A new poster

Hatchards were selling these, along with books, of course. Marvellous!

On being an outsider, and hating Christmas-time

I’m not much of an outsider, most of the time.  Being white, middle-class, grammar-school and university educated does not an outsider make, and I’m a Londoner (suburban division) ALL the time.  However, at Christmas time (say, November onwards), I feel very different.

Yes, being Jewish, even the hypocritical sort, means I approach this “holiday” with a different angle to the normal WASP – who doesn’t love Christmas songs, especially those written by Jews (including the discerning indie favourite, “Fairy Tale in New York”) – but I actively hate this time of year.  Christmas is a Christian festival, celebrating the birth of Jesus, and is a perfectly valid celebration (so he was probably born in July, so what?) for Christians.  I am not a Christian, and I don’t believe Jesus was the messiah, as he’s yet to come, in my book, and it’s gonna be a BIG party when he turns up – beers are on me.  I appreciate that I live in a Christian country, and that this means I will see a lot of Christmas around and about, but I don’t.

I see a commercial feast of tinsel, trees, baubles and robins.  What has any of this to do with the birth of a baby in a stable in Jerusalem? What have turkey, fruit pudding, snow, and reindeer got to do with the saviour of the world (perhaps) – even Santa is a product of the Coca-Cola marketing machine!  St Nicholas has long been relegated to a chap on the side of a delivery truck. There is something rotten in the heart of the Western World, and I think it’s a craving for what religion used to give the vast majority of the population, before the Enlightenment and atheism kicked religious practice into the sidelines – the release of tension and the celebration of life. 

Looking at Judaism, and Islam (although I know very little about the latter), there are festivals of stern, difficult action (Ramadan, Yom Kippur) but there are highly ritualised celebrations of life and God (Sukkot, Eid). The year balances the cycle out, and so you have peaks and troughs of sustain and release.  The same happens in Christianity, if you do it properly – Lent feeds into Easter (don’t get me started on eggs and rabbits), and Advent feeds into Christmas (is Advent a time of restraint? Christians who don’t do things just for the pretty lights, please explain…)

For the secular, however, there is nothing like this in society (the closest parallel I can think of are sporting seasons) – and since patriotism became something to be laughed at, VE/VJ day and the Queen’s Birthday are a lot less important.  The commercialisation of Christmas has filled a necessary void, and it has imposed itself on my life.  In my office, different sections are competing for the most interesting decorations – one office has, I admit, done a very good job with differently hanging baubles (don’t…), but today, I was told off for not “being in the Christmas spirit”.  When retorting with “I’m Jewish, Christmas means nothing to me, therefore, what spirit can I be in?”, I was informed that “I was missing the point”. As far as I was aware, Christmas was about Christ, not about tinsel.

It is only at this time of year that I wish I lived in a society that didn’t give a fuck about the commercialised nonsense this festival has become, and either properly celebrated Christmas, which I would happily ignore, or was somewhere that didn’t celebrate it all.  Call me a Scrooge, call me a humbug, I don’t care – Christmas should be about one thing only, Christ.  He’s not for me, he’s not for atheists, agnostics, and those completely disengaged from religion, so why should I celebrate him – more to the point, why should anyone who isn’t a Christian bother at all?

Days 14 – 17

Day 14 – a book I would recommend for the High School or College reading list… well fuck me, that’s a difficult one.  Anything decent and modern, I’d say, as the national curriculum, at least in my day (Christ, how old do I sound?) had nothing seemingly past the 60s (apart from some Margaret Atwood, whose writing I detest…)

Secondary school children should be force-fed Joyce’s Dubliners (for The Dead, if nothing else – can you top it as a short story, as an observation on life and marriage and social mores, as a snapshot character study?); I also found the Middle English of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales eye-opening, so I’d make the Prologue, at least, compulsory; finally, I’d say that the poetry of one Ogden Nash is worth study, as much as Donne or Milton or any one of the Romantics, because comedy and wordplay are so absent from English Literature in schools – serious, issue-led works are all fine and dandy, and big meaty plays like Othello and Hamlet, or Streetcar, or poetry like the Divine Comedy can allow 16 year olds to expostulate on themes and the like – but to really understand the effect of well-chosen language, read comic verse aloud and then try to work out why it’s funny.

