Reading Challenge 2013 Part 2: 40-31
Rather than giving you so much preamble this time, let's just launch into
the next ten shall we?
40) All the King’s Men – Robert Penn Warren
No, this isn’t the first of many ‘I saw the film adaptation first’ novels that I hinted at in my last post, although since reading this I have seen the Best Picture-winning film adaptation. So in answer to your next question, no this isn’t down as low as it is because it paled in comparison with the film with which I was already acquainted.
Actually there was very little for me not to like in this book. It’s an undoubtedly compelling story – dramatic, darkly comic at times, with a piercingly sharp eye turned on small-town American society that can also sweep the whole vista of the American political scene. So why number 40 then?
I actually wasn’t sure what it was about this book that didn’t sit right with me, until I saw the film adaptation. The fact is that although the story and the vision of this book are very good, I felt the writing let it down. It just didn’t actually seem all that interested in itself. A fact not helped by the first-person narration from another of those sort of ‘blank-slate’ type narrators whose lack of personality allows the bigger characters at the heart of the story shine brighter while at the same time becoming somewhat tiresome themselves.
For this and other reasons (which I’m coming to), I think this sort of story works better in cinematic form. Broderick Crawford’s larger-than-life performance as the honest rube turned crooked shyster Willie Stark among other things come to the fore without the distracting filter of narrator Jack Burden’s lack of gravitas. It also just seems to move along at a faster pace, bringing out the little ironies and the rapier-like social critique along the way.
That’s not to say that cinema is a higher art form of course, but in this sense it just served to highlight to me how unfortunately slow and unemotive the book felt to me, when it really needn’t have.
39) The French Lieutenant’s Woman – John Fowles
And no, this isn’t the first of those ‘I saw the film adaptation first’ novels either. Stop jumping the gun on me, you impatient lot. In fact I haven’t seen the film adaptation of this at all… so how do you feel now?
I’m not quite sure even how they could properly adapt this critical dissection of Victorian society into a film – that is, without just chopping up huge portions of the book and putting the flatline romance story straight up on screen. Because Fowles, or at least, the persona of the narrator that he takes on through these pages, is essentially the main character here, and in many ways the main agent.
At its heart it’s a tragedy of star-crossed lovers, fated to meet but destined to break apart, but also an examination - a defence, even - of Victorian society, of the mythology surrounding both it and its reputation for repressive prudery. At times it’s also a deconstruction of the storytelling process itself, and how we weave our own meanings and perceptions into the fabric of reality.
All of which would go a long way to making this a really great book, if only those things were of any great interest to me, and particularly if Fowles didn’t perform it all with so much sweeping gusto and pomposity. It’s not a bad book, truly, but you really have to be into this sort of thing for it to leave any greatly favourable impression.
38) The Berlin Stories – Christopher Isherwood
This is a damned funny one to write-up, I have to say. For one thing, it’s kind of not really ‘a novel’ but one that’s presented by TIME as ‘two novels in one because fuck logic’ (I’m excluding Lord of the Rings from this same indictment as it’s one story told across three books, whereas this is two novels set in the same time and place and featuring many of the same characters… eh, it’s tenuous is what I’m saying)
But moreover, I only read the first of the two, Mr Norris Changes Trains, this year, whereas the second, Goodbye to Berlin, I read nine years ago in preparation for an English course at uni that I didn’t even end up taking. So there’s really a huge interval in between me reading the two, and out of sequence.
Both, though, do follow many of the same kind of threads. It’s a somewhat journalistic approach to storytelling – detached, observant but narrowly focused, while taking in the social-political happenings of Berlin in the 1930s in its peripheral vision.
I can’t say I adore the way Isherwood writes, nor did I find either book particularly mind-blowing. I feel I enjoyed Mr Norris a touch more, if only because the story was a bit more engaging (but possibly because it was read most recently), but ultimately the staid, journalistic feel of both books just left me a little unamused. Again, perfectly good books, just not really my thing.
37) Death Comes for the Archbishop – Willa Cather
I have very mixed feelings about this book. Knowing very little about Willa Cather going in, beyond the fact that she’s one of America’s most beloved writers, but also having heard about her more in connection with My Antonia, I was surprised to discover that this is considered her ‘masterpiece’.
And, having read it, I still am.
For one thing, it’s a very readable book. Readable not just because the prose is not very challenging, but readable because the story chugs along pretty steadily without a whole lot of reflection or introspection, and also because frankly everyone in the book is really quite polite and likeable.
