Brainquake - Samuel Fuller

 Samuel Fuller had a long and controversial career as a Hollywood scriptwriter, director and, ultimately, auteur.   He had an even longer career, almost sixty years, as a novelist.   Brainquake is his last novel, written and published in France in the early 1990s but never published in English until Sam's widow suggested it to Hard Case Crime in 2014.

What a triumph it is, brimming over with Fuller tropes: crime, of course; racism; calculating, predatory women; heroic women; and, ultimately, new life in France.

Paul Page is a bagman.   The trade is almost hereditary - his father was a bookie and bagman.   Mental illness is also hereditary.   His father suffered from brainquakes and so does Paul.   These rosy-tinged hallucinations prevent any attempt at living a normal life.   Paul's early life is so abnormal - he doesn't go to school, his parents have to patiently teach him to speak - that bagman is the only hope for him.   His father's contacts land Paul the best possible job.   For ten years he moves millions of dollars for the Mafia, posing as an independent taxi driver.

He speaks to no one.   He barely speaks at all.   He lives alone, in the house inherited from his parents.   He intereacts with no one except the female Boss and the people he passes the money to.   But then he sees Michelle Troy, a young mother wheeling her baby through the park.   And becomes obsessed.   He is watching Michelle in the park one day - the first time he has seen her with her husband - when, somehow or other, the father is shot dead from inside the pram.

"Sixtyseconds before the baby shot its father..."   That is how you start a thriller of the darkest shade of noir.   And Fuller keeps up that standard for 300+ pages.   And let us not forget that he was well into his eighties when he did so.   The supporting characters are masterfully drawn - the six-foot-plus Black homicide detective Zara, Father Flanagan, the mob hitman who poses as a Catholic priest and has an appropriate method of murder, the Cody brothers, Al and Eddie.   Fuller creates them lovingly but is always prepared to sacrifice them, brutally, where the plot demands it.   Story is everything to Fuller but he doesn't stint on the nuts and bolts of literary craftsmanship.   The prose is crisp, the dialogue punchy.

A fascinating read - rounded off with an excellent afterword from publisher Charles Ardai.   Highly recommended.

Austerlitz - W G Sebald

 I had heard so much about Sebald.   Surely he couldn't be as important as people claimed?   But he is.   Austerlitz is his last novel, published in 2001, the year he died.   It is magnificent beyond belief.

Austerlitz is a novel in 415 pages, consisting of five or six paragraphs and a couple of dozen photos.   Like E L Doctorow, Sebald has mastered the art of incorporating speech into his text without the use of speech marks.   Sebald, however, goes much further.   Austerlitz is the account of the titular character, given over several meetings over more than thirty years, to an unnamed first-person narrator who might be Sebald but probably isn't.   The assumption of many, I know, when the book first came out, was that Austerlitz was Sebald.   That obviously isn't the case.   Austerlitz is Czech and came to the UK in the mid 1930s via Kindertransport.   Sebald was German, wrote in German despite having spent his academic career teaching at UK universities, and wasn't born until 1944.   Germany is a country and German a language that Austerlitz claims to have blocked from his consciousness.

Jacques Austerlitz is the protagonist's real name but he was brought up in Wales as Daffyd Elias, adopted son of a fire-and-brimstone preacher and his English wife.   It is only when he is fifteen or so, after his 'mother' has died and his 'father' has started a long, grief-stricken decline, that the headmaster at his boarding school tells him his real name, though it is agreed he will be Dafydd Elias until he leaves.

Austerlitz becomes a scholar of institutional architecture, which allows him to travel, which in turn enables him to start a thirty-year quest in search of his birth parents.   All of this - peppered with lectures on the building of prisons, hotels and hospitals - related to the narrator, of whom we learn very little, though whatever he does enables him to travel on a similar scale.   Austerlitz's account becomes more layered the deeper he delves.   In Prague he finds a friend of his mother's who used to babysit him.   So she tells him what his mother told her, and sometimes what his father told his mother who then told the friend.    This is a serious business, leading in his mother's case to the ultimate hotel-sum-prison-cum-asylum, Theresienstadt, built as the highest class spa and converted by the Nazis into their showcase holiday/death camp.   Sebald also plays a joking game, seeing how many times Austerlitz can find himself in places also called Austerlitz.   Brilliantly, this also encompasses the Great Eastern Hotel in London.

