The Unbearable Stifling of Being (A Communist)

Communism sounds like the greatest thing in the world when you look at it theoretically. It's just when you put it into practice that it can become about as scary as Fascism. Fundamentally, the fact that you need people in charge of a system that promotes total equality means that the power-hungry will always rise up and warp the system to their advantage. In a world where people are desperate for control it's impossible for any society to be completely democratic, no matter the intentions. And artists seem to be a constant source of misery for the men in the big chairs: they are the ones that have both the minds and the means to criticise the ruling powers, and in Eastern Europe they were supressed as quickly as possible if they dared to speak out against the regime, and some were even pre-emptively silenced, just in case they should become disgruntled.

It is against this backdrop that Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being is set, in post-Second World War and Russian-occupied Prague. My main reason for wanting to read this was that I visited Prague a couple of years ago and absolutely loved the place. The only hangovers from Communism I saw were the amazing public transport system and a Ruskie hat that I bought which caused an old lady to say "Salut, comrade" at a bus-stop, thinking I was a Czech Communist, not an English tourist. So overall, Communism seemed pretty cool to me. But obviously not if you were Milan Kundera back in the sixties. Characters in the novel are hounded by the government into signing documents declaring their support for Communism, while equally harassed by anti-Governemnt protestors into condemning the regime; conversations in private dwellings are surreptitiously recorded and then broadcast to discredit the speakers; people are tricked by government agents into giving away their bodies for blackmail; nobody can trust any person, or even any wall, as you never know what horrors may be lurking behind it, ready to denounce you to the powe-be and destroy your life. Anyone in a position of respect or responsibility is forced to unswervingly dedicate themselves to Communism, lest they be jettisoned into a life of obscurity. It's the mad stuff of dystopian fiction and it's hard to believe how real this oppression was, so recently, and in countries so similar to my own.

One thing we did see in Prague: on the day we left we were wandering about and accidentally came across the Memorial to the Victims of Communism. I'd seen it in the guide book but didn't think it looked that impressive, and maybe seeing it in the picture above you don't think so either, but in person it's one of the most striking things I've ever seen. It shows full bodies receding back into nothing to depict how Communism stripped Czechoslovakia's citizens of their identities and livelihoods. It's hard to imagine a society that would not only crush art and philosophy, but even remove doctors it didn't like from their jobs and leave them to rot in squalor. The Unbearable Lightness of Being is a great book that combines a great story, complicated philosophical musings, and also teaches you about the messed up modern history of a beautiful city. That Kundera obviously experienced much of the fear and paranoia whipped up in the novel makes it all the more vivid. Sometimes I think back to that old woman who thought I was her comrade. I guess Communism treated her well, and she was sad to see it go. Everything is relative.

The First Quarterly Book Battle

I've decided to reward the best book I read of each year with a nice trophyless award, and figured that the only sane way to do such a thing would be to split the year into four, hold a massive scrap between all the books I read in each quarter, and finally pit the four bloodied finalists against each other in a battle to the death, where only one can stand supreme over the pulped carnage of everything else I've read that year. So let's get started, and get the pugilists that I've passed my eyes over between January and March into a cage and arm them with barbed-wire-wrapped baseball bats:

In the first quarter of 2012, I've read the following books: Submarine, Blood Meridian, Porno, White Fang, Post Office, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, A Brief History of Time, and London Fields. Let battle commence!

To start with, I think we can comfortably have London Fields fed rat poison by Oliver Tate from Submarine, as it's the only book I've read so far this year that I didn't like. There were good things about it but they were outweighed by the tedious bad ones, so it's an early casualty of the battle. Submarine, I did like, but after a really good and funny start the book seemed to lose its way the further it went on, and I think I learned more about how not to write from Submarine than anything else. Submarine gets a smack overdose from Porno and crawls into the corner to quietly leave the competition. Porno suffers from the fact that it's never quite going to live up to the amazing Trainspotting, and though the excitement of the continuing misadventures of the characters portrayed so well in the original novel keeps you turning the page, ultimately when I finished the book I felt slightly hollow, and realised it was because the sequel wasn't half as good. A super-charged rabid White Fang leaps at Porno and tears its throat out, words pouring from the wound and leaking all over the arena. White Fang I loved, there are some fantastic moments in it and the whole story really challenges your perspective of the world, but unfortunately it's just a bit small I think to be considered as my Book of the Year. It's more of a novella, and with its energy expended in dispatching Porno, White Fang exhaustedly curls into a ball and gently passes away. Meanwhile, as tempestuous war rallies all around it, Post Office sits on the floor and drinks itself to death. I really enjoyed reading this book, and it's a perfect example of how a well-crafted character (or just a thin representation of the author) can be so enjoyable that a book can be a great read without having too much of a plot, but overall, in comparison with the other books in the battle, I think Post Office is just a little too lightweight to win.

