‘The World According to Jeremy Clarkson’ by Jeremy Clarkson

Not fiction, but a series of articles that Clarkson wrote for The Sunday Times over a couple of years, which have been gathered together into a collection. On screen, in programmes like Top Gear and Have I Got News For You, Jeremy Clarkson is a very funny man. Not a comedian, but possessed of a sharp wit and an amazing turn of sarcasm that has me in stitches whenever I watch him.

The book has flashes of the same brilliance, but surprisingly they are only flashes. Whether reading it all in one go was a bad idea, or whether he’s funnier when he speaks than when he writes, or whether I was just in a bad mood, I’m not sure. But after creasing myself over the first few pages, my giggles turned to smiles and my smiles to frowns. Far too much of his wit is either deeply prejudiced or in shockingly bad taste. Would you suggest putting a statue of Hitler in Trafalgar Square, for instance? Nope? Thought not. But Clarkson does, and appears to mean it. Once the humour wears off, what’s hiding underneath isn’t always very pleasant, and too often the sarcasm becomes a rant. I did finish the book, but I can’t say I really enjoyed it.

‘Ripley Underwater’ by Patricia Highsmith

Bit of an odd one, this. It’s the last (so far) in the Ripley series about a charming psychopath, the first of which was made into the film The Talented Mr Ripley starring Matt Damon. I’d never tried Highsmith before and wanted to read one of the books to see whether there was as much of a homoerotic element in them as there was in the film, and the answer is yes, I think there probably is, although it’s kept extremely subtle.

The story was exciting – a psychological thriller told, tautly, from the villain’s point of view. Highsmith is very good at getting right inside her main character’s head and making all his actions seem totally logical and reasonable, even when they amount to murder, which makes for a chillingly good read.

The style, however, is strange. The author uses character names rather than pronouns almost exclusively, which leads to paragraphs such as ‘Well, well, Tom thought, realizing that his heart was beating faster than usual. Due to anger? Surprise? Not fear, Tom told himself.’ After a while the repetition becomes really noticeable, to the extent that it gets in the way of the story. A shame, as otherwise I think I’d have really enjoyed the book.

‘Better Angel’ by Forman Brown, writing as Richard Meeker

The use of a pen name is important in this book. It was published in the early 1930s when homosexuality was still a criminal offence, but the subject matter is a (clearly autobiographical) account of a young man ‘coming out’ and coming to terms with his own sexuality. The author was unable to use his real name and it’s only in the last ten years that the book has been updated with Brown’s name on the cover and a new section of author’s notes and photographs at the end. The fact that the characters are at best thinly disguised, at worst wholly undisguised, real people was no doubt another reason why an alias was used and it’s only now when most of those named are dead that the true story can be told.

And an intriguing story it was too. From Brown’s early days as a penitent member of a strict Christian sect to his happy-ever-after love affair was a long and complicated journey encompassing two or three affairs with men, a misguided and ultimately ill-fated affair with his first lover’s sister, and a growing love for his first lover’s best friend.

As an autobiography it works well. As what ought to have been an important piece of social history it’s less successful, at least in my opinion. There’s little feel for the unbelievable danger of finding other gay men in such an intolerant society, and Brown packs in far too many internalized monologues on his state of mind and the condition of his love for ‘David’ which leaves too little room for anything else. Whether the hero Kurt is attending church as a child, holidaying in Italy as a young man, or having sex, he spends pages at a time micro-analyzing his life instead of telling us about it!

I found it rather dry and tedious, and was more interested by the all-too-brief biographical notes after the story proper had finished. According to these, Kurt and his friends set up a travelling puppet theatre in the US later on in life. Oh for some (any!) description of this fascinating way of life!

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This review is currently appearing at Speak Its Name.

Review accepted

Here’s some good news – I’ve just had my review of Jim Grimsley’s ‘Boulevard’ accepted for the non-fiction section of Forbidden Fruit. The book is a gay ’slice of life’ novel set in 1970s New Orleans, and very interesting for a number of reasons.

The review is due out in August and I’ll post another message here when it’s available. I’m afraid you’ll have to wait till then to find out whether I liked the book or not.

‘The Facts of Life’ by Patrick Gale

I’m normally a big fan of Gale’s work.  His ‘Rough Music’ has made it onto my all-time favourite book list, so when I saw this book on the shelves of my local Oxfam bookshop, I grabbed it.  It’s a big thick volume, and tells the story of one family, through three generations of trials and tribulations, rather like a man’s take on Cynthia Harrod-Eagles.

