Top Ten films of 2009

More to choose from than with books, and pound for pound, quality is higher, along with the quantity:

1. Oldboy. D: Park Chan-wook. Sick, brutal film about revenge delayed, redeemed by the fact that it is brilliant in every way. It is important that there are still people this crazed and talented making films.
2. Darwin's Nightmare. D: Hubert Sauper. Lives of Tanzanian fishermen and the pending collapse of the lake's eco-system. Grim and objective account of human degradation and environmental destruction to sate western appetites.
3. Der Dritte. D: Egon Gunther. A woman seeks love amid the socialist realism. Stylish, nouvelle vague comedy drama from GDR. Yes, you read that correctly.
4. The Sweet Smell of Success. D: Alexander MacKendrick. Crackling script, brilliant musical score and ace performances as human louse Tony Curtis weasels his way about the screen. Brilliant.
5. Nackt Unter Wolfen. D: Frank Beyer. Concentration camp cat and mouse as prisoners conceal a child. Stark, brilliant, only slightly weakened by some clumsy pro-USSR propaganda.
6. La Chinoise. D: Jean luc Godard. Godard renounces radical leftism in charactertistically off beat tale of student terrorists. Alternates typically confrontational mis en scene with touches of casual brilliance.
7. All the Kings Men. D: Robert Rossen. 1950s take on political corruption. Swaggering performance by Broderick Crawford as sleazy politician.
8. Architekten. D: Peter Kahane. East German architects run up against institutional inertia. More interesting than it sounds, shot in a low key, realist style, with understated excellence in all areas.
9. Angelus. D: Lech Majewski. Weird fable about individuality, spirituality, shagging and the end of the world, set in communist Poland. Captivatingly strange.
10. No Country for Old Men. D: Joel & Ethan Coen. Film noir with cowboy hats. Impressive, but spoiled by a cartoon villan.

n.b. this is films I watched in 2009, not films released.

2009 - reads of the year

Not a vintage year by any means. These are my stand outs - I've had to go right down to my ** rated reads to make up a Top Ten.

1. Red Shift by Alan Garner. Brilliant novel that defies description. Three stories, where love and violence coincide, intermesh and repeat across the centuries, around the same Cheshire locations.
2. Hitler: a Study in Tyranny by Alan Bullock. The first full biography of Hitler largely based on Nuremburg testimony. Extensive, detailed, enthralling, though hardly uplifting.
3. The Cold Six Thousand by James Ellroy. Sequel to American Tabloid, exploring the decade between the murders of Jack and Bobby kennedy. Contains all Ellroy's good and bad points in abundance.
4. The Wild Palms by William Faulkner. A convict accidentally escapes from the pennitentiary, while two lovers drift aimless to disaster. Two novellas exploring freedom and compulsion. Initially unconvincing, ultimately riveting.
5. Baghdad Burning by Riverbend. Iraq after invasion, told with wit and rage by a blogger who has been silent for almost 2 years. Prescient.
6. Germinal by Emile Zola. French miners strike against their apalling work conditions. Disaster ensues. Over-wrought and bathetic, but still powerful.
7. Under Western Eyes by Joseph Conrad. Off kilter tale of crime and punishment, set in Tsarist Russia and Geneva, as an embittered student is forced to infiltrate a revolutionary group.
8. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. In a reversal of prior experience: first half drags, second soars. But too much of his supposedly luminous tale is just a an endless recitation of odd stuff happening.
9. Big Muddy by B.C. Hall & C.T. Wood. A modern Mississippi journey. Worthy, but lacks the detail to match the scope of the project. The book I'm most interested in re-reading, which is why it makes the list.
10. Towards Another Summer by Janet Frame. Autobiofictography. A childhood that veered between desperate poverty and imaginative nightmare is described brilliantly, but the adult present, played as a comedy of manners, is unsatisfying.

2010 had better be an improvement.

Interesting

Yesterday I experienced a new thing in my Nanowrimo career - a complete, catastrophic collapse in confidence. It was very, very weird. I suddenly realised there were several important things in my plot I wasn't happy with, and it seemed that if I tried to change one, it would make the others worse.

It was really horrible, to be honest, and if I hadn't been sanding down a wall, and hence too dusty to venture into the CLEAN part of the house, I might have done something rash. I was contemplating abandoning my whole work to date - 9000 words - and starting fresh. With a new investigator, new setting and new mystery, because I was sick of what I had.

Thankfully, I didn't. Instead, I wrote a list of things that were causing me pain. One thing that was freaking me out was the fact that Donna (my amateur sleuth) was probing a 'live' case - a body had been hauled out of the river a couple of days before - and the police were still investigating. I HATE stories in which bumbling amateurs get in the way of the professionals, nor amateurs who put themselves in danger when the police are justdoing their job, ma'am.

Another thing was the flatness of what I was writing - it is a first person narrative and damn Donna seemed to have no character or spark. This was a big problem because it was affecting her interactions with other characters. When she was meant to be subtly grilling suspects, or trying to bend someone to her will, I was coming up dry.

And so on. It was a rap sheet for my novel so far. Then I wrote down solutions - and I realised a lot of them were things I knew, but had forgotten to do in the nanorush. I'd intended that the police would 'close' the case as an accidental death, for example, which would prompt Donna to carry on her own investigation. And instead of focusing on plot stuff I let Donna relax with a friend - which was fair enough, as she'd just been bashed on the head the night before - and do trivial girl stuff for a little while.

And it worked. The story feels like it is back on track. In plot terms, I'm not very much further than I was 2000 words ago, but I feel a bit more comfortable with who I am dealing with, and why they are doing it. And I think what I wrote tonight was almost readable, unlike every other night of whacking the sludgebeast to see what falls off ...

So if you are struggling, draw up the rap sheet. If you like, you can sling it in my direction and I'll try to offer solutions. Because we're almost into Week 2, which is a whole different ball game.

Emergency plot surgery II

When all else fails, write a murder mystery. These can be set in absolutely any genre, and can be as bloody, grimly serious or sickly funny as you like.

Choose a genre and a setting. You want pirates? You got 'em. you'd rather be writing high fantasy about The Knights of the round table? That's good too. Vampires and werewolves? Grow up. That's so six months ago. But you can still have a murder mystery peopled with vampires and lycanthropes, if you must.

Concoct six characters. They can be pretty cliched, that doesn't matter. They'll develop as you write. Then create a victim. Randomly assign the character's a motive for killing him/her (money, lust, jealousy, revenge and so on ...). Make one of your characters your investigator. Have them start by explaining why they would have killed the victim. Then have the MC casually admit that somone beat them to it, but (here's the clever bit) everyone thinks the MC did it. So the MC has to clear his or her name ...