I'm now left with three books, all of which I think are amazing, all of which I rate as five star reads, and I'm finding it very difficult to choose a winner. A Brief History of Time was probably the most fascinating thing I've ever read, and considering I usually find non-fiction a bit of a struggle, I surprising didn't have any problems getting through this masterpiece. I've decided it's not going to win, but I can't really think of any reason why; perhaps it's just the fact that I'll always side with fiction over fact. But Brief History is so good that it doesn't deserve to be slaughtered for the sake of gratuitous sport, so it instead closes its eyes and opens them in another galaxy, at another time, is judged by somebody who prefers non-fiction, and wins the Most Enthralling Book of All Time Award.

So I'm left with Blood Meridian and The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, trading blows to see which will be added to my shortlist for Book of the Year. In this pugilistic competition I've constructed it's tempting to psychologically give Meridian the edge, as the book is so full of crushing violence that in any real fight it would kick the hell out of any book alive. Blood Meridian confirmed my belief, after reading No Country for Old Men and The Road, that Cormac McCarthy might well be the best writer alive, and this is a doubly complimetary statement as an initial look at his work made me think that he was a terrible writer. McCarthy is so good that it's almost impoosible to learn from him: he's a true original and any attempt to take anything from him would immediately smack of horrible plagiarism. I can't wait to read more of his novels. The Wind-up Bird Chronicle was also the third book I'd read by Haruki Murakami, and while with his first two I found some tiny indefinable quality missing, with Wind-up Bird everything came together and made for an absolutely thrilling read, the best surrealism I've ever seen on a page, the most twisted and wonderful characters, and a roller-coaster ride through modern Japanese history that clouded my mind for weeks with thoughts of nuclear war. It's a really tough choice between the two, as I'd have to say that they're both among the top 10 books I've ever read, but I feel like I could read Wind-up Bird again right now, and probably get ten times more out of it than I did the first time, so I think it's going to have to be crowned the champ. Wind-up Bird gets out its big bowie knife and replicating perhaps the best (certainly the most emotive) scene from the book, pins Blood Meridian to the ground and slices its cover away inch by inch like orange peel, leaving Meridian naked and dying on the ground. Wind-up Bird holds the cover aloft and tweets in delight at its victory.

The best book I read between January and March is: The Wind-up Bird Chronicle. Woo hoo!

The Best Simile of All Time

In reading Graham Greene's Our Man in Havana (a great surreal spy thriller), I came across what I think is the best simile I've ever seen. I wish I'd written it down at the time, and I can't find it now, so I don't remember the exact sentence, but Greene described a character doing something "like a human". I just thought this was such a brilliant, emotive way to describe somebody's actions, thoughts, anything, and also sublimely simple.

Describing somebody as "like a human" immediately puts the reader right into the shoes of the character in question and makes them consider just how they would feel in such a situation; it highlights the fragility of the human body and the human mind in reacting to trauma or joy; it allies the reader closely with the character that the simile is being applied to; it accentuates the gut wrenching emotion felt by the character, and lets us know exactly how they are feeling in a way that no other metaphor could.

I don’t think Greene would mind (in his current dead state) if I stole “like a human” from him. It’s an agonising phrase to apply, because you know that there’s probably only one occasion out of everything that you write that you can use it. If you came across the phrase used twice by an author it would seem very strange, and perhaps lose much of the impact from the first time that you saw it, so you’d have to work very hard to find the most appropriate place to drop it. I wonder if Greene agonised over it for years, tentatively dropping it into other novels and removing it before he settled on using it in Our Man in Havana, or whether it came to him in a moment of genius. Maybe it just slipped out and he barely realised it. That’s the true beauty of the phrase: it’s something that at first seems so innocuous, and it’s only when you pause to consider it that you realise how utterly magnificent it is.

