This gets compared to the wondrous Stoner (an undiscovered novel of the 1960’s) by John Williams which I cannot recommend enough. It’s compared because like Williams’ classic this is the story of one man’s unremarkable life, told in an unremarkable way. And whilst this too is a beautiful (and recommended) read, it does not have quite the same depth, or class, of Stoner. Nevertheless it packs a punch like Barry McGuigan, light but lethal.
Unlike Williams’ opus this is a little read with a great deal of droll Germanic humour sprinkled throughout, despite the fact that it tells the story of a life of a largely sub-optimal life underpinned by frustration.
It’s Germanicness is at the heart of its appeal, because it feels so unlike most things I’ve read. And it packs a great deal into an almost tiny offering. Only 149 large-type liberally-spaced pages in and it’s done. Leaving you with a whiff of satisfaction and a little regret.
Its title is entirely descriptive, the whole life in question is that of an uneducated labourer in a German/Austrian lumber region that gradually transforms into a ski resort and walking hotspot. Our hero, Andreas, takes spartan opportunity and turns it into passable satisfaction with great dollops of misfortune (in the form of a bullying stepfather and a delightful wife who expires too early to make him truly happy) along the way.
It’s fundamentally bleak and yet, like Stoner, has an air of uplift in it, and it’s this effortless parable-telling that raises it up from almost mediocre content into a thing of pastoral beauty.
This might be his slightest novel, weighing it at only 205 pages, but it’s his densest.
Another unreliable narrator – an old Japanese painter and teacher – Masuji Ono tells part of his life story, often repetitively (maybe he has dementia) and full of false modesty. He’s actually an arrogant old fuck.
It’s set in an unnamed Japanese city between 1948 and 1950 as the Empire is setting about post WWII rebuilding and the country is on its knees.
Ono-San was a celebrated pre-war artist, seemingly of a propagandist bent (and maybe in the pocket of the Emperor) but his star has faded and it’s causing some trouble in selling off his youngest daughter into arranged matrimony.
The book dwells fastidiously on the customs and mannerisms of a horrifically mannered and often obsequious Japanese cultural set of mores.
For a western reader (even though Ishiguro has long been a naturalised UK citizen), this makes for tough reading. There are many Japanese place names to contend with and his cast of characters is vast for such a small tome. What’s more, given the episodic, and sometimes rambling nature of the prose they pop up sporadically but with important things to say. It’s a laborious follow.
Like anything Ishiguro turns his hand too it’s quite brilliant in the quality of the writing and the slow release of information that just keeps one on track plot-wise, but it has none of the empathy of his other novels and certainly no playfulness at all. So it makes for a n endurance test, albeit a shortish one.
It was the least enjoyable of his books for me. But a weak(ish) Ishiguro beats 9/10 writers into a cocked hat and for that I recommend it. Just don’t make it your Kazuo debut.
I keep hearing good things about Maggie O’Farrell, the Irishwoman living in my native Edinburgh, and so I’d picked both of the above up in a charity shop some time ago, but left them languishing in my ‘to do’ pile. A conversation with my friend Victoria prompted me to start reading, and I’m glad that I did.
Both books share a strong sense of style. O’Farrell densely plots her novels so that there’s quite a long bedding in period in the story to establish exactly what’s going on. In that respect she writes like a crime/thriller novelist. But that effort is rewarded with depth of character and intriguing and clever stories.
In Heatwave we follow a family’s journey to uncover why their elderly father has simply upped and went one morning, right in the middle of the notorious 1976 UK-wide heatwave. O’Farrell captures the sweltering oppression of that one-off summer vividly and the story unfolds in very thin layers as we discover what both bonds and splinters this intense family. It’s a great read, although at times I felt she outstayed her welcome.
In the superior This Must be The Place another disappearance sets the story off, and another family saga. Again much of the action takes place in Ireland. But don’t think that makes her novels formulaic, they are anything but.
This time a stunningly beautiful and famous film actress with great artistic integrity (think Jennifer Lawrence) simply disappears overnight with the speech-impeded son of her and her auteur film-director partner. She flees to remote Ireland where she reestablishes her life before being stumbled upon by an American linguist with a troubling romantic life and a drink and drugs problem.
The attraction is instant but not eternal.
What follows is another heavily interweaving story covering the couples lives (including their past) and that of their own and shared children.
Each character is brilliantly drawn and the book’s multiple time lines gradually fall into place so that we are eventually left wondering if this is a romance with any real chance of making it through.
It’s a lovely story with real depth and quality of writing.
Clearly O’Farrell has an acute eye and ear for family life in all its complications. Both novels deconstruct the complexity of familial rivalry, sibling love (and the lack of) and the hierarchy of decision making in that unit.
It seems to me her writing is maturing with experience and that she continues to increase her personal writing ambition, with her latest, Hamlet, picking up many plaudits and book of the year nods. I look forward to reading that but, for now, she’s made a solid impression on me and I can recommend both books quite strongly, especially This Must Be The Place.
It’s yet another morsel of evidence that Irish writing is on fire just now – many of my favourite recent reads have come from that Isle (including Anna Burns, Colin Walsh and Paul Lynch.)
Graeme Macrae Burnet rose to prominence with his Booker Shortlisted, His Bloody Project – a genuinely original historical crime novel, of sorts, that was transfixing from start to finish. He’s followed it up with this Longlisted Booker contender.
Again you could say it’s a crime novel of a sort in which no real crime takes place, but may have been autosuggested by the psychiatrist who plays one of the novel’s two central characters.
Arthur Collins Braithwaite is a brilliant lothario that stumbles on a career in psychiatry in the 1960’s in Oxford and London. A rule breaker, he actually has no formal qualifications but has some celebrity status and notoriety that keeps him in patients for a while. One of those patients, Victoria, is the sister of our second (and third as it happens) main protagonists – Victoria’s mousy sister, (unnamed throughout the book) and her alter ego Rebecca.
Victoria is the autosuggested victim, having thrown herself to her death from a bridge after a session with Braithwaite. Unnamed sister decides to visit Braithwaite to suss him out but undercover as a patient that she calls Rebecca.
What follows is a quite brilliant study of, I would say, Schizophrenia. So different are unnamed sister and Rebecca in so many ways that we have a clear Jeckyl and Hyde situation, although without the horror.
It’s a fascinating story based around Braithwaite’s case study notes of Rebecca and unnamed sister’s ferocious battle with herself to define her true identity.
In parts hilariously funny, but always with an undertow of sinister mental health issues it makes for a unique and unputdownable read.
Ultimately it became clear why Gabrielle Zevin is a children’s book writer, but it took a while.
It’s an accomplished book that wants to be more than the sum of its parts and can’t quite reach its lofty ambitions. For a start it chooses one of Macbeth’s most famous soliloquies as its title and that’s bold. Macbeth is grieving the death of his wife and wondering what’s the point. It’s all just another day.
That’s kind of the point of this novel. Unrequited love between the two central characters, Sam and Sophie who are gamers turned celebrated game-makers. They both love one another but neither can find it in themselves to declare that love and so tomorrows follow tomorrows as their lives gradually unfold, alone and apart.
It’s nearly a masterpiece, but it falls sadly short by believing its better than it really is and the characters become caricatures of themselves and eventually outstay their welcome so that, in the end, it becomes a bit of a drag to complete. There’s also a bizarre penultimate chapter that is so up itself its laughable.
But, it’s a good read. It’s fun and it’s fresh. It’s just not as good as it wants to be.
