Category: books

A pox upon you. You’re a pack of mudheaded bigots who loathe excellence on principle and though one might cordially wish you all in hell still you wont go. You and your nauseating get. Granted, if everyone I wished in hell were actually there they’d have to send to Newcastle for supplementary fuel. I’ve made ten thousand concessions to your ratfuck culture and you’ve yet to make the first to mine.

THE PASSENGER is unexpected. It’s the funniest McCarthy I’ve ever read – like he sat down, cracked his knuckle and said, fuck you, Pynchon, DeLillo and all your crowd, this is the real music. The book is, by turns, fucking hilarious, tragic, scary, fascinating, heartbreaking and just plain weird.

The Kid was at the window looking out at the raw cold. The snowy park and the frozen lake beyond. Well, he said. Life. What can you say? It’s not for everybody.

Bobby Western is a deep sea diver who’s hired to survey a sunken passenger plane. When he gets inside it, he finds one passenger and the plane’s navigational console missing. You think you’re getting a conspiracy thriller. You’re not. The missing person and the missing navigational gear are the metaphor. This is the story of a man who lost his way, and a man who was in love with his sister: a genius mathematician with severe mental issues who killed herself. This is all sometime in the early 1980s.

Just his daily list of things to do. Pick up cleaning. Call mother. Fuck chickens.

Occasionally, conspiracy thriller tropes rise – and, strangely, whenever they do, the book loses juice. I have seen that people were unhappy that this is essentially a plotless novel. Do not listen to them. This is a book about spooky action at a distance. It is a book of encounters and conversations on a dizzying array of topics, and those conversations are so compelling that you won’t want a conventional plot.

Sometimes you get the sense that McCarthy believes the Twentieth Century actually ended in the 1980s and we just didn’t notice.

I should also note that the Western’s father worked with Oppenheimer on the bomb, and that plays into a lot of what happens.

They carried their skin bundled up in their arms before them like wash that it not drag in the rubble and ash and they passed one another mindlessly on their mindless journeyings over the smoking afterground, the sighted no better served than the blind.

It is intercut with the experiences of his lost sister, Alice, with her cohort of recurring hallucinations. These two threads tangle together towards the end in an entirely surprising way. It is, in lots of ways, a novel of the unexpected, but also one of circularity and inevitability. It had me riveted, and I think it’s a small final triumph, the perfect descending note at the end of an amazing life.

THE PASSENGER, Cormac McCarthy (UK) (US+)

One Comment

During victory marches, captured enemy warriors walked along as proudly as they could – death by sacrifice guaranteed prosperity in the afterlife – but with their hearts in their throats: dying on the sacrifice stone was no picnic, and before getting there they sometimes had to spend months in a cage in the yard of the warrior who had captured them. With white-lipped stares, their eyes darting reflexively here and there, they would watch the crowd waving their little flags and tossing flowers, imagining that eventually one of these bastards would buy a strip of warrior arm or loin in the marketplace to eat in magic tomato salsa on a tostada.

Hernan Cortes and his ragged little conquistadore army shamble into Tenoxtitlan in the year 1519, to discover an alien world ruled over by Moctezuma, a tired and hallucinogen-addled king of a culture run on blood and drugs.

…the reason his office had invested so much in these rituals was that the Tenochca believed in them – or pretended to believe because they brought wealth to Tenoxtitlan, gave the world solidity, and permitted the flow of magic mushrooms and vision-inducing cacti that made life tolerable in a city where everyone worked without cease.

Sometime a little too meta for its own good – the foreword seems to go on forever and it’s too gleeful in pulling its own ending apart – but when it’s focused, which is much of the book, it’s great. These last days of the Aztec Empire are imagined in dirty detail, an experimental meta-historical fiction that roams across many different aspects of the culture and the players, giving a good deal of depth and grain to its lessons.

The priests did as they liked – Moctezuma had given them too much power – and now they could scarcely put two and two together, afflicted with the shakes from excess consumption of leg of sacrificial victim, and high as kites from stuffing themselves with mushrooms, cacti and magic tomatoes.

