The Third Quarterly Book Battle

A bit late due to various factors (having to finish 1Q84, writing my own novel, getting married, being tired) here is the third battle in my quest to find the best book to grace my eyes in 2012, encompassing all that I read between July and September. Previously, the grand final has been reached by Haruki Murakami's The Wind-up Bird Chronicle in the first battle, and Stephen King's The Long Walk in the second.

In the third quarter of 2012, I read the following books: The Big Sleep, Love in the Time of Cholera, Oblivion, Boxer Beetle, and 1Q84. Let battle commence!

It's a thin field this quarter, partly due to the grotesque obesity of 1Q84 greedily hogging my reading time. The personified 1Q84 of my imagination lumbers around the arena with its guts spilling over the nappy that is its only clothing, slow and confused, yet showing flashes of pugilistic brilliance, much like a young Audley Harrison. Its wild attacks luckily catch Love in the Time of Cholera in the chops as it's delivering a 200-page soliloquy on love and knock it to the floor, at which 1Q84 tires and drops arse first onto Cholera's face, suffocating it. I was really disappointed with Love in the Time of Cholera after expecting great things from it and hearing so much about the author, Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I expected a Latin American magical realism tour de force, but all I got was turgid and overlong musings. I found it an absolute chore to get through. And now it's dead. 1Q84 staggers to its feet, but seduced at the prospect of food to gorge and sustain its spiraling word count, it picks up a beetle casually dropped by Boxer Beetle, only to find that it's a super strength hardcore Nazi beetle, that sticks in its throat and eats it alive from the inside. 1Q84 was another book that I found disappointing: some of it is very good, and through the first two books I enjoyed it and looked forward to finding out what would happen, but the third book seems an unnecessary addition to the tale, and feels as if Murakami was bowing to pressure to continue the story rather than writing it to find out himself what happened. The story is caught between fantasy and realism, neither one nor the other, and not enough of either to be truly satisfying. I still liked it, but when you've read a book as good as The Wind-up Bird Chronicle a few months before, anything will struggle to match that masterpiece. Boxer Beetle stands over the corpse and malevolently chuckles, and is still grinning as it collapses to the floor, a bullet hole showing daylight through to a smoking gun held by The Big Sleep. Boxer Beetle, the interesting debut by Ned Beauman, I picked up on a whim after finding out that he's around my age and wanting to see how he writes, and I wasn't disappointed. Unfortunately, the competition here is just too strong for it, but I think in the future Beauman may write some truly great novels.

That leaves us with two books duking it out for the heavyweight title: Raymond Chandler's detective noir The Big Sleep, and David Foster Wallace's short story collection Oblivion. It's tough to choose between them. Wallace's stories showed me a way of writing that I didn't know was possible, treating words like water and trickling them onto the page in wonderful mixed up ways, and infusing the beauty of his story-telling with a dry scientific style that when I write about I always think sounds terrible but knocks me down with majesty when I read him. The first story in Oblivion, Mister Squishy, about a focus group studying a cake, is one of the best fifty pages I've ever read. The Big Sleep, meanwhile, provides a blueprint for every great crime novel of the post-war era, and displays an understated greatness in the writing as its protagonist stumbles from clue to clue to solve a mystery. Just writing this, I've changed my mind four times about which book should win, and as the two foes stand in the centre of the ring trading blow for blow I still can't work it out. Eventually, (after leaving this post for half an hour and coming back to find them still barely raising their skinned and bloodied fists, their legs turned to jelly, their pages crinkled and print running with sweat) Oblivion launches one last fevered assault of perspicacity and The Big Sleep falls into a heap on the floor, pulped.

The best book I read between July and September is: Oblivion. Hip hip hooray!

Steppenwolf: the Book from the Future

I tried to read Herman Hesse's Steppenwolf once before. I didn't get too far, only to page 69, before I gave up, flummoxed at the total lack of sense I could derive from it. That was a few years ago, and last month I went back to it, determined to make it through and finish this time. I did, but I'm not sure if I understood it any more than I did the first time. The big difference was that this time, rather than casting it aside and moving onto something else, I loved it.

The story is mostly an insane mess, stuffed full of ideas, and even reading it now it seems as if it would be ahead of its time if it was published today, so god knows what people thought when it came out in 1927. It's a wild mix of philosophy, post-war guilt, mental disintegration, and bourgeois-baiting brilliance. But other than those buzz words,  it's only now that I'm coming to write about it that I realise Steppenwolf has again tricked me into remembering or understanding barely anything about it. I can't even put my finger on what I liked about it other than the imagination. It's the kind of book that you could give a hundred different people to read, and when they finish they'd think it was about a hundred different things. Or like a poem, one you have to read dozens of times to uncover what single lines are trying to say. Hesse always said that it was misinterpreted but never took the time to fully explain what it was about, so it seems the book's secrets may be locked away forever. I don't get it, but I like it.

I've Written A Whole Book

November has come and gone and inside that time I managed to beat NaNoWriMo and write an entire 50,000 word novel! I wrote nearly every day in the month, and learnt that I don't have to worry anymore about wanting to be a writer but not doing much about it, because I'm not terminally lazy, I can do it. Now I've got 50,000 unedited words that I'm sure are mostly drivel, and I'm looking forward to sitting down and banging them into some order. Unfortunately, I had to have an operation under general anesthetic last week and it's knocked the hell out of me, so I haven't started yet. Stitches come out tomorrow though and I'm hoping I'll feel better after that, so soon I'll be able to embark on the second and much more time-consuming stage of NaNoWriMo: turning a load of words into a book that makes sense.

NaNoNearlyThere

With just a few days to go of November I have somehow resisted the urge to muck around on the internet or procrastinate in other ways, and I'm only 3500 words from my 50,000 target for the month. It's been very tough going, and I'm shattered and looking forward to a rest when I'm done, but I'm most looking forward to reading it back, praying that there is actually a decent story hidden in the manic speed writing. Just a couple more hours of work and I'll have reached my target. I can't wait.

Going Solo

I read Roald Dahl's first autobiography, Boy, when I was myself a boy, loads of times, as I did with nearly everything that Dahl wrote. Matilda was my favourite and still is, but BFG, The Twits, The Witches, Fantastic Mr Fox and all the others were on my bookshelf and very worn out. I actually had Boy in a double edition with his continuing adventures, Going Solo, but for some reason I never read that one. I'm sure I remember starting it once, thinking it was boring, and never going back to it. What a young fool I was! Going Solo is just as exciting as anything else the great man ever wrote, and it's really interesting to see how his little details from his experiences as a young man served as obvious inspiration for his later books. The book is split roughly into two parts, the first chronicling his adventures as a Shell rep living in Africa, and the second detailing his time flying for the RAF during the Second World War. This is the best stuff, it's almost a real-life Catch-22 as Dahl somehow survives the insanity of the British war operation in the Mediterranean, including such crackpot plans as being sent to join a squadron at an airfield that doesn't exist, and taking on the might of a 100-strong Luftwaffe squadron in Greece with the help of only eight other RAF planes. Reading all this, it's miraculous that Dahl survived to write his wonderful stories, and the world is lucky that he did.

