Category: books

The telegram, addressed to the man who had hired me to investigate the case, said briefly and somewhat obliquely that they were never coming back: “WHAT ARE WE LETTING IN WHEN WE SAY GOODBYE?”

A fascinating short novel, beginning as a weird detective story and ending in a descent into living folklore. There may be something about this first quarter of the 21st Century – I feel like I’ve read a lot of novels, particularly in the last ten years, that are about the emergence of myth, legend and folklore into the contemporary moment. Eruptions of old dreams into modern day.

The case of the woman who disappeared behind a whirlwind. The case of the castrated men. The case of the woman who gave her hand, literally. Without realizing it. The case of the man who lived inside a whale for years.

The detective is hired to find a missing couple – really, a missing wife and the person she vanished with – and finds herself in the Siberian taiga, tied to a translator and getting lost in a forest of stories. I’ve seen people tempted to see the book as Latin American magical realism, but that feels lazy. The fairy tale is a universal language. It creeps around our bones like Siberian frost or forest lichen, and it never lets us go. I really liked this mysterious little book.

THE TAIGA SYNDROME (UK) (US+)

I guess if they get me I won’t care much.

Haven’t, to my recall, read Parker before. But I enjoyed the JESSE STONE tv movies with Tom Selleck, and I assume the wit in them came from the books. I was quite right – Selleck and his crew clearly loved the books, and the best lines are all to be found on Parker’s pages. I was interested to discover that the Jesse Stone of the books is a good fifteen years younger than Selleck was when he made the films, and I have a new admiration for the careful nature of the tv adaptation. They’re worth watching, not least because they’re shot largely in Canada and therefore access some of the great Canadian character actors of the time – Saul Rubinek, Stephen McHattie and William Devane.

This book reads like butter. I see how they hook people. You almost don’t ask yourself how the embattled police chief of a small town in Massachusetts has time to fuck literally every attractive woman he passes. (Even despite telling everyone who even looks at him that he’s obsessed with his ex-wife.) Despite the smoothness, Parker is a restrained writer. He generally avoids painting on the page, but will occasionally drop in pieces like “the old unlovely snow” to remind you he’s there with his hand on the tiller. Hemingwayan emotional elisions abound, the dialogue is entertaining, Parker knows how to keep a thin and simple plot/counterplot cooking with short punchy scenes, and I always enjoy an open crime story (the COLUMBO style, where we know who the bad guys are almost from the start, and the pleasure is seeing them and the detective trying to outsmart each other).

A fun, easy read for the most part, and I feel better educated by having finally read Parker.

STONE COLD, Robert B Parker (UK) (US+)

Caught up in the swirl of Le Chat Noir, Satie slips into the orbit of one Joséphin Péladan and his occult group the Ordre de la Rose-Croix Catholique du Temple et du Graal. Péladan is the son of the Chevalier Adrien Péladan, founder of something called the Cult of the Wound in the Left Shoulder of Our Lord Jesus Christ; he owns a vast library of hermetic works inherited from his brother, who died of poisoning from a self-concocted alchemical tincture. Péladan himself will pass in 1918, having imbibed a tainted oyster. (Does this family sound like a great lost Borges story, or what?)

Another of Penman’s fragmented almost-biography cultural essays, following on from the superb FASSBINDER THOUSANDS OF MIRRORS.

This time, Penman looks at Erik Satie, and it’s a shattered mosaic of the thing, Penman picking up shards and examining them before putting each in one of three pots.

Not sure I was aware that Satie invented ambient music.

We wish to establish a form of music designed to satisfy “utility” requirements. Art does not come into these requirements. “Furniture Music” creates vibrations; it has no other purpose; it fills the same role as light, warmth and comfort in all its forms.

Like the Fassbinder book, it’s stupidly quotable:

The morse code of sunlight playing against a sluggish green river on a summer afternoon, when we were young; before all the ghosts came.

It has a lot more of Benjamin’s Arcades Project to it than FASSBINDER, it doesn’t have the sustained attack of the previous book. It’s far more of a wander, notes scribbled on scraps of paper (as Satie himself used to do).

In 1970, Australian pianist Peter Evans had to abandon a solo performance of (Satie’s) Vexations after 595 repetitions because he felt that ‘evil thoughts’ were overtaking him and observed ‘strange creatures emerging from the sheet music’.

It places Satie — eccentric, mysterious, multi-disciplinary and perhaps even a living artwork (his uniform and peculiar schedule evokes Gilbert & George for me) – as constantly a few years ahead of the centre of 20th Century art, and still somehow soundtracking the 21st. Satie himself is made fascinating and maddening, the ghost inside European culture and Magritte’s bowler hat, and, for me, this book could have gone on forever.

I love books like this, where a person is offered convincingly as the secret key to the world.

…he takes aside his young friend Max Fontaine and, with an amused expression and whispering so as not to be overheard by the nuns, confesses: ‘Last night I dreamed I had two willies! You can’t imagine how many things you can do with that thingamajig.’

ERIK SATIE THREE PIECE SUITE, Ian Penman (UK) (US+)

‘He has a cat?’ Cunningham nodded. ‘One of those creepy-ass breeds. Bald as an egg. More wrinkles than Yoda. He follows it around the block on a leash. Looks like he’s taking his balls for a walk.’

The first book in this series, FEARLESS, was British writer MW Craven shamelessly going for the Jack Reacher audience. It wasn’t his best, his grasp of American idiom is shaky in places, and he had to lay a lot of foundation.