Emergency plot surgery

I've been really nervous the last day or so. Ditching a plan and deciding to wing it - AGAIN - suddenly seems like a really bad idea. But there's no going back. Whatever is going on will have to work itself out over the next thirty days, as I write. Or not. That might have to wait until editing. Doesn't matter.

So if I'm nervous, some of you must be panicking. Please, don't. Take a breathe. Write. If you don't know what to write about, invent a couple of characters - A BARBARIAN WARRIOR and a SLEEK ELVEN ARCHER (or equivalents appropriate to your genre) and put them in an odd situation. Perhaps the BARBARIAN mistakes the ELF for a woman and propositions him. If that isn't enough, send in a DWARF, who picks a fight with the ELF, only to have the BARBARIAN throw him out the window for harrassing the BARBARIAN'S girl. You see how this works?

It doesn't matter if whatever you are writing falls to pieces. The important thing is to be writing - we can always fix the pieces, later. We can't fix something that isn't there. Once you finish writing for the night, take a few minutes to think about what you want to cover tommorrow. That way, your unconcious mind can start putting ideas together over night.

Eeep! Plot munchies!

This ... happpens ... every ... single ... year.

About 48 hours out from Nano, I suddenly felt my plot is not only the most boring and ill conceived plot ever, and my characters the least interesting or original, but I'm writing in entirely the wrong genre. Suddenly, I want to write about Dragons. And Elves. And Cthulhu. And romance. On Mars. And pretty much everything except Donna and her bloody half assed attempts at solving mysteries.

I've got the plot munchies, in other words.

Plot munchies stem from two sources. Either, you're losing confidence in your story and yourself, which is perfectly natural and the way it should be. In which case you have to stick to it with bloody minded determination. Or, your creative imagination is prompting you to address some problem you haven't identified. In which case, you need to work out what it is and sort it, otherwise you'll get blocked.

Unfortunately, there is no easy way to tell which type of plot munchies you're experiencing.

I think I've managed to sate mine for now. I gave some serious thought to my plot (such as it is - being on holiday has meant nil planning has been done in the last week ... oh, well) and decided I didn't like it anymore. So I chanaged it. In my original version, my victim was a fairly anonymous person called Victor.

Problem was, I didn't see poor Victor as a real person. People could have killed him all day and I wouldn't have cared. He was just a corpse for the other characters to have a mystery about. So I'm changing focus and instead of dead victor in a warehouse, it'll be the killing of a school girl that Donna is called on to investigate. And even though Lucy dies before the start of the story, I care, and I want to find out why and who killed her.

Interestingly, a lot of my planning for the murder of Victor can be transferred straight over to the new conception of the story - a hint that my original version wasn't right. But now it all seems a better fit.

Still, 24 hours to go, for me. Plenty of time to change my mind again.

More on outlining

When people are outlining, they tend to think in terms of the plot, purely. There is a lot more to a novel than plot, however.

Especially in the opening stages, you will be introducing characters, and establishing what sort of people they are. You'll also be describing settings and creating the mood for the story. All of that would be left out in an outline that focuses on the plot mechanics and nothing else.

So if you are phasing out a story, remember to include plenty of phases where apparently trivial things allow the important characters to show the reader what sort of person they are. These could be little incidents that don't do anything to move the plot forwards, or even have anything at all to do with the main action - going to buy a newspaper and remembering to say "Thank you" to the person in the newsagents, for example, or the main character spending half an hour listening to a friend complain about her problematic love-life, even though we know this is an inconvenience.

Setting and atmosphere are also important and need to be established. If you're following an ABC outline, you might not give the reader enough information to help them picture what is going on, or feel the appropriate sort of emotion. You'll also, probably, feel dissatisfied with your writing, because you'll know it is missing something. And, of course, every word you write describing a setting is a word less you have to write to reach 50,000 ...

Here's an example, from the book I think of as the best story every written - Nostromo, by Joseph Conrad. It is page 69 of the story, for no particularly good reason:

She had watched her carriage roll away with the three guests from the north. She smiled. Their three arms went up simultaneously to their three hats. Captain Mitchell, the fourth, in attendance, had already begun a pompous discourse. Then she lingered. She lingered, approaching her face to the clusters of flowers here and there as if to give time to her thoughts to catch up with her slow footsteps along the straight vista of the corridor.

A fringed Indian hammock from Aroa, gay with coloured featherwork, had been slung judiciously in a corner that caught the early sun; for the mornings are cool in Sulaco. The cluster of flor de noche buena blazed in great masses before the open glass doors of the reception rools. A big green parrot, brilliant like an emerald in a cage that flashed like gold, screamed out ferociously, "Vive Costaguana!" then called twice mellifluously, "Leonarda! Leonarda! in imitation of Mrs. Gould's voice, and suddenly took refuge in immobility and silence. Mrs. Gould reached the end of the gallery and put her head through the door of her husband's room.

Charles Gould, with one foot on a low wooden stool, was already straping his spurs. He wanted to hurry back to the mine. Mrs. Gould, without coming in, glanced about the room. One tall, broad bookcase, with glass doors, was full of books; but in the other, without shelves, and lined with red baize, were arranged firearms: winchester carbines, revolvers, a couple of shotguns, and even two pairs of double-barrlled holster pistols. Between them, hung by itself, upon a strip of scarlet velvet, hung an old cavalry sabre, once the property of Don Enrique Gould, the hero of the Occidental Province, presented by Don Jose Avellanos, the hereditary friend of the family.

That's about 300 words, so if you're going in for very detailed outlining, it is one phase. In an outline, it would be described as "Emily Gould walks through the house to her husband's room" and, in plot terms IT IS ENTIRELY POINTLESS, but in other respects, it is a very important page:

• It helps establish Emily's character, particularly in contrast to her husband's - after all, he should be there to wave goodbye to his important guests.
• It includes several ironic or symbolic tropes such as the parrot shrieking "Vive Costaguana!" a bit of senseless patriotism which will be replicated in human form later on, and the guns in the cabinet are suggestive of the danger that hangs over the Gould's.

So don't forget to include space in your outlines for character building, atmosphere and symbolism. After all, if it is just going to be about the clever plot, a reader would be as well sticking with the outline.

My sorry example

I first did Nanowrimo back in 2004. That, my friends, seems a long time ago now. I've done it every year since then, and always managed to hit 50K. One thing I know for sure - reaching 50k is the least of your worries.

In my first Nanowrimo, I set out to write a murder-mystery. I had a vague plot and one scene in my head - someone standing on a beach at night, coming back to their senses after a drunken blackout. My idea was that the character - named Bob, after a friend - would be framed for a series of grisly murders. In trying to clear his name, Bob would discover that he was, infact, a killer, though perhaps not the killer.