I'm getting on well with my NaNoWriMo challenge. I wrote every day for twelve days in a row which was very tiring but very worth it. I was up to within 1000 words of where I should have been, but was too busy on the weekend to do any more so I'm now back to 3000 behind. I've done over 30,000 words now though, and I've got Thursday and Friday off work so I'm hoping to catch up then. My novel is about a boy who's very shy, but follows a salesman and learns the art of manipulating people through his words and actions, moves to Los Angeles when he turns sixteen, and eventually becomes the leader of a cult. It's vaguely planned out but I'm sure there are lots of twists and turns hiding in my brain that will jump out when I least expect them. Hopefully when I read it back at the end of the month a title will leap out at me, because at the moment I've got no idea what it should be called.

A State of Narcopolis

The first thing that attracted me to Jeet Thayil's Narcopolis was its brilliant cover, and it certainly fits what was a great read. I often wonder about covers: does the author get a say in them, and when the book is rebranded who decides it's time to get rid of an old cover and move onto a new one? If I ever have novels published I would hate it if they were given bland covers, or had covers with images on them that I didn't like, or that I thought altered the way in which my work would be perceived. Narcopolis has a cover that it makes it look like a druggy book about India informed by centuries of its culture, and that's exactly what it is. It reminds me of Trainspotting, Salman Rushdie, and Naked Lunch with the meandering insanity slightly tempered, and this combination could never be a bad thing. Narcopolis, combined with the recent BBC series Welcome to India (which showed the hand-to-mouth existence of some extremely poor people, doing anything they could to eke out an illegal living), has renewed my interest in India, but though I would love to visit it I think it wouldn't be so much a holiday as a difficult insight into the gross privileges we enjoy in the West.

My November novel, still untitled, is coming along very well. I'm now up to 19,000 words, having written every day since last Monday, easily a record for me. I used to find myself riddled with excuses not to write: bemoaning the lack of comfort and writerly atmosphere in my house and reasoning that when I move next year everything will be fine and I'll be able to write without problems, but now all those cares have drifted away as I'm desperate each evening to sit down and see where my story goes. Then an hour later I've done my 2000 words, and my story has new characters and incidents that if I rewound time and sat down again to write would probably never exist. I haven't read a word of it yet, and I'm excited at the end of the month to look back on it and see what I came up with. It does have something of a plot now: it's about a boy who overcomes his supreme shyness to learn how to manipulate others to his will, and leaves for Los Angeles when he's sixteen to eventually become the leader of a cult. Beyond that, the story is still writing itself as I go along. It's all very exciting!

The Precious First Draft

Three days into my challenge to write a 50,000 word novel in the four weeks and two days of November (I started late), and even though I've only written 7,000 words so far, the amount I've learnt about writing is staggering. I've managed to add at least two thousand words a day for three days in a row, which doesn't sound that long a time to write in consecutive days, but for me it's really good. I used to be so precious over my first drafts, constantly going back and changing things, or sitting and agonising for long minutes over the perfect word to use in a sentence. I'd even read articles in which people said not to do this, just to get the first draft done and out of you and worry about polishing it later, but chose to completely ignore this advice. It's only now that I have the very real time pressure of knowing I just have to write and write whatever is in my mind, get it out onto the page thick and fast in the battle to reach 50k, that I'm finally realising that a quick first draft is not only easier, it's actually a lot more productive.

I've stopped myself from doing any more than skim-reading tiny parts of my 7,000 words so far, so a great part of it may be garbage, but at least it's there, and there's plenty of time to print it out and cross out masses of it and swap things around once I've finished. I used to worry so much about mt writing being almost-perfect first time that it would slow me down hugely, and even put me off sitting down to write because I'd know that it would take me hours to write a few hundred words, but now I know that the only person who'll read the unedited tripe is me, and everyone else will only see the gold that comes out of a mind quickly working and adapting to the pressures of getting words onto a page, and of course the hack n slash of editing that follows this. I'm really excited to keep going with my novel; the thought that in only three weeks I'll have something so big completed is amazing.

Beach House and NaNoWriMo

I went to see the band Beach House on Saturday and it was unlike any other gig I've been to. Where most bands make me want to dance, or maybe slightly sway or tap my foot or something, Beach House made me feel, in a good way, like all I wanted to do was stand completely rigid for the entire duration of their set. I felt as if I was on smack, like I would have been happy to collapse into a chair and stare at the wall for hours while listening to them play. The singer has a very strange presence, she reminds me of a monster or the girl from The Ring, the way she stands and towers over the microphone and stage is enthralling. Neither of these things sound like positives really, but the gig made me feel very content and dreamy, something that no other band I've seen has ever done.

I've decided to take part in the NaNoWriMo (National November Writing Month for longhand) challenge this year, in which the idea is to try and write like a beast for the whole of November, bashing out an entire novel by midnight on the thirtieth. You're meant to get to 50,000 words, but since I forgot about it for the first couple of days and was then in Bristol for the weekend, I only started yesterday. That leaves me with 2000 words a day for the duration. The idea is to just write and write and write, not to think too deeply about what's coming out onto the page, not to go back and change things, just to get your ideas all out of you. It's meant to teach you how to not worry about the first draft so much, just to speed through it so the words are there, and then later on you have as much time as you like to change them. And also, it shows you that you are capable of writing a novel, no matter how shoddy the first draft may be. This is perfect for someone like me who has started writing a novel, but then agonised and procrastinated so much that they worry they'll never finish.

Hopefully in thirty days I'll have a complete novel written, and I'll learn loads along the way I'm sure. I'll keep you updated.

1Q84: What was the Point?

I've finally made it to the end of Haruki Murakami's 1Q84, and after 1200 pages and no real answers, I'm struggling to see the point of the whole endeavor. The book was alright, but why it was dragged out to that length is beyond me; perhaps it was only done so that it could be classed as an epic. There are some great ideas in it, but they're only loosely explored, and too much time is given over to plot instead of surrealism. In the third book it becomes excrutiating as the chapters are alternately focused on three different characters, and nearly every single thing that you read has already been covered. It's difficult to feel any tension when you know exactly what is going to happen. The Wind-up Bird Chronicle fit in way more in half the number of pages, and it's so much better for it. One of the main problems for me is that the book is more plot-driven than his usual work: where Bird Chronicle is a piece of mad surrealism that you can happily get to the end of without answers and draw your own conclusions, or just be beautifully lost in everything that happens, 1Q84 is instead a sci-fi-thriller without much of a pay-off. If it had been balls-out surrealism the lack of closure would be fine, but the style of the book means that you expect more from the ending. It's like the loose ends are too loose to be satisfying, but not loose enough that you can get lost in their meandering paths. I read somewhere that Murakami initially stopped the novel after its second book, but returned to it a few months later to write a third, and I personally would have preferred it to end at the conclusion of Book Two. I'm sad because I love Murakami, and I will definitely re-read the other novels of his that have previously bamboozled me, but I don't think I'll pick up 1Q84 again. Luckily, I've still got about ten books in his back catalogue to get through.