Cutting Out Pointless Words

Well I've finished London Fields, and although it does get a lot better towards the end, the 150 pages in the middle that I had to skimread were interminable. There are some really interesting ideas in it, but the book is packed with so much drivel and pointless philosophising that anything good is drowned in a swamp of cleverness. Nearly every guide to writing focuses on getting rid of anything that you don't need, and I've find that this has been about the best advice I've had. Every time I write something I spend a lot of time going through it and taking out as many words as I can, and the piece always reads better for it. I guess this is most pertinent to short stories, and with novels there is more leeway for tangental writing, but the bottom line is that everything on the page should either move the action along or increase the reader's understanding of a character, and there are thousands of words in London Fields that do neither.

I've looked the book up on Good Reads and lots of people on there rave about it and praise it as Amis' best book, so maybe I'm wrong, or maybe I just think Amis is a bit of a nobhead. Maybe reading London Fields will end up being one of the most important things I do in developing myself as a writer. I hope so, because I spent a lot of unenjoyable, slooow time reading it.

Reading Books You Don't Like

Is there anything more tortuous (excluding torture) than desperately trying to drag your eyes through a book that you don't like? Watching a film or listening to an album, the end is always in sight and you don't have to pay attention if you don't want to, but the masochism of reading a horrible book requires your full attention, and every page feels as if it lasts forever. Ordinarily, I'd just put the book down and move onto something else, but it was only when I was three-hundred pages into Martin Amis' London Fields that I realised exactly how much I hated what I was reading, and now I'm too close to the end to stop. It may have been the surprise as much as anything: I tend to like everything that I read, including the backs of shampoo bottles, and even if I don't engage with the story that much I still find it really interesting to see how an author has written what he or she has, and the choices that they've made while crafting the novel. But, other than the fact that I'm going to have to finish reading it because I want to know what happens at the end, I can't really think of anything good to say about London Fields or Martin Amis, except that he knows a lot of words.

It's a rank feeling, knowing that you're picking up a book to enjoy yourself, and having to read a load of steaming navel-gazing dung, featuring three characters whose actions and motivations make no sense whatsoever. The central character, Nicola Six, is spinning a web of deception so unbearably stupid that I'm finidng it confusing whether I'm supposed to believe that the two male leads under her retarded spell are the dumbest people in the history of the world, or if Amis actually thinks a woman pretending not to know what an erection is is believable. It's bad, but I have to finish, even though it's making me miserable when there are so many great books on my shelf itching to be picked up. Maybe the point of London Fields will become apparent when I finish it, but I'm not holding my breath.

Dickensian Inadequacy

I left work early the other day to spend some time outside in the beautiful weather, rather than in my dungeon at work, and was happily working away at my new short story, before stopping for dinner and watching a documentary that Armando Ianucci made earlier in the year about Charles Dickens. And after that, as is nearly always the case when I hear anything about Dickens or read anything that he wrote, I just felt woefully inadequate as a writer. Dickens is like the Beatles: everybody just takes it as read that he's brilliant, but it's rare for people to actually set out examples in front of you to prove it, since it's so blindingly obvious. Ianucci was doing this in his programme though, and every single one highlighted exactly how amazing the man was, how he employed the written word in a way that nobody before or since has ever come close to.

When I'm reminded of his brilliance I immediately want to pick up a new Dickens novel, but I can't immerse myself in his work too much, as the creeping feeling that I'll never be a hundredth of the writer that Dickens was makes me want to pull my eyes out so I can't see the rubbishy words that I write. My subconscious always beats him out of sight: when people ask me who my favourite authors are I hardly ever think of Dickens, even though when I consider him he's clearly heads and shoulders (and chest, stomach, midriff, and most of the legs) above anyone else. But for the most part he needs to be locked away deep in the back of my mind, otherwise I'd never write anything, just like I didn't that night.

Dickens aside, my new story is coming along very nicely, as is the first part of my novel, and hopefully both will be up here to read soon.