is certainly knapsu:

“a language much too lacking in chewability for hard Finnish jaws, so sloppy that only little girls could get top marks in it - sluggish double Dutch, tremulous and damp, invented by mud-sloshing coastal beings who’ve never needed to struggle, never frozen nor starved. A language for idlers, grass-eaters, couch potatoes, so lacking in resilience that their tongues slop around their mouths like sliced-off foreskins.”

The Sirens of Titan - Kurt Vonnegut

A friend of mine refuses to accept that this is a science fiction novel - if it is well plotted, funny and warm, with no talking robots, then how could it be?

Well, it is, there’s no getting around it. I don’t have much to add - except that it was refreshing to read something based on imagination rather than observation. I went for this as a toe-dip into the world of SF - I assumed there must be some good novels in there, but without knowing where to go I played safe with Vonnegut (I bought Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? at the same time - haven’t read that one yet). And yes, this a good novel, and I’m glad I read it. Where to go from here is another question - I’m open to answers.

Double Indemnity - James M. Cain

Cain is a great writer: great in a way I wouldn’t have noticed a few years ago. He breaks up opponents’ play deep in their own half, plays the simple pass and shoots when he can, usually from inside the box; no step-overs for Cain. With him you get crisply drawn characters, pacey plot and great dialogue; he writes in the service of the story, not to show you how clever he is.

It has been great, this wallow in the crime novel; my Waterstones 3 for 2 lake has now been drained, so this might be the last one for a while. I read this all the way up the road to my house, glancing occasionally for lampposts. Only certain books do that to you. The narrator's voice is engaging, he almost sounds like a hero; and Cain doesn’t blink as he shows him plan and carry out a murder. If I have a criticism it is that written in 1936, Freud’s shadow looms a little large over Double Indemnity, so certain motivations seem a little shaky. But hey, that’s the past for you, they didn’t know nothing back then.

Equal Danger - Leonardo Sciascia

It annoyed me as I read this, how good a book it was to be seen reading, or to say that you have read - regardless of whether you enjoyed it. It has an independent publisher (Granta), it is post-modern, it has an author who is both obscure and revered. Best of all, it’s not even Italian; it’s Sicilian.

But if the above make it a hard book to love, it has one major redeeming feature: it is very short. You don’t have to invest much time in it - lucky, or Sciascia’s casual round up and dismissal of his plot, like a millionaire lighting cigars with $100 notes, would be even more frustrating.

He’s good, you see, Sciascia, and he knows what he’s doing. Unfortunately what he does here is slightly annoying. He has a few other books in translation - I’ll be giving them a try; they’re short too.

Roseanna - Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo

On the back of this is a quote from the Birmingham Post, “they (Sjowall and Wahloo) are the best writers of police procedure in the world"

The best writers of police what now?

Bing! Another genre I knew nothing about.
Bing! Another country! Of course Sweden.
Bing! Another series to get in to!

Resistance was futile: written by two Swedish marxists, a couple in fact, this series follows a morose, terribly Scandinavian police inspector, documenting along the way Swedish social changes of the ‘60s and ‘70s. I’d sort of forgotten about Sweden; when I was a child I wanted to live there - thanks pretty much to the flag and those little red horses. If I needed as good a reason to get interested in the place again this will do just fine.

So, police procedurals* - they’re alright. There’s no whodunit aspect - but that gets tiresome anyway after a while - instead you follow the police as they try and solve a case. If done well, this allows some time for character development; luckily here it is done well, you wouldn’t know this was written by two people, though there is the occasional jarring point of view change.

There are ten of these in the series, and unusually the characters develop throughout - they are not “tales from the precinct” style cases where the chronology is fuzzy and the personalities static. They had been out of print but are sneaking back in. I’m getting in now. I’ll let you know how it goes.

The Grifters - Jim Thompson

Here we are again, courtesy of the Waterstones summer sale, another “Crime Masterwork”. This series has been selected by critics and authors as the best crime novels around, ones which should never be out of print - their spines are ugly, but their covers are nice. I'd thought about Jim Thompson for a while; I’d seen the film so went for the Grifters as a safe way in.