And, while I'm at it, Murakami's boob obsession is bizarre, and absolutely cringey to read. You can barely get five pages through 1Q84 before Aomame, the main female character, is talking about her tits, or somebody else's, constantly saying "if only my breasts could be a little bigger". I found it very odd that Murakami went on about boobs so much when I've never noticed it in any of his other books. I don't know why it wasn't all cut in translation. And while they were at it, they could have cut another five-hundred pages and I probably would have loved 1Q84. It seems like a missed opportunity to me, and I'm upset :-(

Estella's Life as a Looper

The other night I went to see a play version of Great Expectations featuring Jim Fenner from Bad Girls, which was reason enough to go. It was very interesting how it was staged: all of the action took place around one set, Miss Havisham's house with its dining table topped by a moulding wedding cake and surrounded by decrepit artefacts and cobwebs. The costumes were really cool too, with most characters emblazoned in mad Alice in Wonderland-style Victorian fancy dress. But the best thing about it, as with anything to do with Dickens, was the characters. Every character in it is so alive that when you read them you can imagine them sitting next to you. Estella is my favourite: a young lady moulded by her ruthless guardian, Miss Havisham, into becoming a man-hating fiend, who'll go through life breaking hearts just to see the pain she can cause, all the while taking solace in the feeling that she has no heart of her own. Estella is doomed to live this life thanks to Miss Havisham's own heartbreak, which made her feel the need to "protect" Estella in such a way that, although she couldn't suffer the pain of Miss H, she could also experience none of the joy of life.

As I'd seen the time-travelling film Looper the night before, I couldn't help drawing parallels between the two. Great Expectations' characters are in a way very similar to those in Looper: fated to live out their existences in a seemingly unbreakable cycle, but forced through their lives by the weight of benefactors' expectations rather than following their own paths again and again as in Looper. In a way maybe Estella is a time traveller of sorts, doomed to live her life forever, in slightly different heart-breaking ways and in different bodies, as each woman in the chain is destroyed by love and passes on their loathing to the next generation, leaving their child cursed to make the same mistakes.

Getting Better With Age

I was first attracted to the author Ned Beauman because he has the same surname as me (with a different spelling). After finding out that he was younger than me and already a twice-published novelist, I was intrigued to see how developed he is as a writer at such a young age. I've been reassuring myself for ages that it's fine if I'm a bit of a lazy writer, if I don't see myself being anywhere near ready to get a novel published for the next few years, because there's so much to learn that it's impossible to write properly until you're about forty. Yet here he was, published at twenty-six, and with back cover blurb that sounded very interesting.

It was reassuring to read Boxer Beetle and see that, although Beauman is clearly a very talented author, he still has a long way to go before he reaches the peak of his powers. The premise and historical background to Boxer Beetle were very interesting, but sometimes the action lagged a bit. The things I most enjoyed were the little scientific asides on eugenics and scary-tough beetles, and that a character had trimethylaminuria, a condition that makes you smell of fish. I'm looking forward to reading his next novel, The Teleportation Accident, when it comes out next year in paperback (I hate hardbacks) and following Beauman's career as he matures. It's exciting how much better you get as you write more. I read back stories that I wrote a couple of years ago and see dozens of mistakes that I wouldn't make now.  There's a long way to go, but at least I've got the rest of my life to improve my writing. I feel sorry for sportsmen who hone their craft and should be getting better and better, but are instead constantly battling the decline of their bodies. Despite all of the improvements to their mental performance and understanding of their game, they are always struggling to match the highs of their physical peak, and then they get to their mid-thirties and it's over. It must be very frustrating to be sat on the pundits' couch, knowing that if you had a body twenty years younger you could be one of the best players in the world, but having creaky knees and a bad back instead. In contrast, it's probably better to be unhealthy as a writer. Moving around is overrated.

David Foster Wallace Is A Literary Genius

After reading hundreds of different authors in my life (I'd love to have a list of them all, in fact I often daydream about when I die there being my very own nook in heaven filled with statistics on my life: top ten dinners I ate, top ten bands I listened to, top ten happiest moments in terms of how big my smile was etc) I've recently come across somebody who writes in a way that I've never seen before, a way that I never thought could possibly be entertaining, that shakes up everything I held true about writing. David Foster Wallace wrote half the time as if he was compiling a very sober textbook, and the other half as if he was making more detailed and studious footnotes for that same book, but somehow the end product is magnificent. In Oblivion, a collection of short stories published shortly after his death, everyday concepts and bizarre setups I never would have considered interesting enough to write about entwine to form a compelling collection of stories, and page after page words that I've never heard before, and am so sure I'll never hear again I don't bother to look them up, slide seamlessly into his elegant sentences and make perfect sense.

I absolutely loved the book, and have since found out that many of the stories within aren't even considered his best, so I'm looking forward to discovering more. My favourite was Mr Squishy, a story about a focus group for a new Twinkie-like cake, with a very sinister member among them. Most of it entails ridiculously in-depth statistical analysis of people's perception of cream and so on, but God, it's so interesting. I don't think there can be a much better endorsement of how good Wallace is than the fact that when you describe what you love about his work it just sounds awful! If you haven't read him, track something down and be amazed.

He's My Favourite Author, I've Read One of His Books

I recently read an article discussing how odd it is for people to proclaim authors as being brilliant, or among their favourites, when they had read just a tiny amount of their output, usually only one or two novels. I have been doing this myself for years, mostly with writers that I liked while I was at university. For example, I often cite Joseph Heller as being one of my favourite authors, when what I should really say is that Catch-22 is one of my favourite books. Even though Catch-22 absolutely blew me away when I first read it, and has done the same after three re-readings, even though it's easily the funniest novel I've ever read, one of very few to make me genuinely laugh out loud, and on nearly every page too, I have never read anything else by Joseph Heller, and at this point in time I don't intend to. This is one of the funny things about literature: if I hear a brilliant album by a band, there's no way I could leave the rest of their repertoire unheard forever, but I'm perfectly comfortable doing this with Heller, and plenty of other authors whose books I've really enjoyed. I'm not sure exactly why this is. Of course, I've heard that Catch-22 is by far and away Heller's best book, but still, I usually would like to see for myself if his others are any good rather than just accepting this as fact, especially considering how much I love Catch-22. There just seems to be some invisible brain-switch that flips when I get to the end of a novel that tells me, regardless of the quality of that particular book, whether I want to read more by this author or not.

Just recently, I've begun to get into a couple of authors and actually feel the desire to read a number of their books, to immerse myself in their thoughts and feelings and worldviews, and devour their entire publishing history. Haruki Murakami is the best example of this, perhaps even more so because I didn't actually love the first two books of his that I read, they just really made me want to see more of what this intriguing novelist had to say. I kept going and came to The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, which encapsulated everything that I thought could have been amazing about the first two books I'd read but was just slightly missing, and Wind-up Bird was so good it's encouraged me to make my way through his canon until I've taken in every word he's ever printed. At the moment I'm reading 1Q84, his latest work, and with each chapter I feel as if I'm understanding him more as an author and person. I'd love to go back and read the first two books I read by him, because I'm sure now that I'm a devoted fan, I'd like them all the more.

So it's odd: some authors are lost inside their greatest works and you feel no need to go any further, while others produce a body of work that holds together and elevates each individual piece to a level that it cannot reach alone. I'll have to stop thinking of Joseph Heller as one of my favourite authors, and just leave Catch-22 alone on its pedestal as one of my favourite books.

