Texan Cliché

Lay Down My Sword and Shield by James Lee Burke

My excuse now is that we’re in lock-down and my concentration is not great. So I found this on my bookshelf. The only recollections of how it got there is a recommended from the owner of Murder Ink alongside a vague memory that I enjoyed it back then (what was my excuse then?)! Otherwise I recognised nothing about the story.

It’s 1960’s Texas and everyone is hard-boiled. It’s an utterly different planet to the one I live on and nothing about it is attractive or, frankly, believable. Fisticuffs, booze, racism and whatever other Texan cliché you want. He writes well though, particularly in describing the desolate terrain.

One great line caught my fancy:

… my father asked [Woodie Guthrie] what the migrant farm workers thought of the movie Grapes of Wrath, and he said, “Most of the people I know ain’t going to pay a quarter to see no more grapes, and I don’t expect they need any more of this here wrath, either”

Bathing in Pre-EU Nostalgia

The Five Ripley Novels by Patricia Highsmith

• The Talented Mr.Ripley
• Ripley Underground
• Ripley’s Game
• The Boy Who Followed Ripley
• Ripley Under Water

When I was a teenager, I half-heartedly learned French in school. The truth is that in my insular 1960’s world, France may have existed, but it was, to my mind, some kind of theme-park where the real world didn’t happen. The non-English-speaking world rarely appeared on television and was only as real as a novel. Then, in 1975, I went there and it exploded in my face. I’ve never gotten over it. A romantic dream come true.

That’s what I like about the Ripley novel’s. Either Highsmith had the same experience with Western Europe generally or she saw into my heart; I think the former. She herself moved to the Europe of my dreamy 1960’s-70’s and lived and eventually she died there. Most importantly, her amazing psychopathic Tom Ripley had my experience. He is a wannabe European, mesmerised by acting European, gobbling up language and culture at every turn, floating effortlessly between France, Germany, West-Berlin and Italy.

This is not Scandinavian gore. Ripley is not evil; he’s just self-obsessed. He’s self-educated and many readers, I think, find him sympathetic and care what happens to him. Highsmith’s style is to record all the banale details of his day, while revealing his thoughts and doubts, letting the tension that you know is there build until something happens. When it does, he doesn’t have a plan, he just muddles through. It could be me (minus the psychopathic tendencies of course, he-he).

Of course I can now see the warts in Europe too but the truth is: I’d rather not. I quite yearn for the feelings which that early explosion of discovery afforded me and reading Ripley quite stirs them up. It’s like a bit of time-travel back to a period when we were less sophisticated and working very hard at becoming so. Vive les années 70!!

I’ve read the entire series three times now and there’ll be a fourth time in a few years.

Briefs

Review: Counterparts edited by Danielle McLaughlin

Well I never thought I’d say lawyers did anything useful but this little anthology of writing by Irish lawyers astounded me. Mostly short stories, a smattering of poetry intersperses the book and generally goes right over my head as poetry invariably does.

The stories are well written and reveal their authors as very humanistic people, not a quality I noticed in twenty years of dealing with corporate lawyers. The book pairs texts with a brief extract from a true court case (many of them recognisable from the newspaper) and finishes with a short note by the author on why he or she paired that case with his text, perhaps influence or resonance with the theme.

All of life is there: middle-class murderers, old-peoples homes, euthanasia, state torture. Hat’s off to Danielle McLaughlin for a great idea, well executed. The title is good too but I prefer mine!

Landlubbers Take Note!

Review: The Bird of Dawning by John Masefield

What a gem, this is, presented at our last meeting by Brendan¹. One of my favourite genres, sea yarns. The author takes us aboard a racing tea-clipper which sinks; the survivors pass some days at sea and find a sinking abandoned tea-clipper which they save; rejoining the race, we finish with a sprint up the English Channel.

All the above is just an excuse to save some sea-lore with us.  The vocabulary is fabulous covering both sailing terms and all the amazing tools and implements to be found aboard a boat before the information age. A [incomplete] glossary is provided. Written in 1933, it deals with a period when steam was just about to replace sail. Many interesting characters are on board, showing how a life of labour and hard-grind could be an escape from a chequered past.

This one joins my pantheon of top sea-faring books and I’ll be looking out for more by Masefield.

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^{1 … though how, I’m not sure, since we were discussing books by women and neither the author nor any of the characters are female!}

Robert, Charles, … et al

Review: This Thing of Darkness by Harry Thompson

I don’t go in much for celebrities or hero worship though I’ll admit a few scientists and mathematicians have earned my grudging regard. However, Captain Robert Fitzroy of HMS Beagle has now joined my personal Pantheon.

This delightful book claims to be an honest, fictionalised telling of his life and its intersection with the life of Charles Darwin and a whole host of mesmerising people including the first (Tierra del) Fuegians to arrive in Britain and Argentina’s first dictator. Apart from skippering the Beagle, Fitzroy was Governor of New Zealand and the creator of the British Meteorological Service. I’m cynical enough to feel that the author loved his subject too much to display all the warts but trusting enough to feel the truth is nevertheless there in his work. Darwin is painted more critically and comes across as very smart but also very vain and somewhat cowardly.