Though he is now a cult figure, when Thompson died none of his books were in print. He wrote quickly, and you can tell, just about: sometimes there is an odd turn of phrase, something you feel he would have changed if he'd gone over and over his manuscript. But this also gives the novel its vibrancy and interest. You notice Thompson’s writing and syntax; his writing is more conspicuous than a Cain or Hammett.

Thankfully the characters are scum-bags - each working an angle and out for themselves. It’s a book about con-men and women, and how bad can that possibly be? It doesn’t quite work, and having seen the film first, the ending was a bit spoilt for me, but con-men, people, con-men!

Mystic River - Denis Lehane

In 1975 a childhood friendship between three boys descends into a fistfight in the street. A car draws up and a man claiming to be a policeman gets out. One of the boys gets into the car, the other two do not. The car drives off; four days later the boy escapes and returns home. The friendship between the boys is over. Twenty five years on and the boys are grown up: one is a reformed criminal; one a detective; the one who went missing is now married and stuck in a succession of dead-end jobs. One night the daughter of the reformed criminal is murdered, and the now grown-up missing boy comes home covered in blood. The detective is assigned the case.

This is a novel about grief, friendship, masculinity, growing older, loss, family, deindustrialisation and what can and cannot be escaped from the past. But it doesn’t shout about it. It is a serious book about people marketed to appeal to the thriller fan. And it is thrilling: I read its 500-odd pages in a few days; if I’d been on holiday it would have been over even sooner. When I was about half way through and anticipating my feelings at the end of the novel, I worked out who I would need to buy this book for: I came up with about six or seven people that would just have to read it.

In the end, it did not quite live up to its enormous promise. This might be true for men of any generation, but fathers are sentimentalised at the expense of sons. Older males are stoic, admirable and possibly alcoholic: they are Men. Younger ones are shiftless, without honour and probably mixed up in drugs. There may too be a problem with the pacing - the built-up emotional punch does not hit quite as hard as I expected; and though the whodunit aspect was never overly important, it is resolved almost casually, and slightly unconvincingly.

But it was never really about who committed the murder, it is about the effects and reverberations of that death upon a community. It is a powerful, wrenching novel, disguised as an airport thriller – I won’t be buying it for you, but do yourself a favour: get it for yourself.

Double Whammy - Carl Hiaasen

You know what? It’s not that hard to write a novel people will enjoy: a well-paced, believable narrative, interesting and distinctive characters with some sexual tension and humour to ease the thing along and you're pretty much there. You need a good reason to discard any of these if you expect anyone to be interested in your story.

Luckily Hiaasen respects his readers enough to make his work enjoyable for them; that was refreshing. Sure, it doesn’t offer much of an illumination on the human condition, but at least it’s funny, which is more than you can say for Nausea. The characters are just dissimilar enough from stock genre-types to bring it to life, and with the swamp man Skink, Hiaasen hits on a memorable original.

It’s not going to change your life, and I suspect you could pretty much pick up any Hiaasen and have a similar experience; but it’s a lot of fun, and surely the best novel exploring corruption in the world of competitive bass-fishing.

The Murders in the Rue Morgue - Edgar Allan Poe

All I knew of Poe was that he had written a poem called the Raven (possibly in an unusual metre?) and that his stories were admired by goths. He was someone I could afford to put off. Then the Waterstone’s summer sale, responsible for so much these last couple of months, pushed me into picking up his crime stories.

According to the blurb, “in just five stories, Edgar Allan Poe laid down most of the conventions of detective fiction.” I have no reason not to believe that; but he also seems to have laid down most of the conventions of bad detective fiction at the same time - ludicrous coincidences, unbelievable motivations, contrived situations, shoddy characterisation...

The first three stories are probably the most famous, and concern the prototype for Sherlock Holmes, Auguste Dupin, narrated by a proto-Watson, on hand to show his amazement at his friend’s genius, and ask the important expository, “but how did you know?” Now this Sherlock Holmes thing: it might be fashionable to give Poe the credit, but those who do forget an important point - Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories are well constructed, charming and suspenseful. Holmes sprinkles his deductions throughout, and we have at least a chance of keeping up with him. Each of these five Poe stories follows one template: first there is a mysterious occurrence; then the mystery is explained in its totality by Dupin or his substitute, using clues that have not been made available to the reader. They are puzzles rather than stories, puzzles you are not given enough information to work out yourself.