It didn't work out like that. A couple of days in, I introduced a character called Angie, simply to boost the word count. She and Bob proceeded to spend a lot of time having sex, travelling to Amsterdam and smuggling drugs. None of this was foreseen or planned.

Ultimately, I was about to reveal that Bob was a mass murderer when I realised something was Very Wrong. I'd forgotten to include any murders. Not even one. Bob and Angie had been so busy with all the other stuff, I'd forgotten what I'd originally intended to write about. It was a fantastic ride, however, starting two weeks into November and writing 4000 words a day, without time to think ahead or plan. Inevitably, I learned a lot of tricks to keep the narrative going in these circumstances.

In 2005, I started out with a main character who bore some resembleance to myself - a grumpy 30 something school teacher. He would investigate a killing at the school where he taught. After a few thousand words, I realised my narrator was dull and I hated him. I introduced a co-narrator, a female student with miles of attitude. She was good fun to write, and eventually I abandoned the luckless teacher completely. Ultimately, lack of plot was my undoing - I couldn't decide who was behind the killing, and so I simply set pieces all the way to 50,000 words, hoping one of them would spark something. It never happened. I realised that perhaps - just perhaps - some forethought might be helpful.

So in 2006, I wrote a brief plan, just a couple of paragraphs. It was a hardboiled murder-mystery that started well, but as the story evolved, I became uncomfortable. I couldn't see how I could reconcile the two plot strands that were developing - and they had to be reconciled, otherwise the story would make no sense. I didn't manage this reconciliation. Post nano, I seperated them completely into two stories. I expanded one of them into a full length, 62,000 word story. While still very imperfect, it had a begining, a middle and an end, a satisfactoy number of people were killed, I knew (by the end) who did it and eventually solved the mystery.

2007 saw me revisit the hardboiled genre, and my long sufferring Private Detective, Jack Callaghan. I sent him to a small Southern town to investigate the killing of one of his old army buddies. There was racism, murder, a gun fight in a blazing house and then (because you can never have too much of a good thing) a fist fight in a blazing house, a gorgeous and evil woman (you need those), a noble and lovely woman (you need those also) and of course thwarted love - for my one golden rule is Jack Can Never Be Happy.

I slogged away at it through November, December and into January, eventually reaching 92,000 words, some of which weren't bad. There were still flaws. Most noteably, I forgot to introduce my killer until the scene where he was unmasked - once again I'd followed too many interesting diversions and lost track of where I was - but nothing that couldn't be fixed with editing.

Last year's nano, on the other hand, was a horrible, mishapen thing, that lurched and blundered hopelessly about until I reached 50,ooo words, at which point I wrote the most unconvincing wrap-up in the history of detective fiction, and tried to forget the whole thing.

LESSONS TO LEARN FROM THIS:

First, and most important - Keep trying. I had to do three nanos before I managed to come out with something like a real narrative, and that was after extensive reworking of a botched nano effort.

Second - Don't get bogged down in details or too hung up on your plot. If there is something that you really want to explore and it is going to take yo away from your plot, go with it. This is you unconscious mind feeding you new ideas. If it doesn't work out, you can always have a character wake up, yawn, and say "I've just had the strangest dream ..."

Third - Remember that Nanowrimo is more about fun, practice, learning writing tricks and good writing habits than it is about producing a great novel. You might get lucky and produce something that can be hanmmered into shape, though perhaps not first time.

Fourth - Don't write about characters who are very dear to you. Some people carry characters around in their hearts and can't bear to see them sullied in the dirty scrum of Nano. If Tarquin, Prince of Arongier is a character you deeply love, have been developing for years and want to write great book around, don't bring him into Nano. Find someone you don't care too much about, who can take a few knocks. Believe me, by the end of Nano, you'll care for him or her a lot more than that simpering fool, Tarquin.

Planning versus winging it

In the final analysis, there are two types of people - those who, if they were trying to write a novel in a month, would plan it carefully, and those who wouldn't.

I've never been a planner. Every year, I try. I am full of good intentions. Each October I dutifully start trying to think about what I will write in November. I write murder-mysteries, and the received wisdom is that a mystery should be planned. You have to figure out the clues and red-herrings, the intricacies of the murders, the unravelling leading to a satisfying denouement. Most of all, you need to know who killed who, and why.

Perhaps. So far, however, that hasn't been my experience. I find the openess of making up a situation, throwing in complications and then trying to work out some sort of feasible solution to be far more fun and creative than plodding my way through a dull outline, prepared weeks before and that I am already bored of.

Still, each to his or her own. I do some rudimentary outlining in the latter stages of writing, once I've created a horribly complicated mess and need to start making sense of it. Usually, 2/3 to 3/4 of my way through a story, I'll look back at what I've got and work out where I want to be at the end of it. It is only at this stage that I'll decide who my killer is, and the crucial evidence needed to convict him or her. Often, this involves pretending that I've written stuff that isn't in the story at all - whole characters have to be magically incorporated, events recalled that will only occur in subsequent drafts. It is messy, but it works for me.

Usually, I set out 20 steps to get me to this stagem, and aim to write at least a thousand words for each step. They are very generall, i.e. "Jack follows Letitia to the secret house and confronts her." Though vague, I could cheerfully write about that for a couple of thousand words.

This should not be confused with the outlining method known as Phasing - where the story is broken down into literally hundreds of little steps, and you aim to write about 250-500 words for each step. I find this idea fascinating, but alien. How can you plan out a novel in advance like that, whe you don't know what the characters will actually do when they are confronted by the situations and dangers in the plot? Because you'll find your characters do start to do odd things that you don't expect.

I think a lot of the people who find themselves in trouble during nano are the ones who have planned out their novels in detail, and then find the story they want to write no longer matches the one they planned. Because they've invested so much in the plan, they don't have the confidence to wing it, become fustrated or bored, and quit.

Also, bluntly, I can't imagine spending so much time planning something out like that - no wonder people get fustrated waiting for the 1st of November starting pistol only to find they've completely lost interest. Their story has become old and stale to them before they even start to write it. Also - and this is a particular risk - they's had too much time to see the holes in their plot and this has discouraged them. It is a lot easier to look back at 50,000 words of semi-sensible novel and identify the bits that need to be fixed, than it is to set out to write something you know in advance will be flawed.

So, don't be afraid to plan in big strokes rather than intimate detail. And don't be afraid to follow your wild whims. And, if you are one of these people who likes to plan everything out in advance, don't be afraid to ignore the whole of this message.

Discipline

I've suggested you need to be selfish. Alas, there is more to it than that. You need discipline. After all, if you don't write 50,000 words, you'll have alienated you family and friends, neglected you pets and jeopardized your health for nothing.