For example, here is Ogden Nash’s brilliant “Fleas”:

Adam/Had’em

That’s all there is, but it’s pithy, witty, and dark.  It tells you a lot about what doesn’t get mentioned in Bible studies, and humanises one of the most enigmatic characters in Genesis.  It plays with New York cadences, and was deliberately written to attempt the world’s shortest poem – it qualifies, as it’s got metre and certainly isn’t prose.  Why isn’t this sort of thing studied in schools?

Day 15 – my favourite book that deals with a foreign culture.  I’ve already covered two books that do this (in Middlesex and A Suitable Boy) and while my pick isn’t a stone-cold favourite of mine, it’s suitable in that it deals, solely, with experiencing a foreign culture: Shogun by James Clavell.  A big historical novel about the political machinations in Elizabethan-era Japan, told through the perspective of an English sailor marooned there who manages to advance, somewhat, in a wildly alien culture, it’s a cracking read, barreling along with vim, vigour and violence.

Day 16 – my favourite book-to-movie.  2001: A Space Odyssey shouldn’t count, because Arthur C Clarke wrote the book and the script simultaneously, as part of the wider Kubrick project, so I’ll plump with Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.  Whilst, in the context of the four behemoths of fiction that came after it, the third in the saga is quite slim, in relation to its forebears, it marked a great leap forward in the depth of storytelling and characterisation that Rowling put across to her audience, and a recognition of their growing maturity.

The film, too, was a great leap forward for the franchise – Alfonso Cuaron came onboard to direct, and ripped up the cutesy kids film atmosphere of the first two films, and made a dark, almost arty movie, where Dementors freeze roses, seasons transition through ghostly montages and the whole feel of the design is one of foreboding. Dark stuff indeed, and one which set the bar for the rest of the series.

Day 17 – a book-to-movie horror story.  This is the thing – a lot of books I’ve read haven’t been made into films, and most of the films I see aren’t ports of books, or are ports of books I haven’t read… but two nights ago, I went with a couple of friends to see Breaking Dawn, Pt 1. Oh, dear, god.  The books are a very guilty pleasure, I will admit, because they are pulpy trash with a hard line in comedic Mormon penetration fantasy – something I can’t resist laughing at.  However, the film was a poorly made, poorly acted, poorly scripted (and that’s a talent, considering the source material – which I enjoyed, but which can’t ever be called literary) and poorly scored advert for the brands of all three leading actors.  Some of the scenes were so bad, the cinema hooted with laughter (apart from one Twihard, who was sternly shushing everyone), which would have been appropriate, if this wasn’t meant to have been a powerful moment showing Taylor Lautner’s breaking free of his wolf-master’s clutches and his dominance of the pack… instead, it sounded like an outtake from the Power Rangers film, a friend pointed out.

I loved it – it was so utterly awful, it’ll be cult watching.  However, as an adaptation of a book, it’s probably the worst I’ve ever experienced.

Days 12 & 13 – emotionally draining, and childhood favourite

Another break, another catch-up.

Day 12 – the most emotionally draining book I’ve ever read, and one which forced me to stop, put it down and wait a bit, is American Psycho, by Bret Easton Ellis.  There are so many stomach turning scenes of creative, highly stylised violence in this book, and at some points, I felt too strung out by what Bateman was doing to his assortment of victims (real or not) I had to stop. Whilst this means I’m probably too wimpy to read hard-edged, cutting social satire, the disciples would say, I simply feel that it was excessive in the extreme.

I know that the point of the book, and the very excessiveness of it, is to hold up a mirror to the shallow and egocentric lifestyles of the rich and vacuous, and to make them squirm in their expensively tailored suits, but part of me feels that it would be more effective if the violence was toned down a notch – people wouldn’t read it to say they’ve read it. All in all, a disgusting, draining, nausea inducing book.

Day 13 – my favourite childhood book

I covered, in my last post, Roald Dahl (in relative depth), as his books got me into reading, and were the first books I read.  However, my childhood reading, as opposed to my junior school/grammar school reading, is typified by one book: JRR Tolkein’s The Hobbit.