Being Married

Apologies for my silence over the past few weeks, I've been busy getting married so have had no time for anything else. Even now everything's official, it's hard to fit anything in as I keep getting distracted and entranced by the ring on my finger. I took it off earlier and my hand looked ridiculous: bare and cold and miserable. Getting married is the greatest thing I've ever done, I've never felt so happy or excited. It feels strange to me that usually when you do something brilliant, like visit an exciting new country or see a great film, you can always experience that event again if you want to, but getting married is the most fun I've ever had and I'll never be able to do it again. Well, I don't want to anyway. It was a blast.

All this has meant that I haven't been able to write or think about writing very much, so I still have a story that's 90% done and I need to get over the finish line with, and a novel that hasn't been worked on for ages. But I now know what it's like to get married, to go on honeymoon, and to be a newlywed, so all off this knowledge can surely only make me a better writer. Next time I sit down I'll have all these new emotions and experiences to draw from, and then I'll be unstoppable!

Too Much Cholera, Not Enough Magical Realism

After being stuck in a k-hole with it for weeks, I've finally managed to get to the end of Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and sadly I'm not overly impressed. I got into that horror zone where it becomes a chore to get through a book, when you stop being excited about having the opportunity to read and it begins to feel like work. I thought Marquez was the South American version of Gunter Grass or Salman Rushdie in the Magical Realism stakes, and that was exactly what I wanted to read, but it turns out that Cholera barely has any magic in it at all, and is instead a very loooong reflection on love and ageing. Well, it's only 4oo-odd pages, but it felt a hell of a lot longer to me. It's not a bad book, and the first fifty and last fifty pages are very good, but I just didn't find it that gripping, and because I was expecting Magical Realism I was very disappointed. Maybe I should read One Hundred Years of Solitude instead, that's meant to be a more magical one.

It's got me interested in the idea of British Magical Realism, but I don't know if any novels exist. Would it even be possible to have a UK novel in the style, or to get British people to enjoy a home-set one? For me, a lot of the joy in the style is in the exotic settings of the books, usually in societies tinged with mysticism (for someone born in the UK) that accentuate the fantastical qualities. Would a book like this set in the all-too-familiar setting of little England work? I suppose it would: the British isles is swarming with fairies and witches and history that could spill into an everyday British tale and magic it up, it's just hard to imagine it striking a chord in the same way that a trawl through the history of newly-independent India can.

Birmingham: A City of Thrilling Literature

I'm reading Love in the Time of Cholera at the moment, which is proving to be quite an arduous task with lots of stuff going on in my life (getting married in two weeks!). The book is mostly making me pine to go back to South America, as the city-setting reminds me a lot of the wonders of Lima and Cusco in Peru, places littered with bustling little back-alley shops with buckets of meat hung out the front, and wild dogs mooching around looking for a feed. These are places ripe for readers to get lost in: whether you've visited anywhere similar or not, the settings are so vibrant they eat you alive and you have to live in them until you stop reading and they spit you out. More and more I find that I'm choosing the books I read based on their settings, and I particularly love cities, both places I've already visited and those that I've never been to. It makes me wonder if my novel's setting of Birmingham, the drabbest city I've ever seen, is really going to spark the imagination of readers. I don't think I've ever read a novel that sets even a second of its action in Brum; perhaps the history of literature is trying to tell me something.

In fact, the only book I can think of that is set around here is The Rotter's Club by Jonathan Coe, a Birmingham-born writer who wisely sets most of his work in London. Maybe I should read that and see if there's anything of Birmingham that Coe doesn't cover that's worth committing to the page. I'm thinking maybe I should set my book in a better city, but there must be something about Birmingham that makes it important to house my story. I just hope the setting can inspire people to pick it up, to think "ooh, wow, a book set in Birmingham, that sounds like a thrilling place for characters to live", and then travel from all over the world to stare at the wonders depicted in my novel, such as the horrible Broad Street. It's the kind of place that becomes very small and dull after a couple of months of living here, but surely it's got to hold enough interest for an unfamiliar reader to live in, especially if I can convincingly get the Brummie accent onto the page.

The Missing Piece of the Puzzle

I read The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler recently to try and immerse myself in a good example of hard-boiled detective fiction so I'd be able to write some myself, and found that Chandler, rather than just being an example of a good detective writer, actually defined the genre, and any offbeat noirish detective yarn that's been imagined in the past seventy-five years has his fingerprints all over it. It's wicked stuff, with the main character, Philip Marlowe, careering from one sun and booze soaked scene to another, often with little idea of what he's doing, but always managing to come away with another clue to solve his case.I really enjoyed it, and I'm now looking forward to reading some of the other Marlowe novels.

The Big Sleep is a very cinematic story, and those qualities make it completely recognisable when you live in a world in which tv channels are stuffed wall to wall with detective dramas of varying quality. Marlowe seems to be the blueprint for many a sozzled tv detective, and his slightly surreal adventures are the perfect base for a million different stories. It was only halfway through The Big Sleep that I noticed the similarities to The Big Lebowski, one of my favourite films, and looking it up I found that the Coen Brothers had loosely based their story on Chandler's novel. And just like all of the thousands of screenwriters and authors that have taken inspiration from Marlowe, The Big Sleep has given me a lot of help in continuing my own series of surreal detective stories. Just a pesky horror story to finish off and I can carry on with it.

The Second Quarterly Book Battle

This is the second of my battles to determine the finalists of the best book I've read in 2012. Last time around, the terrific flaying abilities of The Wind-up Bird Chronicle won it a place in the final, so let's see what I've been reading over the past three months and the weird and wonderful ways in which they'll destroy each other...

In the second quarter of 2012, I've read the following books: Our Man in Havana, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Hunger Games, Child of God, Lights Out in Wonderland, Catching Fire, The Winter of Our Discontent, Mockingjay, The Long Walk, Disgrace, and Birdsong. Let battle commence!

The Hunger Games books immediately group together for strength in numbers and catch Lights Out in Wonderland napping, day-dreaming of being as good as its big brother, Vernon God Little. Lights Out is alright, but next to God Little it's just sad to see DBC Pierre unable to replicate the magic of his first novel, and Lights Out is quickly snuffed with an arrow to the face from the Hungry ones. Then, in a surprise move, the first two, far superior, Hunger Games books stab the disappointing finale Mockingjay in the back, then throw it off a cliff. Graham Greene's Our Man in Havana is a great read, but ultimately a bit too fluffy to be that important, although I really enjoyed it. Havana, trapped in a scenario it's desperate to get out of, attempts to flee the country but is locked in a bathroom by Disgrace and set on fire. I learnt a lot from Disgrace in how to make an unlikeable character relatable, and the only real criticism I can think of for it is that I love travelling in my mind to the settings of the novels I'm reading, but I couldn't wait to get out of Coetzee's South Africa. I know this actually makes it a better book, but I love to daydream-travel! The Winter of Our Discontent sneakily dispatches Disgrace, and then, appalled at what it's done, walks into the sea to commit suicide. Discontent is another amazing novel from John Steinbeck, and I loved it. I'm really struggling to get rid of some of these books from the competition, they're all great!