Here’s the core: Ben Koenig has a neurological condition that means he can’t experience fear. He was a US Marshal, and that fearlessness convinced his boss that this meant Koenig could be turned into a high-value asset, so he sent Koenig off across the world to train with the scariest military forces on the planet. This didn’t work out so well, and now Koenig is a drifter with a five million dollar bounty on his head. But he’s still considered a government asset, and is tracked and handled by Jen Draper, an ex-spook who now runs a private intelligence company. They hate each other.

With that out of the way, you can now enjoy NOBODY’S HERO, in which Craven relaxes. It’s the sort of weird caper more usually found in his cosy-ish-crime Washington Poe series. The Poe books internally rail against the cosy-crime concept: you can all but hear Craven’s dark side rattling the bars. No need for that in the Koenig books. He seems to have realised that in the Koenig books he doesn’t have to be nice or cute, and his enjoyment of that ripples off the pages.

If you enjoy high-level shit-talking before something appalling is done to someone in terrible detail, this is your book. Koenig is, as he is often accused of being by Draper, a complete fucking arsehole. In this book, Craven leans into it, stepping past the Reacherisms into what is basically voluble psychopathy. He is less the white knight errant than a terrifying guy with a brain injury who is trying to do the right thing.

(And if you’ve read the Poe books? There’s a crossover that made me smile.)

NOBODY’S HERO is a riotous entertainment, and Craven here cracks that Dan Brown chaptering style in a way that’s more fun to read than Brown’s own. It’s funny, extremely violent and well built. Future-forecasting types may also enjoy the plan to destroy America herein, which Craven works out in enough detail to make his next attempt to secure an ESTA challenging.

NOBODY’S HERO, MW Craven (UK) (US+)

Being a writer means I have books on absolutely everything and anything. I picked this up at West Holt Experimental Archaeology Village about twenty years ago. And the joy of being alive in this particular epoch is that there are books on absolutely everything and anything within reach.

Amazingly, this is still available.

DARK AGE NAVAL POWER (UK) (US+)

It was right here. And if you looked at the country as a map – if you thought of Texas as the grip and Florida as the magazine clip and the Northeast as the barrel – America was a gun.

A new long short story by Benjamin Percy, and that lovely moment where you can just relax and be told a story by a master thriller writer. Especially one who’s having fun with the form.

Walker didn’t need anything. When his wife said, “What about a suit? You said you wanted to get fitted for a new suit. You said the old one was too tight,” he said, “Yeah, but when do I ever wear a suit?” and she said, “You never know when there’s going to be a funeral.”

Here’s the bit. Guy gets shot in the head. Wakes up from his coma six months later, convinced that it was his family who died when in fact they were uninjured and he was the only one who took a bullet. And he explains to his therapist that the last six months unfurled very differently – his family are dead and he became an avenging vigilante. His doctors insist that the bullet in his head lit up his brain for six months and he dreamed that entire alternate timeline in his coma. But that timeline is very, very detailed. Which is true?

A writer is in control of their tool when they can lay down a phrase like “the soft basin of his elbow” or “The same lies slid sideways.” I tore through it in a single sitting, and it held me on the precipice of its truth the whole time. Marvellous.

And a round of applause to this interesting outfit Neotext for putting this sort of thing out into the world.

THE HUMAN BULLET, Benjamin Percy (UK) (US+)

I read this on Kindle, my partner did it as an audiobook, and, listen, this book is fucking terrifying and had made us review everything we eat. It’s about ultra processed foods, or UPF:

Paul Hart had explained how most UPF is reconstructed from whole food that has been reduced to its basic molecular constituents which are then modified and re-assembled into food-like shapes and textures and then heavily salted, sweetened, coloured and flavoured. Avena speculated that without additives these base industrial ingredients would probably not be recognisable as food by your tongue and brain: ‘It would be almost like eating dirt.’

Or, put more plainly and chillingly:

Whenever I talked about the ‘food’ I was eating, she corrected me: ‘Most UPF is not food, Chris. It’s an industrially produced edible substance.’

And here’s a small thing I had to sit and think about, after having spent years making smoothies:

The fibre that gives an apple crunch and solidity makes up just 2.5 per cent of the apple’s weight. The other 97.5 per cent is juice. The way the fibre is arranged around the cells and the fluid – that’s the matrix.

Apple juice, which is typically around 15 per cent sugar, behaves much like any soft drink. But so does the apple purée, even though it contains all the constituents of the apple, including the fibre, and was made moments before consumption. Fibre is important, but the matrix, the structure of the apple, is key.

This is when I switched to whole berries, sliced apple, almonds and honey for breakfast.

And here’s a new word: commerciogenic.

The Jelliffes catalogued instances of formula companies marketing breastfeeding as being ‘backwards and insufficient’, and in 1972 coined the phrase ‘commerciogenic malnutrition’ – malnutrition caused by companies.9 Modern obesity is also a commerciogenic disease.

…all diet-related diseases are commerciogenic.

Anyway. This book is long, detailed and as horrifying as Lovecraft. I did not want to find out how xanthan gum is actually made. Nor did I want to know what emulsifiers actually do to the gut. But this book lays out in excruciatingly clear sight exactly why I needed to know these things. It’s a really well written and deeply researched piece of work in very conversational and easy prose and fuck me it’s nasty reading.

ULTRA PROCE3SSED PEOPLE (UK) (US+)