Kavalier and Clay - Michael Chabon

I had not read Chabon before picking up The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000 - winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2001).  I had seen the film of his Wonder Boys and hated it mightily.  Then I saw that this was about American superhero comics, which I loved as a kid and still retain a fondness for, so I had to have it.

A marvellous book, combining the Golem of Prague and gay Hollywood actors circa 1940, amongst many other themes.  It's something of a monster itself - 636 pages of tightly-wrought, pitch-perfect prose - but I didn't find a single bum note or a passage I speed-read through.  I wallowed in it.  I luxuriated.  The characters were so well crafted that they could do anything and I would still root for them.  Chabon does not do goodies and baddies.  Here, everybody is basically good and a little bit bad.  Even walk-ons like Sammy's feckless midget strongman of a father take root in your imagination.

One of those books I can't recommend highly enough.  Gimme more!

Five Modern No Plays - Yukio Mishima

Having been inspired by The Lady Aoi in the Traverse Plays collection, I quickly got hold of this, which includes Aoi and four other reworkings by Mishima, translated and introduced by his friend Donald Keene.

Two of the plays, it has to be said, don't work very well.  Kantan (Life and Death) and The Damask Drum (Aya no Tsuzumi) are from No's earliest period where dance was much more important than story.  Mishima therefore struggles to timeshift them to a theatre in which text is all and dance more or less irrelevant. 

That said, the use of dance in Sotoba Komachi is beautiful and touching.  This is the story of a ninety-nine year-old female vagrant who meets a young poet in the park and is encouraged by him to recall her long-gone youth.  Eighty years ago Komachi was the girl in the life of Captain Fukakusa.  They mingled in the highest society.  They went to glittering balls.  They danced.  As she remembers, she and the poet dance - and on waltz other guests from that long ago soiree, gossiping about Komachi, complimenting her on her beauty, her grace, her taste in fashion.  And all the time we are watching a centenarian tramp swaying in the arms of a penniless poet.  Exquisite - a coup de theatre every bit as stunning as the boat in Aoi (Aoi no Ue).

The final play in the collection Hanjo (Lady Han) is, like Aoi, based on an original by the fifteenth century master Zeami.  There is no sweeping theatrical gesture: instead, we have a curiously moving study of a mad girl who waits every day at the station for her long-lost lover, but when he finally shows up she refuses to believe it's him.  One of the plays that stays with you long after you finish it.

A Rabbit Omnibus - John Updike (1)

Okay, I should have read the American master years ago, but what can I say?  Better late than never.  This Penguin collection isn't, of course, the complete Rabbit, but the first three instalments, Run, Redux, and Rich.  I'm reading them separately amid my other reading, and will review them here in the same way.

Rabbit Run then, from 1960.  The story of a twenty-something who can't quite come to terms with adult responsibility.  He runs away, literally, three times.  Such a simple story with a handful of characters yet executed with such minute detail that it's like a compressed War and Peace.  There are no stereotypes here, no good guys or villains.  Everyone, down to Nelson the toddler, is three-dimensional, drawn with empathy and compassion.  Thus the tragedy, when it comes, is shattering.  I don't do plot spoilers in this blog, so let's just say I have never, in half a century of reading, come across that particular tragedy in any other novel.  It is one of those everyday catastrophes that we simply don't talk about - and here too, once it has happened, nobody really talks about it.

A stunning read.  A genius at work.

The Devil's Star - Jo Nesbo

The downside of reading a Nesbo is that it means there's one less to look forward to reading.  The Devils Star is Harry Hole at his daunting best.  What I admire about Nesbo is that he manages to maintain the flavour of the series whilst always striving to expand his technique.  There is a scene here, where Harry pushes himself beyond mental and physical limits to try and figure out the killer's code which is superb - a man tripping out, alone in his flat, saying and doing nothing, yet you are completely spellbound.

The mystery is expertly handled, with a convincing red herring and a couple of clever chronology tricks that work especially well.  I certainly didn't guess who'd really done it until Nesbo told me.  And, as for where the killer hid the body of the missing victim ... noir at its blackest.

Best Radio Plays of 1983

Another in the invaluable but sadly defunct Methuen series.  We begin with Wally K Daly's clone caprice Time Slip.  Very much in Ayckbourn mode and very funny. Wally K must be one of the more prolific and long-serving radio writers and is also a very amusing guy.