There’s a funny sense while you’re reading it that the book’s title is kind of foreshadowing doom - wondering ‘when’ and ‘in what form’ this death will come - and yet for all the occasions when the archbishop is entering hostile territory in New Mexico occupied by vengeful natives not wanting to be converted, or traversing across hostile terrain with inadequate supplies, and catching illness, and encountering spirit life, death doesn’t actually come for him. Death, in fact, doesn’t come to him, until *spoiler alert* the end, when he’s old, and he dies and whatever. So I think a better title for this book would actually be “Life happens for the Archbishop”.
As with Hemingway though, there’s definitely something I’m missing here. There’s certainly some spiritual exploration, themes of native mythology, territorialism and companionship. But it’s so easy to skim through this book and take the most superficial view of it as a story about a guy who does stuff.
I didn’t dislike this at all, but I found very little to love.
36) Falconer – John Cheever
This book was actually the last that I read in the challenge, so I’m prepared for accusations from Cheever die-hards that I’m being a little unfair to it, with the least possible time given to absorb and reflect on it before ranking (basically a day after I finished it, I ranked all the books).
Now let me tell you this, Ms. Cheever die-hard (yes, Cheever die-hards are all women of ambiguous marital status): I didn’t find there to be that much to reflect on in this book. Similarly to Death Comes for the Archbishop, this prison-set drama reads quite easily, as stuff keeps happening, and rather than getting bogged down in deeper explorations of guilt or indictments of a broken justice system, it keeps travelling down the plotline.
More so than the Cather though, I felt there was potential for this to be something more, if it had wanted to be. I’m not sure if I’m just being influenced by so many movies/HBO series set in prisons, where there is a less ambiguous line drawn between pro- and antagonists. There’s shading here and there in Falconer that the prisoners are sort of treated badly, but there’s also shades of prisoners helping each other to cope on the inside as well as prisoner subterfuge, basically all the hallmarks of any prison movie/HBO series, without actually focusing on one and giving it a proper examination.
So ultimately I found this a little confusing. Like I said, it’s an easy read, and it would be a long bow to suggest that its melange of themes makes it a bad book, but I’ve just found prison more effectively evoked in other fictional works.
35) The Sot-Weed Factor – John Barth
This book was a real challenge. For some reason it was right at the top of my ‘want to read’ list (which dictated a lot of my choices last year, when I could just pick and choose), and then when I bought it from a second-hand book store in Newtown and read the blurb, I couldn’t for the life of me remember why.
Essentially a satirical historical novel, it tells what could only be described as a tawdry alternative to US settlement history, where a great deal of prostitution, incest and sex slavery forms the backdrop of the development of modern-day Maryland.
It’s also an epic slog of a read, with a great many interwoven storylines, all centring around our utterly hapless (unsympathetically hapless and naïve, would be my harsher assessment) protagonist Ebeneezer Cooke and his dastardly childhood mentor Henry Burlingame who acts as Pangloss to Ebeneezer’s Candide, always showing up at opportune times and in a myriad of different disguises.
Aside from being long, and at times quite troublesome, The Sot-Weed Factor is at times also very amusing, but its tawdriness (and its liberal use of a word I never knew existed, ‘beshit’) becomes tiresome at times. I do, though, have to make special mention of a line, possibly the greatest and most classily delivered sexual innuendo. It comes when they’re telling the story of a missionary priest who is captured and stripped naked by a tribe of natives and goes like this:
“The good man struggles, but the maid hath strength, and besides, his foot is tethered. She lays hands upon the candle of the Carnal Mass, and mirabile, the more she trims it, the greater doth it wax!”
“The greater doth it wax!” How good is that? Recommended in some senses, but only if you can manage to sit through it. Also I just told you the best line from the whole book.
34) Tropic of Cancer – Henry Miller
Well, that scoreboard’s been idle for a while – in fact, throughout this whole post so far – but notch up another on the ‘young people wandering around aimlessly trying to find themselves’ tally.
And if John Barth lost a point or two for his overly liberal use of the word ‘beshit’ then Henry Miller loses a tonne of points for his frankly cartoonist use of the word ‘cunt’ in this effort. And not just the fact that he uses it so often, but that he uses it so often synechdocically, as a charming way of referring to the women of Paris (prostitutes, yes but anyway, charming).
Not that I’m a prude or anything, but I get the point, Henry. Move on.