The number of times I borrowed this from our local library is lost in the mists of time (and their computer system), but I must have read it over 30 times.  I devoured the story of Bilbo’s hunt for treasure, his battling with Smaug, his riddles with Gollum, the dwarves, the elves and the wizards.  It could be that Tolkein, like Dahl, wasn’t writing down at children – he didn’t write as complicated a story or use as complex language as he did with the Lord of the Rings, but he didn’t do what some authors (and adults) do with children, and patronise.

It’s a dark old story, and told well, in the classic fable style he took into The Fellowship of the Ring, but which turned into a horribly overwrought chronicle in the final two parts of the Ring saga.  It was my first brush with fantasy, and the laguage, the epic sweep, the outlandish but still somehow human characters all struck a chord with me, which continues to this day.  I haven’t read the book in a good few years, but will definitely do so before the grand Peter Jackson epic is unleashed on the world, for good or ill.

Days 10 & 11 – the first novel I remember reading, and the book that made me fall in love with reading….

I honestly don’t remember what the first novel I read was – all I know is that it was something by Roald Dahl.  Likewise, the books that got me to fall in love with reading were Dahl’s.  A master of humour, creepiness, downright scary situations and an iconoclast (what else is Fantastic Mr Fox, after all?), he brought reading alive for me as a child.

Once, at my grandfather’s memorial week (for an explanation, click here), I was sitting there, reading a Dahl book (at that point in my childhood, it would have been Boy & Going Solo), and one of my grandmother’s friends scolded me for reading a book by an anti-semite.  I had no idea, at the time, what an anti-semite was; now, having endured a very small amount of serious anti-semitism and a fair whack of crazed anti-Israel sentiment (yes, a Socialist at university tried to convince me that Venezuela was a more democratic, open and humane place to live than Israel… but that’s a discussion for another place), I understand where she was coming from.

However, I would never stop anyone reading Dahl because of his well-publicised anti-semitism.  It rankles with me that the author whose books defined my youthful reading, who I can still devour, and who even wrote one of the Bond films (You Only Live Twice, since you asked politely), can have been so implacably scornful of my race and religion; it is ironic that the only mention of Jews in his writing (that I’ve read) is the encounter in Palestine at an airfield during an operation in WWII, where he meets a bunch of orphans and their carer.

You have to remember, he was brought up in a Norwegian household in 1920s Wales, went to an English public school and then worked for Shell in colonial East Africa.  It’s not an upbringing which would exactly bring one into contact with the Children of Israel; however, his comments, some of which coming as they did in the mid-80s, were spectacularly ill-judged.  I abhor his views, but I accept that for people of his generation, they weren’t as uncommon as we’d now wish.  What depresses me more is that someone with that much talent, and evidently no fool, was stupid enough to say such things, in public and in print.

Going back to the books, there are three distinct areas, for me, of his writing: children’s books, the adult stories and his memoirs, and the Charlie books.  I loved Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator – these are towering works of imagination, and Willy Wonka one of the great children’s characters.  Utterly believable, the world Dahl evokes is still a twisted mirror to our own.

Of the adult stories, my favourites are Vengeance Is Mine Inc, Neck, and The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar – of the children’s, The Witches scared the living daylights out of me, long before the film had a chance to, and Fantastic Mr Fox is just so subversively brilliant.  Even small children, by the time they’re of an age to read it, know enough about morality to understand that Fox is somewhat of a criminal, but they love him anyway – subversion being the key to surreal, macabre children’s fiction.

Of his memoirs, I certainly preferred Boy when I was younger, and Going Solo now I’m out of education, but both together can be quite affecting.  The scene at the end of Going Solo, about returning home from war, is quite brilliant (echoed, or possibly echoing, GM Fraser’s descriptions of Dand MacNeill visiting Scotland on leave from North Africa) – one of the greatest experiences my generation will never have is travel by boat and train being the only affordable way to reach far flung parts.  Planes, whilst convenient, are so uninteresting, and remove all sense of distance – I’ll stop before I get all Paul Theroux on you all.