This won the Booker Prize a few months ago and in quality terms sits alongside Colson Whitehead’s deadly duo of The Underground Railroad and Nickel Boys that won him the Pulitzer back to back. None of the three of them are what you would call easy reading, but each shares a love of humanity that shines through human anguish and strife like glorious beacons. In Lynch’s book, set in Ireland, a totalitarian government has rapidly insinuated the culture of the nation, turning its citizens into either patriots or rebels. Eilish, our central protagonist is a middle class mother of four married to the leader of the Irish teacher’s Union. The book opens with the Gardai at her door seeking the whereabouts of her spouse. Only a few pages later he is incarcerated, we know not where for, presumably, crimes against the state. And so begins a nightmare that threatens the whole substance and meaning of her life. Eilish, certainly not a patriot, finds herself shunned by her community. Slowly but surely the book ramps up Ireland’s descent into mayhem and the implications it has on all of Eilish’s family, including her newborn Ben who reaches toddler stage by the time of its heartbreaking denouement. The story is really about familial love in the midst of war torn chaos. It is directly inspired by the Syrian conflict that was the catalyst for the English Channel’s boat crossings but this is only one conflict in a constant global shifting sands of outrageous political, and religious, fervour. How a state as solid and secure as Ireland can implode quite is rapidly as it does is not really the point, but it’s shocking. The point is that poisonous aspects of nationhood and tribalism can spring up anywhere, any time. There are echos of the Wehrmacht that fully kicked off on Kristallnacht; it’s subtly portrayed in a horrifying passage half way through where it’s car windscreens, rather than Jewish shop windows, that take a battering. But the analogy is clear. Lynch’s prose is beautifully poetic and this conflict’s place in time is regularly referenced when he spells out that although we are reading a story set in Eilish’s present, it is rooted in both the past and will well-up again in the future, such is the certainty of the human condition. Lynch uses no para-breaks (see what I am doing here) nor quotation marks which renders the story breathless, echoing the turmoil and lack of headspace Eilish finds herself in, unable to make clear decisions because events constantly pile on top of each other. What’s more, her father is suffering from Alzheimer’s and is crumbling. Like many older people he is doggedly independent and in denial of his condition. And living on the other side of Dublin, across various frontlines, visiting him is a treacherous, verging on suicidal, undertaking. There is absolutely no let off in the accelerating heartbreak and injury that befalls Eilish and her brood as she seeks safety in some form or other. But ultimately that safety comes at a great price. It’s heart wrenching redolent of The Road but with less time for contemplation or consideration. It deserves to join the highest echelon of Irish novels, indeed any novels. I was broken-hearted that it had to end.
Kala is the latest in a string of Celtic (Irish and Scottish) books that I have greatly enjoyed. In his acknowledgements Walsh puts this run of Irish writing successes down to the Arts Council funding he received and the impact of their funding on the Irish Writers Centre. The SNP or future coalitions in Scotland would do well to imitate this investment in the arts and culture.
This terrific thriller opens with ‘the gang’ 15 and foolish sitting on their bikes at the top of a steep hill goading each other on to ride down the hill towards a narrow gap in the wall that takes them across the main road between onrushing cars to the field on the other side. This death defying stunt is a metaphor for the rest of their lives a deep dark plunge into an abyss of fear and death.
The gang: Kala, Aoife, Helen, Aidan, Joe and Mush live in rural Ireland in a village called Kinlough. It’s not the sort of place you’d expect murders and disappearances, but this is exactly what transpires when days after the hill-cycle Kala disappears, never to return.
Brought back together some 15 or so years later Joe has become a pop superstar, Helen a Canadian Freelance journalist but the rest of the gang have stayed at home, and although still great friends, grudge the glamorous lives of these two protagonists.
They’re back for a wedding that never happens because Kala’s murder is confirmed on the day of Helen’s arrival, when her bones turn up on a local building site.
The gang, led by Helen, attempt to understand what has happened and in the process discover a nightmarish underworld of low life scum. Something they were completely unaware of until now.
Told as point of view by Joe, Helen and Mush in alternating short chapters the story freely flows between now and their childhoods as the truth slowly reveals itself through a pretty hefty cast of 21 characters, mostly related to each other in some form.
In many ways it’s a procedural story, but the quality of writing (from award winning short story teller, Colin Walsh, in this his first novel) is considerably above average with outstanding descriptive prose that never misses a beat. He also nicely mixes the tenses with Mush and Helen speaking in first person and Joe in third person omniscient – which makes you think maybe he has stuff to hide.
It’s a great character study and a rip roaring yarn, so it’s difficult to imagine anyone who wouldn’t enjoy this. So do yourself a favour. Go Irish this year. And then go see the movie, that it surely must evolve into.
And if you have room for more of an Irish bent I highly recommend (the much more complex but truly brilliant) Milkman by Anna Burns that recently won the Booker).
I didn’t know of Sylvia Patterson, she was never really a big name music writer like Barbara Ellen or Miranda Sawyer but, as it turns out, she had quite the CV behind her.
Raised in Perth by an alcoholic mum and adoring dad her life story (Published in 2016 but evading me until now) is diaphanously explored through this wonderful book’s pages.
She’s a bit of a sorry soul in most respects; addicted to weed, a very heavy drinker and unable (mostly) to forge a real relationship, her housing situation in London is sub-optimal to say the least and she barely had two pennies to rub together – life as a music journalist, especially a freelancer, may be glamorous but it sure isn’t financially rewarding.
The book sort of evolves as it emerges into the light, starting out at the lite end of glamour in Dundee on Etcetra before graduating to Smash Hits (Ver Hits) in London then NME before Glamour magazine (fits your lifestyle and your handbag) as music editor, before going freelance.
We get real insights into all of these magazines as Patterson charts the gradual and terminal decline of the music press. My beloved NME being the most remarkable implosion.
But the meat of this extraordinary, and yes it is extraordinary, story is the interviews which she retells in forensic detail. She’s clearly kept the tapes which allows her to transcribe them in all of their gory glory.
Madonna, Prince, Spike Milligan, Blur (wankers especially Damon), Coldplay, Kylie (12 times), Spike Milligan, Eminem (utter cunt), Cypress Hill, Marc Almond (wanker), New Order, Oasis, Pulp, The Manics (bevvie merchants extraordinaire), Led Zeppelin, The Beckhams, Beyonce (as Destiny’s Child), Britney Spears, Amy Winehouse, Adele…The list is endless and all killa no filla. Most have at least a chapter each dedicated to them, all are analysed as artists and human beings. Some do not fare well.
The writing is brilliant, unique in style, relaxed, a bit gossipy but never show offy. This feels like a true expose of the music industry, a bit Kenneth Anger I suppose.
Patterson herself comes across as brave, bold, maverick, non-conformist but vulnerable and scatterbrained, so in no way is this a “look at me” self aggrandisement, but a slightly sad, slightly regretful summation of a career that feels terribly overlooked. If her journalism was as good as her book-writing she should have been the most famous music journo in the biz. Maybe spending too long at Smash Hits, which people like me sneered at, was part of her problem – although writing stars emerged from that stable. Perhaps her lack of ambition stimied her. I don’t know, but what I do know is I’d love to meet her and admire her tremendously.
David Greig has written some of my favourite plays. I will never forget his Macbeth addendum, Dunsinane. And The Strange Undoing of Prudentia Hart is a play like no other you have ever seen. Add to that The Suppliant Women (after Aeschylus) Solaris and Yellow Moon and you have a writer of significant importance. (And that’s just the tip of the iceberg).
I bumped into him on Monday lunchtime on Lothian Road, and after chittery chattery he asked me if I was still writing this largely undiscovered colossus of writing magnificence. “Yes”, I humbly replied.
“Well, you’ll regret meeting me today” he proclaimed as he fumbled in his rucksack to fish out a copy of Columba’s Bones and thrust it into my hands. With that he disappeared into the fog.
It wasn’t foggy.
Gulping with fear I strode to Sainsbury’s for my Red Pepper and Lentil Soup, a bargain at £1.50 in these days of crippling extortion. Fear, because the thought of ploughing through a religious tale set in Iona in 825 was my idea of hell – I’d read the publicity and had abandoned the idea of purchasing this novel.