The image of writers as louche dandies who spend their time making witty retorts and sleeping with attractive members of the opposite sex is a myth. When I'm not writing, my time is spent talking to a three year old who thinks singing "Heads, shoulders, knees and toes ... and poo!" is witty. The only person I get to sleep with is my wife and she's generally asleep, as in actually asleep, by the time I've finished writing for the night.

Writing is a skill and you needs to practise regularly to develop it. Some atheletes might be born with stupendous ability, but won't achieve their full potential without training. Thus it is with writers. Damn few get published without slogging through mundane, fustrating, demoralising and often seemingly pointless tasks. Nanowrimo will probably turn out to be one of these training exercises.

What sort of habits do you need to develop? I think the most important is regularity. Make sure you write same time, same place. This will train your creative imagination to 'turn on' at the right time. Ever had a great idea at 3am and not been able to remember it in the morning? That's creativity running amok. Often, I might have only a vague idea of what I'll going to write. After a hundred words or so, something comes to me, apparently out of nowhere, and it's great. That's because my creativity knows not to waste its time giving me dazzling insights at 3am - it knows that it will have an opportunity to reveal them later on. I've also found that regualr writing means my writing time is used efficiently - on a very good night, I can hammer out 2,000 words in an hour. Again, this because my creativity knows when to move from neutral to high gear.

I recommend you make a point of setting aside your writing time now, though nano is three weeks away. Get into the habit of sitting down and writing something - even if it is just a journal, a short story, or planning for nano - to get your creativity trained. This will also help you physically accustom to a writing routine - nowadays I skip lunch and have a big supper to give me the late evening energy burst I need. It will also allow those around you to get used to the idea that you'll be hogging the computer and really want to be left alone at certain times.

Another discipline issue - ration your time on the Nanowrimo forum. It is addictive. It is easy to squander an entire month procrastinating with other procrastinators, telling each other that you can do it and you'll start soon and your ideas are all good. They might be, but if they don't get written down, they're worthless. Don't spend your precious time telling other people how hard it is. Complaining and commiserating won't make writing easier or your word count bigger. If you are hooked, use it as a reward for hitting a goal: "1,000 words by 9 o'clock, then half an hour on the website." But stick to that, otherwise you'll find you've lost a whole day without writing anything.

Initial advice for Nano newbies

First thing you have to come to terms with is that Nanowrimo doesn't last one month. Not unless your some sort of agraphobic freak on a drip with a colostomy bag. When you think about the amount of time you will actually spend writing, tt probably lasts between 60 and 120 hours, depending on how long you can actually commit to writing. So that's between two and a bit and five days. So during your actual writing time, you're looking at about 400-800 words an hour.

That, I hope, makes you somewhat nervous.

Of course, there are crazy people who spend ten hours at a time typing away but I don't think you want to be like them. Not only must they literally have NO LIFE, but it must be excruiating spending so much time with your novel. By the end of the month, your novel will be like a party, full of people you hate. You won't be able to leave soon enough. One of my big motivations for writing quickly is Getting It Over With.

Every year, I get newbies who say they can maybe write for 15 minutes, twice a week, and ask if I think that will be enough ... No. You need to work out how much time you will need, and make sure you can find it in the day. Doesn't matter if it is 11pm-1am, or 1pm-3pm when the child is having his afternoon nap. For me, it usually 9pm-Midnight. Hopefully, at that time, the children are in bed. My wife is very understanding and just leaves me alone.

So the first batch of questions I want you to answer are:

- When you are going to write? I'm a creature of habit, and I think you can train your creativity to switch on, if you develop good work habits.

- Are you being realistic about how much you will be able to write in that time? If you are going to amble along at 200 words an hour, you're going to need to set aside a lot more time. And you need to know this in advance.

- How will you make sure you aren't going to be disturbed? Family and friends often think 'support' means annoying you and distracting you. Children will demmand attention if they know you're trying to focus on something other than them. I can't see any hope for someone who says "I'll write 1667 words in half an hour while the children are watching Blue's Clues."

Selfishness

Nanowrimo means you have to be selfish.

The most important thing you have is time. November is thirty days. You won't believe how many demands will be made on your time in that month. People will badger you, organisations pester you, employers require stuff of you. The army will try to draft you, government departments will mix you up with someone totally unlike you in every aspect, who isn't doing nanowrimo but who is committing tax fraud, and the police will try to arrest you. Pirates - for where there is nanowrimo, there are sure to be pirates - will try and pressgang you into their crew and take you off on exotic, swashbuckling adventures. But you have to be selfish, and learn to say no to everyone.

November is your month. Make sure people know it. They won't listen, and will try and pester you anyway with their petty concerns, but if you tell people in advance, then you can say "I did warn him your honour, that I needed to be left alone in November but he didn't listen," when you're in court for punching your (ex) friend for disturbing you on the 29th of November. So tell people. Then, insulate yourself.

Insulating yourself is making sure the people who are too selfish to heed your selfish demands for privacy, don't get near you. Borrow a friends big, ugly dog so that people won't come knocking at you door, switch the ringer on your phone to off, uninstall Messenger and close your facebook account so that your friends can't bother you with their useless lives.

Yes, your best friend may have spilt up with X (though you aren't sure who X is, you can't put a face to the name, because they've only been going out a week, and all her boyfriends are bland and interchangeable, anyway), and she might want you to comfort her and pamper her and tell her that she's a worthwhile human being and all men are swine. But she's got the rest of her life to get over her broken heart (and it isn't like she hasn't had practice), and you've only got one short month to complete Nano. Don't let anyone spoil it, no matter how much they want to.

So be prepared to be as selfish as it takes. Writers aren't necessarily nice people, but they are writers.

Rewards

Okay, I know I come across as a bit heavy and negative _ I prefer to call it realistic - but it isn't all bad.

I want you to plan a series of rewards for yourself through out the month. Work out how many words you need to have written by certain key dates (taking into account days where you may be unavoidably away from the keyboard) and work out a schedule of rewards for when (not if) you achieve the targets on schedule.

Typically, rewards are weekly treats and ased on the standard 1667 words per day. So if you hit 11669 words by the end of Day 7, you get your first reward. Obviosuly, it you are aiming for more words per day, or if you're going to miss the first week of writing, your reward chart has to refelect that.

Perhaps you can decide that if you're still on target after the first week, you can buy yourself a book, CD or DVD, or see a movie, or have a relaxing bath with your beloved (if he/she wants anything to do with you after being ignored for a week), or whatever works for you. But make it something fairly substantial and special, so it is a genuine reward, not something you'd do anyway.

If you are so minded, you could make up a cute little race-track style game with 30 steps on it, the rewards marked out, and move a little token representing yourself along it as you progress.