The Hunger Games and Catching Fire get bored hunting in a pair, and go toe to toe to determine which is my favourite book of the series. It's difficult: they're both so exciting and entertaining, and impossible to read at a pace below devouring, but I think Catching Fire just edges it for me. It's probably only because I read Hunger Games after I saw the film so I knew what was going to happen, and Catching Fire I had no idea what was going on, but I just thought the arena of the second one was amazing. After an arduous battle, Catching Fire manages to trip Hunger Games and sink a knife into its heart. Its triumph, however, is short-lived, as Birdsong charges over the top and pumps it full of lead. Birdsong is an enigmatic book: it contains some of the most moving and brilliant passages of any novel I've ever read, but it also includes the most boring pulp ever, the horrible 1970s characters that bring it down from true greatness. Birdsong's World War One chapters hurl grenades at its pre- and post-war sections, and sulk into the trenches and out of the competition.

This leaves us with three: The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Long Walk, and Child of God; and they are all fantastic books that transfixed me while I was reading them, and continue to do so months after I have put them down. Lightness is a real eye-opener to the horrors of Communism, and is written in a beautiful European style. It brought back memories of when I visited Prague and saw the memorial to the victims of Communism, and the book did an excellent job of depicting a country ripped apart by fear and suspicion, and tying this up with philosophy. There's really nothing wrong with this book, but I don't like it as much as the other two, so it's denounced as a Communist and sentenced to die. Child of God, that evil and twisted character study of Lester Ballard, a man it would be a nightmare to cross paths with, is another phenomenal novel from Cormac McCarthy, an author who is fast becoming one of my favourites. Child of God is desperate to unleash some horror upon The Long Walk, but the latter just strolls away, always keeping its pace at a level just out of God's reach. Two days later, the chase is still on, both books fraying at the edges, their covers bent and buckled and spines cracked. The Long Walk is a book by an author, Stephen King, who I had never thought too much of before, but this book infested my mind unlike any other. Even now, every time I walk anywhere it pops into my head and dominates my thoughts, and I'm still planning on trying my own twenty-four hour walk in its honour. Child of God, its pages dripping with sweat, buckles and makes one final grab for The Long Walk, but its fingers close on cloying air and it drops to its knees, before falling on its face, expired. The Long Walk sinks to its knees in victory.

The best book I read between April and June is: The Long Walk. Superb!

The Strange Structure of Birdsong

Recently on my blog, I asked if it was possible to write a bad novel about either of the World Wars, since the material is so heart-wrenchingly emotional that it's surely impossible to fail to engage the reader. I was thinking this while trapped in the horror of the trenches (or under them, as the tunnel-diggers of the novel are) in Birdsong, but now I've finished the book I can see one possible way to blemish a war novel: structure it like Birdsong. Everything in the book that takes place during the war is phenomenal, and the first hundred pre-war pages I could just about stomach, as they were clearly pertinent to the plot and emotions of the main character while the war is in session. On the way home from work I had to stop reading the book I was so worried that I would burst into tears at the train station, and I thought I might have to put it aside for a few weeks while I recovered. It's brutal, beautiful, and staggeringly affecting. But I cannot for the life of me imagine why Sebastian Faulks thought it would be a good idea to set about a tenth of the book in England, 1978, following a bunch of completely unlikeable tossers.

To be fair, I can understand reasons why you might want to go into the future: to juxtapose the horrors of war with the mundanity of normal life; to show how easily forgotten people's actions are after they die; to depress you completely that the heroic actions of main character Stephen Wraysford during the Great War led to the birth of a rubbish character who has no redeeming qualities whatsoever; but surely these could have been covered in five pages, rather than ten times that amount of flouncing around? The war bits of Birdsong are easily five-star material but the 1979-stuff is one star at best, and I can't fathom why Faulks would want to cheapen his novel with this tripe. It's one of those where I can see the point of what he's done, but I don't enjoy reading it. It's almost as puzzling to me as why the Arctic Monkeys included the horrible Brick by Brick on their latest album when they can write amazing songs for fun. Maybe in some way they were both done in order to make the words and songs around them more powerful and important, and if they were, they did their job.

Sherlock Holmes: Super Fraud

I've long thought Sherlock Holmes stories to be some of the most original I've ever read, and so individual that any author taking any elements from them easily results in shameless parody. Now it turns out that, though the adventures of Holmes are still as exciting and original as ever, the character and premise themselves may not be as quite a unique product of Arthur Conan Doyle's mind as I assumed.

In researching my own series of surreal detective stuff that I plan to write, I decided to read the Edgar Allan Poe detective stories, the genus for the genre. And I've come to the conclusion that if Doyle and Poe were writing in the lawsuit-happy modern era rather than the mutually-respectful Victorian one, Doyle may well be getting dragged around the courts by Poe for some compo after stealing his ideas (STOP PRESS: Poe had been dead for forty years before Holmes appeared, so court cases were easily avoided). The Poe stories feature a detective called Dupin, and the similarities to Holmes stories in their structure are staggering: both are written from the point of view of the detective's friend, both focus on analytical abilities as being more important than intelligence, and both detectives are depicted as insular characters who ruminate over problems by themselves, before revealing their deductions in a manner that initially sounds ridiculous, but when explained make perfect sense. Poe only wrote three Dupin stories, and while it's clear that Doyle developed the detective a lot from Poe's initial blueprint, I was still surprised at how much seemed to be pinched from the American author, rather than being a wonderfully original creation as I had previously been led to believe. Perhaps, in the fiery depths of the afterlife, Poe is preparing a lawsuit for a cut of the profits of the numerous Sherlock adaptations doing the rounds, while Dupin, the original, lies buried and forgotten. A profit-share in the Jonathan Creek DVDs is next on the agenda.

Hard-Boiled Wonderland

I've decided to develop the characters and world in my story Citrus Asphyxia, and write a series of detective stories. I've always thought it would be cool to write a series of stories that all fit neatly together in the same world, and the Sherlock Holmes stories made me a big fan of detective fiction. Plus, when I wrote Citrus Asphyxia I loved the licence for invention that it gave me: any little surreal idea I had fit perfectly into the story. Then I came up with an idea for a new freaky character and he seemed to slide into that world, so I thought why not resurrect Forbes and make him a character in a number of my stories?

One thing I've always loved about Bret Easton Ellis' novels is that a minor character in one could leap out and take centre stage in another, that his small world of young, disaffected Americans really do breathe the same air and hang out together, and there's no reason why they shouldn't inhabit the same pages. For me, it led a real credence to the world-building of the Ellis novels, as if they were taking place in a parallel universe to our own. I want to do the same with the Citrus Asphyxia stories, to create a bunch of characters that exist together, even though they might not appear in the same stories or ever meet. So I'm going to revise Sherlock Holmes and Edgar Allan Poe detective stories and read Raymond Chandler novels for inspiration, and set up a series in which each story will focus on a different freak as Detective Forbes wades through madness to try and apprehend them. I think this might help me a lot with building a convincing novel-sized world, without the pressure of writing an entire novel in one go. Stay tuned for more!

Is It Possible to Write a Bad World War Novel?

