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.

Cormac McCarthy is Jesus Christ

Reading Child of God by Cormac McCarthy has taught me little that I didn't already know about the author, merely reinforcing my opinion that McCarthy is perhaps the greatest living writer in the world. I've been spending a lot of time over the past couple of years picking up a lot of rules on how to write well and engagingly, and it's remarkable how McCarthy ignores basically every single one of them, yet writes the most compelling and exciting books I've ever come across. I'd like to know if his writing is brilliant because he doesn't know the rules and doesn't need to, or if he knows them but cunningly subverts them. I never could have imagined that an author whose content is basically just "and then he did this, and then he did that" could stand out for me as being a great writer, but McCarthy is certainly this. I've now read four of his books and rate all of them five stars. Apparently he's working on four new novels at the moment; at the grand age of 78 I hope he's got a few more years left in him to deliver some more classics and get the Nobel Prize that he deserves. Reading his novels makes me feel like a little kid sitting next to a fire and listening to a wizened old man telling me the story of his life, and this is a very good thing indeed when that life is full of scalp hunters and demons roaming epic American countryside.

Speaking of the rules of writing, I may have followed a couple I've picked up recently, regarding engaging the senses of a reader and building thought-provoking metaphors, a little too religiously. I thought that my new story, Zombie Mega Apocalypse, was more or less finished, until I read it aloud to my girlfriend last night, and realised that it was way too wordy, and definitely needs another draft before it's ready to be unleashed. Hopefully I can knock a few hundred words out of it at the weekend, and then it's back to the novel. Maybe I need to put the rules of writing to one side and just write, I guess paying too much attention to rules can leave you end up writing just like everyone else, and if I can't be Cormac McCarthy, I want to be me.

Er, No I'm Not Reading The Hunger Games, Your Eyes Deceive You

I try to avoid fad books. I haven't read The Da Vinci Code or The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, and now that their moment in the spotlight has passed, I suppose I never will. It's funny how these books seem to be everywhere at the time: in the Summer of 2005 (or thereabouts) beaches everywhere were packed with people reading Da Vinci, and only six months ago I would see at least two people a day on the train with Dragon Tattoo, now I don't see anybody. These books seem to quickly slip into obscurity after their initial burst of popularity, never to return again. I'm generalising, as obviously there are some exceptions, but I mostly don't find these books to be very well written, although the basic stories are always exciting. They're usually a bit like watching a mad action film, and while I love Die Hard and its kind, when it comes to popular books I'd mostly rather just watch the inevitable Hollywood version than sit and read the book. I also feel a bit embarrassed reading a book that's very popular in public: I know I shouldn't care about what people think, but I really worry that people will see me reading a popular book and think that I'm only reading it because I've had it advertised to me. This is silly I know, but I can't help it. Even writing this, I feel as if I'm being judged as some wannabe cool kid. I feel ashamed.

I love dystopian stuff, so when I heard about The Hunger Games coming out at the cinema I was itching to see it, and it didn't disappoint me. I just found the whole thing so exciting, the world that was laid out in front of me was captivating. There are a few plot-holes and silly bits,  but who cares when a film is this much fun? I immediately wanted to watch the next film, which I knew I'd have to wait years to see. In the following days I became obsessed with the world of the film, desperate to find out any little extra detail. I did a Wikipedia search but had to abandon it for fear of finding things out about the rest of the trilogy. I wasn't really interested in reading the supposedly Twilight-esque teenybopper books, but when I found out that the mad freaks at The Book People were selling the box-set of the three books for only £4.99 (!) I gave into the temptation.

So now I'm in the process of reading the first book, holding it flat on my lap on the train so that nobody can see I'm reading something popular, instead of a book by a Nobel Prize winner that nobody's heard of. And it's really, really good. It has this indefinable quality, page-turnability or something, that just means I have to keep reading and reading, even though as I've seen the film I know everything that's going to happen. It might just be that it's so easy to read that your eyes just flow onwards and onwards, never interrupted by having to stop and work out what's going on. Whatever, it's a brilliant book, and so much better written than I expected it would be. The only other faddy literature I've read has been the Harry Potter books, where I find the story and imagination to be really good, but some of the writing dreadful. Originally I planned to just satiate my appetite with the first book and wait for the films, but with a hundred pages left, I think the book has now overtaken the film in terms of how much I like it, so I might have to whizz through the rest of them too.