It does frequently go nuts, by the way. This is one of the moments where the metaness works:

I love this room, said Moctezuma, you can’t imagine how I miss being a priest. Where there were splotches of blood, he saw sprays of flowers. The withered fingers of the hands of great warriors sacrificed during the year’s festivals swayed pleasingly like the branches of a small tree to the beat of some music he couldn’t place, though in a possible future we would have recognised it. It was T. Rex’s ‘Monolith’.

Don’t think you know how it ends – it wanders a little into alternate history possibilities at a couple of points, but the author sets things up so his story-within-the-story both lands, and lands feasibly enough to be pleasing.

By turns deeply interesting, really funny and absolutely fucking chilling, this is a real ride of a book. Don’t worry too much about the fake foreword thing – the book is careful enough in its writing that you won’t miss much by just skimming it and getting on to the human meat of the book.

YOU DREAMED OF EMPIRES, Álvaro Enrigue (UK) (US+)

Comments closed

I got this a full year ago and apparently didn’t note it here. I picked it up from the LRB Bookshop, and it’s sold out now, but I imagine copies are floating around out there.

A unique tribute to a remarkable writer, film-maker and walker, in an edition of only 400 numbered copies – each signed by Iain Sinclair – this 192 page A4 illustrated publication features over 170 contributors, including Peter Ackroyd, Caroline Bergvall, Keggie Carew, William Gibson, Xiaolu Guo, Philip Hoare, Toby Jones, Stewart Lee, Esther Leslie, Rachel Lichtenstein, Robert Macfarlane, Jonathan Meades, Dave McKean, Michael Moorcock, Alan Moore, J.H. Prynne, Denise Riley and Marina Warner.

Featuring original essays, poems, images, letters and reflection from writers, artists, musicians, publishers, friends, critics, booksellers and readers, it is not only a celebration of a unique body of work but also a de-facto history of the last 60 years in experimental literature and culture.

I’m sure much to his horror, Iain Sinclair has become a British cultural touchstone. I remember discovering WHITE CHAPPELL, SCARLET TRACINGS around the age of 19 and being knocked flat by the thing. You have to remember, I’ve spent most of my life living an hour from London, and half my family came from the East End, and so Sinclair’s London rites and quests spoke very directly to the mists of my history.

Iain is a British writer, documentarist, film maker, poet, flaneur, metropolitan prophet and urban shaman, keeper of lost cultures and futurologist.

The son of a Welsh GP, Iain studied in Dublin before moving to London with his wife. His early work was self-published, and he worked as a teacher and labourer while researching occult aspects of the city’s past.

If you’ve read the entire LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN cycle, you’ve met Sinclair – he is Norton, the prisoner-ghost of London. His influence stretches across all the back streets of the London-adjacent writers’ work and all who look for magic in the urban ancient.

Of his later work, I would also recommend AMERICAN SMOKE, which takes him out of London, much to his benefit.

Comments closed

He seemed almost like he was doing his best impression of the way a regular human being walked, but having never seen one before.

Labutut’s recent speciality is fanciful fictional biographies of real scientists. He very much bends the boundaries between novel, essay, reportage and invention, and, as in his previous book, WHEN WE CEASE TO UNDERSTAND THE WORLD, you didn’t always know which was which and what was happening. It was an excellent book.

This one zeroes in on John von Neumann, and is told in a series of statements by the people who knew him. All of which is invented, although the bare biographical elements and timeline are true. Like I said: a fictional biography. And it’s just brilliant.

Von Neumann was one of the scientific/mathematical prodigies of the 20th Century, with a deeply conflicted legacy – initiating our digital world, but using those tools to ensure the hydrogen bomb worked. And the device he used to do that, he named the Mathematical Analyzer Numerical Integrator and Automatic Computer. The MANIAC. And a maniac is how the genius von Neumann is presented – an alien child.

Superbly written – each chapter is its own little story of him, and some of them are fully eerie. Very recommended.

THE MANIAC (UK) (US+)

Comments closed