I was inclined to hate this book for large parts of it, if only because I read it quite recently and I’d grown weary of the ‘YPWAATTFT’ style of writing [there has to be a better acronym for this], but at the same time there were a number of high points to this. For one thing, it felt a little bit more like it went somewhere – certainly more than Augie March or The Sun Also Rises did – but it also scored points for just a number of interesting one-liners that it would just casually drop in here and there. Nothing earth-shattering, but just enough to make you stop and think occasionally. One that I enjoyed was something along the lines of “money is the one thing the French mass-produce”.
I’m also hinting at the other thing that endeared this book to me, which was that I felt it gave quite an idiosyncratic dissection of the seamy underbelly of Parisian life, which was particularly interesting to read in light of the recent legislation against prostitution in France. So while it did have some meaningful things to say, it suffered greatly from its otherwise shameless misogyny and the inevitable lack of direction that comes from this type of story.
33) The Big Sleep – Raymond Chandler
Aha! Finally, we come across the first of my ‘I saw the film adaptation first’ selection. The funny thing you’ll notice is that I’ve called this the first of many in this situation, and as the bottom-ranked one, it’s really somewhat high. So foreshadowing what I’ll say later is it really doesn’t harm a book to see the film adaptation first – as long, that is, as the film doesn’t stick too closely to its source material.
Which is basically the problem with The Big Sleep, and why it finds itself the lowest-ranked of the book-to-film pairings. Having studied the film for my HSC Extension English class, I’m really quite familiar with the storyline – convoluted and multi-faceted though it is – and essentially the whole point of genre fiction like this is that it’s very heavily plot-centric. So if you’re following the same storyline and the missing element is you don’t have Humphrey Bogart’s presence, the book is going to be outmatched in the fight to the death.
There are a couple of points, too, where the film diverges from the plot that Chandler laid out, but in those couple of cases I think it did them for the better - or at least it gave it extra dimensions which worked perfectly well, like the added emphasis on Vivian and Marlowe’s relationship (particularly at the end) and the downplaying of Carmen’s character, who plays a pivotal role in an extra ‘twist’ ending which feels a little tacked on, and which the filmmakers prudently dispensed with.
Anyway, that’s more than enough book-film comparison I think. I liked both, but like All the King’s Men I think the film actually handles the material better, which is funny because in so many ways it’s just a shot-by-shot realisation of the book’s story. I’m a fickle one really, aren’t I?
32) Under the Volcano – Malcolm Lowry
I’d heard so many good things about this book, so I went in with pretty high expectations. Expectations that were soon deflated, somewhat, when I realised this was a Ulysses-esque ‘all in one day’ stream of consciousness narrative.
So obviously I found it a somewhat difficult read, but compared with my experience with Ulysses there were more rewarding parts to this.
Primarily its portrayal of alcoholic stupor, which it largely centres around, given that it is the story of a drunken wretch in Mexico, whose estranged wife returns in a last-ditch effort at reconciliation, only to find that he’s far worse gone than anybody, including himself, realised. It’s sometimes harrowing, but it deftly captures that increasing sense of unreality.
At various times I was inclined to hate it, but strangely enough, it was the very last line of the book that managed to convince me otherwise, and that resurfaced in my memory while doing the sort. I won’t ruin it here obviously, and telling you the last line out of context of the rest of the book would have no effect, but suffice to say it is absolutely brilliant in all of my favourite ways. Darkly comic and absurd is all I will say. It was the high saving grace of a reading struggle.
31) Money – Martin Amis
Yes, sound your alarm bells, there’s another Amis on my list, and it’s not right at the bottom! The truth is that while Amis remains for me the epitome of curmudgeonly cynicism (basically, hatred of everything), I did enjoy this book a lot more than others of his that I’ve read.
And enjoy is the critical word here, because the truth is I didn’t get a whole lot of deep meaning out of this story. It’s oddly detached and more than a little disjointed as it chronicles the overpaid exploits of a yuppie flitting between the UK and the US trying to get some trumped-up trashy film made.
But although, as with the other Amis works I’ve read, there’s a real mean-spirited edge to this, not just cynical but almost cruel, I found that OK here because the exploits were told in an entertaining way that was at times really very amusing.
There’s also the added mystery element to this book, which is never satisfactorily resolved, but does keep you guessing as to who/what/why the hidden menace to our protagonist is. While everything else could almost read like another aimless wandering story, it’s that sword of Damocles-style threat that kept me intrigued even while I was inclined to hate the story and all of its characters.