The effect his books have had on me is not evident in my writing style – for that I blame a whole host of modernists, as well, retrospectively, as Sterne – but I suppose is much deeper.  I prefer, and have done since reading his works, books with a darker edge, a slightly off-centre, off-balance, uneasy tone, but with humour.  My favourite book, for instance, is about the growing realisation that the main character is a hermaphrodite, whose grandparents were incestuous siblings.  That’s not exactly Austen – likewise, I preferred Chaucer to Dante, and Shakespeare to Milton, because the humour, bawdy and social commentary was pithy and wry, as opposed to the moralising and overtly religious tones, something, I realise, stems from Dahl’s writing.

No matter what the view of Dahl as a man, as a commentator, as an anti-semite, he is still the author of some of the finest children’s English literature of the 20th century, and I know I shall be passing my love for his work long into the future.  Like most geniuses, he was very much a flawed character, but those flaws shouldn’t get in the way of his output.  I do not condone his views, but I shall not condemn his art because of them.

Day 9 – a book I’ve read more than once

This is simultaneously too easy, and pretty difficult.  If I buy a book (as opposed to borrowing it), I want value from it.  Spending £7.99 on a paperback, to me, is the same as spending upwards of a fiver on an album – if it’s worth listening to again, I will, so if it’s worth reading again, I will.  Some people counter this with the argument “once you’ve read it, you know the plot, there’s no joy in reading it again” – I say “Specious!”.

When you read a book for the first time, you immerse yourself in discovery.  The plot, as they say, thickens.  You find novelty in the development of characters.  Plot twists are suitably twisty, shocks shock and awesome moments awe.  This is not lost, exactly, when you re-read a book, but the freshness of it dims.

On the obverse, I find, there is a greater appreciation for the little things.  The best example, and one which shows just how well planned the whole damned thing was, is the Harry Potter saga.  Once I’d read the seventh book, I re-read the entire series, back to back, with little respite.  The plot hangs together brilliantly, and while there are ideas which I’m sure came to Rowling midway through, certain small things do pop up later, mainly to do with the character of Severus Snape.  Much of it, of course, it due to the tying up of the plot in Deathly Hallows; however, the whole was planned in one fell swoop, so I believe, and thus it makes re-reading the saga, as a whole, that much more satisfying.

The other reason I re-read books is for the language.  Tomes mentioned here previously are rich in their linguistic tics – whether playing with certain perspectives, as in Middlesex, or simply using the broad-sweep of Anglo-Indian vocabulary to bring to life what could become a turgid take on family life in A Suitable Boy.  I love reading these two in particular, but others as well (Waugh, Wodehouse, Bill Bryson’s travelogues, Le Carre) for their styles, and the brilliance with which they mould English into their own inimitable styles.

The book which stands out, for me, as a linguistic tour de force, is James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.  Told, in no uncertain terms, by my English teacher at 15 to read this, I was not the most literary of chaps.  I was reading Tom Sharpe, the brief phase of “lad-lit” (Tim Lott, John O’Farrell), and books assigned by the school – nothing, really, was very literary. On reading this, and then re-reading it, to make sure I’d even started to understand it, I was bowled over.

Here was a writer playing with language.  Plot was important, as it was, after all, a semi-autobiographical journey from toddler-hood to student-hood, but the way in which the narrative voice grew in maturity from “moo-cow” to long, flowing passages of angst and self-reflection astounded me.  I was shocked, and impressed, by the monologue and mania in the section at the retreat.  The explosion of emotion at the end, when Dedalus falls in love, was powerful stuff for a 15 year old. I devoured it, and still do; it’s the only book that can take me back nearly a decade – the only thing that makes me thankful for going to my school.  If it wasn’t for being there, I would never have been taught by this teacher, and he’d never have ordered me to read Joyce.

It’s a pity I had to write an essay comparing it to Jane Eyre (really, I ask you: “presentations of school in Jane Eyre and one other book” – I could have been so much more pretentious, and I do believe I wrote over 10,000 words… that essay may in fact still be in the loft) but that did not dim the lustre.  This is, without doubt, the book that got me into reading serious, grown-up, canon-fodder (groan).