It all sounds very complicated and avant garde.   In concept, it is.   In practice - on the page - it isn't at all complicated.   We are swept along.   Where a conventional narrative might rely on tension we are moved by delight and fascination.   I devoured it in thirty page chunks, sometimes gorging myself with a fifty-page sitting.   I simply could not get enough.

The Sleepers Den - Peter Gill

 The Sleepers Den is an early play by Gill, mounted at the Royal Court in 1965 when he was only twenty-five.   This, in the collected edition, is a revised version, again at the Royal Court, from 1969.   In both versions the lead actress was the great Eileen Atkins, and I suspect much of the revision was an expansion of her final disintegration in Act Three.

The play is indeed a vehicle for the leading actress, albeit in an extremely wretched, miserable setting.   In that sense it combines classical theatre tradition with the then modish working class, kitchen-sink model.   The life of the Shannons is crammed into a single multi-purpose room in the rundown slum housing they rent.   Mrs Joan Shannon runs the household, which consists of her brother Frankie, her daughter Maria and her elderly bedfast mother.   There is, we are told early on, no Mr Shannon and seemingly never has been.   The title of the younger Mrs Shannon, Joan, is purely honorific.   We pretend that single motherhood was a trend of the late sixties but it was in fact very common in working class communities.   We had a neighbour in that situation and one of my godmothers was the same.

Both ladies I knew just ignored any criticism and got on with it.   Joan, though, shuts out the wider world.   She does not work, partly because she feels obliged to look after her mother.   Maria is too young to work and Frankie brings in the only income.   In fact Joan keeps her mother sedated with pills and treats herself to the odd luxury via the dreaded 'club'.   Now those chickens are coming home to roost.   The 'club' has referred her to its solicitors for non-payment and the Catholic Church has sent in one of its visitors to enquire after the older Mrs Shannon.   We discover, though Joan never does, that Frankie has been working extra hours and has stashed away a the overtime wages; it's only a few pounds but it would be more than enough to clear his sister's debt.   What Frankie is saving it for we never find out.   It's one of those questions that Gill cleverly wants to leave us with.

In the end Joan barricades herself in her world-room.   She even swaps places with her mother.   Is she mad?   Or is she just vocalising her agony?   Another question audience or reader can take away with them.

The March - E L Doctorow

 The March (2005) came thirty years after the legendary Ragtime (my favourite novel of all time and one of my top five favourite movies).   It is less ambitious, more serious, deeper, but just as satisfying.   By this time in his career Doctorow has refined his technique.   We have fewer main characters but they are subtly drawn and fully three-dimensional.

The titular march is General Sherman's devasting sweep through the South, the decisive and destructive culmination of the American Civil War.   I don't know how accurate Doctorow's take is (it is thirty years since I read Shelby Foote's definitive account) nor how many of the characters are historical.   It makes no difference.   Doctorow gives us confidence in his narrative.   We follow Pearl, the slave girl who can pass for white, other displaced and debased Southern women.   The Yankee surgeon, Wrede Sartorius, the renegade rebels Arly and Will, who hijack the negro photographer Calvin.   Not all the characters stay with the march; not all survive to the end.   But through it all the focus is on William Tecumseh Sherman himself, the maverick who wishes he could live alongside his troops.   He cannot sleep, he bears the deepest of personal losses - and he knows that history will mark him as the villain of the piece.   And we also have two brief cameos by President Lincoln himself - a man who suffers even more than Sherman.   The suffering is where Doctorow brushes genius in The March.   I have not read all of Doctorow, who is grossly underpublished in the UK, but what I have read favours the comic over the tragic.   Here, in this late work (he died in 2015) we get the subtle autumnal tone of history, literally marching on.   There is a transcendant paragraph at the very end which sums it all up: "the shadows began to lengthen as the afternoon wore on.   The green of the land grew softer, and the road,, in a slow descent, passed into a valley.   And then there was a dark, thick grove  of pine where some of the war had passed through..."