Nevertheless, all the stories have their moments, and there’s much fun to be had in the overblown gothic. For a closing taste, here’s the narrator’s description of his early days with Dupin. Who could fail to enjoy it?

At the first dawn of the morning we closed all the massy shutters of our old building; lighted a couple of tapers which, strongly perfumed, threw out only the ghastliest and feeblest of rays. By the aid of these we then busied our souls in dreams- reading, writing, or conversing, until warned by the clock of the advent of the true Darkness. Then we sallied forth into the streets, arm and arm, continuing the topics of the day, or roaming far and wide until a late hour, seeking, amid the wild lights and shadows of the populous city, that infinity of mental excitement which quiet observation can afford.

I Served the King of England - Bohumil Hrabal

I was in Sherborne, thinking about this book, about how I’d been looking at it in Waterstones the week before, weighing it in my palm before deciding to leave it for another day. Ahead was a street market. One of the stalls had a selection of a couple of hundred books. This was one of them; it was fate, I bought it for £2.

This fortuitous discovery, and my wistful romanticizing of Prague and the author (mainly from this photo), may have led to unrealistic expectations. I was really really ready to love this book.

And for the first half, I did. Now, Europe east of Germany acts as this hemisphere’s South America - when novels aren’t magical realist there’s always the feeling that they might go that way. Need I say that the story is against a backdrop of Czech history from the ‘30s through to the communist ‘50s? Do I have to mention that Dittie is a very small man? Comparisons with the Tin Drum are inevitable and obvious - next time someone talks about the Tin Drum say you've read this, and isn't it interesting that European literature responded to the Nazi past through stunted seducers? I don't have anything to add on the issue. I'd leave it hanging - you should too.

The breaking out of war changes the novel. From erotic adventures in brothels we come to marriage with a Nazi. It was refreshing to have a character associating with the Germans, but from here on the novel seems to lose its coherence and become one damn thing after another.

Hrabal was said to write in Hrabalovština, a playful use of Czech and probably untranslatable. He did about enough for me to want to try another of his books: he still has my respect, but for now I’m withholding my love.

Second Harvest - Jean Giono

I went on holiday to recently. I wanted to take a book by a Provencal writer – came up with this one.

Here is Amazon’s synopsis:

In the only three inhabitants remain - the blacksmith, a widow and Panturle, the hunter. Soon Panturle is abandoned and begins to lose his mind. But then a woman arrives and life is restored to the village as Panturle plants wheat to produce a second harvest.

Yep. That’s pretty much the size of it.

There’s nothing at all surprising here – if the description sounds like the kind of thing you’d enjoy, then you’ll enjoy it. Thankfully Giono has kept it short, so it’s all over pretty quickly: if you’re not enjoying it too much it won’t take long; but then, you’re not missing much if you skip it.

So if the destination is obvious, how about the journey? It is written in the pared-down style of a parable. This is a book about humans, and their relationship to the soil, and could have been set in , take your pick. There is nothing particularly Provencal about it; Giono was friends with Pagnol but, in this book at least, shares little of his enthusiasm for local colour. It’s by the numbers, but I wasn’t unmoved – I’ll check him out again.

The Stain on the Snow - Georges Simenon

I swear this summer’s Waterstone’s 3 for 2 sale was the best in years. Included were all crime and science fiction books. I work near the UK's biggest branch, so I went for it. I’m trying to cut down on the number of books I buy, but I’ll usually make an exception for writers I haven’t read before: I left the Elmore Leonard on the shelves and took some chances.

Fuck me this book is good. It’s one of the Crime Masterworks series. Sure, there’s some crime in it, but it’s no more a genre novel than The Outsider or Crime and Punishment. The story concerns the actions of a vile pimp and thief scoring some prosperity in a country under occupation (never named, but presumably this is Belgium under the Nazis). I went into this completely fresh, so I’m not going to give you anything else on this. Suffice to say, it’s extraordinary.

Now, it seems as if Simenon is prolific like a motherfucker. So here’s another author for me to catch up on. It’s the best and worst thing about reading - the volume of books out there. You think you have a rough idea of what’s available, then you look at another country, or genre, or period, and there’re hundreds of great things you’ve never heard of. You’ll never read the tiniest fraction of things you’d enjoy - there are hundreds of potential favourite novels out there for you. Great, isn’t it?