BUT (and this is the important part) you can't just give yourself the rewards if you don't hit your targets. If you don't stay on schedule, you don't get the CD. Not ever. Well, at least not until next year. Otherwise, where is the motivation?

So no "Boo-hoo-hoo, I feel so sorry for myself I'll buy it for me anyway." This is about motivating yourself to achieve, and rewarding achievement. If you're going to give yourself the treat regardless, there is no motivation.

Yay!

Two important developments - first of all, I HAVE A PLAN! Not, alas, for world domination, but for the second part of Honeybees. So that's really cool. Whereas with Part One, I had a plan and then blew it all to hHell in interesting and creative ways, I will probably not diverge too much from what I've work out. Part One was about me discovering the parameters of the world I was writing about, Part two is more plot focused. So while I'll be open to new ideas, I expect to end up pretty much where I the plan says I should nd up.

The second important development isn't really a development at all, it is a sort of almost nearly development - I'm within a spit and whistle of 10,000 words for Part Two. Which, given the creative ennui and unhalthfulness and so forth, is something. Obviously, actualyl breaking 10K would be more worth noting, and something I should have done a month ago, but things are certainly looking up.

Finally

... a break through. Since Socnoc, I have been pottering about, trying to decide what to do with the 50,000 word not-bad manuscript I'd produced.

First, I took a couple of weeks off. Then I had Swine Flu. Then I edited what I had written, trimming some of the fat and correcting the egregious errors. Then I though I had a good idea and tried to tease it out. Then I found myself stuck. Then, after procrastinating for another couple of weeks - taking me to near the end of August - I forced myself to start writing again, even though I was still uncertain about how I was going to do whatever it was I was trying to do. Then I got all unhappy, and unwell again and took a few nights off, continually telling myself I'd start writing real soon.

Finally, last night I worked it out. The orginl concept was all wrong. A much simpler, and much bleaker alternative suggested it to me. Which fitted with the whole thematic idea I'd been pursuing. And suddenly I actually want to write again. So it must be good.

Book review: Who Moved My Cheese?

Possibly the worst book ever written is the toe-curlingly awful Who Moved My Cheese? by Spencer Johnson, MD.

It really is one of the most remarkably awful things I've encountered in book form, and no opportunity to scorn it should be missed.

Frighteningly, it sells by the ton and has received four hundred and thirtynine 5 star reviews on Amazon (so far ...) though, hearteningly, it has also received 398 1 star reviews. Websites have been set up to spread its trite message further and celebrate its unbearable naffness. Many people I know who are sensible and successful - far more sensible and succesful than I - swear by it, and cite it as a inspirational book, second to none. But it is awful.

I read it when my wife was loaned a copy through her work, when that company was going through one of its regular restructures (as it is again, now). The book tells you how to regard these changes as opportunites and challenges, not as obstacles. I suspect it's appearance in the soon-to-be-liquidated department was not exactly a coincidence.

So, basically, when your employer tries to piss all over you, instead of protesting or - Heaven forbid - involving the union - you have to thank them for giving you a chance to explore your potential elsewhere. I kid you not. It doesn't advocate biting the hand that feeds you, so much as kissing the hand that slaps you.

The means of putting this wondrous message across is ... um ... cheesey (I suspect I may not be the first person to make that joke. But, what the Hell?)

A group of old friends meet up and discuss their lives. One of them starts to tell a story that is mean to illustrate the correct way - in the opinion of the good doctor - to face up to change. Whatever happens to you, roll with it. Embrace change. Life gives you lemons, make lemonade. This is athe literary level the book operates at. And there isn't a sherd of irony in it.

The story teller mentions that , when his company was gonig through changes, some people clung onto their old fashioned ideas and sufferred losses as a result. How foolish of them to think they might have had any rights what-so-ever, or that anything other than acceting your redundancy notice with a smile and a heart felt thank-you was the right way.

The book is short, which is the best thing that can be said for it. Most of it consists of a parable recounted by the narrator in the group of friends, illustrating different ways to deal with change.

Everything below is absolutely true and faithful to the book. I have not invented it. This is true. This exists. Adults pay money to be told this, and say 'thank you.'

The parable describes the experiences of two 'Little People' (That is, proles, like you and me), and two busy little mice. For reasons that are never made clear, they live in a maze, and every day they eat cheese which is delivered to the same spot by POWERS UNKNOWN.

I repeat: I am NOT making this up.

Then, one day, the cheese isn't there. The little people sulk and protest, unable to accept that SOMETHING HAS CHANGED. The mice immediately scurry off through the maze, and find more cheese.

Eventually, the little people realise that they should follow the example of the mice and go in search of new cheese, instead of sitting about bewailling the change that has befallen them. As they go, they daub the walls of the maze with maxims, just inc ase the readers of the book are too dim to work out the lesson for themselves.

It one of the most patronising books I've ever read. And it is wrong. No consideration is given to the idea that a change may not be appropriate, or that the 'little people' should protest when their jobs are out-sourced to China, that workers - for the book is really telling workers that they need to accept just that sort of thing, hence the reason it appeared in Mrs Lurgee's workplace when the 'little people' were having their cheese moved - might have a say or a stake in the company they work for. Change is always good, especially if it involves you losing your job. Be grateful, grasshopper, for the chance to experience poverty, insecurity and hardship.

The only thing worse than the tedious, obvious, insulting narrative and preachy lessonering, is the way the book is written. It is written in a curdled style that made me want to puke. It made Woman's Day read like Raymond Chandler. Sugary doesn't begin to describe it.

And, I repeat, this book sells by the million, to successful, presumably intelligent, business people. What is so wrong with the world that this is allowed to happen?

Is there no God?

Film review: Elephant

Elephant (2003). Directed by Gus Van Sant.

I did not like Elephant. I appreciate the thoughtful reviews above, and I'm glad they were able to discern something in the film that I missed, but the fact remains, elephantine and unignoreable, that the film left me cold, and slightly repelled.

I suppose you might say, of course you should feel repelled, it is a film about a high school shooting. It isn't meant to be nice. I get that. My revulsion wasmn't aimed at the events on screen, however, but at the presentation of events by the film makers.

The film is technically superb. Van Sant has declined over the years. The talent that made Mala Noche two decades ago now produces - the verbs have been chosen judiciously - work such as Good Will Hunting and Finding Forester. Mid-brow crap. Good, polished, mid-brow crap, but lets not pretend it's anything more than it is. That said he's always been technically brilliant, no matter how banal thepiece he's attached his name to - beautifully images, adroit camera work and framing, excellent editing and that elusive quality of texture where a simple shot seems to convey some quality of depth or meaning beyond the disparate elements. And, at his best, he's always managed to make his films seem effortless, no matter how technically adept they are. Mala Noche has the feel of the Greatest Home Movie Ever Made, when in fact it is a densely wrought piece played by a group of excellent actors.

