26 Books

I have an uneasy relationship with Don DeLillo’s work. Parts of Underworld, DeLillo’s masterpiece, are stunning, among the best prose that I’ve read. However, I just don’t find his characters convincing. They all sound the same and appear to be there not to have conversations but only to express ideas to each other, ideas that aren’t really listened to because characters in DeLillo are always talking at crossed purposes. But I persist because DeLillo’s reputation is such that I feel I must be missing something.

White Noise (Picador Books)

Don DeLillo
Picador 1986, Paperback, 326 pages, £7.99

To White Noise, then, which was DeLillo’s breakthrough novel and tells the story of a university professor who runs a course in Hitler studies and lives with his wife, their son and their children from assorted previous relationships. The professor, Jack, and his wife, Babette, are both strongly afraid of death and obsessed with the idea of which of them will die first.

Pony books get a terrible press. They summon up thoughts of pink-faced young gels in breeches smacking crops against their boots and “winning through” to win umpteen rosettes in implausibly competitive country shows.

Well, Thelwell’s certainly full of these caricatures, and the frankly terrifying Saddle Club series from the 90s scared any competitive edge out of my horse-mad tween self, but pony books from the 40s through to the 60s are wonderful, which was why it was so nice to find a couple hanging around my parents’ house.

As a child, Pink Pony was one of my favourites, up there with St Clare’s and Malory Towers as a totem of a childhood that was far removed from my own suburban London life. Half-French October (brilliant name) spies a beautiful strawberry roan foal in a field one day. Her parents have promised her a horse of her own and she talks them into letting her own it and break her in herself. Bearing, in mind she’s barely 12 when this pony appears, what 12-year-old do you know who could a) commit do that sort of challenge and b) what parents now would let her? Let alone having a pony in the first place, bloody expensive things that they are.

One of the most important of the Oulipian writers, Georges Perec is best known for Life: A User’s Manual – a collection of interlinked stories about the inhabitants of an apartment block – and A Void – a novel most famous for having been composed without the use of the letter e. The translation, which repeats the feat, is well worth reading.

Species of Spaces and Other Pieces (Penguin Classics)

Georges Perec
Penguin Classics 2008, Paperback, 320 pages, £10.99

This volume collects Perec’s non-fiction work, though ‘non-fiction’ is perhaps not the best term for such a parade of flights of fancy, odd word games and barely-contained lunacy. There’s also a clever Borgesian short story, ‘Le Voyage d’hiver’, in which an academic searches for the provenance of a mysterious book.

Somewhere in the recesses of my brain there is a memory of reading that only Jesus Christ and Richard Wagner can compete with Napoleon for the amount written about them. Both Wagner and Napoleon shared a relentless myth-making about their own lives with a good portion of an eye on the judgement of history, to the extent that there’s a question as to whether either was able to act without considering posterity first. As a result, both are repugnantly egotistical. But, whereas Wagner’s reputation is saved from his own personality by the transcendent quality of the art he left behind, Napoleon has a much more questionable set of accomplishments to defend.

Napoleon

F.J. McLynn
Pimlico 1998, Paperback, 749 pages, £16.99

McLynn is a rather leaden writer, and it is hard to stay with him through 700 odd pages without lapsing into boredom. His style is extremely repetitive, especially when writing about people in Napoleon’s circle for whom he has an obvious enmity. Chief among these are Talleyrand, Murat and the Emperor’s sister, Pauline. McLynn has a habit of using the same pejorative adjective every time he mentions one of these personalities (for Talleyrand, for example, it is invariable ‘venal’, for Pauline, ‘nymphomaniac’).

Douglas Coupland is a tricky one for me. I should be a huge fan. His name is synonymous with Vancouver, my home city. He is bright and highly observant — the slightly awkward local son you ought to love because he knows your city and by extension you, and his work reflects your personal, political and spiritual experiences at a very local, nascent level. He is someone I would love to sit next to at a dinner party. But his novels have never done it for me. I think of Coupland as more of a thinker than a fiction writer: I want his take on things and I’ll work my way through a novel to get it, but if it were down to me I’d rather get my hit in essay format.

Microserfs

Douglas Coupland
Harper Perennial 2004, Paperback, 384 pages, £7.99

While I have read most of Coupland’s work, Microserfs never made it to my bedside table. When the book came out, its subject matter — human life within an increasingly controlling tech infrastructure; the worrisome question of whether people were becoming less human and more tech-like — didn’t resonate with me and the book fell off my radar. But one boom, two busts and a whole rethinking of the digital-human divide later, Microserfs seemed like a worthwhile read.