Days 6-8 – books that make me cry, are hard to read, and something obscure that should be a bestseller

Day 6 (in the Big Brother House…) – there are many books that make me cry, two of which have already been posted (damn) so I’ll have to go for a slightly embarrasing one: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.  There are plenty of deaths in it, all of which manage to jerk a tear.  As Rowling’s writing matured, along with her audience, she’s been able to slide in some biting political comment, as well as truly heartbreaking scenes.  The death of Dobby, the house-elf, is one such scene.  Laying down his life for his friends, by taking a dagger to the heart, his final act is to spirit the intrepid band of vagrant youths young wizards to their safehouse.  Harry’s burial of Dobby, eschewing magic for hard graft, is plainly, emotively done.

Day 7 – this is possibly the easiest book to choose, and definitely the hardest thing I’ve ever read (in English – attempting to read A La Recherce Du Temps Perdu in French, and bad GCSE French at that, was suicidal folly).  One word shall explain it all: Ulysses. Caveat emptor: I shall update this if I ever get around to finishing Ulysses, and therefore deem myself worthy to fail at reading Finnegan’s Wake.

Day 8 – a book I’ve read, of which no-one seems to have ever heard, and which, to my knowledge, isn’t troubling the bestseller charts (and has never done), is the Mortdecai Trilogy by Kyril Bonfiglioli.  There must be some interest, because I’ve got a reprinted, collected version of said trilogy, with cover quotes by Stephen Fry and other rent-a-blurbers, but not a single person I’ve ever met has even heard of it, let alone read it. Buy it here and laugh your heads off.

Day 5 – a non-fiction book I enjoyed

In my second year of University, reading for a Bachelor’s in History, I took a course on Czech history.  As a case-study of the nineteenth century’s burgeoning European nationalism, it was paradigmatical – the reading list was one of the most wide ranging of that year.  Some of the key texts on nationalism, the rise of, were fascinating to me, someone who, whilst identifying as British, and more specifically English (and even more specifically, a suburban Londoner…), has a ridiculously mixed European heritage (being of the tribe, it’s not surprising).  Identity has been an undercurrent of my life – growing up in a very mixed race suburb, going to first a faith primary, then a secular grammar, and finally a pretty ethnically homogenous University, I have experienced what it feels like to be in different mixes of people and to wonder how you’re perceived.

Eric Hobsbawm and Benedict Anderson took this to another level, to use a hideous cliché. EH is one of the greatest historians I’ve ever read, but Anderson’s “Imagined Communities” was a whirlwind tour on how Nations and Nationalism fit in with Identity, Class and Other Things (lots of Issues and Themes there…)  As a book, it’s a tough one – his prose isn’t always crystal clear; as an historian, he assumes that you know his area of expertise (South-East Asia and South America) as well as he does.

However, once I’d got through it a couple of times, my neurons were firing more than they ever had.  I had, as the Greeks say, a Megale Idea.  The question was “why didn’t England/Britain have a revolution in the 18th and/or 19th century like a large amount of the rest of Europe?” and then “hold on! We had a short-lived one in the 17th”.  Further to this, my overview of medieval economic history that year highlighted two things – the Hundred Years War and the Peasants’ Revolt.  I connected the dots – perhaps the Hobsbawm and Anderson school of thought that showed a consistency of conditions for nation building, nationalistic thinking and revolutions could be applied to the long 14th century in England.

I wrote a dissertation on that idea, and I lost count of the amount of times I read “Imagined Communities” and Hobsbawm’s “Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: programme, myth, reality” during my third year.  Whilst I came to the standard conclusion of a history student (possibly, sort of, you could make that argument guv’nor, to an extent), I did see a definite echo of conditions in 18th and 19th century central Europe with medieval England.  Precisely what, you can ask me for a copy of the dissertation…

Day 4 – a book that reminds me of home

A difficult one, because I live in the place I’ve called home since birth (well, one move, but all the stuff from the first house went into the second one).  To work this one out, it’s time to go to University, and desperately try to remember what I was reading there, that made me think of home.

Not much, is the answer.  The majority of books I read at University were, unsurprisingly, books from the library, or books bought there.  The only book that I borrowed/pinched from home would have been my Mother’s copy of Vikram Seth’s “A Suitable Boy”, the longest single volume novel in the English language, and a ridiculous epic sweep through roughly a year in the lives of four Indian families in the early 50s.