Elephant, for what it is worth, has many of these qualities. The cast in particular are superb. It is noteable that some of the characters they have to play veer towards caricature - the clique obnoxious Bratzb ,itching between their bouts of bulimia, the awkward, shy girl with her own body insecurities and, inevitably, spectacles. The film is at its best when it is avoiding such trite characterisations, when we aren't given obvious pointers to what sort of character we're being presented with.

It is also beautifully presented. Van Sant knows how to create a mood with lighting, how to create an effect by moving his camera. But herein lies my issue with Elephant. The narrative has been coyly constructed so events unfold from several different perspectives and in a nonlinear fashion. Obviously, you have to do something along those lines when you're dealing with a limited time frame and you have several different characters all in different places - I get that. But this film goes beyond that necessary parralell construction, and makes its irregular timeframe a feature of the film itself. So the opening minutes are - in digetic terms - only moments away from the final scenes, but seperated by an hour or so of screen time. We see the killers, armed and intent, entering the school, then the timeframe shifts to earleir in the day, as we follow different characters as they move towards the bloody denoument.

Why is this a problem? Because it seems to me to be a deliberate, exploitative attempt to creat etension, to engage the audience emotionally, and focusing their conciosuness on their own nervous anticipation of events - will it be now? Now? NOW?! We might all know that the elephant is in the livingroom, but the preoccupation is not what to do about it, but when it is going to go rogue.

I must add, the much-commented-on non-linear construction isn't anything to get excited about. It is, essentially, a gimmick, the sort of thing you might expect from a premium episode of a TV show like ER. The startlement that greets a film that tweeks with its time frame says more about how low our expectations of cinema in general have become,trather than than the excellence of the film causing the stir.

It is also interesting that time-manipulation is a favoured tool when the film-makers are addressing some unpleasant topic - Gaspar Noe's Irreversible being the obvious exemple of this. Perhaps they feel that twisting the timeframe gives their work a particular gravitas, or intellectual weight. It isn't just a nasty little story about something unpleasant happening, it's a challenging and provocative piece of cinema. I'm not buying it. Elephant isn't as petulantly attention seeking as Irreversible - Noe is a director to whom the term enfant terrible may be applied more literally than is usual - but it is arid.

So, in the end, the film becomes exploitative. It becomes about who dies and who lives, about our mounting trepidation as we move into the final twenty minutes - for Van Sant rejects the only intellectual justification for his muddled time frame and has the climactic blood bath at the end, rather than dropping it on us - or, even more courageously - not including the shooting sequence at all.

Elephant is not the great film that needed to be made about this subject. It is a pity that it may, for all the doubts expressed above, be the best treatment the subject of high school violence receives for a long time.

*

Really bad sex

I award the Empurpled Septre for Sexual Bathos to Nigel Tranter for this hyberbolic humping, from The Steps to the Empty Throne, the first book in his trilogy about Robert the Bruce:

"... My love for you has been eating me up. These many, many months. When I despaired ever to see you again. Yet still loved and hoped. And now - to have you, hold you, here! It is more than flesh and blood can stand ..." "Ah, Robert - so it is love! Then, my dear, I yield. Sweet God, I yield me!" Suddenly, fiercely, she was pressing forward, against him. "And, save us - I conceive your flesh and blood to be standing very well, my heart ...!" she got out, before his mouth closed over hers, and their lips and tongues found greater eloquence than in forming foolish words.

Tranter would have been well advised to heed his own wisdom at this stage, but decides to plough on, using many foolish words in his search for greater eloquence:

The man's hands were almost as busy as his mouth - nor were the girl's totally inactive, either. He shrugged his own cloak to the floor, and hers quickly followed it. Then he was tugging at her gown, while still he all but devoured her with his kissing. Her defter touch came to aid him, and the taffeta fell away from her shoulders. The pale glimmerof her white body was all that he could see, but his urgent fingers groped and stroked and kneaded the smooth, warm, rounded flesh of her, serving him almost better than his eyes, her nobly full, firm breasts filling the ecstatic cups of his hands to over flowing, as they overflowed the cup of his delight.

I'm not convinced her breasts could be both nobly full and at the same time firm, unless she's followed Pamela Anderson's lead, but lets not dwell on that, for Tranter certainly doesn't:

Suddenly he was down, kneeling, his lips leaving hers to seek those proud, thrusting breasts, the exultant nipples ...

Steady on!

... reacting with their own life and vigour. She bent over him, crooning into his hair, her strong arms clasping him to her, rocking. But their need was a living, growing thing, a progression, and quickly even this bliss was insufficient. He drew her down to him, pulling at the gown's folds which a golden girdle held around her waist; and willingly she came, loosening it. The spread cloaks on the floor received them, and with swift, sure co-operation she disposed herself, guiding his clamant manhood and receiving him into her vital generosity.

Clamant manhood?

The man fought with himself to control the hot tide of his passion, to give her time. Blessedly she required but little, and together their rapturous ardour mounted and soared into the high, unbearable apex of fulfillment. With blinding, blazing release, and a woman's cry of sheer triumph, they yeilded themselves together in simultaneous surrender into basic, elemental oneness, a profundity of satisfaction hitherto unknown to either.

I actually enjoyed the book, overall. It's just unfortunate Tranter likes to write really bad sex scenes every now and again.

Stop the world - a new film from Godard

The great man is working on a new film, called Le socialisme, probably due for release in 2010.

A trailer is available on You Tube:



Apparently, he is also pondering a film exploring the shoah. Themes of destruction and genocide have been immanent in his recent work, such as Forever Mozart and Notre Musique.

Fired from the Canon

A list of ten classics you shouldn't trouble with.

I haven't read them all,and I'd disagree about Absalom! Absalom! which is one of my favourites, for all the reasons it is damned. As for the others he mentions, those that I have read, I agree are definitely over-rated.

Yes, even One Hundred Years of Solitude. Especially One Hundred Years of Solitude.

My intended reading for 2009

I know it is midway through the year, but I've lost the papercopy of thislist and it's good to have it somewhere safe for reference.

FICTION

1. December Heat by Luiz Alfredo Garcia Rosa. South American noir, apparently.
2. An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser. Tragic, and American, going by the title. Because they do it differently over there.
3. The White Guard by Mikhail Bugalov. Shenanigans following the Bolshie revolution.
4. Becoming Madam Mao by Anchee Min. My token attempt to read a book my wife has read. She is sensible and doesn't return the compliment.
5. The Ropemaker by Peter Dickinson. One of the authentic Big Beasts of British fantasy writing. So Harry Potter for grown-ups.
6. Purple America by Rick Moody. Purple, and American. Those crazy Yanks!
7. Quisante by Anthony Hope Hawkins. Swashbuckling nonsense, hopefully, from the author of The Prisoner of Zenda.