Fast forward 5.5 hours, to whence I sit on the #43 Lothian County Bus to South Queensferry. People are looking at me like I’m a leper as I guffaw at page three of this magnificent jewel.
It’s only 180 pages, it’s A5 in size, pocketable, and has big type for the hard of reading, so if it was going to be a chore it was going to be a manageable chore.
It’s not a chore.
Yes, it’s set on Iona. Yes, it’s 825AD (or whatever they call it now). Yes, it stars a monk, a viking and a widow. No, it’s not a turgid bag of fleapiss.
What David Greig does, and this cues me up to blow voluminous smoke up his beardy arse, is conjure up (based on an existing story I think) a truly great thing. Firstly, it’s hysterically funny (think Monty Python meets Mary Beard, pissed). Secondly, it’s properly engaging. In so few words Greig creates three characters that are at once unique and at the same time familiar. Thirdly it’s unputdownable.
It’s a story about revenge, love (of God, man and woman) and values. But mostly it’s just a right rollicking read. I’ll say no more because it’s easy to spoil it.
By Wednesday teatime, as I rolled off the #43, it was done. I will be extolling its virtues to all and sundry for many moons.
In which Curtis writes a truly romantic novel that is laugh out loud funny. but it’s not a romantic comedy. Oh no. that would be vulgar.
Instead she writes a heartwarming love story about a mousy looking mid-thirties TV sketch show writer for Saturday Night Live who finds herself in a relationship with the hottest pop singer in the United States whilst writing a sketch for SNL about an unattractive man pulling a hot woman. (This is a common occurrence, usually linked to money. She appropriates it and calls it The Danny Horst Rule , which states that men from SNL can date way out of their league, but the same isn’t true for the women working on the show.)
Except, of course, they can, and she does.
Kinda meta.
Also it’s a favourite of writers to write about writing/writers but it’s the first time she’s done it and I think will land her her first movie. Just don’t call it a romantic comedy.
So that’s the premise. Hot musician pulls dowdy spinster.
It’s told in three acts. The first is a wonderful exposition of what goes on behind the scenes in a week at SNL (OK it’s called The Night Owls) and involves a guest host, Noah Brewster, of multi million selling Making Love in July fame who hosts the show and briefly falls for one of its best writers, Sally Milz.
Then Covid hits and their relationship is renewed via email in Act 2 before fully consummating itself IRL in Act 3.
The whole book wrestles with The Danny Horst Rule and explores the unlikeliness of this megastar falling for this ordinary woman. Except she’s not ordinary, she’s whip smart, experienced and very, very funny.
The whole basis of what grounds relationships, spoiler, it’s not looks, is explored over 300 page turning leaves.
I loved it. My seventh and now complete back catalogue of Sittenfeld’s (although the first signed one I have). It’s not her best, although it’s not far off, but it could be her most succesful when the movie goes stratospheric.
In which Curtis follows up her dream debut, Prep with a bid of a dud. It follows the relatively uninteresting fantasy, and then real, love life of Hannah, starting when she’s fourteen and never been kissed.
It’s like Curtis took a breather after Prep which, as fairly obvious auto-fiction, was a book bursting to get out of her. But this, the difficult second novel, was something to keep her publisher happy. It’s unoriginal, uninspiring and fairly insipid. So bad is it, in fact, that I’m even struggling to remember the plot a month after reading it.
The boys and men are all cads of course and the only good one gets away. All a bit fucking Mills and Boon. (Certainly not Penguin standards although my copy was Picador published).
One to resist. I mean, the title kind of sends out big red distress flares, doesn’t it.
Go instead for her fabulous later canon which has established her at the top of living American women writers.
I’ll bore for Scotland about Curtis Sittrenfeld, just not this one.
In the pantheon of great Scottish vernacular writers Graeme Armstrong has joined the podium. He stands alongside James Kelman, Irvine Welsh, Ely Percy and Anne Donovan.
Maybe he is the gold medalist, but let’s see what novel #2 brings.
My only criticism of this amazing book is it could have been edited a little more tightly.
That critique aside, in the meantime we have a belter in The Young Team which is an auto-fictional story of life in brutal, and I mean really brutal, gang culture in Airdrie and the surrounds (Coatbridge, Wishaw, Motherwell, Hamilton).
Whatever, they’re awe shite.
The Young team tells of Azzie’s life as a wannabe gang leader through the ranks, to…well, you’ll have to read it
The grit in this story is that Azzie has a brain. Trouble is he uses it infrequently as his gang-inspired rage too often rules his heart over his head.
At times you grit your teeth so hard you can barely breathe as this horrific story unfolds. It’s not quite Glasgow’s Jimmy Boyle-esque razor gangs, but it’s not far short.
Life in North Lanarkshire’s schemes is awful, although interestingly Armstrong rarely suggests that, it’s just life.
Aggro, violence, wine (Buckfast) drugs and motherly love are the soothing embraces that make this land home. No matter what.
The drugs (or is it the violence – there’s plenty of that) centre the book. Azzie is close to being a junkie, but he’s also close to being a murderer (OK, manslaughterer).
He’s smart, but he’s also mental.
I wouldn’t want to meet him (although I would love to meet Graeme Armstrong). We read of his life from wannabe gang master to sensible 22 year old retiree. But the needle still skips.
It’s, to be honest, terrifying. But it’s written with the mind of a philosopher.
Azzie can escape, unlike most.
This makes it sound like a cliche but it’s anything but. Ignore comparisons to Trainspotting. That’s lazy and predictable. This is a far more serious, and more important, book.
“It’s shite being Scottish”, yes it is – in this den of iniquity.
The stories of rave culture add a bit of levity (but even these are horrifying in places). I wasn’t one of them (thankfully reading this) but levity is not a tonal reference of this book.
Many say it is funny like Irvine Welsh. (It isn’t). OK, it has funny moments. But it isn’t a comedy book by any stretch of the imagination. It’s much more Alan Warner than Irving Welsh in this respect.
So, don’t buy this for a laugh.
Buy it to , I dunno, I’m so middle class that I don’t want to say/admit it – feel better about your life?
Actually, naw, just revel in Graeme Armstrong’s writing skills.
It’s a belter. And it’s coming to a TV near you soon so get it read first.
His latter career has actually escalated him to a higher status than Vic Reeves (Gone Fishing and Atletico Mince), but oddly the latter stage of the aforementioned is the most uninteresting part of this, in places, great book.
The first act, his childhood and early career is by far the most successful section of the book as he recounts his slow clamber out of painful shyness that cripples his ambitions. Once succesful, and telling the story we know, he tries too hard to write his way though it rather than simply storytelling. It exposes his weaknesses as a writer pretty badly.
Early on, his similes are laugh out loud funny, but they dry up. The real strength is his descriptions of laddishness and naivety that populate his early years.
The shyness he experiences feels a little laid on too thickly for me, but when he concludes the book he comes back to it and urges readers to overcome their own feelings of inadequacy, so maybe it is for real.
Either way it lurches from laugh out loud funny (the shoe waterfall) to banal.
I doubt I could cope with his novel which I fear would suffer from trying to be funny rather than naturally being so.
This is a journalistic review of The Johnson years as Prime Minister. The man I should just laugh at and write off as a fool and egotist beyond compare, but whom I actually despise with all my being.
In its lengthy account of a short period of power he is spared little in the way of criticism but not lampooned. Yet, the authors who have previous in this space are clearly holding back, although we are under no illusion that this man was entirely unfit for this, or any, office of state and that not only had he no moral compass but he actually had no compass at all.
So clueless was he in the job that the real Prime Ministers of this sad, pathetic ruin of a country (largely his fault) was not him but Dominic Cummings and his smart but desperately unlikeable wife, Carrie Simmonds.
The Cabinet had virtually no say in ANYTHING. But, you know, look at who that bunch of wankers were.