The cream of the collection for me is Never in My Lifetime by Shirley Gee.  A compassionate study of the Northern Ireland Troubles written at the height of the violence, the play is notable for being non-judgemental: bomber and victim are treated with equal depth and compassion.  I loved it.  Shirley Gee had previously won a Giles Cooper Award for Typhoid Mary (1979) and Never in My Lifetime, in a stage incarnation, won the Samuel Beckett Award in 1985.

The other full-length script here is Martyn Read's Scouting for Boys, an odd but engrossing confection in which an elderly scoutmaster accidentally returns to the stately home where he was once a notably cussed butler.  Alison Steadman and Jeremy Child played the barmy and quite possibly incestuous aristocratic twins.  Great fun.

Gerry Jones's The Angels They Grow Lonely is a short, particularly radiogenic fable about a man who can fly.  In Kafkaesque progression he visits a series of doctors all of whom know about the condition.  There's a lot of it about, apparently, we just don't mention it.

Normally I hate monologues, especially on radio, but I went for Steve May's No Exceptions in a big way.  It's the recollection of an unnamed primary school PE teacher of a kid from a troubled background who could run like the wind but simply couldn't do his reading and his maths.  So he was excluded from sport because those are the rules, no exceptions.  And now, some years later, he's got into car trouble with the police.  A beautiful piece of writing.

The Unlucky Lottery - Hakan Nesser

What is it with Nesser and the clunky titles?  The Unlucky Lottery sounds like a kiddies' book along the lines of The Big Red Bike.  To be fair, the blame surely lies with those who publish the English translations - Nesser's Swedish original was called Munsters Fall which at least has the virtue of relevance.

The lottery here is merely the mcguffin to get things going.  And it justifies one of the great opening lines: "The last day of Waldemar Leverkuhn's life could hardly have begun better."  Then we are back in the familiar/unfamiliar locale of Nesser's not-exactly-Netherlands.

The story is neatly unravelled - with one glorious red herring - but suffers, in my view, from being officially one of the Van Veeteren series, when the semi-retired Inspector isn't dislodged from among his antiquarian books until page 205 and contributes precisely zilch to solving the case.  In truth, he just slows things down unnecessarily.

Nesser really writes top quality Eurocrime.  I recommend him to friends.  Next time, though, I hope to sample one with a sensible English title.

I also recommend Conor Carton's critique of The Unlucky Lottery, which you can find here.

World War II Film and History - Chambers and Culbert

This is a collection of American scholarly articles from 1996.  It has the preoccupations of its time which, whilst always relevant to discussion of the media, are not always relevant to the history thereof.  I'm talking feminism and race.  It is a deplorable fact that the role of black people in WW2 has been neglected in mainstream film and that the role of servicewomen - as opposed to spies, agents and underground activists - was mainly administrative in WW2.

The are two contrasting pieces about a documentary called Liberators (US 1992) which may have bigged-up the role of black GIs in liberating concentration camps.  Sorry, but the colour of the liberators is not the issue in the concentration camp narrative.  There are also two articles about a very late Nazi film called Kolberg (1945) which I have never heard of but which I will now look out for.  The idea was to big up a rather peripheral Napoleonic seige in order to stiffen civilian resolve as Germany was blown to smithereens around them.  Other contributions that resonated with me were Freda Freiberg's paper on China Nights (Japan 1940), which apparently extols the moral virtues of Japan's invasion of China from 1937, and Stephen E Ambrose on The Longest Day (US 1962).

Ambrose is the historian whose books lie behind Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers.  It would be interesting to add papers discussing how those portrayals of war have changed the nature of the debate, particularly given that the issue here is one of accuracy.

The editors, John Whiteclay Chambers and David Culbert, use The Longest Day to illustrate the point in their conclusions:

"In The Longest Day (US 1962), an account of the Allied invasion across the English Channel in World War II, there is not one word about causation.  The Germans apparently lack understanding as to why they should resist.  Allied victory is inevitable, one is tempted to say, because the Anglo-Americans have so many more Hollywood celebrities in leading roles." [p. 151]

The Song of Names - Norman Lebrecht

Norman Lebrecht is a journalist and broadcaster who has written prolifically on classical music.  This, his first novel, published in 2002, is set firmly within the world of highbrow music.  His narrator, Martin Simmonds, is the middleaged chairman of a company that trades in cheap musical scores, counting off the days to desultory retirement.  His father, who set up the company before the war, was a musical zealot who not only published scores but promoted major concerts and managed emerging talent.