That is how a master ends a masterpiece.

Hide and Seek - Xan Fielding

 Xan Fielding was a Special Operations Executive agent sent to occupied Crete in 1942 to organise resistance groups.   He was later joined by Paddy Leigh Fermor but they only worked together briefly because they were in charge of separate halves of the island.   Fielding had no active part in Paddy and Billy Moss's 1944 kidnap of the German commander (see below, Ill Met by Moonlight) save that the idea was originally his.

Fielding's account is different in tone to the gung-ho adventure of Billy and the selfdepracating narrative of Paddy.   Fieldings believes that his mission to Crete was a failure and British Command let the Cretans down by not invading.   Command also forced him to lie to his Cretan followers, which causes him profound shame.

Billy's account of the war in Crete is based on his diaries of the time.   Paddy's was not written until the others were dead.   Hide and Seek was written in 1954 after Fielding had revisited the island post-war.   It is therefore a travel book as much as a war book.   It was probably always how Fielding, the lifelong traveller, viewed it.   Born in India, he was brought up in France by his French grandparents and - like Paddy Leigh Fermor, but separately, he walked across Europe from West to East as a pre-war teenager.   When war broke out he was living and working in Cyprus.   It was only the Cretans' vigorous response to the invasion-by-air (history's first) that persuaded him he might have a role to play.

One advantage Xan Fielding has over Billy Moss is that he is a much better writer, better even than Paddy Leigh Fermor who was, eventually, persuaded to accept a knigthood for his literary work.   Paddy is fluent and imaginative, but seems always to be holding back, afraid to impose himself on his own narrative.   That is the key to his friend Xan's superiority.   He gets the balance exactly right.

Xan, who died in 1991, was in later life a translator from the French.   He was the man who translated Pierre Boule's Planet of the Apes and Bridge on the River Kwai.

One Moonlit Night - Caradog Prichard

 One Moonlit Night is possibly the only Welsh literary work that has come close to Under Milk Wood, both in terms of prestige and literary attainment.   Given that Under Milk Wood was a radio feature, One Moonlit Night stands alone as the Great Welsh Novel of the Twentieth Century.   It was written in Welsh and though Prichard was a Fleet Street journalist who lived in London, he did not do the translation (this one, for Canongate, is by Philip Mitchell).

It came out in 1961, when Prichard was 57.   It is the story of a boyhood in the North Wales during and just after the First World War.   The boy, our narrator, is never named but we are clearly meant to assume it is the author.   This lulls us into a false sense of security for the shattering ending, which clearly does not relate to Prichard.   The writing is modernist, more so, in my opinion, than Thomas's dramatic feature.   For example, where Thomas resorts to the Voice of the Guide Book, Prichard's Voice seems to be that of a prehistoric goddess associated with the Black Lake.

On one level we have the everyday chitchat of ordinary people going about their business.   But that is regularly skewered with madness, suicide and death.   One Moonlit Night is light and very dark at the same time, which gives it a unique charm.   Yet Under Milk Wood is infinitely better known and loved.   Partly this is because Under Milk Wood came first, largely because Thomas was famously dead when it premiered (otherwise he would have exploited producer Douglas Cleverdon's gullibility for years to come).   Mainly, though, it's because Thomas wrote in English and Prichard didn't.   There have been radio productions of his sole novel in English and Welsh (Un Nos Ola Leuad), including one this year, but they have never really caught the public imagination.   It's a shame.   I was fascinated, enthralled, and highly impressed.

Albanian Assignment - David Smiley

 Smiley, whom some suggest may have provided le Carre with the name, was a career cavalry officer who spent most of World War II with the Special Operations Executive.   He was a regular resident of the house in Cairo known as Tara.   Thus he knew Paddy Leigh Fermor and thus, inevitably, this book includes an introduction by Paddy.   Other than partying, Smiley and Paddy did not serve together.   Paddy was a Cretan specialist, Smiley served with Billy McLean, in Albania, twice.