Mum read this once, as is her wont, and passed it to me.  I have since read it every year – along with the Lord of the Rings (it’s so funny, unintentionally so, but still, utterly hilarious) and Middlesex – as part of my literary comfort blanket mind-bath. This is a book you really have to dedicate some time to, and it definitely reminded me, at University, of the people I’d left back in London.  My parents, for either reading or not reading it, my sister (for the book is full of sisters) and my family, for there is nothing if not a focus here on family, close and very widely extended.

Apart from the people, the very act of having to dedicate time to reading it is something that I only do with this book (consider the sheer physical size of it – almost impossible to read at rush hour, and the only book, grudgingly, that makes the e-book reader concept look attractive to me).  It’s an armchair, cup of tea, Sunday afternoon sort of book, one where you do get lost in Seth’s amazingly evocative world.  Like a Victorian novel, the descriptions of place can be wildly overlong, but the modern cadence of his writing keeps me merrily floating along the Ganges with him.

Another reason this reminds me of home is that a large number of the novels in my parents’ house have some connection to India, either colonial or post-Independence – it’s a period my Mother is absolutely fascinated by, and the number of novels dotted around the place set in the sub-continent grows each year.  This is possibly the best, and certainly the biggest – the only other contender for me is Forster’s “A Passage To India”, which I read idly one summer at school, along with “A Room With A View” (but more on my schooldays reading in various following posts).  None of them, though,reminds me so forcibly of home as “A Suitable Boy”.

Day 3 – A book that completely surprised me

Apart from the obvious (books thrown at head, rather painful that…) I don’t tend to get surprised by books.  Excited, disappointed, entranced; disgusted, engrossed, bored – all of these emotions are fired by books, but surprise is not one I can really relate to.

Books tend to find their way into my hands after they’ve got a reputation.  I don’t read books when they’re released (and the very few exceptions come from bankable authors: I’m currently reading “The Marriage Plot” by Jeffrey Eugenides, on my phone (of all places), bought as soon as it arrived in the Kindle Store – knowing how much I loved “Middlesex”, and tolerated “The Virgin Suicides”, I felt this was a low-risk purchase… and I was right) as I tend to find my my mother and aunt do, and pass me the books they enjoyed.

Likewise, once the reviews have been and gone in the papers, I’ll canvass colleagues, wait a few months to see what’s being read a lot on the Tube; then I’ll buy newish books.  Classics, on the other hands, I find difficult.  Perhaps it’s because at school and at University I had enough time for a good few hours of reading at once – I now only seem to be able to read on the tube, which is an hour at a time.  No longer can I read in bed, and so that doesn’t leave much of an evening, after a day in the office, to take the risk on a novel that isn’t already a “banker”.

Only one piece of writing, and I use that term loosely, has surprised me over the last few years, and that is Inio Asano’s graphic one-shot, “Solanin”.  As a plot, it’s pretty standard – recent graduates in Tokyo find their lives dull, and resurrect their university band, while struggling to find meaning in their existence.  However, it is the format that brings this to life – stunningly drawn, without a lot of the cod-pornography that manga and anime fans seem to dribble over, and a really tightly written sense of reality, it works brilliantly.

I was entranced, and I go back to it as one of my favourite books (now that I have rediscovered it in the archaeological dig that is my bedroom, having thought I’d lent it out).  I can think of one other novel that somewhat surprised me, although having known in advance that it was written by IA Sealy, I suppose the only surprise was that I understood it the first time I read it!  It’s called “Red: An Alphabet”, and concerns itself with a love story, surrounded by ridiculously stylised musings on the alphabet and Matisse.  A good book, but most definitely not one for the suitcase, to read by the pool.

I suppose what “surprised” me about both of these books was their form, not their content.  Asano, writing (and drawing) in a medium I’m not used to, hasn’t converted me to graphic novels – although I’d like to pick up Satrapi’s “Persepolis” (having seen the film), and I have bought “Maus”: perhaps these are exceptions in a genre filled, at least to my untrained eye, with a load of teenage boy aimed claptrap – and Sealy, whilst following on from Joyce (there’s a lot more to come from me in this meme about Joyce) in using different forms and structures to frame a novel engaged me more with these forms and structures than with anything he’d plotted.  Even now, I can only remember a few scenes, the overall syllabary concept and an obsession with Matisse.  Nothing of the plot remains.