Promoted to his own ‘boat’ at 23, Fitzroy eventually makes it to rear-admiral, but his career and life are a series of failures (at least in his eyes). A dutiful man, he is burdened with a humanism that brings him into regular opposition with the world. When his superiors don’t ‘do the right thing’, he does, at his own expense, and so eventually bankrupts himself. He chose Darwin as a companion and though bright enough to share Darwin’s insights, he could not reconcile them with his religious beliefs. He sea-trialed the Beaufort scale for his friend Admiral Beaufort. A scientist in his own right, he produced charts of Patagonia, Chile, Tierra del Fuego and the Falklands and studied weather patterns, believing that weather could be forecasted.

This is a stunning adventure novel, which happens to be true. It will take pride of place beside Childer’s Riddle of the Sands on my bookshelf.

 

New Member of the Pantheon

Review: The Weight of Snow by Christian Guay-Poliquin

I have a short list of writers that I read without hesitation. Most of them are never mentioned by my acquaintances so they seem to be a bit outside mainstream popular reading. They are characterised by very even-toned poetic works containing rather human stories with no fireworks. Perhaps the best known are Jim Crace and Graham Swift but others include Hubert Mingarelli and Laurent Gaudé. I am now ready to add Christian Guay-Poliquin to this pantheon.

He is a Canadian writer recommended to my wife (on my behalf) by my bookseller this summer. I could tell from the blurb that it was his second novel. Having read it (in French) I went exploring to find out if it has been translated and IT HAS!!!! Indeed, it turns out that this novel was a sequel to the first so I probably should have read the other (Running on Fumes) first. Never mind! I’ll read it next.

Some apocalypse has occurred, rarely mentioned and never explained. The protagonists are in a cabin in a Rocky Mountain type of terrain with no electricity, one an old man wishing to get home, the other a young man with broken legs.  That’s all I’m saying.

Read it, its worth it.

Update April 2020:  … especially now in a Pandemic!!

Nothing Happens. Repeatedly!

Review: Djinn by Alain Robbe-Grillet

I’ve just read this short (130 pages) marvel, cover to cover, in two sessions and I’m completely exhilarated. My, no contest, best read this summer. Reading The Erasers earlier put it back in my mind; I had fond, vague, memories and decided to refresh them.

(My neighbour, surprised to find me reading it, tells me that anglo-salon readers find the nouvelle vague writers impossibly French.) The book is completely indescribable. It takes place in some kind of time vortex so that by the final page you feel you’ve come full circle, several times, and are starting out again.

A famous review of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot said:

Nothing happens. Twice!

This could be said, in spades, of Djinn. Nothing happens on so many levels; every character metamorphoses into others, the future and the past are confused and the very last line left me gasping when a further conspiracy theory level seems to be introduced.

Go on! Spoil yourself. It’ll take you 3-4 hours to read it and change how you see literature unless Godot already did.

Shit Happens

Review: It Loved To Happen by Leonardo Padura

It Loved To Happen is a quotation from Marcus Aurelius, Roman Emperor (161-180 AD) and is the title of a superb collection of stories from Padura, sadly not translated to English yet. However, I found this one, which contributed the title, on the web if you’d like to sample Padura. It’s highly worth your time.

This is about the real, sad lives of Cubans, many of them outsiders: drunks, prostitutes and gang members, but also “successful” people who end up wondering: “is that all there is?”. It’s written by a man both proud and frustrated to be Cuban. He loves the place but sees self-expression, creativity and motivation crushed by the revolution. We meet Cubans travelling on military services obliged to depend on the generosity of people they meet because they’re so poor, and torn by the temptation to defect at the cost of never returning. Nobody does! Sex is pervasive in the book, reminding me of Pulp’s Common People who “dance and drink and screw / because there’s nothing else to do”.

This is a sad collection but deeply poetic.

Ripping Yarn

Review: Cause for Alarm by Eric Ambler

[ File Alongside: The Wreck of the Mary Deare, The African Queen ]

Not really a review, just a quick mention.  Eric Ambler was one of John Le Carré‘s influences. As well as quite well-written spy-thrillers, he made a decent career writing screenplays for Hollywood.  I was amused to note that his screenplay credits include The Wreck of the Mary Deare, based on the novel by Hammond Innes recently loaned to me by Eugene (and a ripping good yarn it is too).

Ambler’s work is very British, but to his credit, it is very European too.  One feels he would be a Remainer in the Brexit debate. His characters are suave cosmopolitan people, usually with some mastery of a European language or two. Their conversation is the stuff of black-and-white B-movies, quite a delight on the written page; you can easily picture a Robert Donat or Cary Grant in the rôle. I must be getting nostalgic – I also clocked up C.S. Forrester’s The African Queen this year!

Cause for Alarm was written in 1938, and anticipates WWII. It is nice to read about the years leading up to the war in a book written before the war was a fact. Just writing this reminds me of The Riddle of the Sands, another book anticipating a world war, written by our own Erskine Childers and surely one of my all-time favourite thrillers.

This is easy old-fashioned summer reading.

Moon Palace

This is a book by Paul Auster, an American author. It is a story of the travails of an American young man. He is he only child of a single mother and she dies when he is quite young. By and large, life seems to happen to him and when he does make decisions to give life more direction he usually succeeds in making things worse rather than better. Slightly dysfunctional, in “the catcher in the rye” sort of way but not from a psychological problem but rather from poor decision-making (not assisted in decision-making by an experienced adult?). There are a number of coincidences that seem to me a little unbelievable, the storyline isn’t “a gripping page-turner” but I really enjoyed the book – so it must be the quality of the writing that I enjoyed. I suspect that it is the kind of book Don might like.