The Yips by Nicola Barker: A Review

In my reviews of novels long-listed for the Man Booker Prize 2012, I now turn to:

 

Nicola Barker is no stranger to the Man Booker lists – she was shortlisted for Darkmans and longlisted for Clear – and yet she is one of those novelists that I’ve never gotten around to reading.  I should have come to her sooner, for on the basis of The Yips, she is bloody brilliant.

It seems, to me, that Barker’s fiction is all about the characters – the plot is almost incidental – and in The Yips the cast of characters is broad and all well drawn.  There’s Shelia, a vicar, who is married to Gene, who works three jobs and has survived cancer seven times.  He works with Jen, who is a barmaid with a PhD in bullshit.  Together they meet Stuart Ransom, a golfing legend whose life is in freefall.  Then there’s a tattooist who specialises in genital tattooing, and a free-thinking Muslim sex therapist.  Their lives collide, again and again, quite often in comic fashion.  There is a plot behind all this manic energy, but it’s best not to summarise it, but to ride it, like a wave.  It is the sheer momentum, the fizzle-crack of Barker’s dialogue, and the often hilarious asides that carry you through the 550 page doorstop of book.  It really doesn’t feel that long. 

Barker’s novel is certainly outside the realist tradition favoured by most novelists working in English today (myself included), and is closer to a ribald sex comedy of the Elizabethan age.  There are secret identities, lost children, trickster figures, a punch-up on a giant chess-board.   It has a manic, almost magical, energy.  The formatting of her pages is odd as well, deliberately so – reading it I found I couldn’t quite recall how a page was supposed to look, that this was odd, but that it was also distinctly pleasing.  It made the familiar strange again.   

In this kind of novel it is easy to develop a favourite character as well, and for me it was a toss-up between Ransom and Jen – is Jen a genius or just a clever flirt?  Is Ransom actually so full of bullshit or is there a real man hiding inside?  Nicola Barker would never deign to give you answers, but she’ll thoroughly entertain you as you try and work it out.

The Yips has been longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2012.

Will it win?

I have read, a while ago, that it is one of the favourites to take the prize this year.  Having not read her other novels, I can’t say if this is her best, but it is certainly very good, very fresh, and very funny.  The Booker has, in previous years, been given some criticism for not awarding to comic novels (until Howard Jacobson), and it’s sheer manic energy might see it booted off the longlist, but I doubt it.  I’m almost certain it will be shortlisted.  Will it win though?  It might.  I’ll hold off judgement until I’ve read the rest of the longlist.

The Lighthouse: A Review

In the next of my posts about Man Booker Prize long-listed novels in 2012, I turn now to: 

Alison Moore is a debut novelist, whose first novel, The Lighthouse, has been receiving rave reviews – and a lot of press attention for its small publisher, Salt – following its long-listing in the 2012 Man Booker Prize.  The book, winningly presented, comes adorned with praise from the likes of Margaret Drabble and Jenn Ashworth.  It is, then, difficult to come to this work without expecting rather a lot of it.

A middle-aged man, recently separated, has come to Germany to walk part of the Rhine.  Futh’s life has not gone well – he has little to show for it, and he rarely makes an impression.  As he sets out on his walking holiday he begins to reminisce on the things that have gone wrong.  In a parallel storyline, hotelier Ester is becoming increasingly restless in her marriage to Bernard, a violent man who is drifting apart from his wife, and so Ester takes to sleeping with willing guests.  The two storylines co-exist, and slide inexorably towards collision. 

Drabble, in her cover quote, calls The Lighthouse “melancholy and haunting” and both are apt descriptions.  Futh is haunted by past mistakes, indecisions and loss.  His walking holiday does not bring solace or understanding – in the way it does with Harold Fry, in Rachel Joyce’s long-listed novel this year, which also has a long walk at its heart – and seems even to drift him further away from who and what he is.  Certain keys scenes and phrases are repeated in the novel, they become a refrain that hollows out the characters, and are replayed with slight variations in perspective, altering our understanding of them.  As this short novel progresses, it becomes increasingly unsettling, and by the final sequence set in the Hellhaus hotel, it is nail-biting. 