The Albanian situation in the second half of the war was even more complicated than the Cretan.   The Italians had annexed the country and only really when Italy surrendered did the Nazis get involved.   At this stage the Albanian resistance, which had always been divided between supporters of King Zog and Communists, turned active against once another.   Smiley and McLean's first mission had been to unite them and get them fighting the enemy, their second was to try and salvage what they could.   Their situation was further complicated, according to Smiley, by Communist moles within SOE Command at Cairo and later Bari.   Smiley and McLean, in the field, were allied with the Zogists but Command ignored their reports and supported the Communists of Enver Hoxha.   Hoxha, meanwhile, contributed to the deaths of serving British SOE officers - again, according to Smiley.

Smiley, like all right-wingers, claims to be uninterested in politics.   He is not involved with negotiations (left to McLean and Julian Amery, who arrived slightly later, both of whom, of course, later became Conservative MPs).  Smiley prefers blowing things up.   He is generous to those who served with him, whatever their nationalities or beliefs.   He really likes Albania.   The fairly slender text is packed with fascinating military details.   It should be noted that Smiley only wrote after he retired from a lifetime military career.   Along the way he had worked with MI6 and served all over Europe and the Middle East.   Before the war he had served in Abyssinia and Palestine.   His tone sometimes jangles the modern liberal ear, but he certainly knew what he was talking about.   As for his personal conduct, he held the Military Cross and bar.   In other words, he won it twice.  That's quite an achievement.

Landor's Tower - Iain Sinclair

 Sinclair's fictions are like his non-fiction: complex, deeply layered, psychogeographic, and filled to overflowing with arcane knowledge.   The latter is what we come for, the rest then seasons the mix.   As elsewhere, we begin with the book-runners, nomadic eccentrics scouring the country for bibliophilic rarities.   On their fringe is Norton, who is a writer on the side.   Some plucky soul has commissioned him to write a novel about the Victorian weirdo-aesthete Walter Savage Landor and his doomed attempt to recreate manorial life in a Welsh valley.

Sinclair is famously the psychogeographer of London.  He was born and raised, however, in Wales.   For Norton, who is really Sinclair thinly disguised, returning to Wales means returning to childhood and a long Welsh prehistory.   Time is irrelevant.   The narrative hops back and forth, action mutates into memory and vice versa.   Again, this is what brings Sinclair fans to the party.   Many of the characters he encounters are or were real.   Celebrity drug-dealer Howard Marks, for example, and a whole troop of American beat poets, many of whom I will now be checking out.   Norton falls for a woman in Hay on Wye who might be real or might be several different women.   Norton spends time in a psychiatric hospital with a bookish doctor who happens be called Vaughan.   One of Norton's manias is for the Georgian Vaughan twins, one a poet, the other an alchemist.   There is also the matter of the club foot which the owner bequeathed to Norton's father, a doctor in General Practice.

It sounds complicated and absurd because it is.   Sinclair is like Umberto Eco, only more so.   Polymath, poet, prose-wrangler and, first and foremost, a psychogeographer.   I find him and his work endlessly fascinating.

The Slab Boys Trilogy - John Byrne

 The great John Byrne, who sadly left us earlier this month, was hailed as one of Scotland's greatest contemporary artists.   But he originally made his name as a playwright, with The Slab Boys (1978), which deals with his life before getting into art school.   Byrne's fictional persona is Phil McCann, who is 19 years old in 1957 and working in the colour preparation department ('Slab Room') of Stobo & Co, Carpet Manufacturers.   His oppo is George 'Spanky' Farrell and their mutual victim Hector Mackenzie.   All are smitten with the comely Lucille, who shows no interest whatsoever in any of them.