This very funny book is hard to categorise. Is it fiction or non-fiction? Is it a biography or a book about not writing a biography? Having read it, I still don’t know the answer but I’m tempted to say that’s it’s all of those things.

Out of Sheer Rage

Geoff Dyer
Abacus 2003, Paperback, 242 pages, £8.99

Geoff Dyer, or a fictionalised version of him, wants to write a book about DH Lawrence. However, he alternates between being paralysed by procrastination and restless to the point that he can barely stay in one country. He’s in Paris when the book begins but believes he can’t write there and gives up his apartment with the intention of moving to Rome. Having given up his apartment, he becomes convinced that he can’t write anywhere else but Paris but it’s too late.

Ian wrote favourably about this spy novel last year and James is a fan too so I thought I’d see what the fuss was about. The only other Len Deighton I’ve read is SSGB, his alternate-history novel imagining Britain after a Nazi victory in Word War II. That book is decent, though pales in comparison to Thomas Harris’s Fatherland. Similarly, Berlin Game is good but not a patch on John Le Carre’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.

Berlin Game (Panther Books)

Len Deighton
Harper 2010, Paperback, 432 pages, £7.99

Deighton’s hero, Bernard Samson, is an ageing spy who has been deskbound for five years. He’s come up the hard way, via a childhood spent in post-war Berlin where his father served in military intelligence. Despite having apparently benefited from nepotism, Samson resents the Oxbridge types whose contacts and breeding have allowed them to bypass him on the professional ladder. He is sharper than his bosses, who don’t have his field experience, and is cynical about their motivation. Samson’s wife, who is also an intelligence officer, is an Oxford graduate from a rich family – a reminder both of how well Samson has done for himself and of the world to which he will never truly belong.

Although Susan Sontag and Annie Leibovtiz were famously romantically involved towards the end of the former’s life, the essays in this collection were written before the pair met, which leaves the fascinating question of how intimacy with one of the world’s most famous practitioners of the art modulated Sontag’s views, if at all.

On Photography (Penguin Modern Classics)

Susan Sontag
Penguin Classics 2008, Paperback, 224 pages, £9.99

As they are, Sontag veers between the wilfully obfuscated prose that academics love and the statement of complete banalities presented as riveting insight.

This is a remarkable and profoundly sad book. It is set in Italy during Word War II and focuses on the struggles of ordinary people to survive among the rubble, violence and poverty.

History

William Riviere (Introduction)
Penguin Classics 2002, Paperback, 768 pages, £14.99

Ida Mancuso is half-Jewish and lives in Rome. As the Axis powers become aware that they are losing the war, so the violence against their racial enemies accelerates. In one remarkable scene, Ida runs through the now deserted ghetto, drawn there as we feel compelled to touch a plate we have been told is hot, and ends up at the railway station, just as the final train is being dispatched to Auschwitz-Birkenau, and as the train leaves, one of the deportees hands her a fragment of a note to his family which she carries around with her wherever she goes thereafter.

Carter is a delicious writer. I’ve only read two of her novels, six years apart, and I’m tempted to keep that distance so I don’t just guzzle down the rest and make myself sick. As it is, the first – the batty and beautiful Nights At The Circus – makes a theatrical diptych with this, Carter’s last novel, a bawdy, Bardish chronicle of a showbiz family tree which has the unnerving feeling of Ballet Shoes narrated by Barbara Windsor.

Wise Children (Vintage Classics)

Angela Carter
Vintage Classics 1998, Paperback, 256 pages, £7.99

It’s narrated by Dora Chance, an ageing Brixtonite whose life since 12 has been spent furiously dancing up cash with her identical twin, Nora, and who has taken on the mantle of chronicling the sprawling history of the Hazard family, a cross between the Oliviers, Redgraves and Jaggers. The illegitimate children of legendary Shakespearean actor Sir Melchior Hazard (a ham of the highest order), the Chance sisters are born on the wrong side of the bedspread and the tracks. In a big hurrah for south of the river, they live in Brixton, in a bubble of glamour and grind with their adoptive Grandma – a naturist alcoholic whose iron-jawed nature has much in common with Giles’ indestructible Grandma. I love south London, and as it barely gets a footnote in most novels beyond “This is where crime happens”, this made me empathise with the Chances even more.