For father and son everything fell apart in 1950 when the old man's ward and most-gifted protege - Martin's adopted brother and hero - David Eli Rapaport (Dovidl) inexplicably vanishes on the eve of his heavily-rpomoted Albert Hall debut.

The structure is smart: the 'present', rolled out in present tense narrative, is actually 1990, allowing Martin to be in his very early sixties and therefore still just about active; the middle of the book, one huge chapter in past tense, is the boyhood and young adulthood of Dovidl, 1939-1950.  This is clever and appropriate without ever straying into the flashy.  Lebrecht has no need to show off his literary craft because the book relies on his encyclopedic knowledge of the classical field and his personal experience of being Jewish.  Yes, some of the Jewishness here is just as esoteric as the music.

Here, as just as taste of this heady confection, is a sentence that particularly struck me from page 241:  "In the intro-extrospective schism that afflicts every belief system, Dovidl won the battle of the navel-gazers."

The Song of Names, as you can see from the paperback cover above, won the 2002 Whitbread First Novel Award.  This is no surprise.  In the entire 311 pages only one false note distrurbed my reading delight, one clever flourish too many, and that - sadly - on page 310.  I wish Lebrecht's editor had persuaded him to think again.  Nonetheless, his second novel is The Game of Opposites (2007) and I'm on the lookout.

Morality Play - Barry Unsworth

Shameful though it is, it took Unsworth's recent death to remind me to check out his work.  I scanned through the list and this one leapt out at me.  It's medieval, which I like, and it's about drama, just like my PhD.  I acquired a copy, jumped in - and was immediately blown away with how well Unsworth writes.  He doesn't lay on the history research with the proverbial trowel, yet there are things here even I didn't know about.  Did medieval players really have a lexicon of hand gestures with which to express emotion?  I genuinely don't know but if they didn't they should have and it sounds absolutely convincing in this text.  It is also a murder mystery with a paedophile serial killer on the loose in County Durham.  But that's not what Morality Play is about.  Unsurprisingly, it's about morality and the moral code of the age, which is obviously different to ours.

Most of all, though, this is high literature, plainly but beautifully written with the editorial control of a true master.  It might only be 188 pages long but there is no way this novel is slight.

Traverse Plays - Jim Haynes (ed)

Classic selection of 8 one-act plays from the Sixties.  Not all are original - both Bellow plays are dramatised short stories, but no less effective for the transition, and the Pinget is the famously free 'translation' by Beckett of the original French radio play La Manivelle (known in English as The Old Tune).  Marguerite Duras's La Musica reads like a radio play, with voices 'off' and 'overheard' telephone conversations, but - as far as I can discover - isn't.  I can find almost nothing about George Mully, whose "analytical farce" The Master of Two Servants left me cold and unamused.  C P Taylor's Allergy is amusing enough but for me the two standouts in this collection are the Yukio Mishima (The Lady Aoi) and the Heathcote Williams (The Local Stigmatic).

Mishima's play is startling - when he mentions a 'living phantasm', he really means it, and I can't think of a coup de theatre to match the boat sailing into the hospital room and the way its sail is then used for the denouement.  It is actually a Noh-style play, which explains much but also adds to the wonderment.  Oriental magic realism, perhaps.

Williams likewise regards the stage as a fluid space.  His two principals, Graham and Ray, move seamlessly through several locations.  Their dialogue has a surface gloss of hyper-realism, but it is only realistic in the sense that Edward Bond's dialogue is realistic - what they say is rarely important, what matters is the violence of the ritualised arguments that arise from such trivia.  As so often in Bond, the verbal violence becomes physical as the apparent antagonists collaborate, without any discussion or qualm, in a monstrous assault on a film actor they encounter in a pub.

Both these plays are object lessons in how much can be achieved in one act.  They continue to resonate long after reading and one can only imagine the effect they have on theatre audiences.

None of the plays here seem especially dated but it is sobering to think that only Williams and the Traverse Theatre founder Jim Haynes, who edits and introduces the collection, are still alive.