It is a play of coming-of-age at a time when tides were turning.   It is a vivid evocation of the industrial life where young lads had very little to do and therefore indulged in high jinks.   It was notably successful around the UK in the late seventies and two follow-ups ensued, Cuttin' a Rug (1979), which takes place the same evening, at Stobo & Co's Christmas bop, and Still Life (1982) set ten years on, in 1967, and then five years later in 1982.

Cuttin a Rug, I have to say, didn't do it for me.   It was originally a radio play, The Staffie, then it became a stage play (Threads), then The Loveliest Night of the Year and finally this.   On radio I can see it working well.   On stage and on the page it reminds me too strongly of Willy Russell's Stags and Hens, one of very few creative works which I actually despise.   The problem is, it is all action 'off'.   The dance is going on in the ballroom and from time to time we are meant to hear what is going on.   The action we see, however, is in the gents and ladies' cloakrooms (Act One) and then the terrace where revellers go to do whatever.   It is, frankly, overwrought.   Ironically, given it is supposed to be the coming of age of the Slab Boys, the standout characters are tea-lady Sadie and the frustrated spinster Miss Walkinshaw.

Still Life, on the other hand, is much more successful.   Phil is now a working artist, albeit unsuccessful.   Spanky is still at the carpet factory but is trying to make it as a musician.   Spanky has married the divine Elaine and they have a baby daughter.   The setting is the Paisley cemetary.   The funeral that brings them together is for poor Hector, done to death with a brick by a man he was having sex with in a cubicle at the swimming baths.

Hector had episodes of mental illness and was sectioned for a time.   Phil's mother had lifelong mental issues (as did Byrne's mother, and with reason - Byrne believed he was the product of incesr between his mother and her father), which gives Phil a reason for attending.   Spanky has simply seen it in the paper.  The narrative thread of Slab Boys was, will Phil get accepted at the art school?   The thread of Still Life Act One is, will Spanky's upcoming appearance on Juke Box Jury lead to better things?

It does, and in Act Two we are still in the cemetery but Spanky is just off a plane from the States where he is a major rock star.   Phil is still a jobbing painter but now he is married to Lucille and has adopted her daughter with Spanky.   He is back in the cemetery to see the memorial stone for his mother.   The play works well.   The jokes are dark but the main characters have all mellowed and the ending is upbeat. 

It should be noted, there is a fourth instalment, making it a tetralogy - Nova Scotia (2008), which I have got hold of but haven't yet read.   Menawhile, surely someone is planning to revive The Slab Boys?  A great play should never die.

Are Snakes Necessary? - Brian De Palma and Susan Lehman

 Another cracker from Hard Case Crime.   I wondered, as I read, how much was De Palma (director of Scarface, Carrie, etc) and how much was co-writer Lehman?   I got to the end and all was clear.   The storyline was definitely De Palma, complete with Hitchcockian twist, and the writing was probably mostly Lehman.   This was far from a bad thing.   One is a visual artist, the other word-based.   They come together beautifully.

It's a story hung around a brief affair twenty years ago, between stewardess Jenny Cours and politician Lee Rogers.   A casual encounter today leads nowhere in itself but has massive consequences down the line.   Jenny's daughter Fanny, a student videographer, gets herself attached to Rogers' re-election campaign.   This causes headaches for Rogers' fixer Barton Brock.   But first Brock has to strongarm a quick separation for a Las Vegas millionaire, Bruce Diamond, and his drop-dead gorgeous latest wife, Elizabeth.   Elizabeth has had an affair with photo-journalist Nick Sculley - they sat next to one another on the plane - but leaves him high and dry in Vegas and starts a new life as an online agony aunt who she sits next to on the bus.   Nick, heartbroken, accepts a gig as onset photographer for a remake of Vertigo being shot in Paris (I did say it was Hitchcockian, right?), where Fanny Cours also shows up, having been booted from the Rogers campaign.

Actually, it's more complicated than that.   Gloriously so.

Even the structure is cinematic.   Short chapters, one or two pages mostly, jump cutting between storylines, all written present tense.   Another, very unusual twist: Are Snakes Necessary was originally published in France, in French, in 2018.   There is apparently a second novel stuck in works.