The name of the hotel is fascinating.  Hell, in German, means light (or bright) – so this hotel is the Light House – but ‘hell’ also has other connotations for the English reader.  There is torment in hell, but there is also light here.  Such contrasts are played out sub-textually, and bring an extra resonance to the novel.

The Lighthouse then is a very resonant, challenging novel.  It is beautifully written by Moore, in sparse but elegant prose.  Every word feels earned and precise and right.  It all builds wonderfully.  It certainly marks Alison Moore out as a novelist to watch.  It must be wonderful for small publisher Salt to have such a prestigious literary prize notice one of their works and reward it (justly), but it also puts much pressure onto Alison Moore – pressure I hope that doesn’t cripple her or force her to be more commercial in her next work.  It is the quiet exactitude of this novel that makes it such a powerful work, and a real surprise.

Will it win the Man Booker Prize?

It is a short novel – not even 200 pages – and its brevity could count against it.  It is a novella, not a novel.  I also suspect – as the judges will – that Alison Moore has bigger, better novels to come.  These factors could easily see it fail to make the short-list.  However, the precision and quality of her prose mark it out as something distinctive and unique, and they could easily take it through to the short-list.  I’d like to think this could win, but I doubt it will.  Though I would be happy to be proven wrong.

Umbrella

In my reviews of Man Booker Prize long listed novels, I now turn to:

Will Self has always been one of those writers whose work I hear about.  His novels all sound tricksy, clever and comic – three qualities I adore in fiction, and yet, somehow, I’ve managed to avoid reading his fiction all these years.  This is not to say I’ve not read his other work – his occasional pieces in British newspapers have been interesting, insightful, if occasionally sending his readers to their dictionaries.  This later quality is often seen as a negative to the Self-bashers – why does he see fit to exclude the majority of his readers by using words not in common usage?  It’s a crap question, and only an idiot would ask it.  That said, he is not going to win many over with his new novel, Umbrella, which will not only have them rooting out their dictionaries, but also their medical encyclopaedias.   This, as I see it, is a good thing. 

Self has been very open about Umbrella.  He wanted to write a modernist novel for the twenty-first century, to prove that the modernist tradition wasn’t moribund and could still prove insightful.  He has succeeded totally in his intended aims.  Umbrella is a literary tour-de-force, undoubtedly Self’s best novel (I can make that claim without having read the others, because the sheer depth and range of this novel is vast) and is utterly brilliant.

It is an apparently difficult novel in construction.  It is stream-of-consciousness told without chapter breaks, almost no paragraph breaks, no speech marks and run-on sentence; it has scenes that switch characters, time and location, sometimes within a paragraph and over 400 pages of it.  You hear this, you think it will be tough to read.  It really isn’t.  I found Umbrella flew past, that I followed its shifts with relative ease, and that it all built to such a wonderful conclusion. 

The story concerns Audrey Death, whose Encephalitis lethargica forms the spine of the novel.  We see her life in World War 1, and we see her Doctor, in the 1970s, attempting to wake her with experimental treatment.  We also see this doctor, Busner, in 2010, returning to the hospital where Audrey once lived and he once worked.  Along the way we meet Audrey’s brother, Albert, who has an eidetic memory and who has turned his back on his sister.  The novel unravels these various histories – personal and case – and builds a commentary upon memory, life, health and friendship. 

At first I thought it surprising that Self had a novel on the Man Booker Prize long list in 2012.  After reading Umbrella, I think he might just win it. 

Will Umbrella Win?

I think it might.  It has the scope that Booker judges love. It has a story that engages intellectually and emotionally, and is absolutely superb.  Where it might fail is that its construction is deliberately complex, and this might put people off.  If it wins, I suspect it will become one of those winners that people talk about but rarely read (or at least finish).  It’s not populist, but it should be rewarded.  British fiction can be quite tame – it is good to see some experimentation is left in the old beast.

Communion Town

In the latest of my reviews of long-listed novels for the Man Booker Prize 2012, I turn to:

Communion Town, by debut novelist Sam Thompson, is one of the more surprising entries in the 2012 Man Booker Prize long-list.  Though the cover blurb does not advertise it as such – though it hints at it – this is a collection of ten short stories set in around the same fictional city.  This, as a description, however, suggests continuity, and this is the last thing on Thompson’s mind.  Much like Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, the one city seen in this work changes dependent upon who is telling the story.  Some of the stories are pastiche – of Sherlock Holmes, of American pulp detective fiction – some stray into science fiction, some into horror, others into thriller and romance.  The novel (if we can call it that) is then a blend, a phantasmagorical journey into the night of a city where anything is possible and indeed will happen.