Johnson’s tenure is simply a series of flip flopping popularity policies, so desperate was he to recreate his popularity as Mayor of London where he had few “Big decisions” to make and the opportunity to make grandiose investments in infrastructure that made him look the great visionary he so strived to be.
He fucked up Brexit, then fucked up Covid, aided and abetted by so many muppets that he almost gets excused for some of the paucity of vision and insight. But the behaviour of number 10 during this period of national abstention was part of what brought him down, and of course, the lies.
It should be a big old schadenfreude read but the truth is it’s all a bit disappointing. It’s very badly written, and I mean awfully so. Many paragraphs are so badly constructed that you have to read them two or three times to get the point. (It was a rush job I think.)
And there’s a lot of f***ing redacting of swearing which drove me nuts.
So Daily Mail.
So, the experience of reading what should be a good old character assassination (and in a veiled way it is) is diluted by its lack of commitment and an attempt at fairness (constantly Johnson is complimented on his dealings with the Ukraine – he hardly won any medals of honour in his ill fated term at the Foreign Office though, did he.)
It’s not great. And wasn’t worth the time out of my life.
It could have been a lot shorter.
Let me have a go.
Chapter One
Boris Johnson got elected. He was a total cunt. He got binned by his inept cronies.
Andrew Greig is a poet, novelist, philosopher and climber. (He might even consider himself a golfer.)
After a near death experience he resumes the childhood sport that protected him from his abject misery at Dollar Academy.
Golf.
He’s clearly a decent golfer, but rusty. In this philosophical musing on his life and the merits of golf, whether competitive or solo, he visits 18 golf courses (nearly all in Scotland) from the bizarre and almost never played in the likes of Gigha, North Ronaldsay and Iona, via the better known but still relatively obscure Shiskine on Arran (personally my favourite golf course), to better know and championship courses like North Berwick, Nairn, Forres and Royal Dornach.
It’s not a sporting handbook and it’s not a philosophy on life. I mean it is a bit of both. But, taken in totality, it’s actually an inspiring self help manual on how to value life, love and, yes, sport so that golf can be something to inspire and fulfil your life rather than, like I do, break clubs in frustration.
I may learn from it. I hope so.
It’s an interesting read for anyone who harbours any sort of interest in this noble game.
The centrepiece of this extraordinary collection of short stories is called, simply, Bowls. It’s on an epic scale (for McQueer), stretching to nearly 40 pages and telling a class-driven story of Big Angie “a horrible overgrown ned” (middle aged and dressed in trackies and Rangers tops). Big Angie is a class bowler and an even classer Bingo player. The trouble is she hates everyone and everyone hates her. That is, until she strikes up an unlikely companionship with the wife of her male nemesis at the bowling club. This relationship having been established, McQueer can take this story wherever he likes, as he usually does.
Two belter lines that sum McQueer up drop in this tale and had me both laughing out loud on the bus but also quoting them in the office.
“Aw fuckin cheer up. We’re gawn tae Blackpool, no Auschwitz.”
“Look pal, if ah wanted tae hear an arsehole talk” looking the boy up an down “Ah wid’ve farted.”
His cast of characters in the book include ne’erdowells, rogues, daft laddies and talking budgies.
He brings a distinct lack of logic to his tales and, yet, they all make sense.
Some of them are even quasi science fiction.
I’m reminded often of James Robertson’s recurring Jack character in 365 Stories, a parody of daft Jack in Jack and the beanstalk. Many of McQueer’s characters are just as daft, but that lends them an air of charm.
There’s a story about people’s knees bending backwards, not forwards, and the hilarious havoc that ensues.
There’s a strange shark-like monster called Ethan (that talks – of course it talks) and befriends a rigger.
And it’s all written in hilarious Glasgow dialect – there’s nothing new about that having been put to great effect recently by Ely Percy in Duck Feet, and James Kelman has made a career out of it. But neither express themselves anywhere near as joyously funnily as this, and neither even approach the curse threshold, or maybe even 10% of it, that McQueer does. I love the way he portmanteaus anycunt on a regular basis to capture the genuine street rhetoric of Glasgow.
All in folks, this six year old collection from 404 Ink (Bravo) is a belter.
You’ll have seen its gaudy cover everywhere because its ubiquitous.
So, I’m not sure I can add much to the clamour about this universally loved phenomenon.
It feels like it’s written by a woman for women (a copywriter as it happens).
But I’m a gadgey, so here’s my take.
Although it screams women’s lib in CAPITAL LETTERS, as a man, I really liked it.
I was reading it on the back of my favourite American female writer’s Privileged (Curtis Sittenfeld) – also a take on girl power but from the 18th century transposed to the 21st.
It turns out to be a clever political read that challenges male dominance (including acceptable rape) and puts sand in the oyster.
That sand being Elizabeth Zott.
She’s a character.
She’s amazing.
She’s the book.
Everything about this novel is about Elizabeth Zott. Crazy name. Crazy girl.
It becomes a thriller having started out as a character study but really, it’s just a about humanity, and love.
I could tell you about the grief, bullying, corruption and all that.
But all that matters is you love this beautiful, strident, complex woman and her battle with convention, with scientific prejudice (essentially women didn’t do science in the 1950’s) and with the television industry that, even then, objectified women – no-one though was going to objectify Elizabeth Zott, unmarried mother, scientist and hater of domesticity.
Gramus does a great job of constructing a spider’s web of a plot that all comes together beautifully in the end and creates a character that we all fall in love with as her difficult battle with integrity unfolds in 400 delicious pages.
I have Romantic Comedy, Sittenfeld’s latest, teed up to go – but first I read this.
Now anyone who follows me knows just how highly I rate Curtis Sittenfeld.
Her book before last Rodham (my discovery book of hers) was book of the year for me, that year.
American Wife is a masterpiece and I don’t understand why it’s not better known.
Sisterland is a good read but I’d say her only average book, but even average isn’t average in the hands of Curtis.
Prep, her debut, is a cracking read.
So what of Eligible?
Like Bridget Jones, I suppose, it’s a modern retelling of Pride and Prejudice.
So far so what?
She sets it in Cincinnati among the super rich but, of course, our heroine Liz is not super-rich. She’s a late thirties, and pretty decent magazine writer with a bit of fame behind her. She suffers a hideous but hilarious racist, classist, pretty much everything-ist hag of a mother, a disenfranchised and long suffering, but realistic, ailing father, one great, pregnant sister and three brat sisters.
The title comes from the name of a Love Island type of show in which sister Jane (the other nice pregnant one) has fallen, mutually, in love with the star. Until he finds out she’s pregnant, but not to him.
Liz, meanwhile, is in love, not in love, in love, not in love with a super rich surgeon called Darcy Fitzwilliam (bit of a clue there to the source material) – the Eligible star’s bestie.
What makes the book so great is the fact you know she is honouring, but piss-taking, the Austen classic but in such an uproariously funny way that I constantly caused my fellow bus passengers to turn and look as I bellowed form the back seat of the number 43.
It’s absolutely fucking hilarious. Now, Sittenfeld does a good line in humour.
The whole premise of Rodham is built on that, but this is another league. It’s spit your wallies out funny. It’s choke on your own phlegm funny.
I need say no more other than just read this MF, and don’t worry about the Bridget Jones comparison.
Oh dear. There was so much to desire from this book. A history of my informative years in which two Scottish Labels (Fast and Postcard) were making Scotland the centre of the musical universe, right here in my own back yard. It was an amazing time.
Add to that the fact that the two central characters, the svengalis of the scene, were Bob Last and Alan Horne and that I know Bob well (indeed he is chair of the Leith Theatre on whose board I serve) and you have a recipe for greatness.
To be fair no stone is unturned in the research and there are thousands of interview snippets from the likes of Edwyn Collins of Orange Juice, Roddy Frame of Aztec Camera, Davy Henderson from Fire Engines, Phil Oakey et al from the Human League – alongside contributions from Altered Images, Josef K, Scars, Rezillos, Gang of Four, Joy Division, The Bluebells, Associates, and many more including Geoff Travis of Rough Trade.
