A Game of Thrones: Page-Turning and Mind-Boggling

Game of Thrones is probably the best thing I've ever seen on tv. Dragons and magic and political intrigue and mountain men called Shagga make it ridiculously exciting and imaginative, and the grey lines between good and evil that nearly all the characters operate on has left me rooting for everybody in the series, even those trying to kill each other. One thing I never thought I'd do though, was read A Song of Ice and Fire, the series of books that inspired the show. By the time I'd watched the first episode, five sumo-sized books had already been released, and with a couple more still due I decided that rather than dedicating a year of my reading time to George R. R. Martin I'd just watch the tv show and forget the books. I can't give up that much time to reading a fantasy series that might go on forever, or be left unfinished when its ageing, overweight author pegs it, when there are so many wonderful books out there that haven't been turned into tv programmes.

This all changed when I rewatched the first two seasons of Game of Thrones in anticipation of the third season starting in May, but unfortunately watched them too quickly and left myself with a week gap of shaking excitement before I could watch anything new. At this point I was consumed by Game of Thrones, desperate to immerse myself in its world, to find out any tiny detail the tv show might have missed, and horribly unable to use Google for more information for fear of spoilers. So I had to read the first book, titled A Game of Thrones to confuse people. I've never been so excited to read something in which I knew every single thing that was going to happen. It truly is a remarkable book. I've spoken before, when I was reading the Hunger Games trilogy, of the problem with a page-turner being that they're usually light on detail or thought-provoking passages, but Martin seems to mix the two, page-turning and thought-provoking, into a delicious cake that he's been gorging on for the last twenty years, since he began the series.

The depth in A Game of Thrones is staggering: tiny details are dropped only to became major plot points a few hundred pages later, insignificant characters are carefully given back-stories that may or may not emerge in later novels, and there's even a whole recent history to the events of the novel, that is only summarised but would make a great story in itself. It's amazing to immerse yourself in what at times seems like an alternative history to the world (but with dragons). It's huge, and brilliant, and if you like the tv show and are thirsting for tiny little extras you really should give it a go. And if you haven't seen the tv show then you're a damn fool.

Monsters of the Raj: R.E. Dyer

Since reading Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh, I've found myself in the middle of a big Indian phase: eating curries and listening to Ravi Shankar, and moving on to another Rushdie book, Midnight's Children. It's actually the second time I've read this masterpiece, but there's so much going on that the first time through some of the events depicted in it washed straight over me. On my second reading I've been looking stuff up as I've gone along, and came across the horrific story of the British Indian Army Officer, R.E. Dyer.

After the end of the First World War, Indians were increasingly noisy about wanting the British to get out of their country and leave them to it, and Britain, desperately clinging to the remnants of their fading empire, were none too happy about the protests that were breaking out. In Amritsar, a few Brits had been injured after being attacked by a mob, causing Dyer, the man in charge of the area, to impose a rule on the street of the attack that anybody wanting to pass through the street would have to do so crawling on their belly, and impose a general curfew on the region. There was tension in the air.

On the 13th April, 1919, Dyer thought it fair, given that the offenders were breaking curfew, to command fifty officers to fire upon a crowd gathered peacefully to celebrate a religious festival. The Indians were in a courtyard surrounded by tall buildings, and Dyer ordered the few exits blocked, and then told his squadron to unload their weapons on the all-ages crowd. Around 1650 shots were fired, and even the British admitted to causing 350 deaths, although Indian estimates are closer to a thousand. The incident became known as the Jallianwalla Bagh Massacre. Perhaps most shocking is that when Dyer was removed from his position and sent back to England in a little bit of a disgrace he was seen as a hero for standing up to the 'rioters',and his commanding officers praised his actions. Living in Britain you don't hear too much about this kind of thing (the British doing nasty things), but the Empire must have been full of mad and ruthless thugs if they approved this kind of savagery. I guess there's a lot of stuff going on right now in the world that the media don't report. Scary!

Magical Realism in the UK

Since I first read Gunter Grass' brilliant mad dwarf chronicle The Tin Drum, Magical Realism has become one of my favourite genres to read. In Magical Realism the wackiest ideas sit alongside narratives that are usually important historical and cultural chronicles, meaning you get to read some fantastic ideas and at the same time learn a lot about the particular country or time period in which the story is set. It got me to wondering if the UK was a setting that would lend itself to the genre. To me the UK never seemed magical enough, but that might just be because I was born and raised here (apart from a few years in Holland) and so the red phone boxes and fish and chips just seem completely run of the mill. So I set about the task sometime last year, struggled a bit to keep the pace up, stopped in November to write my novel, and just recently got back into Magical Realism, while reading The Moor's Last Sigh by Salman Rushdie, and decided to finish my story.