It’s not the most charming of reads, but it’s nevertheless engaging.
40) All the King’s Men – Robert Penn Warren
No, this isn’t the first of many ‘I saw the film adaptation first’ novels that I hinted at in my last post, although since reading this I have seen the Best Picture-winning film adaptation. So in answer to your next question, no this isn’t down as low as it is because it paled in comparison with the film with which I was already acquainted.
Actually there was very little for me not to like in this book. It’s an undoubtedly compelling story – dramatic, darkly comic at times, with a piercingly sharp eye turned on small-town American society that can also sweep the whole vista of the American political scene. So why number 40 then?
I actually wasn’t sure what it was about this book that didn’t sit right with me, until I saw the film adaptation. The fact is that although the story and the vision of this book are very good, I felt the writing let it down. It just didn’t actually seem all that interested in itself. A fact not helped by the first-person narration from another of those sort of ‘blank-slate’ type narrators whose lack of personality allows the bigger characters at the heart of the story shine brighter while at the same time becoming somewhat tiresome themselves.
For this and other reasons (which I’m coming to), I think this sort of story works better in cinematic form. Broderick Crawford’s larger-than-life performance as the honest rube turned crooked shyster Willie Stark among other things come to the fore without the distracting filter of narrator Jack Burden’s lack of gravitas. It also just seems to move along at a faster pace, bringing out the little ironies and the rapier-like social critique along the way.
That’s not to say that cinema is a higher art form of course, but in this sense it just served to highlight to me how unfortunately slow and unemotive the book felt to me, when it really needn’t have.
39) The French Lieutenant’s Woman – John Fowles
And no, this isn’t the first of those ‘I saw the film adaptation first’ novels either. Stop jumping the gun on me, you impatient lot. In fact I haven’t seen the film adaptation of this at all… so how do you feel now?
I’m not quite sure even how they could properly adapt this critical dissection of Victorian society into a film – that is, without just chopping up huge portions of the book and putting the flatline romance story straight up on screen. Because Fowles, or at least, the persona of the narrator that he takes on through these pages, is essentially the main character here, and in many ways the main agent.
At its heart it’s a tragedy of star-crossed lovers, fated to meet but destined to break apart, but also an examination - a defence, even - of Victorian society, of the mythology surrounding both it and its reputation for repressive prudery. At times it’s also a deconstruction of the storytelling process itself, and how we weave our own meanings and perceptions into the fabric of reality.
All of which would go a long way to making this a really great book, if only those things were of any great interest to me, and particularly if Fowles didn’t perform it all with so much sweeping gusto and pomposity. It’s not a bad book, truly, but you really have to be into this sort of thing for it to leave any greatly favourable impression.
38) The Berlin Stories – Christopher Isherwood
This is a damned funny one to write-up, I have to say. For one thing, it’s kind of not really ‘a novel’ but one that’s presented by TIME as ‘two novels in one because fuck logic’ (I’m excluding Lord of the Rings from this same indictment as it’s one story told across three books, whereas this is two novels set in the same time and place and featuring many of the same characters… eh, it’s tenuous is what I’m saying)
But moreover, I only read the first of the two, Mr Norris Changes Trains, this year, whereas the second, Goodbye to Berlin, I read nine years ago in preparation for an English course at uni that I didn’t even end up taking. So there’s really a huge interval in between me reading the two, and out of sequence.
Both, though, do follow many of the same kind of threads. It’s a somewhat journalistic approach to storytelling – detached, observant but narrowly focused, while taking in the social-political happenings of Berlin in the 1930s in its peripheral vision.
I can’t say I adore the way Isherwood writes, nor did I find either book particularly mind-blowing. I feel I enjoyed Mr Norris a touch more, if only because the story was a bit more engaging (but possibly because it was read most recently), but ultimately the staid, journalistic feel of both books just left me a little unamused. Again, perfectly good books, just not really my thing.
37) Death Comes for the Archbishop – Willa Cather
I have very mixed feelings about this book. Knowing very little about Willa Cather going in, beyond the fact that she’s one of America’s most beloved writers, but also having heard about her more in connection with My Antonia, I was surprised to discover that this is considered her ‘masterpiece’.
And, having read it, I still am.
For one thing, it’s a very readable book. Readable not just because the prose is not very challenging, but readable because the story chugs along pretty steadily without a whole lot of reflection or introspection, and also because frankly everyone in the book is really quite polite and likeable.