NON-FICTION

1. The History of the English Church and People by Bebe. Because its all true.
2. Hitler: A Study in Tyranny by Alan Bullock. Apparently the first full biography of Hitler.
3. For The Islands I Sing by George McKay Brown. A poet's autobiography. Hopefully more interesting than that sounds.
4. America in the Twenties by Geoffery Perrett. So I can wax knowledgable about the parallels between the last Economic Apocalypse and the current one.
5. All Too Human by George Stephanopolous. Clinton insider's account of the Salacious One.
6. Big Muddy by BC Hall and CT Wood. A book about the Mississippi. Why not?
7. The Hemingway Bookclub of Kosovo by Paula Huntly. Either an account of how literature brought some relief to those suffering in the horrors of ethnic cleansing, or a book soon to be adapted into a Stallone movie in which Hemingway takes out Milosevic.

RE-READS

1. Under Western Eyes by Joseph Conrad. The Great Man's most difficult good book.
2. A Disaffection by James Kelman. I won't be re-reading Translated Accounts just yet.
3. Red Shift by Alan Garner. A totally mad fantasy jamboree, where the past and present and the bit in between get all mixed up. Hopefully I'll understand it better this time.
4. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Nuff said, surely.
5. The Wild Palms by William Faulkner. Faulkner's great. This novel is strange. But it is referenced in Godard's A Bout De Souffle. Which is cool.
6. From Bondage by Henry Roth. Part three of Roth's Harlem Quartet, written after a helf century of literary silence.
7. Germinal by Emile Zola. Grisly story of miners and anarchists.

An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser

I doubt I have ever read a worse book than this. Let me make myself clear. This is not irony. I will not, with some intellectual pole dancing, reverse this judgement and reveal that this is, in fact, a great book. I mean An American Tragedy is a dreadful book.

A book can be bad for many reasons: paucity of ideas; clumsy characters; psychological shallowness; bad writing; lumbering self importance; unjustifiable length. An American Tragedy combines all these features in a positively indecent display of literacy ineptitude.

The story is simple enough. Clyde Griffith, a young man from an impoverished background, attempts to improve his lot by attaching himself to a wealthy branch of his family. Initially successful, his dreams of social advancement are compromised when he gets a naive young girl, from an even less socially auspicious background, pregnant. Faced with the destruction of his hopes, he murders her. He is caught and brought to justice.

That is the story in a hundred words. Dreiser stretches the tale out to almost a thousand pages. He manages this feat by practising redundancy. This is a writer who never found an idea idea so banal or obvious that he didn't think it worthy of repeating at least three times. The novel, with this repetition cut out, would be significantly reduced in size. I'm not suggesting it would be improved: there is an abundance of other flaws to be addressed. But at least the ordeal would be reduced.

So, what can the reader who ignore my warnings expect? Sludge. Dresier writes in a style that combines of plodding prose with hysterical hyperbole, outlandish metaphors, and occasional descents into complete incomprehensibility. Here's a taster, from the crucial central section, where dim Clyde schemes the murder of bland Roberta:

Indeed the center or mentating section of his brain at this time might well have been compared to a sealed and silent hall in which alone and undisturbed, and that inspite of himself, he now sat on thinking the mystic or evil and terrifying desires or advice of some darker or primordial and unregenerate nature of his own, and with out the power to drive the same forth or himself to decamp, and yet also without the courage to act upon anything.

Say what? Is it really necessary to specify that this brooding takes place in the "center or mentating section" of his brain? Why resort to the crudely anatomical "brain" at all? The whole first section could be reduced to "Clyde's mind might well have been compared ..." But no, even that's too redundant. "Might well have"? Don't shilly-shally, Theodore, might it or might it not? Assuming it might have, we now have "Clyde's mind was like a sealed and silent hall ..." But does it need to be "sealed and silent"? Let's just call it silent. In fact, let's forget the hall altogether. It's a clunky and cliched simile and, worst off all, pointless. It says, in effect, that Clyde's head was like a place where Clyde sat thinking. Now maybe I am just a Philistine, but I'm not convinced such a revelation merited such torturous phrasing, nor am I certain that this too-long novel would have been significantly weakened by excising the passage altogether.

Dreiser's genius is that he can produce sentences like that on almost every page. Here's another one:

And this, while not producing a happy reaction in her, had the unsaisfactory result of inducing in Clyde a lethargy based on more than anything else on the ever-haunting fear of inability to cope with this situation as well as the certainty of social exposure in case he did not which caused him, instead of struggling all the more desperately, to defer further immediate action.

It is worth noting that this occurs on page 423-4, and the earlier quotation on page 483. After sixty pages, Dresier is still hammering home his point with a manic obssession that betrays either contempt for his readers, or a lack of confidence in his ability to create characters. Okay, Theo, Clyde's a procrastinator. We get it.

Dreiser is no one-trick pony, however. He can do all kinds of incompetence. He specialises in sentences that wander all over the place, from stale metaphors to bland insights to pointless comment, insufficient punctuation and absolutely no point. He can also be a useless writer in very few words at all:

Clyde's hair-roots tingled anticipatorily.

Is it possible to imagine a five word sentence that combines more literary gaucheness and pretention? Not for Dreiser the common place 'in anticipation.' He must demonstrate his mastery of language with the clumsy, pretentious 'anticipatorily.' And the almost creepy precision of 'hair-roots.' What's that all about?

Dreiser also indulges his penchant for metaphors of the stalest and most trite type. Example has already been made, but, in the manner of Dreiser, I won't stop with one instance. Rarely has an author demonstrated such an enthusiasm for figurative language, with so little originality, or discernment:

But just the same, shameful as it was, here were the stark, bald headlands of fact, and at their base the thrashing, destroying waves of necessity.

There are some metaphors that really, really don't deserve to be extended. And sometimes he just stops making sense altogether:

And so he was about to repeat his customary formula in such cases that all could be told to him without fear or hesitation, whatever it might be, when a secondary thought, based on Robert's charm and vigor, as well as her own thought waves attacking his cerebral receptive centers, caused him to think again.

"Her own thought waves attacking his cerebral receptive centers"? What are we to make of this pseudo-scientific balderdash? The whole book is a sustained exercise in bathos - Dreiser's attemtpts to wring us, move us, puzzle us, inflame us, suceed only in boring us, or providing us with occasional unintended amusement.