Now I think I'm left with a prime piece of English Magical Realism. There's still a bit of editing to do, but I've got a story about a Cornish giant who wrestles his way up the country to fame and notoriety in the fifteenth century, before becoming a lieutenant to Richard III and fighting in the Battle of Bosworth. In the present day he's dead and buried in the Atlantic Ocean, but something's rumbling off the Cornish coast... I think it's pretty good, and when it's finished I'm going to do my damnedest to get it published.

Book of the Year 2012

The grand year of 2012 may be a very distant memory, but I still haven't handed out my award for the best book I read during that golden age, and the literary community are getting on my back about it. I thought, given the four books that won my quarterly battles have shed enough blood for a lifetime, that for this final installment I'd give them a rest from scrapping and just choose my favourite. So here are the contenders to be named my Book of the Year 2012: firstly, from the icy depths of January-March, the hypnotic Japanese odyssey of Haruki Murakami's The Wind-up Bird Chronicle; from April-June, Stephen King's thrilling dystopian novel The Long Walk; from the icy depths of July-September (it was not a good summer), David Foster Wallace's mind-boggling short-story collection Oblivion; and from October-December, Philip Roth's Nazis-in-the-USA imagining The Plot Against America.

The Wind-up Bird Chronicle was my fourth Murakami novel, and the one I'd been waiting for. I previously found his style and imagination amazing, but was just looking for everything to come together in the perfect package, and Wind-up Bird was that package. It made Murakami one of my favourite authors. Wind-up Bird is the story of a typical everyman (the same as nearly every Murakami main character) whose wife (and cat) leaves him and forces him into a twisted narrative full of fantastical characters and mind-bending adventures. I loved everything about this book and it left me really excited to one day visit Japan.

The Long Walk proved to me that Stephen King is a truly great writer, when previously I'd always put him alongside more pulpy popular authors. It's the story of a not-too-distant-future-sport in which a hundred teenage boys gather at the northern-most point of the USA, and walk as far as they can, non-stop at a minimum of four miles per hour, until gradually they drop and are slaughtered by referees and only one is left standing, the champion, winner of "the prize". I was absolutely mesmerised by this novel, and for a long time afterwards it made me concentrate on every step I took, noticing any tiny niggle, wondering how long I could keep going before I collapsed. In a strange way it was a knackering experience to read as I followed the slowly dying boys as they strived to just keep moving down the road. A phenomenal book, both with a great original idea and told excellently. I'm surprised that it doesn't have a higher reputation, and I'd love to see a film version.

I read a lot and have come across many different authors, but David Foster Wallace stands alone as a truly unique voice. Every word he uses seems to be chosen with scientific precision, and he brings stories to life in a way that I've rarely seen matched. Sometimes he can become a bit too much, and although I would one day like to read his gargantuan novel, Infinite Jest, for now I found it a lot easier to read the short stories collected in Oblivion. Every one concentrates on subjects I would never have expected to be entertaining, and is told in such a way that no other writer could imitate. I've since heard that he's got even better shorts out there, so considering how highly I rated this collection I think I'll be in for a treat when I get around to reading some more of his stuff.

The Plot Against America is a frequently terrifying novel, in which Philip Roth fantasises a 1940s in which the USA becomes progressively infatuated and embroiled with Hitler and the Nazis. At first, it seemed so far-fetched that it was unrealistic, but it's shocking how little Roth actually has to rewrite history to make it plausible that America could have sided with Germany, a possibility that doesn't bear thinking about when you consider the impact such an alliance could have had on our world. Roth focuses his story on a personal level by showing how this creeping Nazism would have ostracised and affected America's Jewish population, and the awful racism his characters endure is made all the worse when I briefly reasoned that it was just fiction, that this didn't happen, but a split-second later realised that, of course, this happened to Jews all over Europe at the time. Scary reading, but brilliantly told, and the fact that the central characters are all based on himself and his close friends and family makes it all the more realistic.

I read a ton of other great books in 2012, but these made the final shortlist, and though it's a very tough choice (I almost decided at the last second to switch to The Long Walk), I'd have to give this prestigious award to the book that made me fall in love with an author I know will be one of my favourites for a very long time, was constantly inventive and engrossing for over 600 pages, and made me desperate to go to Japan. Cue the wild celebrations, my Book of the Year 2012 is The Wind-up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami. And, just for fun, it picks an Uzi off the ground and blasts the hell out of the other three.

It's Been A While

Gosh, I haven’t posted on here for ages. It turns out when you’re trying to buy a house you really don’t have time for anything. So many headaches, so much advice, so very tired. But now we’ve bought one and moved in so things will hopefully get back to normal. I can start reading books at a normal pace, and maybe, shock horror, do some writing too! The manuscript for my novel is tucked away somewhere in the thousand boxes of the move, but once I track it down I’m going to plough on with my second edit, and hopefully soon it’ll be in the kind of shape where I’ll let a couple of people read it, and then send it on to some agents to get some stinging criticism or complete ignorance. Just wanted to let you know that I’m back and raring to go again, and hopefully my beautiful new house will inspire my writing on beyond my wildest dreams.

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.