Between these myriad interviews is a good, strong chronological narration of the times but, the trouble is, the interviews themselves are often flabby and repetitive with sometimes several renderings of the same topic. It can get really tedious.
Putting that to one side, and it’s a big put-aside, the story is great with Last coming out of it all as a hero and Horne a bit of a dork.
Consequently it can only possibly be of interest for a thin sliver of the boomer post-punk generation and even then it’s a marathon, not a sprint. If it comes out in paperback I’d recommend a tortuous visit to the editor’s room.
But, for those interested in the scene it is a must read. I just wish it had been leaner.
Having brushed the tears from my eyes as I put this truly magnificent novel to bed I now have the task of explaining to you why it is so irridescantly beautiful, without gushing. But I’ve blown it already.
A made up story about craniopagus twin sister (that’s conjoined twins joined at the head) has the potential to be exploitative (some might even go as far as to say sick).
This is anything but.
Rose the bigger, stronger of the two essentially carries the smaller, clubfooted, Ruby. They’ve never seen each others’ faces joined, as they are, looking away from one another. They are close, as you would expect, but they fall out, they get jealous, they go through puberty in very different ways, they have very different metabolisms.
Ruby gets terribly car sick and this narrows their horizons, but deep down these two are tremendous explorers.
The midwife, Lovey, that delivered them to a 17 year old girl, unmarried and entirely incapable of raising them, adopts them with her crazy Slovakian immigrant husband Stash, and so life begins on a Canadian farm.
The story takes us to Slovakia and the Northern USA but mainly plays out in in rural Canada, in a small town community where the girls are beloved by the community. It takes the form of an episodic retelling of their lives with all the joy and tragedy that they experience in their 30 years, which makes them the oldest surviving craniopagus twins in the world.
Along the way the full arpeggio of emotional experiences any ‘normal’ pair of twins might encounter is rendered in a mix of humour and pathos, but it’s never pathetic.
The class in Lansens’ writing is of the unfussy variety. She’s a natural storyteller and avoids over sentimentalising this genuinely extraordinary story.
My love for Ruby and Rose deepened with every page. I suspect yours will too.
I often say things are masterpieces, that’s because I choose well. This is Lori Lansens’ masterpiece, because I very much doubt she can trump it.
This is not of general interest I would have to say.
It’s long, rambling, full of obscure B movie, C Movie and D movie references.
It’s about exploitation, blaxploitation and trivia that won’t make you look any cooler in your local bar if you could even remember it.
It’s a reference book with little or no real reason for existing.
A very, very large % of the population – about 99.83 I’d say – would consider this utterly self indulgent wank.
And they’d be right.
Even 88.9% of Tarantino fans will hate this.
100% of the moral majority would bristle at it.
It’s full of long lists of actors, directors and critics I just don’t give a damn about.
But.
I’m glad I read it.
When he’s not listicalling he can be thrilling with his put downs.
Most of the films he chooses to “review” (or speculate upon) he derides, yet they are his favourite films. ( Taxi Driver, Paradise Alley, The Funhouse, Bullit, The Getaway).
He has a fucking OBSESSION about The Searchers and its influence on nearly every movie in this textbook.
It’s a thing of great paradoxes. The films he loves he slates quite often.
What’s even more amazing about it is that my son bought it for me. Tom is emerging from a 28 year cocoon of non-reading to alight upon shit like this.
He liked it. Sort of. I liked it. Sort of.
You know what? It’s a male-bonding, sonofabitch, kinda wanky motherfuckery that you might just like.
Three characters slug it out for superiority in the dark storytelling stakes.
A 12 year girl, Nelly, with an unusual line in Queen’s English.
Her 15 year old worldly wise genius sister, Marnie, who cannot hope to ever conform and is shagging a drug dealing ice cream van man in the back of his vehicle.
And an outed, ageing, gay (‘paedo’) recovering from the death of his long time lover.
The girls’ parents are both dead and rotting in the garden, where they buried them on Christmas Eve. They’re sort of living with the ‘paedo’ who has taken them into his care and turns out to be a lovely bloke.
The social services, an alcoholic, psychotic grandfather and a ripped-off drug dealer who the girls’ dad has £70k of cash from, are all closing in on them.
And it’s all set in a poor part of Glasgow against the backdrop of a series of amusing secondary characters; boyfriends, school friends, dogs and teachers.
It’s a black and hilarious comic conceit, spitting its venom in tiny short chapters each helmed by the girls and the old man, Lennie, in equal turns.
I laughed out loud a lot at this filmic tale, and although it has many flaws its originality and devil may care attitude to convention make me recommend it.
This was my fourth Curtis Sittenfeld novel and whilst it ranks fourth in her extraordinary canon of work that in no means consigns it to mediocrity. Far from it.
It’s a 500+ page story about twin sisters from St Louis who lead different paths in their lives (different attitudes, different body types, different adoption of their inherited skill).
The larger and more free spirited of the two. Vi, has embraced her psychic abilities while the more repressed (annoyingly repressed and uptight) sibling, Daisy/Kate, is attempting to bury it in her past and her subconscious as she rears her perfect children (actually one’s a fucking brat) and coddles her perfect husband, being psychic does not feature favourably in that scenario.
All hell breaks loose though when between them, after a small earthquake, they predict a potentially armageddon-like follow up, on October 16th precisely that could lay ruin, to St Louis.
This prediction has consequences.
Vi embraces the situation with gusto and becomes a minor media star (she’d definitely make I’m a Celebrity) and so a period of anticipation populates the rest of the book as the two sisters and their extended friend and family group deal with the consequences, the event itself and the aftermath.
Like all Sittenfeld novels it has beautifully readable prose, considerable humour but an underling tension that keeps the book meaningful.
Not her best, as I say, but her least best is better than most writers’ best best.
Want the real Curtis, on fire? Rodham and American Wife are your go to’s. Prep is bloody great too.
Kazuo Ishiguro is famous for his ‘unreliable narrators’, central protagonists that tell their tales in such a way that you can’t be sure that what the story they are relating is true or manipulated to protect their side of it (most famously in the Remains of The Day, and a Pale View of Hills). Thus his seemingly simplistic narratives are riddled with undercurrent, red herrings and blind alleys, although none of them are crime stories.
In this he sets up perhaps his most unreliable narrator of all, because the narrator isn’t even human, she’s an Artificial Friend (AF), or, technically, a robot. She has been created through robotics, for sure, and powered by AI to act as a companion for rich kids of the future who live lonely existences in what is a privileged but fairly nihilistic lifestyle.
You’d think that, as a robot, she wouldn’t have emotions, but she does, and these develop as the novel does (that’s AI for ya!). The keenest of all, the hardest to describe and the least reliable of them all, is love. Not romantic love, but familial and caring love. The love of a devoted nurse, or ‘Agape’ (the love of God for Man and Man for God).
In the beginning Klara is for sale in an AF shop and we learn that she is acutely observant, the best AF The Manager of the shop has ever had in fact, despite the fact that she’s a lowly AF2. The far more advanced AF3’s are bossing the sales charts and she’s in danger of being remaindered – something this novel never will be.
Despite her lower spec something about Klara resonates with Josie, a silly teenager, who has her eye on her and the first part of the book is a cat and mouse relationship that results in Klara eventually being sold to The Mother of Josie. All characters are capitalised by Klara and referred to in the third person throughout. The same applies to The Sun.
Part two (of six) sees the unfolding of a love story between the increasingly poorly Klara, her platonic boyfriend Rick, who has lived next door since childhood, The Mother and Klara.
Gradually the significance of The Sun unfolds and its role in the story. In the simplest of terms Klara is solar powered so needs The Sun for energy but in the book The Sun is also God and Klara believes The Sun has the power to make Klara well again. How she became unwell is not revealed for some time but is an important part of the story as it is a consequence (and a risk) of creating her elevated position in the novel’s society.