Being a collection of ten short pieces, there is a distinct shift in quality between the pieces.  The gumshoe story – Gallathea – I found a wonderful pastiche for a few pages before quickly descending into boredom (with the styling, not the story).  The Sherlock Holmes pastiche was very clever – The Significant City of Lazarus Glass (great title incidentally, with a great villain and a great ending), but because it was Thompson pretending to be Conan-Doyle pretending to be Holmes, I felt at a distance from the emotional fulcrum of the piece.  This is a common problem for me with science-fiction and fantasy stories, however – that the author must exert so much effort in creating, building and sustaining his world, the emotional lives of its inhabitants comes as a secondary effort and is, as a consequence, less than engaging.  Nevertheless, by the end of this work, it was this pastiche that remained the most vivid – and I dearly hope Thompson expands upon Lazarus Glass and this version of Communion Town. 

Communion Town itself is a wonderful creation.  By removing us from actuality, Thompson is able to play tricks on the reader a real-world setting would not allow – the laws of physics can break, monsters can be real – and I suspect it is a setting to which Thompson will return.  Why waste all that effort creating the place, only to let it rot?  (I mentioned the Lazarus Glass story, but I also want to know more about the first, the eponymous story, as it had me biting my nails with tension). 

Thompson’s work, then, enthralled me and annoyed me equally – sometimes between stories, sometimes even in the same story – but this is not a major criticism.  It is actually a good thing – for what it reveals is in Thompson we have a writer very much in control of his work, very much able to write brilliantly, and from whom we can expect exciting new works. 

Will Communion Town make the short-list for the Man Booker Prize 2012?

The quality of Thompson’s prose is strong, and is ideas are very good – so from a literary perspective he has the goods – but I suspect the lack of cohesion between the individual pieces (making it a collection of short stories, not a novel) will see it dropped from the short-list.  Which would be a shame, as writing as versatile and interesting as this should be celebrated and more widely read.  Though I suspect his later novels will see him ignored by the Man Booker Prize, I think he might go on to win some sci-fi awards.

My Top 10 Films

By my reckoning, it’s a week until Sight and Sound, the British Film Institute’s magazine, releases the results of its ten yearly poll.  For those not in the know – every ten years, beginning in 1952, Sight and Sound has surveyed the world’s directors and critics and asked them what they think the 10 best films of all time are.  Every decade but the first has seen Citizen Kane come in at number 1.   I suspect this year will see Kane lose that top spot for the first time since ’52 – Tokyo Story might rise above it, as might Sunrise (a film more viewed and accessible now and in a quality blu-ray print).  As is usual, I suspect no film more recent than 1979 will make the list. 

In 1961, Penelope Houston, then editor of the magazine, asked people to play this “impossible but intriguing game again” and nominate 10 films.  Nick James, the current editor, has been doing the same again over the last twelve months.  Because I’m not a famous director or film critic (at least not yet!), I’ll just have to suffice with you, the readers of my lovely blog. 

There a number of ways of approaching this question: do you go for films that have had the biggest influence upon the medium?  Or do you go for films that have had the biggest impact on you, the viewer?  Each question would, I am certain, provoke a very different top 10.  Do you select a film because you know it is important, but isn’t actually one you would watch more than once?  For instance, I adored Battleship Potemkin, but I have no inclination to watch it again.  But I’ll happily sit through El Dorado every Christmas (it’s my Great Escape equivalent).  El Dorado, no matter how brilliant it is, wouldn’t make my top 10, but Potemkin might.

So I’ve given it some thought, and I think it’s best to mix a bit of the two different views: important works and personal favourites.  A blend of everything that makes cinema what it is for me.

It is also very tough to choose just 10 films.  I wrote a long list, and whittled it down.  The final push from 12 to 10 was toughest.