The book opens in the years just after World War Two.  The first characters we meet are Edward, an exiled German Jew, and Sally, a working class girl who’s made it to the rank of doctor by intelligence, hard work and sheer determination, at a time when such positions were usually held by men, or by women of a higher social class.  Both characters have a ’surrogate parent’ in the form of someone who sponsored them through university, who they turn to in times of need, and both of whom are generous to a fault.  Sally’s sponsor retires to a nunnery and leaves them a strange little house in the wilds of the Norfolk Broads, which they fall in love with almost as much as they fall in love with each other.  They marry, move to the house and produce a family, who become the focus of later chapters of the book: their daughter Miriam, and their grandchildren Alison and Jamie, both of whom fall in love with the same man.

 Unfortunately the book has some major flaws.  The most obvious of these is that it’s told in third person omnipresent, which seriously detracts from getting to know the characters.  The focus shifts from Edward to Sally and back again seemingly at random, and we’re no sooner told that Sally is annoyed about something, than the focus flips to Edward, and doesn’t return to Sally until half way through the next chapter by which time the action has moved on by several months.  It’s very distancing and very frustrating, and it means that when the characters are presented with serious problems, you don’t feel you know them well enough to care. 

The second flaw is that unlike Harrod-Eagles, Gale has crammed all three generations into a single volume.  It’s already over 500 pages long but even so, telling the story of five different main characters in a book that ’short’ means that inevitably a lot of the fine detail gets left out.  When Edward is faced with a terrible choice regarding the last surviving member of his family, his actions don’t ring true because we haven’t read enough about his inner battles, or his reasons for making the choice he does.  It’s almost as though Gale says “Oops, Edward decided to do this,” without any further explanation, or any fallout, and it’s too disconnected to make any real sense.

I would have liked the book to be split into at least two, perhaps three volumes.  I think Edward’s story alone would have been interesting enough to carry the first volume – there aren’t many books written about the Jews who fled to England just before the War, leaving so many family members and friends behind, and his relationship with his ‘father-figure’ Thomas, who is clearly a homosexual and clearly in love with him, could have been developed hugely.  Why wasn’t Thomas jealous when Edward decided to marry Sally?  Why didn’t he try to persuade Sally not to marry Edward, or at the very least make a few not-very-well-hidden passes at the younger man?  Too often Gale doesn’t include nearly enough tension, and the tension he does introduce is often not very well used.

Sally’s character too could have been so much better developed.  I’m assuming Gale did his research; it must have been very unusual for a working class girl to become a doctor in those days and the story of her struggle to be accepted for what she was would have been fascinating.  As it is, we get a few snippets where male colleagues patronise her, and a few scenes where the rest of her family disapprove, and that’s about it.

In the end I lost interest in the younger generations and the book is still sitting, half-read, on my bedside table.  My overall impression is one of huge frustration at a valuable story wasted.  Such a shame for an author who’s produced some wonderful books.

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This review first appeared at Speak Its Name.

‘Fool’s Errand’ by Louis Bayard

The first of the holiday reads…

Gorgeous, just gorgeous! This book is warm, funny, lively, involving and, er, did I mention gorgeous?

It tells the story of Patrick, a gay man living in Washington DC who falls asleep at a friend’s house and sees the man of his dreams. But has he dreamt ‘Scottie’ (so called because he was wearing a cranberry Shetland jumper) or does he really exist? Patrick sets off on a quest to find Scottie again and embarks on a crazy carousel ride of broken relationships, broken down cars, new friendships, new directions, and ultimate happiness – with a houseful of rats and a dog thrown in for good measure.

Bayard’s writing is sheer joy. The words flow so skillfully that you’re hardly aware of them as you immerse yourself in Patrick’s ever-so kooky world. It’s a real slice of life, too, full of intricate detail and the sort of ruefully amusing everyday disasters that happen (all too often) to us all. I didn’t often laugh out loud, but there was hardly a page where I didn’t smile at something. And the romance, unexpected in a book written by a man, is believable and very, very sweet.

If I had to grumble about anything I’d say Patrick’s change of heart at the end is a little too sudden and unexplained. But that’s only a niggle in a simply wonderful book. This is only Bayard’s first novel. I can’t recommend it enough and will definitely be on the lookout for more.