Larking around

Being halfway through Birdsong and completely immersed in the horrific world of trench warfare, I was marvelling at how brilliant the novel is when it suddenly struck me that every novel I've ever read set in one of the World Wars has been fantastic. Catch-22, The Tin Drum, and Slaughterhouse-5 are some of my favourite books of all time, and I've recently read The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and The Book Thief, and the Second World War settings of both of these raise the importance and emotion of the books considerably. If you think about it, unless you went way overboard on detail, you'd have to be an extraordinarily bad writer to fail to emotionally connect a reader with characters living through these horror times. It only takes a sentence for a torrent of emotion to flood a reader's brain, endless reels of nostalgia sloshing through them, and a character would have to be an absolute dick for you to not want them to survive the Battle of the Somme or the bombing of Dresden. To engage a reader you need to connect them to the story, and who could fail to connect somebody with such wickedly important phases of history? Writing within these settings, you immediately have a backdrop that every reader in the Western world can identify with.

But is it because war novels are so easy to write that I've only read brilliant ones, or the fact that there are so many of them that the cream rises to the top and all of the boring World War books tumble quickly into obscurity? To me right now the writing in Birdsong seems magnificent, but I've never heard praise for any other Sebastian Faulkes book, so is it just that his subject matter is so enthralling that he couldn't fail to be amazing in Birdsong, and outside of this his writing isn't really that good? Perhaps I've hit on a guaranteed path to authorly success: as long as you research the era, just plonk your characters into World Wars and they will instantly become insanely likeable, tear at the reader's heartstrings, and give you a smash-hit literary classic. Maybe I'll go back and rewrite all of my short stories so that they're set in the trenches.

Travelling Through Literature (But Not to South Africa)

Nearly every book that I read leaves me itching to visit the country in which it's set: Steinbeck makes me want to move to America, Murakami has me desperate to seek out the surreal Tokyo of his mind, and The Tin Drum left me contemplating a weekend break to Gdansk. I find literature to be one of the very best ways (other than actually going somewhere) to get a sense of what a place is like: even if a book isn't fully focused on the place in which it is set, something of the energy of the environment seems to seep into the fabric of the tale, into the actions and thoughts of the characters, in a way that even films often don't achieve. It's brilliant to sit and read and be transported around the globe, getting a native perspective on weird and wonderful locations, and living with characters as their habitats weigh upon their personalities.

However, after reading J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace, South Africa is one place that I could certainly spend the rest of my life avoiding. Disgrace's South Africa sounds like a difficult and troubled place, and certainly not a welcoming one. The people painfully split and unable to live in harmony under the crushing spectre of recent history, the police corrupt or just plain lazy, crime rife and surely ruthlessly targetting somebody like me who likes to wander around without much of a plan, up hills and down dark alleys; I don't think Disgrace is going to be used in South African tourism advertising any time soon. It is an excellent book though, as its Booker Prize and numerous accolades atest, and a very interesting study in character, forcing you to sympathise with a man who seems like nothing more than a prick for the first fifty pages, but then quickly opens up into a complex and convincing character. I just won't be daydreaming about a holiday in the Eastern Cape anytime soon.

Zombie Mega Apocalypse

Woo hoo! A lot of editing has passed since I thought it was finished two months ago, but my new short story, Zombie Mega Apocalypse, is now finished and available for you to read. The story comes from a question that I had floating around in my mind for a while: "what would happen if we knew the world was going to end, and had a definite date for the destruction of humanity?". How would society cope? This popped into my head around the time of the riots last August, when the fragile string holding decency in place frayed and people began to disregard the law, doing whatever they wanted. In the face of this I realised just how tenuous our grip on civility is: if people decide to just do what they want, en masse, how can they be stopped? Often this question is asked with regards to positive consequences such as the overthrowing of dictatorships, but it also applies to basic human decency. For a couple of days it seemed as if England was on the verge of something very bad happening, but luckily decent people came together and eventually overpowered the thugs. But if the world was going to end anyway, what motivation would the decent have to continue their battle?

I tied in my own disillusion with our technology-riddled society, and how it has changed living on Earth into an existence far removed from our original states of being. The more I think about it, the more I think that I might be an Anarchist. Politics and society have appealed to me less and less in recent years, and I want them gone, and nature to reign supreme once more. All of this comes together in a big fat melting pot to form Zombie Mega Apocalypse. Check out the beginning below and then follow the link to read the rest:

Zombie Mega Apocalypse

Until that night, I hadn’t looked up at the night sky in years. I stepped off the train and, rather than staring at the ground and ploughing the ten minutes to my door as usual, the biting February air wrenched my gaze upwards. The low-lying crescent moon sucked at my eyes, the deep dark blue of the early evening sky magnifying its luminescence. As my eyes adjusted, I noticed stars glistening in the formerly pitch-black. It was rare to see the stars around here. I inhaled deeply and my nostrils fought through the smog to the clean winter air beneath. It was beautiful, I thought; why did I never look up at this majesty, this free gift from Earth? It struck me then that I’d lost my way in life: ten years out of university, and ten years since I’d paid attention to anything natural. When did I lose my wonder? The accident, I guess. I thought back with envy to my younger self, so mesmerised by everything, so happy, untainted by the horrors of modern society circling and snapping like sharks. At least, I think I was like that. Nowadays, whenever I think back to a younger version of myself that person is a wide-eyed innocent, never moody, never angry. Until that night I had been drifting, ignoring my surroundings, and the innocence of my younger self was long gone.

I took two trains to work, and two home. In between, I crammed onto the tube with millions of other commuters, often seemingly squished into the same carriage as them all. On my journey I listened to music, ignored existence. I thought that people walking in front of me who moved unexpectedly to the side and blocked my way, without any knowledge that I was trying to weave a high-speed path past them, were idiots. I sprinted for tubes and squeezed through the doors and up against endless bodies, even though another train would be along two minutes later. Every second counted. Everything pissed me off. I worked a boring job but didn’t quit, as every other job was just as dull anyway, as ultimately pointless as the next. I hated what I had become, how annoyed I was by this world of rubbish; hated my iPhone when it worked, but burned with rage when it didn’t, and when it eventually broke. Then I took it to the Apple shop and got a new one. That night, though, I stopped. I gazed lovingly at the night sky and recognised it as the most wondrous thing I had ever seen, could ever see; and even though I’d spent ten wasted years not looking at it, that was okay because there were fifty-odd more in which to marvel every evening until I died. The following day the news was revealed.

Read on...

Walking and Walking and Walking

When I was a young boy, my parents used to drag me away on nice family holidays to the Lake District and other places of that ilk and force me to walk: walk through forests, walk through fields (as long as there weren't cows in there, my Mum is terrified of them), walk up hills, walk on roads. I used to hate it, trudging along sulkily by myself either far in front or far behind the rest of my family. I vowed that if I ever grew to like walking I would have become an old loser and would kill myself immediately. When I started enjoying walking I was only about sixteen, so reasoned that I was probably not quite over the hill just yet, and put my cyanide capsule to one side.

