The Fourth Quarterly Book Battle

Hmm, I'm running slightly behind on my glorious blood feast of all the books I've been reading: by rights I should now be pitting the books I've read in Quarter One of 2013 against each other, but time slips away so quickly that I'm only just now finishing up last year's carnage. Here's the fight between all the books I read between October and December of last year, the winner of which will go on to contest a grand final of 2012 with the other quarter winners: Haruki Murakami's The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, The Long Walk by Stephen King, and David Foster Wallace's short story collection Oblivion.

Here are the lambs to the slaughter and the roaring lions I read in the final three months of 2012: Narcopolis, Going Solo, Steppenwolf, The Plot Against America, Snow, and The Secret Life of Harry Houdini. This is going to be a tough one, there don't seem to be any lambs...

I think this is the most consistently good set of books that I read in 2012, and accordingly there's a lot of ducking and diving and false attacks as the combatants feel each other out. The slathering crowd is becoming restless, when Snow makes a power move and attempts to place the entire arena under military siege. But what's this? Just as Snow is delivering the order to take the other participants into custody, that fiend Narcopolis sneaks up and injects a filthy superdose of heroin into Snow's bulging neckveins. As Snow drops to the ground its eyes scream "why?", "why am I considered the worst book you've read in a three month period? I'm so good" but unfortunately the competition is just too fierce for it to survive. I really enjoyed Snow and it showed me a battleground dividing East and West I'd never known before, but ultimately it just wasn't quite as enjoyable as the other books. Narcopolis sags from the energy used in delivering the death blow, and suddenly realises it's used all its smack and needs to get to an opium den pronto. It turns nervously to look for one, and lo and behold, a back-alley heroin shop stands right behind it. Narcopolis gratefully enters, but seconds later The Secret Life of Harry Houdini appears from nowhere, pulls down the facade of the opium den, and reveals the lifeless body of Narcopolis floating in his famous Water Torture Cell. "How did he do that?" the crowd gasps. Narcopolis is a brilliant book, one that really fuelled my interest in visiting India, but it's very episodic and struggles to hold together as an individual work; not really a problem for me in reading it, but against such staggering competition in this Book Battle it means it comes up short. Houdini throws a blanket over himself and vanishes, then reappears, then does it again, evading attacks from the other book battlers, until Going Solo has enough and flies a crude fighter plane into the arena, gunning Houdini down before he has chance to disapparate. The Secret Life of Harry Houdini is a mostly great book, unfortunately very occasionally spoiled by the authors' very silly insistence that Houdini was a spy (backed up by very circumstantial evidence). Also, every time it revealed how Houdini performed a particular trick it was deflating to see how easy it was to do. Not that this is the book's fault: it taught me that sometimes things need to remain magic to be magical. Other than its spy stuff, which only covers a few pages out of 600, this is an amazing book about one of the most interesting characters of the twentieth century.

We're down to just three books vying for the title, and since Steppenwolf, although thrilling from first page to last, makes so little sense that it would take me hours to come up with a way in which the book could kill another (unless maybe it turned into an actual wolf), Going Solo swoops for another strike and takes the impenetrable German beast out of the running. I think I need to read Steppenwolf five or six more times to really have a handle on what's going on. I can't believe I enjoyed a book so much despite having no clue as to what was happening, either on the surface or subtextually. It's staggeringly good, but it needs a few years to sink in. Going Solo, Roald Dahl's autobiography of fighting in the Second World War and the dangers of poor organisation coupled with bombs, crashes its plane and stumbles from the wreckage to face The Plot Against America, Philip Roth's goosepimply scary tale of creeping Nazism in an alternative forties America. It's the Nazis against the Allies! I've always loved Roald Dahl, but Going Solo was one book I never read, and after seeing how fantastic it is I have no idea why. The thrill and wonder of his young life that moulded him into a magical storyteller oozes from his early adventures, and his terrifying tales of flying deathtrap planes on doomed missions gives a bone-chillingly individual take on the horrors of war. The Plot Against America, on the other hand, broadens its targets to the international Jewish community, painting a thrilling picture of what could have happened should America have swayed under Nazi control. The most terrifying thing is how far-fetched that possibility sounds, but how little fantasy Roth has to incorporate into the novel to make it seem a distinct possibility. I was left reading through my hands as Jews were steadily vilified by the alternative US government, coming back to the fact that, well it didn't really happen, but then knocked over again when I realised this seeming far-fetched ridiculous hatred took place for real in countries all over Europe. The two combatants strap in to their respective planes for a dogfight, Going Solo in its rickety Tornado, The Plot Against America in its sleek Messerschmidt. In the kind of senseless waste that cost so many lives in World War II, as they dive through the sky for each other the Tornado gives up the ghost, crumbling into pieces before battle can be engaged, and dropping Going Solo into a spludgey pulp on the arena floor. The Nazis win! The Plot Against America just scared me too much not to win.

So that's that: a year's worth of books condensed into my four favourites. I'll be back very soon to determine which of the four will be named my Book of the Year for 2012. Start holding your breath.... NOW!

A Book of Two Halves

At about the halfway mark of The English Monster I was enthralled. The book is set partly in the early 1800s, at the scene of a pair of horrifically spooky mass-murders (that are actually true to life) and the bumbling police attempts to catch the killer, and partly way back in Elizabethan England. The back cover boasts of a character embarking on a journey to trade in human souls, and as fantastical as this sounds it soon turns out that the souls come with breathing bodies attached, and are those of the first black slaves. The hero, William Ablass, sets out innocently to crew a ship, meeting a young Francis Drake on board, and soon finds himself capturing unsuspecting West Africans and porting them to South America to trade with the Spanish. All of this stuff is thrilling: the book jumps between the two time periods easily even though they seem entirely unconnected, and gives a really thought-provoking history lesson. Imagine the fear and plain stupefaction of one day being with your family and people, doing as you always do, and the next being shoved onto a ship by men with weapons you've never seen before, and later being forced into work without pay, never returning to your home again.

It's when the author, Lloyd Shepherd, tries to blend the two strands of his novel that things unraveled for me. I recently read an article on writing which stated that there is one important question an author needs to answer: "why should the reader care?", and with this stuck in my mind I struggled towards the end of The English Monster. It just seemed so desperate to tie things together, and a hundred pages before the end of the book everything that was going to happen was already clear. I've had brilliant (I think) ideas before that have trundled away as I wrote them down, and I wonder if Shepherd experienced this with The English Monster: whether he felt his ending was just as strong as his beginning, or if he found it a slog to get the words "The End" onto the page, unable to string his ideas to novel length. I've only ever struggled to complete a short story, easy enough to abandon if it starts meandering, but I can't imagine the frustration of being 200 pages into a story and running out of things to say. It's such a cruel thing on the author: if I had started at the end and read backwards, by the time I'd finished The English Monster I would be eulogising on how it gets better and better the more you read, but instead I'm left slightly cold at the steady decline of the book.