‘The Benefits of Passion’ by Catherine Fox

One from the files to keep you going until I have time to report on the holiday reading. 

I started out by loving this book. It tells the story of a thirty-something woman, single and training to be a priest, who suddenly starts to hear her body-clock ticking and to take her mind off it, writes an erotic novel.

The style was both original and fun. The flitting back and forth between real-life Annie and her own heroine Isabella was handled well. Unusually with ‘flashback’ style writing I was never once confused as to whose head or time frame I was in. The characters themselves, whether fictional or fictional-within-fictional, were engaging and there was some nice, sharp observational humour, of the type that has you looking for the candid camera the writer’s hidden in your home. LOL

Sadly, I felt very let down by the ending. Both Annie and Isabella found the answer to all their problems in marriage to Mr Right and childbirth, and left all other ambitions and desires at the church gate. Ugh. I have nothing against marriage or children, but these days surely women (fictional or otherwise) deserve something more in their lives? It all seemed a little too ‘pat’, like reading a novel and finding it was actually a sermon from the Church in disguise. I wasn’t entirely surprised to find that Catherine Fox is herself married to a vicar. But what works in her life isn’t necessarily very relevant to the majority of women today.

It was enough of a disappointment that I probably won’t be seeking out other titles from this author.

Holidays

There won’t be any new reviews on the site for a few days, because I’m off on holiday for a week to ten days.  I’ve got a stack of books to read while I’m away and will hopefully pop some thoughts about them here once I’m back. 

‘The People’s Act of Love’ by James Meek

The quote on the front cover, from Louis de Bernieres, describes this book as ‘…the most original… I have read for years’.  I was a bit dubious about that as virtually every book in the stores these days claims something like that – but boy! was I wrong.

The book is set in 1900s Siberia and involves a bewildering array of characters including cossack soldiers, invading Czech armies, castrates, ‘whirling dervishes’, communists, a female photographer, and a cannibal.  Try finding another book with that for a cast list!  ‘Original’ is probably the understatement of the century.

The basic story is of Anna Petrovna, a widowed photographer who’s moved to a remote Siberian town with her son, for no apparent reason; and of Lt Josef Mutz, a Czech soldier who’s become disillusioned with efforts to invade Russia and who has fallen in love with Anna.  Into their lives tumbles Samarin, an escaped prisoner of war who has tracked his way to the town through the Siberian wilderness, and who tells tales of a vicious cannibalistic criminal who is following him.  That’s the simplified version.  In reality the book veers between ‘present’ and past, with the backstories of Samarin, Anna and Anna’s ex-husband, a dashing cossack cavalryman, interwoven into the strands of their present-day lives.  The twist at the end is both massive and wholly unexpected and makes you look back over the rest of the book to see how you could possibly have been so misled.  It’s all very clever.

The author, James Meek, is a journalist by trade and it’s easy to see that he writes non-fiction for a living.  The book’s style is heavily narrative with long descriptive passages and a slightly dry tone, and particularly in the first few chapters it’s hard to ’see’ the characters through the rather dense prose.  It’s well worth persevering, though, because those characters do come to life and the book itself is magical, mysterious, and sweeping, and matches the wide Russian landscapes to perfection.

‘Dancer’ by Colum McCann

This is a fictionalised biography of Rudolf Nureyev. And wow. What a book! I’d give my right arm to be able to write like that. The narrative is experimental to say the least, with frequent changes in point of view from one of Nureyev’s friends, colleagues or relatives to another. Each time the point of view switches, the style changes – from diary entries to letters to rambling monologues, each reflecting the characteristics of the person whose voice is being heard. In one case an entire chapter of 32 pages is told in a single sentence, bringing a breathless, non-stop quality to the voice of a breathless, non-stop social butterfly of a character. It’s masterly stuff.

I found the early chapters relating to Nureyev’s childhood in Russia particularly moving. The life was one of unmitigated bleakness and left me at least in no doubt as to why he defected the minute he discovered an alternative, and more colourful, lifestyle elsewhere.

Some of the character’s homosexuality was also touched upon, although this was primarily about Nureyev the dancer, not Nureyev the sex-machine.

My only criticism is that in choosing to write from everyone’s point of view but Nureyev himself, the central character remains rather shadowy and insubstantial, almost as though he’s dancing behind a net curtain. For such a strong and dynamic character as Nureyev undoubtedly was, that seems rather a shame.