At the moment, every time I take a step I feel as if it's my ten-thousandth in a row, and I imagine shooting pains and cramp enveloping my legs as I stagger onwards, my trainers flapping uselessly from my blister-ravaged feet. The reason for this is the mental torture (in a good way) of Stephen King's The Long Walk. I discovered it at the peak of my interest in The Hunger Games, when I was reading any article I could find on the subject, and came across The Long Walk in a piece about dystopian fiction. Interestingly, the parallel dystopian society in The Long Walk is almost completely ignored, with only tantalising glimpses into its opression beyond the fact that any government dissenters are quickly disposed of. The novel instead centres exclusively around the Long Walk itself, an annual walking competition in which a hundred volunteers stagger in a straight line down the USA. The rules are simple: you must stay above 4mph at all times; if you slow down for thirty seconds you are warned; you get three warnings, and next time you slow down you get a "ticket", or are shot in the head in the parlance of our times. The last man standing wins "the Prize", whatever he desires for the rest of his life.

The dystopia is used only as a sideshow, the main attraction being the endurance challenge of the competition, the mental battle that duels with the fatigue of constant walking to produce a hellish concoction. It's a fascinating story of how, when your life is on the line, a will to survive overtakes tiredness. You live on the road with these boys as one by one they go insane, suffer intense cramps, or simply drop dead after pushing their bodies to the max, and the intensity of the thing warps your mind. I've always thought of Stephen King as a bit of a pulp writer until now, but after The Long Walk I've come to appreciate what a truly great writer he is, and think I'll look into some of his other novels. I'm sure there are a lot of things he can teach me about horror. And as for the Long Walk, at the moment I feel like it's something I might want to have a little bash at, a twenty-four hour version, just to see if I can do it, to appreciate all the more the emotion of the novel. It reminds me of when I wanted to pretend to be homeless for a while and I've doen that, so maybe if I can set aside a weekend and a few days recovery, my own Long Walk may be in my future.

The Retiarius: Ladyboy of the Gladiatorial Arena

Not as hard as he looks, apparently

I've always thought that retiarii, the gladiators who carried nets to catch their enemies and tridents to spear them, seem like really hard thugs, so I was surprised to find out that these fish-men were instead considered the lowliest and girliest form of gladiator, often reduced to opening tournaments for comic relief. Because retiarii were often paired with stronger, sword-weilding gladiators, their MO was to move quickly, dodging blows while looking for an opportunity to net and spear their prey. As they had to duck and dive they wore little armour, and this fact made them stand out as being less masculine in a society where it was strangely thought that the more armour you wore, the tougher you were. Also, the crowd were unhappy with the manner of evasion and tactics the retiarii displayed in the arena, believing that it was far more sporting for gladiators to simply go toe-to-toe and slug it out to the death in a raw test of strength.

Unlike nearly all gladiators, retiarii didn't wear helmets as they couldn't afford to compromise their vision, and this meant that the cloak of anonymity and mystique that hid famous gladiators did not cover them, and they had more in common with the naked slaves sentenced to fight to death in the arena than with their peers. Consequently, they were seen openly as slaves, rather than warriors, and were forced to live in the scummiest of quarters. The emperor Caligula made it a habit to sentence any losing retiarius to death should they survive their contest. There's a whole wealth of brilliant information out there about the different types of gladiators and how and why they fought, which is why I was disappointed when I went to Rome and there was no museum to tell me all about them, just a decaying Colliseum ravaged by time. I was forced to get my knowledge from the brilliant tv series Spartacus: Blood and Sand, which I'm sure is as historically inaccurate as it is exciting, and that would make it very inaccurate indeed. The retiarius always seemed to me like a fascinating character in the way it imaginatively subverted the original stock gladiator, maybe a forerunner in imaginative combat characters that would eventually lead to men with stretchable arms and electric shock powers in Streetfighter 2, but it sadly turns out that they were just scrubbers, shunned for their use of cunning and pace in the face of brute strength.

Mockingjay in Negative

On to the final book of the Hunger Games trilogy, and that insatiable desire to devour pages at warp-speed to get to the end of the story completely waned, and I finished reading the story at something like my normal reading pace. Whatever that indefinable quality that the first two had that made me desperate to keep flipping pages vanished just as mysteriously as it appeared. I still thought the final book was very good, but at times it didn't seem as if Suzanne Collins was enjoying herself that much, like she just wanted to get through it, and it only really got compelling when she managed to twist the tale around to a Games-type scenario for the last hundred or so pages. Everything else was interesting, but a lot of it could have been summarised. These are the pressures of deadlines, I guess, it's hard to keep the writing as tight as possible when there are publishers badgering you night and day to finish.

What struck me as most interesting about the finale was the negativity of much of the book, and the state of society when the trilogy finished. Surely books like this, in Harry Potter style, are meant to finish with sickly-sweetness and high fives all around, and everybody living happily ever after, but the Hunger Games is a lot more realistic, ending with the impression that no matter what you might change, things will eventually creep back to being just as awful over time. The mood throughout the final book really surprised me, and cemented the series' reputation for me as a cut above most teen-type fiction. I was left feeling glad that there weren't any more books in the series, and as if I'd probably never read anything else that Suzanne Collins writes, but I'll never forget the excitement that the Hunger Games has given me, and I look forward to the day when society takes it on as a serious idea, and I get to watch a load of celebrities running around a forest killing each other instead of sitting in a jungle and eating rats.

Steinbeck's Beautifully Evil America

I love America, and even if John Steinbeck paints a thrilling picture of its horrors, his writing seems to have the opposite of its intended effect on me. Although he puts forward fantastic arguments of the country's man-made problems, every book of his that I've read just makes me ache to be an American, to live in that beautiful country with its wild excesses and rampant commercialism. The problem with Steinbeck is that his depictions of nature are so alluring that no matter how depraved his catalogues of societal ills become, I still can't tear myself away from the idea that to live inside the America of his books would be a wonderfully pure existence. Even The Grapes of  Wrath convinced me that begging for work in a California stuffed wall-to-wall with starving migrants would be a brilliant way of life.

The Winter of Our Discontent is the novel that won Steinbeck the Nobel Prize, and it definitely stands up well alongside The Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden, two of his most famous works, and the two that I had read before Winter. The book tells the story of Ethan Hawley, a man who's spent his entire life doing good and getting nowhere, and finally snaps and uses Capitalism's wiles against it in an attempt to beat the system and become rich. What follows is a total disintegration of morals as Hawley chases respect and a life of gentility, and he's sucked under the current of scum that engulfs those who abandon decency in pursuit of Yankee dollars. But still, what a country. Take away its society and it would be perfect.

Is A Book Read at Lightning Speed Necessarily Good?

I read Catching Fire, the second Hunger Games novel, last week in about two-and-a-half-days, which for me is very fast. Usually, I like to mull over a book for a while, let myself get distracted as I'm reading it and have my train of thought choo-choo off into the distance as ideas inspired by the work flood my mind and make the words on the page go blurry before me, but I devoured Catching Fire like a dingo does a baby. Page after page flew by in my desperation to find out what happened next, and every time I got to the last page of a chapter, however much I tried to fix my eyes to the line I was reading they flew down to read the last sentence, and the inevitable cliffhanger meant I just had to keep reading.