It’s futuristic, but not terribly so. This is part of Ishiguro’s skill in that he creates a science fiction setting (rather like in Never Let Me Go) without going all flying cars on us. It’s no Blade Runner. Rather, Ishiguro uses science fiction merely as a means of lifting his astounding character studies into a heightened sense of reality, so that he can play with language, allegory and emotion (or a form of it) that would be impossible in a conventional setting.
The richness of Klara’s characterisation is impossible to overstate. Despite her fairly rudimentary language and her unsophisticated emotional range he succeeds in creating a protagonist that the reader falls in loves with and feels every bump of her personal road as she tries to navigate life in a heartless, selfish, frankly dystopian society. A society where, a subtle subplot suggests, fascism is waiting to spring into life, that would probably manifest itself in some form of Krystalnacht that lies two or three hundred pages into an extended version of the book.
This almost reads like a Young Adult novel, it’s incredibly pacy if you want it to be, but I found myself going back and forth making certain that I’d grasped the significance of many of the scenes and themes in the book: love, hate (in the form of fascism and societal exclusion), a dying planet, religion and the role of God in a secular society.
It’s bursting with ideas, with energy, with pathos and for me stands as Ishiguro’s greatest achievement yet in a canon of work that few can match (that’s why he’s a Nobel Laureate).
Your children could read and enjoy this, you could simply take it at face value and enjoy this, or you could take a little more time and really love it.
Love, after all, is what we are all surviving and striving for.
One last point. I cannot wait for this to be interpreted in movie form.
This is the second Argentinian book I have read recently and it seems the country has a rich seam of dark writing talent.
Enriquez’s book is a collection of short stories that stem from the macabre, but are tempered in her writing, such that it is suggestive rather than gratuitous in its pot pourri of horrors.
Ghosts, witches and disappearances are the staple diet for Enriquez with the disappearances, I assume, as a metaphor for the Junta that dictated Argentina for so long. Children and vulnerable adults often feature.
She has a languid style, even though the stories are short and she has a skill in capturing conversation and description that feels naturalistic (despite the fact that the book is a translation).
I very much enjoyed this slight but powerful collection and I suggest you do too.
I must be a feminist because this new novel is described as a seductive feminist thriller, because it places significant, albeit dubious, power into the hands of its largely female cast (and I say cast because it has movie rights written all over it) as they exact retribution on bad men, very bad men.
It’s also described as The Secret History-esque, which is actually why I bought it
It’s not.
All that said, it’s a gripping page turner set in Edinburgh and France and features a clique of super rich students who invite the rather less wealthy main protagonist, Clare, into their midst to help them in their untoward aspirations.
Clare has a dark secret that the author, Heather Darwent, in her accomplished debut, successfully hides for a large part of the novel.
What Darwent skilfully executes is a gruesome story that isn’t actually that gruesome, but features a strong storyline and an ever interesting bunch of protagonists that interact with each other in increasingly unpredictable ways. It is skilfully plotted, very fast paced, genuinely intriguing and a classic page turner. I finished it in three days which must be some sort of record for me in recent times.
Highly recommended, although hardly life changing and no, it’s not as good as The Secret History.
Little is.
Also, a very good cover, but don’t judge it on that.
Well that was a year wasn’t it. A controversial but great World Cup, the Tories entering the Death Spiral and a meltdown summer.
But as regular readers will know this end of year post is all about culture and what I most enjoyed. It’s not “the Best” because that’s impossible to define but it’s what gave me most pleasure.
But before that: family.
Jeana became the most popular knitter in the universe and brought grins to many faces, especially this Christmas. We had a great trip to Italy in September although the first week in Sicily (Palermo especially) was marred by the tremendously stifling heat. Things got a lot more bearable in Puglia, although the town (Trani) was very quiet.
Tom returned from Canada and sat at our Christmas dinner table, not once but twice, The First in Perthshire with his delightful (and highly sarcastic) Canadian girlfriend, Natasha. She really is a great match. The second was at home with family (his first in about 11 years).
In between times he wrote our car off. Oh well. On the plus side I got a fab Christmas gift from him (as Keir called it, The guilt gift). It’s great to have him back.
Ria is doing great in year three of her dentistry degree but SHUT THE FRONT DOOR, she and Keir got engaged and will marry sometime in 2043. We are all so delighted about that. Keir is a son to us, and even more sarcastic than Natasha.
Amy is prospering in London doing amazing nutrition and fitness work and her relationship with Kieran is blossoming. They now live together and we’ve been delighted to spend much more time with him. He is perhaps not quite as vocal as Natasha and Keir but can hold his own, especially when playing Catan!
I had an enjoyable year at work where Whitespace became Dentsu Creative and I looked after a bunch of international clients (including Generali, Amex and Macquarie Bank’s UK spin off).
Turning to culture…
Music
It was a great year for music. Dominated by Inflo and Little Simz. His band, SAULT, released no fewer than 6 albums although only one is now available. You snooze, you lose.
I was beside myself when Little Simz landed the Mercury.
Notable artists for me were led by the Glastonbury experience (my fourth) with Alan where Little Simz and Self Esteem (who was astounding). ruled the roost. Also Confidence Man and Amyl and The Sniffers put on great gigs.
But Warmduscher and PVA were also great at Hidden Door Festival.
Also in music I can’t overlook my Theatre experience of the year which was Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club with Jeana. Truly great theatre.
Another great theatrical music experience was Manic Street Creature at The Roundhouse during the Fringe starring the excellent Munah. Spine tingling drama.
Theatre
What a year for theatre. 51 shows at the Fringe.
Topped by The Silent treatment, Manic Street Creature, Mustard, Waterloo, Sap and Motherload. Every single one of them female (mostly solo) shows and ALL at Summerhall.
Another stunning female performance was Jodie Comer’s in NTL’s Prima Facie and the all women Pride and Prejudice (Sort of) at The Lyceum.
Yet another (and a Fringe First winner) was Breathless at The Pleasance who had, in my view, a particularly strong Fringe. We Should Definitely Have More Dancing had me in bits at Assembly (and guess what, an all female cast).
Laurel and Hardy was another Lyceum stonker in June and Dreamachine at Murrayfield Ice Rink (part of the Unboxed Festival) was so good I went to the out of body experience twice.
Books
Also a great year for books I devoured three Kasuo Ishiguro books.
Motherwell by Deborah Orr was great but maybe the highlight was by Anna Burns in her Booker-winning Milkman, an astonishing and stylised account of the troubles in Belfast, the likes of which you never re-encounter.
I enjoyed Jonathan Coe’s fun but rather slight Expo 58, and Alastair Mackay’s recounting of punk music in Edinburgh, Alternatives to Valium was genuinely original.
Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep left me desperate for more (she really is a terrific American writer) and an old one that I had missed in Portnoy’s Complaint had me laughing my head off (Phillip Roth).
I reviewed Duck Feet by Scots writer Ely Percy on December 31st last year but didn’t do this summary of the year in 2021 so it gets an honourable mention.
TV
What a year for TV. It just gets better and better doesn’t it.
We are loving Ted Lasso at the moment but other notable TV series were: The White Lotus, This Is Going to Hurt, The Traitor, Industry and, of course, The World Cup.
And again, because I didn’t do this review in 2021, I can’t let the greatest TV show of all time go unmentioned. Succession.
Movies
We didn’t make the movies so much this year. My highlight (unpopular though it is) was Blonde with the astonishing Ana Di Armas as “Marilyn” but really as Norma Jean. Ignore the haters, it’s amazing.
Of course Jodie Comer in Prima Facie gets in here for a second time as we saw it at the Bo’ness Hippodrome – our favourite cinema.
