Dreaming of Babylon - Richard Brautigan

Dreaming of Babylon, subtitled "A Private Eye Novel, 1942", is Brautigan's skewed take on a hard-boiled private eye thriller.  C Card (no first name given) wanted to be a cop but failed the exam.  He is now a completely failed gumshoe, in hock to family and friends, reduced to bumping into blind beggars and purloining some of the spilled coins for himself.  Now, inexplicably, he is offered a paying job by a glamorous femme fatale who puts away beer like there's no tomorrow without ever needing to go to the lavatory.

Card's problem is that he spends his life dreaming of Babylon.  OK, it's not an entirely accurate dream of the historical empire - sometimes he's a band leader on Babylonian radio - but it's a rich source of escapism for a private dick down on his luck.  Even now his luck seems to be changing, his first resort is always to slip into a Babylonian daydream.  This naturally gets in the way of his efforts to borrow a gun with bullets in it.  And even when he's hired, why is everyone else trying to steal the same corpse.

Wild, wacky, brimful of typical Brautigan diversions.  Great fun from a forgotten master.

Gold - Blaise Cendrars

The subtitle says it all: The Marvellous History of General John Augustus Sutter.  Sutter was a Swiss ne'er-do-well who abandoned his wife and children, pitched up in California in the days when San Fransisco was basically a landing stage, and made himself the richest man on the planet, all in the space of a decade.

Then - the twist no one could ever have seen coming - gold was discovered on his land, and it ruined him.

Cendrars was a modernist, himself half-Swiss.  He seems to have spent fifteen years boiling this epic story down to a bare 120 pages.  The result, published in 1924, is startling and seductive.  He declaims what seem to be facts but are probably not.  There is no characterisation, no real development.  Yet this detachment somehow contrives to make the great man's stupendous downfall all the more poignant.

A striking original, well worth discovering.

Ulverton - Adam Thorpe

Amazingly, Ulverton (1992) was Adam Thorpe's first novel, an astonishing achievement in itself, in that it's not a novel in the customary sense.  There are no continuing characters for us to follow, no integrated narrative sweep.  Instead, what we get are twelve excepts from the history of the village - itself, not explicitly located or described.  Each segment has a different voice and a different format.  We begin in 1650 with someone just telling his story, these being pre-literate days in Ulverton (albeit far from the case in history).  We end in 1988 with the post-production script of a documentary.  In between we have journals, a drunken man spinning his tale for more drink, a draft account of being the amanuensis to a forgotten cartoonist and, my favourite stylistically, the description of photographic plates which we don't of course see for ourselves.  Ulverton the village is only a tenuous link; by no means all of the action takes place there.  Instead, the great over-arching link is the land itself, how it is tended, improved, used and even desecrated.

Inevitably, given the truly mixed bag we are offered, some parts work better than others.  For me, unfortunately, the last two chapters (the cartoonist and the documentary) failed terribly.  I hated the former and got just plain bored with the latter.  Personally, I would have ended with the first world war.  The discovery which joins the beginning to the end could have fitted better, and more symbolically, in 1914.  That, though, is personal taste.  Ulverton remains an incredible achievement.  And I liked it well enough to buy Thorpe's most recent novel, Hodd.

Incidentally, what a fabulous cover - the woodcut by Jonanthan Gibbs.  It was that which caught my eye, so it certainly did its job.