Here then are my top 10 films, in alphabetical order, according to English title:

The Apartment (1960)

Apocalypse Now (1979)

Badlands (1973)

City Lights (1931)

The General (1926)

Il vangelo secondo Matteo [The Gospel According to Matthew] (1964)

Irréversible (2002)

Die Büchse der Pandora [Pandora’s Box] (1929)

Pather Panchali (1955)

Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927)

It’ll be an odd list to some.  Surely Irreversible isn’t great art?  It’s surely not as good as Kane?!  And where is Kane anyway?  I love Kane, adore it, but it’s not in my top 10.

The Apartment (1960) 

I think Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond’s script is one of the sharpest ever.  Wilder’s direction is superb.  It is the sweetest, and yet bitterest, romance on screen. 

 

Apocalypse Now (1979)

The opening minutes of this, when I was 11 years old, up late on a school night when everybody else in the house was fast asleep, watched through sleepy eyes, became the moment I fell in love with cinema.  It remains as powerful to me now, over 20 years later.

Badlands (1973)

Cinema for me, between the ages of 13-20, was dictated by my parents’ choice.  We saw Steven Seagal films galore.  We saw James Bond, again and again.  If there was a gun on the front cover, we watched it.  No, they didn’t mistake this for an action movie.  I saw it independently, but I’d forgotten cinema could be this.  I never knew it could do such lyricism.  Like Apocalypse Now, Badlands changed my world.  I still think it the finest American film of its generation.

 

City Lights (1931)

I’d never cried in a cinema.  I did as Chaplin bought a flower.  Magic

The General (1926)

Is this the funniest film ever made?  No.  But it’s the funniest film I return to the most often.  There is craft and genius here that is missing from other comedies of the era.  The General casts a bewitching spell on me.  It’s more than a comedy, that’s why.  It’s bigger than its parts would have you believe. It's utter genius.

 

Il vangelo secondo Matteo [The Gospel According to Matthew] (1964)

The finest religious film, and one of such simple elegance and beauty, it holds me utterly transfixed.  I’m not religious at all – though I once was - and I think it is because it speaks to the soul in a way that other cinema fails to, that Passolini’s finest film retains its power.

Irréversible (2002)

To me, Gaspar Noé’s film challenged everything we had begun to take for granted.  It is structurally a most fascinating film – it owes debts to Memento, to L'année dernière à Marienbad (which almost made my top 10) – but it is bigger than all them.  It seemed, by the turn of the twenty-first century, that all of cinemas taboos had been broken.  Cinema was no longer transgressive.  Then Irréversible came along, and kicked you hard in the face.  Its blended philosophy and extreme violence. It attacked the logic of cinema.  It implicated the viewer in its action.  It made cinema an event again.  It is a moral film – it forces the viewer to consider the acts of vengeance they have seen.  Whereas cinema until this moment had gloried in violence (we cheer when the hero gets vengeance in cinema), Irréversible makes us feel sick with the image of violence.  If this film had been played the right way round, we would have been cheering Vincent Cassell by the end.  Noé was brave enough to show us how wrong this attitude is.   French shock cinema is often seen as nothing more than ribaldry, a cheap nasty entertainment at the end of some dead-end alley.  It’s not.  I think they’ll be evaluating the importance of this film in decades to come. 

 

Die Büchse der Pandora [Pandora’s Box] (1929)

Lulu.  No, not the singer.  Lulu Brooks – Louise Brooks – has there ever been a sexier woman on the screen?   An icon that defined a generation, a style much imitated but never bettered.  It’s not a perfect film – its shaggy, too long, over ambitious – but it retains an elusive quality that brings you back time and again.  It is beautiful in its horror.

Pather Panchali (1955)

The best film about childhood.  Ray’s film contains more heart, beauty and soul than a dozen other films.  Its simple elegance I think belies its great intelligence, and so people often mistake it for a lesser film than it truly is.  The Apu trilogy, of which this is the first piece, remains India’s greatest cinematic masterpiece. 

Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927)

When people ask me: what’s your favourite movie?  I tell them this.  They’ve never heard of it usually, and when I tell them it’s a silent movie from the 1920s, they look at me as if I’m mad.  Unless they’re cineastes themselves, and then they nod, and go yes, it is the finest film of its era.  Some even say the finest film ever made.  There is not a duff note here, not a wasted image.  Murnau’s masterpiece remains the pinnacle of cinematic achievement for me.

