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.