There’s a funny sense while you’re reading it that the book’s title is kind of foreshadowing doom - wondering ‘when’ and ‘in what form’ this death will come - and yet for all the occasions when the archbishop is entering hostile territory in New Mexico occupied by vengeful natives not wanting to be converted, or traversing across hostile terrain with inadequate supplies, and catching illness, and encountering spirit life, death doesn’t actually come for him. Death, in fact, doesn’t come to him, until *spoiler alert* the end, when he’s old, and he dies and whatever. So I think a better title for this book would actually be “Life happens for the Archbishop”.
As with Hemingway though, there’s definitely something I’m missing here. There’s certainly some spiritual exploration, themes of native mythology, territorialism and companionship. But it’s so easy to skim through this book and take the most superficial view of it as a story about a guy who does stuff.
I didn’t dislike this at all, but I found very little to love.
36) Falconer – John Cheever
This book was actually the last that I read in the challenge, so I’m prepared for accusations from Cheever die-hards that I’m being a little unfair to it, with the least possible time given to absorb and reflect on it before ranking (basically a day after I finished it, I ranked all the books).
Now let me tell you this, Ms. Cheever die-hard (yes, Cheever die-hards are all women of ambiguous marital status): I didn’t find there to be that much to reflect on in this book. Similarly to Death Comes for the Archbishop, this prison-set drama reads quite easily, as stuff keeps happening, and rather than getting bogged down in deeper explorations of guilt or indictments of a broken justice system, it keeps travelling down the plotline.
More so than the Cather though, I felt there was potential for this to be something more, if it had wanted to be. I’m not sure if I’m just being influenced by so many movies/HBO series set in prisons, where there is a less ambiguous line drawn between pro- and antagonists. There’s shading here and there in Falconer that the prisoners are sort of treated badly, but there’s also shades of prisoners helping each other to cope on the inside as well as prisoner subterfuge, basically all the hallmarks of any prison movie/HBO series, without actually focusing on one and giving it a proper examination.
So ultimately I found this a little confusing. Like I said, it’s an easy read, and it would be a long bow to suggest that its melange of themes makes it a bad book, but I’ve just found prison more effectively evoked in other fictional works.
35) The Sot-Weed Factor – John Barth
This book was a real challenge. For some reason it was right at the top of my ‘want to read’ list (which dictated a lot of my choices last year, when I could just pick and choose), and then when I bought it from a second-hand book store in Newtown and read the blurb, I couldn’t for the life of me remember why.
Essentially a satirical historical novel, it tells what could only be described as a tawdry alternative to US settlement history, where a great deal of prostitution, incest and sex slavery forms the backdrop of the development of modern-day Maryland.
It’s also an epic slog of a read, with a great many interwoven storylines, all centring around our utterly hapless (unsympathetically hapless and naïve, would be my harsher assessment) protagonist Ebeneezer Cooke and his dastardly childhood mentor Henry Burlingame who acts as Pangloss to Ebeneezer’s Candide, always showing up at opportune times and in a myriad of different disguises.
Aside from being long, and at times quite troublesome, The Sot-Weed Factor is at times also very amusing, but its tawdriness (and its liberal use of a word I never knew existed, ‘beshit’) becomes tiresome at times. I do, though, have to make special mention of a line, possibly the greatest and most classily delivered sexual innuendo. It comes when they’re telling the story of a missionary priest who is captured and stripped naked by a tribe of natives and goes like this:
“The good man struggles, but the maid hath strength, and besides, his foot is tethered. She lays hands upon the candle of the Carnal Mass, and mirabile, the more she trims it, the greater doth it wax!”
“The greater doth it wax!” How good is that? Recommended in some senses, but only if you can manage to sit through it. Also I just told you the best line from the whole book.
34) Tropic of Cancer – Henry Miller
Well, that scoreboard’s been idle for a while – in fact, throughout this whole post so far – but notch up another on the ‘young people wandering around aimlessly trying to find themselves’ tally.
And if John Barth lost a point or two for his overly liberal use of the word ‘beshit’ then Henry Miller loses a tonne of points for his frankly cartoonist use of the word ‘cunt’ in this effort. And not just the fact that he uses it so often, but that he uses it so often synechdocically, as a charming way of referring to the women of Paris (prostitutes, yes but anyway, charming).
Not that I’m a prude or anything, but I get the point, Henry. Move on.