And now I’ve justified each of my choices, I’m aching with pain that I couldn’t include: Don’t Look Now, The Third Man, Citizen Kane, Tokyo Story, Singin’ in the Rain, It’s Winter, The Ladykillers, Last Year in Marienbad, The Lavender Hill Mob, Metropolis, Vertigo, Nosferatu, The Woman in the Dunes, Piccadilly and more, so much more.  Hitchcock, Welles, Ozu, de Sica, Mizoguchi, Tati…

Still, I've 10 films.  5 American, 5 International (I'm counting Sunrise as European, even though it was made by Fox, as everything but it's money and its stars scream Germany and expressionism), from the 1920s to the 2000s.  Even if you don't agree, there are ten films worth your time here. 

UPDATE: Sight & Sound have released their lists.  Here is my reaction:

I predicted Citizen Kane would lose its position at #1 in the Sight & Sound 10 year poll and indeed it has.  Kane is down 1, to #2.  Vertigo has ousted Welles's classic.  Not a surprise, as Vertigo remains a powerful and pertinent piece of cinema, even today, while Welles' film, though still powerful, is more a historic document now.  Also, no films made later than 1980 made the lists, and two films from the 1920s appeared in the top 10 for the first time.  Proof that DVD accessibility has revealed the quality and power of these early films to a wider audience.  I’ve still not seen Dreyer’s Joan of Arc, and until DVD and blu-ray it would have been impossible for me to see it.  Now I can.  I wonder, as DVD companies release more of the forgotten and misplaced films of yesteryear, whether in another 10 years’ time, this poll will look very different indeed.

In my top 20, there would have been La Regle de Jeu, Vertigo, Tokyo Story.  Of John Wayne's films, though, I much prefer Red River to The Searchers.  And the inclusion of Man With A Movie Camera is interesting... I find it a fascinating historical document but it's not a film I would rush to watch again.  I'd much rather take Potemkin over it.

Go on, hit me with your top 10 in the comments below…

Narcopolis

 In the third of my reviews of the Man Booker Prize long listed novels in 2012, I turn now to:

Jeet Thayil’s debut novel, Narcopolis, tells the story of an opium den in Bombay in the 1970s.  Shuklaji Street is where the no-hopers, the prostitutes and eunuchs, the dealers and the users hang out, and Rashid’s opium den is the most famous.  Later in its life, film stars will come there, directors will look to it for inspiration, and the dispossessed will find solace in its walls. 

Thayil’s prose is liquid gold.  He has perfect control, and his novel drifts between scenes as if riding the opium high.  That he has received critical acclaim as a poet comes as no surprise – there is poetry in these words.  His central characters – Rashid, Dimple, the eunuch, and Mr Lee, the Chinese worker who has fled his homeland (narrated through an exciting aside that takes us into Mao’s China) – are all equally well drawn.  There is a subplot about a murderer – Pathar Maar – that adds nothing to the novels, and whose excision wouldn’t affect a thing.

The world of these opium dens falls apart when heroin arrives.  What has been a dream-like India becomes a nightmare India.  Race riots, religious riots, death all around this once great city.  Showing this transition from one drug to another, and its effect on a country, is cleverly rendered, though it does give the impression that Thayil is becoming nostalgic for a lost age.  It is worth noting that Thayil has admitted he lost twenty years of his life to addiction, so to read this novel as a nostalgic impression of a lost era might be to misread it.

Novels about drugs and drug addiction are notoriously difficult to pull off.  For every Junky, there are two or three bad literary trips.  Thayil’s novel – but for a few minor missteps (the killer subplot, Dimple’s transition from illiterate to opining on Baudelaire and Cocteau) this is a novel of some considerable power.  That it is has been long listed for the Man Booker Prize 2012 is unsurprising.

Will it win the prize?

In 2008 Aravind Adiga won for The White Tiger, so we know Man Booker judges are not averse to granting the prize to novels about modern life in the Indian subcontinent.  The most similar novel to have previously made the long list is Trainspotting – and that failed to make the short list as, apparently, it “offend[ed] the sensibilities of two judges.”  Such unenlightened attitudes would hopefully not cloud an audience in 2012, but it cannot be ruled out.  It is one of those novels whose longevity is deserved, but will it be recognised?  I’d like to see it short listed, and I suspect it might be.