The Banshees of Inisherrin maintains Martin McDonagh’s reputation, indeed enhances it, as one of the greatest directors and, not far behind, in fact equal, was PT Anderson’s brilliant Liquorice Pizza.
I also loved Florence Pugh in The Wonder and David Bowie’s surreal Moonage Daydream documentary.
Also in music territory was Andrew Dominick’s beautiful study of Nick Cave in This Much I know to be True and Elvis is probably Bad Luhrmann’s greatest achievement.
The Year started with Speilberg’s wonderful remake of West Side Story. I loved it.
A big shout out to The Vue for their reasonable pricing policy.
Podcasts
Not such a big podcast year for men but The Rest is politics stole the show by a country mile Matt Forde continues to shine with his Political Party podcast and The News Agents (Maitliss and Sopel) after a tricky start really found its voice. But Alistair Campbell and Rory Stewart left everyone else trailing in their wakes.
Sport
This was shite. My golf was laboured. My cycling jettisoned (but will be back). I got to 56 Munro’s, but partly due to the weather it was a lean second half.
So that’s it. A truly great year in which. I also turned 60 and had some fantastic times with family and friends.
Thanks everyone for being part of my life. Have a great 2023.
It’s been some time since my last Unknown Pleasures posting, but I’m delighted to be back with an absolute stonker from the phenomenon that is my great friend Anna Aalto.
You’ll see that Anna does not stride the paths of convention in her life, her loves and her passion for the things that mean a lot to her.
She has not only the greatest enthusiasm for a subject I think I’ve ever encountered (Eurovision) but also an encyclopaedic knowledge of it too. I’m talking the FINAL of Mastermind here. She could be the next Fred Housego.
But not just on this: on design systems, on Swedish culture because she’s a true Swedeophile.
She also made me sing this song at last year’s Eurovision office party (dressed as the clown Djambo) and delights in singing it as she passes my desk.
I work with Anna (she’s a top designer) and love the way her passion for things outside of the workplace are equally prevalent in her work and when you hear Anna present you realise you are in the presence of someone that’s off the scale in her commitment, talent and enthusiasm. It’s a wonder to behold.
As you read on you’ll hopefully be transported to another place where you might not be familiar but you will certainly be intrigued. One of my favourite of the 25 so far. If you’d like to contribute please let me know.,
In the meantime, welcome to the wonderful world of Anna Aalto. I’m honoured to share it.
The book I’m reading
My own work.
I’m always reading and yet I’m never reading. I’m sporadically reading. Picking up things and putting them down, taking inspiration from lines and words and nuances and imaginings. This is because I’m writing. I’m always writing.
My most beautiful pleasure is sitting in a café with a pad – early evening – with a cold schooner of indeterminate beer or a glass of freshly brewed V60. I’m an advocate for good old-fashioned handwriting. But I’m also a stickler for mistakes.
I’m writing about the Eurovision Song Contest. More specifically, I’m writing about the people behind the Eurovision Song Contest. The flag-wavers – the people who go. My non-existant, everlasting novel. It’s inspired by some of the people I’ve met and some of the people I’ve only ever met in my head. It’s ambiguous and very very ‘working’. It revolves around a series of interconnected inner stories – narratives, anecdotes and musings. I was swept unsuspectingly into the intense and underground pandemonic cult of the Eurovision fan community once. A whimsical world of sex and sexuality, music and lyrics, fleeting liaisons and fundamentally, love and friendship. And these second-lives greeted me willingly into this vibrant and unyielding reality that exists behind the masks of accountants and shop-workers and dental surgeons.
There’s also a man who eats my shoes and several incidents in a Wetherspoons. I’m sure I’ll finish it one day.
My favourite author or book and The book I wish I had written
‘Grafisk design: Henrik Nygren’. Presentation of work and memories, 1991–2013.
‘Writing’ is pushing the parameters of the question, but this is my answer. I was lucky enough to speak with Henrik – a seminal book and identity designer from Stockholm who is shamefully unrecognized outside of his native Sweden. I picked up his great behemoth of ornamental literature once in a bookstore on Åsogatan, just opposite the working window of his studio, before making a dash to the airport. I just had to buy it.
£60 later, it is an object and a vessel, rather than a book. Humble and overstated in equal measure, ‘Grafisk design: Henrik Nygren’ is a reflection of Nygren’s work – hundreds of pages long – with ribbons of life woven seamlessly throughout it like mementos in a scrapbook or kisses in a diary. Each page is faultlessly executed. The photography is simple, personal and evocative. The typographic tuning – traditional and unpretentious. It is as if Nygren has harnessed Guttenberg’s press itself.
As a designer, I appreciate and long for the ideals of quiet confidence. I wish I’d written, crafted – birthed – this extraordinary personal composure.
The book I couldn’t finish
Anything by Ian Rankin.
I became entrapped by a fascination of my own making a few years ago. As someone constantly at the whim of people and place, I started to wonder more about the place I’m currently in – the grand old city of Edinburgh. There are few writers more synonymous with the place-making of Edinburgh than Ian Rankin – Sir Ian Rankin – who is frequently exalted with capturing Edinburgh in his airport-fodder as a character in and of itself. Something of a sidekick to the clichéd and unoriginal alias of Rebus – a drunken anti-hero from the police who doesn’t play by the rules.
Rankin’s fragrant reliance on temperate dialogue and product names did nothing to evoke the romanticism and Disneyfication of the city I currently call home – for better or for worse. Caustically naming The Meadows or Cockburn Street or The Oxford Bar in the context of a dog walk didn’t present me with the kind of literary magic his numerous accolades, sales figures and knighthood all seemed to suggest was plausible. It was put down after a chapter or two.
I also couldn’t finish ‘Trainspotting’. It is linguistically unreadable, even after a Guinness or two in the departure lounge of Dublin airport. But that is part of its obscure and illicit charm.
The book I’m ashamed I haven’t read
‘Stockholm Design Lab: 1998–2019’
I’ve always been stimulated and enthralled by SDL’s powerful ability to combine the clinical and the beautiful. Poring over their intense and impressive catalogue is like sitting in the dentist’s chair or chewing on a mint.
With clients like Polestar and SAS, everything is white, and yet almost nothing is. Their flawless clarity and typographic craft is as beautiful as it is sobering, and their perpetual marriage of client and creative gives us all hope.
A few years ago, Bjorn, their synonymous creative director, released a book charting the history of this celebrated consultancy, which until recently used to hang omnipotently over Stockholm’s Slussen interchange. It’s not an easy book to find and it’s not an easy book to buy. Maybe I can borrow one?
My favourite film
‘Threads’ by Barry Hines, 1984
I imagine that some people haven’t seen this. Since it’s release on a Sunday evening in 1984, it has only been shown on the BBC a handful of times. I don’t understand why it hasn’t been shown more. But at the same time, I do.
Threads is a British feature-length television docudrama. Written, commissioned and realised at a height of Cold War tensions between East and West, it explains and explores the effects of global thermonuclear war on the ordinary people of Britain.
Set in the city of Sheffield – an industrial heartland with a charted history of Labour administration and pacifism – it centres on two families, one working-class and one middle-class, whos lives are thrown together by the promise of a birth and a marriage. As the mundanity of family planning and job redundancy beckons, geopolitical tensions escalate rapidly and their environment is transformed irreversibly. In the proceeding decades, society itself is moulded around a new reality as food is scarce, disease is rife and language depletes to reflect a haunting and devastating world.
Hines’ use of unknown actors combined with the incidental static and grainy haunt of 80s Britain creates a perfect and terrifying balance of tension, despair and hopelessness in what has been one of the most seminal films of my life. It is far from an easy watch. It is an event. It is a masterpiece. Its matter-of-fact candid nature brings the fantastical narrative of Armageddon into a tangible human-level reality, which results in a sobering and at times bed-wetting effect on it’s audience. It shows horror, it shows destruction – but never in the manner of glorification. It merely shows you, tells you the effects of societal collapse, and makes it seem as mundane as collecting the milk from your doorstep.