At first I marvelled at how some books inspire this compulsive readability, this all-consuming need to push on and on until there's nothing left of the story, and I puzzled over how I could bring this insatiability to my own work. But then I realised that this might not always be such a great thing. I like the fact that a lot of books I read have asides that make me pause for thought, that they have plots that demand contemplation, that I live in a book for a week or two and get completely consumed by the story and characters, that the sentences are constructed with such care that sometimes I have to read them a second time to get their full meaning and entire benefit of their wisdom. With Catching Fire the words flew by in a  blur, there were no clever and intricate metaphors and pause-for-thought moments, everything was just geared towards making you want to finish it as soon as possible and move on to the next one.

Even as I read Catching Fire I was aware of the flaws in it: that the two male lead characters are very similar, that the book can occasionally be cringey in its descriptions of sexual feelings and relationships, that really there's not much need for the events of the book to take place at all. But that doesn't mean it isn't a thrilling, five-star read, packed with fun and excitement. In fact, if it was a bit more complex and challenging these problems might be bigger stumbling blocks, could take some of the shine off the story's juggernautical brilliance. As it is though, I read Catching Fire so quickly that all I could think at the end was "wow, that's cool" and now I've moved on to a Steinbeck that makes me stare out of the window and contemplate society. It's almost as if books you read really quickly and books you don't are two different art-forms, and each remind you just how great the other is.

Why Can't DBC Pierre Write Anything As Good As Vernon God Little?

DBC Pierre's Vernon God Little is one of my favourite books. I don't think debut novels get much better than this, and racking my brains for the past couple of minutes I've only been able to come up with Catch-22 and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. And look at what followed them (in terms of success, anyway). I don't understand how an author like Pierre can crash onto the literary landscape seemingly fully formed in his genius, and then flounder around paddling on the beach when he should be riding on the crest of a superstardom wave. Vernon God Little is such a perfectly written novel, full of real laugh-out-loud moments, brilliantly-drawn characters, staggering metaphors, and a zeitgeist-pummeling plot, that you'd think Pierre would just be able to reel off another great story every couple of years for life. I don't know what happened to him. His second book, Ludmila's Broken English, began well but quickly became an incoherent mess, gorging itself on nonsensical metaphors and pointless flowery language until it threw up everywhere and left the reader to pick through the garbled story that remained. It was literally full of metaphors that made absolutely no sense, and left you completely clueless as to what Pierre wanted you to be thinking about when you read them.

Still, for me Pierre had enough credit in the bank to mean that I was really excited about reading his latest, Lights Out in Wonderland, but although it's better than Ludmila, it still comes nowhere near the heights of Vernon. Wonderland is full of ideas and there are a few good set-pieces, but I get the impression that what Pierre really wanted to write was a short non-fiction sociology book, but because of his reputation was forced into creating something different, and once again it's packed with words and imagery that just don't fit together.

It must be a funny thing, to achieve so much instant success in an industry where traditionally it takes years of honing your craft to make an impact. As I mentioned earlier, Catch-22 and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest are two of my favourite novels, and widely regarded as two of the best of the twentieth century, yet neither Ken Kesey nor Joseph Heller could replicate their initial success. How could they fail after such phenomenal debuts? To be fair, Kesey's follow-up Sometimes A Great Notion is just as good as his debut but a lot more difficult, and he disappeared into thirty years of acid trips after that, but what happened to Heller, author of the funniest book I've ever read? His other novels must be really bad; I don't think I've ever heard anyone mention them, and I don't want to tarnish his great name (in my head) by picking one up myself.

Now it looks as if DBC might join this illustrious group. What is causing Pierre to be so mediocre, when with Vernon he wrote such a brilliant satire? I can't work out if he's more like a musician than a writer, and spent his life collecting up all his best sentences, greatest ideas, flung them all together in one masterpiece, and now when it's come to the second album he has to start from scratch and can't manage it. Or if he's so bent on replicating the success of his first novel that he's too scared to try something new, to write outside of his proven formula, and so what's come since is just a watered-down version of his initial greatness. It's clear that the talent is still there, and I'll still look forward to reading his next book, but right now my enthusiasm for his work is sliding down a slippery slope, and I'm wondering more and more if Pierre can escape his one-hit-wonder status. Just like when I spent years waiting for Crazy Frog to fulfil the promise of his debut single. He never did, and now he's drunk, destitute, and giving croak-jobs for coppers on the seedy side of the pond.

A Retraction

Now that I'm halfway through the second Hunger Games book, I'd like to retract my previous comments about Panem being a nice place to live. It seems to get more like Birmingham with every page. It's such a wonderful thing to be able to create an entirely new world and society in a novel, to have every tiny detail of it open to your invention. Maybe I'll have to try it some day.

The Hunger Games: Book vs Film

The age-old debate, whether a film adaptation is as good as the book that spawns it, usually has only one answer in the bookish community: the book is better, you philistine. Maybe we should stop complaining and just see them as completely separate entities. It seems a bit pointless arguing: a film being made of a book isn't going to take any potential readers away from the original novel, but instead give the paper version a new lease of life with a brand new set of fans desperate to know more. I really enjoyed the film version of The Hunger Games, and only read the book because I wanted to know more about the world that the story inhabits, and I wasn't disappointed, with a wave of tiny little details crashing into my mind that not only weren't included in the film, but actually would have been impossible to include.

Things like the main character receiving a sleeping potion to feed to her unknowing friend to knock him out while she riskily retrieves an antidote to heal him, how do you get that deceit into a film without some horrible talking-to-camera or unnatural-talking-aloud moment? Conversely, although it's great to sink into your imagination and bring a world to life, isn't it just as wonderful to see a film-maker's vision of that world, fully-formed in front of you. The love interests are quite cringey to read in the book but more realistic than in the film, where they sometimes feel as if they are shunted in because every teen story needs a love triangle. At least there are no vampires. The book is told relentlessly from a first-person view, and I think it would be improved if you had snippets from other characters and an overview of the programming itself as you see in the film, but then you lose some of the intimate voice of Katniss. A film will never be able to allow you into the head of a character in quite the way that a book can, and books leave a lot more open to interpretation in the mind of the reader. But at the end of the day, what does it really matter? Films and the books that inspire them are two sides of the same coin, and they work together in bringing the world of the story to life. The only truly horrible thing about seeing a film of a novel is having to picture the novel's characters as the actors playing them if you read the book second. It's always difficult (Or near impossible) to objectively judge how well either works as a standalone piece of art, as you don't get the benefit of a virgin viewing of both, but in this case there seem to be enough themes that each works by itself and together in tandem.

Although obviously being chosen to take part in the Games and having to murder a load of people or die yourself wouldn't be much fun, I can't help but thinking that in many ways the world of The Hunger Games seems a pretty decent place to live in. The horrors of Capitalism have been removed from the world, and if you can avoid getting into trouble it seems a more peaceful way of life, hunting and gathering in the wild to survive. Big Brother doesn't seem as interfering or dominating as He does in other dystopian fiction, and in many ways life seems to have regressed back to a more simple form, away from work and money and cars and greed. Maybe when I get into the second book of the trilogy I'll find more reasons to fear the regime, but right now, other than the fact that they randomly slaughter twenty kids a year for no good reason, the rulers of Panem seem like a great bunch of lads.