I was inclined to hate this book for large parts of it, if only because I read it quite recently and I’d grown weary of the ‘YPWAATTFT’ style of writing [there has to be a better acronym for this], but at the same time there were a number of high points to this. For one thing, it felt a little bit more like it went somewhere – certainly more than Augie March or The Sun Also Rises did – but it also scored points for just a number of interesting one-liners that it would just casually drop in here and there. Nothing earth-shattering, but just enough to make you stop and think occasionally. One that I enjoyed was something along the lines of “money is the one thing the French mass-produce”.
I’m also hinting at the other thing that endeared this book to me, which was that I felt it gave quite an idiosyncratic dissection of the seamy underbelly of Parisian life, which was particularly interesting to read in light of the recent legislation against prostitution in France. So while it did have some meaningful things to say, it suffered greatly from its otherwise shameless misogyny and the inevitable lack of direction that comes from this type of story.
33) The Big Sleep – Raymond Chandler
Aha! Finally, we come across the first of my ‘I saw the film adaptation first’ selection. The funny thing you’ll notice is that I’ve called this the first of many in this situation, and as the bottom-ranked one, it’s really somewhat high. So foreshadowing what I’ll say later is it really doesn’t harm a book to see the film adaptation first – as long, that is, as the film doesn’t stick too closely to its source material.
Which is basically the problem with The Big Sleep, and why it finds itself the lowest-ranked of the book-to-film pairings. Having studied the film for my HSC Extension English class, I’m really quite familiar with the storyline – convoluted and multi-faceted though it is – and essentially the whole point of genre fiction like this is that it’s very heavily plot-centric. So if you’re following the same storyline and the missing element is you don’t have Humphrey Bogart’s presence, the book is going to be outmatched in the fight to the death.
There are a couple of points, too, where the film diverges from the plot that Chandler laid out, but in those couple of cases I think it did them for the better - or at least it gave it extra dimensions which worked perfectly well, like the added emphasis on Vivian and Marlowe’s relationship (particularly at the end) and the downplaying of Carmen’s character, who plays a pivotal role in an extra ‘twist’ ending which feels a little tacked on, and which the filmmakers prudently dispensed with.
Anyway, that’s more than enough book-film comparison I think. I liked both, but like All the King’s Men I think the film actually handles the material better, which is funny because in so many ways it’s just a shot-by-shot realisation of the book’s story. I’m a fickle one really, aren’t I?
32) Under the Volcano – Malcolm Lowry
I’d heard so many good things about this book, so I went in with pretty high expectations. Expectations that were soon deflated, somewhat, when I realised this was a Ulysses-esque ‘all in one day’ stream of consciousness narrative.
So obviously I found it a somewhat difficult read, but compared with my experience with Ulysses there were more rewarding parts to this.
Primarily its portrayal of alcoholic stupor, which it largely centres around, given that it is the story of a drunken wretch in Mexico, whose estranged wife returns in a last-ditch effort at reconciliation, only to find that he’s far worse gone than anybody, including himself, realised. It’s sometimes harrowing, but it deftly captures that increasing sense of unreality.
At various times I was inclined to hate it, but strangely enough, it was the very last line of the book that managed to convince me otherwise, and that resurfaced in my memory while doing the sort. I won’t ruin it here obviously, and telling you the last line out of context of the rest of the book would have no effect, but suffice to say it is absolutely brilliant in all of my favourite ways. Darkly comic and absurd is all I will say. It was the high saving grace of a reading struggle.
31) Money – Martin Amis
Yes, sound your alarm bells, there’s another Amis on my list, and it’s not right at the bottom! The truth is that while Amis remains for me the epitome of curmudgeonly cynicism (basically, hatred of everything), I did enjoy this book a lot more than others of his that I’ve read.
And enjoy is the critical word here, because the truth is I didn’t get a whole lot of deep meaning out of this story. It’s oddly detached and more than a little disjointed as it chronicles the overpaid exploits of a yuppie flitting between the UK and the US trying to get some trumped-up trashy film made.
But although, as with the other Amis works I’ve read, there’s a real mean-spirited edge to this, not just cynical but almost cruel, I found that OK here because the exploits were told in an entertaining way that was at times really very amusing.
There’s also the added mystery element to this book, which is never satisfactorily resolved, but does keep you guessing as to who/what/why the hidden menace to our protagonist is. While everything else could almost read like another aimless wandering story, it’s that sword of Damocles-style threat that kept me intrigued even while I was inclined to hate the story and all of its characters.
It’s not the most charming of reads, but it’s nevertheless engaging.
posted by Sean's Beard at 5:46 PM
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