My favourite podcast
‘Eurovision Castaways’ by Ellie Chalkley
Tapped from the classic ‘Desert Island Discs’ concept which has lasted generations, I really hope this simple and empowering concept does the same.
In each edition, Ellie invites a ‘castaway’ to the fictional but deliciously conceived ‘Ille d’Bezençon’, a place where alcohol is free and Eurovision fans are free to roam unhindered by the musical pressures of the real world. Each castaway – usually a lifelong Eurovision fan from one blog-site or another – is invited to bring eight Eurovision songs for the ‘duration of their stay’.
The conversation which ensues is a delight. As a lifelong Eurovision super-fan myself, I’m constantly fascinated and enchanted by other people’s experiences and how they have expressed, lived and understood their own lives through the medium of the contest. The choices are eclectic – from Luxembourg’s ‘Papa Penguin’ to Estonia’s failed attempt to send ‘Winny Puhh’ to Malmö – each justified in their own unique way, with every castaway having an anecdote or experience with which to summarise their relationship with the song. Hearing how a Norwegian school-teacher cried at the sight of an unknown Icelandic band was something I could empathise with all too much.
My favourite TV series
‘Around the World in 80 Days’ with Michael Palin. 1988.
This unrepeatable series made me fall in love with travel. More broadly, it made me fall in love with the world. Michael’s unlikely everyman attitude to the journey transports him from legendary python to a man for all time, taking us to places we thought we knew, through the eyes of the people who call the world ‘home’.
I used to watch this on an ancient VHS tape when I was 14 and haven’t stopped re-watching since. Even when I travel now, albeit in a slightly less grandiose and cinematic fashion, I use Michael as my inspiration. He’s never on the outside looking in, but rather seeks to sit on the inside looking out.
My favourite piece of music
‘Longplayer’ by Jem Finer and Artangel
Commissioned in 1999 to mark the forthcoming millennium, Longplayer is a piece of music filtered through an algorithm which is scheduled to play for the next 1,000 years. It has been playing now for nearly 23 years, and never repeats.
It’s atonal ambience is stunningly beautiful, if melodically void, however it’s Longplayer’s sense of statement that entices me to include it. It is a marking of humanity, rather than a marking of music – an intangible expression of longevity, future, past and aspiration.
The Last film/music/book that made me cry
Paddington II. Enough said.
The song that saved me
‘Amar Pelos Dois’ by Salvador Sobral. I honestly believe it’s the most beautiful song ever written. It was always there when I needed it.
If I could own one painting it would be
‘Sunflowers’ by Vincent Van Gogh
At first glance it might seem like an obvious answer. Basic art response. Art for the masses. However, it’s beauty and ubiquity aren’t the reasons for it making this list. Instead, it serves as the most uninterrupted window into Van Gogh’s life and mind. An extraordinary – yet super-ordinary – human being, the story of Van Gogh’s conflict with his own world and his own mind and the liminal spaces in between speak so kindly to the latent the struggles so many of us feel. Imposter syndrome? Underappreciated? Undervalued? Complex and conflicting? Yet, his ability to capture the world in such technicolour and visual song as always spoken to me.
If I could go back in time and meet Vincent, I’d pay handsomely for one of his sacred beauties. As would so many of us.
The place I feel happiest
It has to be Stockholm. The things I feel for this city are indescribable. I’ve never lived there yet I feel at home every time I touch down at Arlanda or tap into the T-Bana. It’s rich lights and bitter temperatures nurture the most complex of emotions – memories of friends and aspirations of what could be. One day. It’s the place I feel like myself.
My guiltiest cultural pleasure
Westlife
I’m having a fantasy dinner party, I’ll invite these artists and authors
Tracey Emin, Henrik Nygren, Stefan Sagmiester, Jessica Walsh and Salvador Sobral. And Mark Gorman.
A stalwart of British art, three designers from different generations and a Portuguese jazz musician. And Mark Gorman.
And I’ll put on this music
‘Music for Airports’ by Brian Eno. ABBA when we’re on the floor by the end of the night.
They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had And add some extra, just for you.
Philip Larkin’s oft quoted poetry titillated school classrooms but it has an immense amount of truth.
Deborah Orr’s parents didn’t just fuck her up, they derailed her, but in this astounding memoire she seems to want to forgive them – even though it’s a full on verbal assassination of a man and woman trapped in time, with deep felt prejudice and hatred for anyone or anything that’s “not like us”.
Deborah Orr’s mother (despite her attempt at defending her) is a horrendous human being, she’d be a great villain in a novel but Win (she refers to her by her given name throughout) is for real. Her Dad, John, might even be worse. They are the silent naysayers of British (in this case Scottish) Conservatism that blighted my childhood and many generations before. I despise them.
Narcissism is at the root of this terrifying story. Again and again Orr accuses her mother of a form of narcism that’s probably not apparent to the outside world. You have to be trapped by it to fathom it out. The fact that she idolised her daughter but could never tell her (admit it) and that it would be a sign of weakness is a form of vanity that simply festers throughout a lifetime and manifests it in many, many ways.
Orr picks them all out for us. One by one.
Instead of declaring her pride in and love for her daughter she stores all of her moments in an old bureau that is the storytelling device at the centre of this book. You see, Deborah Orr, soon to die herself of cancer, is clearing it out in the wake of Win’s cancerous death. John had passed on several years earlier.
It’s stuffed full of mementos, of pride, narcissistic pride, that went unspoken throughout bitter old Win’s stuck up life. A life where Men are the hunter gatherers, women the home makers and their daughters most certainly do not go to university, have sex before marriage or disrespect the family in any way. In fact sex, full stop, is evil – a necessary one for the purpose of propogation..
Somehow Deborah Orr holds it together through a childhood and teenage years full of repression, but strangely also of deep love for her mother, if only her mother would properly send that love back.
John, her father, is a repressed, exhausted Tory working endless shifts in a heavy metal factory in Ravenscraig, the other central character of this tale.
It’s all a fantastic, ultra-real look back at her (my ) childhood in industrial Scotland where the Tories are the oppressor, the shadow of the Iron Lady looms large and the collapse of the town inevitable.
It’s a succession of bittersweet memories, some amusing, most pretty grim.
And later, when Orr frees herself, the men in her life serve her no better than repressed, exhausted, angry John.
Despite all this Orr went on to become a celebrated journalist marrying Will Self but dying young, not long after she wrote this tremendous book. Her one, her only.
So, in that respect at least she went out on a high with an unblemished publishing career.
Oh Deborah, I feel so sorry for you. I feel sure I would have been thoroughly engaged and entertained in your company. If only you’d had more loving, caring and less stupid people around you.
This curious little novel, from 2013, is Coe’s 10th (of 13) and my sixth.
Unlike most of his others it doesn’t set out to be a full blown comedy, few laugh out loud moments are found in here, but it’s an ointeresting bread nonetheless.
written in the third person (which creates a little distance between the reader and character) it follows the travails of a middle ranking Government employee (from the COI), Thomas, who is selected to oversee the British pavilion, specifically a pub called The Britannia, at the 1958 Belgian Expo near Heysel.
1958 is at the heart of the Cold War and soothes global gathering proves to be a hotbed of political conspiracy and espionage with the Britannia a favourite meeting place for many nationalities. Thomas is trailed by a couple of bungling British spy-types (maybe police officers) who ask him to keep his ear to the ground while on duty.
Meanwhile love is in the air, or at least lust, as Thomas falls for a beautiful young Belgian hostess while his wife, back in London, is being ‘looked after’ by Thomas’ lascivious neighbour.
It’s a nice read actually, far from a classic but pleasing on the eye. Whilst that might sound like I’m damning iyt with faint praise I don’t mean that. It’s just not life-changing but a bittersweet light comedy that doesn’t outstay its welcome.
gibberish 