Well, beyond the writing itself, what else have we? A story that should have been idiot-proof. The sumary I gave above may have struck some as interesting. it is. But Dreiser is such an inadequate writer that whatever intrinic tension, pathos or interest in the tale is crushed by his ponderous style and his insistence on telling us everything at least three times, in progressively more awkward sentences. The characters are hopelessly two dimensional. Clyde is bland and unlikeable, and - as he is rapidly tracked down by the forces of the law - shown to be stupid as well. We find it hard to care for him because his passion for the superficial and silly Sondra Finchley is so unconvincing. Note, not misplaced - part of Dreiser's Big Idea is that Clyde sacrifices Roberta's true love for Fickle Sonra's fancy - but unconvincing. Similarly, we don't care overly much for the feeble Roberta. It might seem mean, but rarely has a damsel been so distressed without inspiring any pity in the reader, who can only long for the chilly waters of the fatal lake to close over her.

Now, in fairness, there is one bit - just one - where An American Tragedy generates a modicum of interest. This is during Clyde's trial. The trial is a gift to Dreiser, who can't resist his urge to reiterate what we've already read, and has various witnesses tell us things we already know. But the cross examination of Clyde by the bitter, angry district attorney, Mason, does generate some power. For once Dreiser's compulsion to leave nothing out is some sort of a virtue. Reproduced virtually verbatim, the cross examination runs to thirty two pages, and it is grueling read as Clyde is slowly broken down. It lacks tension, because Dreiser is such an idiot he tells us precisely about the fatal trap Mason sets, well before it is sprung, but the relentlessness of the cross examination stands at odds with the rest of the book. Just two men, one questioning, one answering, almost word for word, without the continual flat footed authorial showing off that ruin the other 824 pages.

Dreiser is a mediocre writer who attempted to tackle a big idea in a big way and came hopelessly undone. Unwittingly, he provided his own epitaph, describing the luckless Clyde as an "inadequate Atlas," trying to endure the weight of his troubles. Dreiser is a similar figure in a similar predicament - like Clyde, he is incapable of carrying off his project successfully, and to foolish to abandon it.

NO STARS

Bloomsday

From the Independent, a likeable Twitterstunt for the 16th of June, the day when the action of Ulysess takes place:

Twitterers take on Ulysses

The decline of Western civilisation in 140 characters or less

AP

Wednesday, 17 June 2009

Forget about Ashton Kutcher. James Joyce's Ulysses, one of the most difficult novels in English, is on Twitter.

Two devotees of Ulysses have adapted its 10th chapter to Twitter, which limits users to 140 characters per post.

Called Wandering Rocks, the chapter is especially well-suited to Twitter because it follows 19 Dubliners going about their daily business.

For three years now, Ian Bogost, a Georgia Tech professor, and friend Ian McCarthy, a product manager at LinkedIn, have commemorated "Bloomsday" on Twitter on June 16.

That date in 1904 is when the entirety of Ulysses takes place, chronicling the experiences of a man named Leopold Bloom.

Bogost says using Twitter "for literary performance art might help shift perspectives on the service" and get people to use it for more than self-centered musings.

"Perhaps in so doing, we can shift people's interest in social media technologies from egomania and immediacy toward deliberation and cultural reflection," Bogost wrote in an email from Australia.

Bogost and McCarthy have dubbed their performance Twittering Rocks, a play on the chapter's title that could also mean Twittering is awesome.

They have registered 54 of the novel's key characters as Twitter users, and Bogost built a software program that tweets their first-person utterances at the correct moments in the chapter.

"The result is a complex web of timed interactions between many characters," he said, "precisely the effect Joyce was aiming for in the novel."

Tim Clare's five rules for getting published

From the longer article describing Clare's own experiences, published in The Independent:

1. Don't believe you dilute your vision by reading others' work.

2. Don't be afraid to lose faith in your original draft. To edit is not to scorn your infallible muse.

3. Don't submit your work with supporting material. Self-portraits in green crayon do not scream "I am creative".

4. Don't approach editors somewhere they could not reasonably be expecting to field submissions. Catching them off-guard will not get you a better deal.

5. The Writers' Handbook and Writers' and Artists' Yearbook are both produced by publishers. Ignore them at your peril.

10,000 words

The new project, provisionally titled 'Honeybees,' breached the 10,000 words mark. It's going fantastically well, 2,000 words a night without too much struggle. And - most strangely - I seem to be sticking to my plan, more-or-less. Though it's a bit wordier than I envisioned. But Phase 1.5 was meant to be a tense night time excursion in a town under curfew, and that's what I wrote tonight.

Film Review: Knafayim shvurot / Broken Wings

Knafayim shvurot (2002) D: Nir Bergman. Starring Orly Silbersatz Bana, Maya Maron.

This is a generic, but likeable family drama set in Israel. It describes how a woman and her children struggle to cope with the death of their husband and father. Each caught up in their own grief, they fail to recognise each other's pain until a second, jarring crisis jolts them out of their self-absorption.

The film's main strengths are its setting and its cast. It is set in Haifa in Israel, and this makes it slightly more interesting than it might have been if it were set in Anytown, USA. The use of authentic urban Israeli locations gives the film a realistic feel, and makes it simultaneously drab and exotic, which is helpful as the action and conflicts brought out in the script are fairly predictable. The script eschews any mention of the region's wider tensions, which is probably a good thing - if the lost father had been killed in a terrorist atrocity,or kidnapped by Hamas, it would have given the film a ridiculously melodramatic edge. As it is, his death is touchingly futile, underscoring the (mercifully) lightly stated message that people's true value should be appreciated when they are around.

The small cast are very good, particularly Orly Silbersatz Bana as the mother, Dafna, still reeling from the loss of her husband and so locked up in her own grief that she can't help or support her children, preferring to escape to the numbing urgency of her job as a nurse. Maya Maron is also very good, though her role, as the elder daughter who's dreams and hopes are being crushed by the weight of responsibilities suddenly dumped upon her, is a bit too pat and cliched. Maron makes you believe in her character's grief and resentment, even if her budding career as a singer is not as convincing. Some likeable, non-cutsie child actors help as well.

The film's significant weakness has already been indicated - it is very generic. Tropes established early on are revisited at the end in time honoured fashion. The tensions, while given some bite by the cast, are predictably laid out, and the combination of Maya's nascent pop career with the crisis overwhelming the family is straight out of Scrpitwriting 101. But that's all bearable. What's more annoying is the too-quirky brother, Yair, who responds to his father's death by withdrawing into childish behaviour, cod-philosophy and wearing a gigantic mouse. I suspect there is meant to be some significance intended here, but if so, I'm refusing to see it as it would spoil what was otherwise a likeable enough little film.

*

The Cold Six Thousand by James Ellroy

I read The Cold Six Thousand hoping to answer a question, which was whether James Ellroy was developing from the writer of breakneck but clunkily plotted pulp crime novels to something bigger. As often happens when you look to literature for answers to a question, I only got more questions. I still don't know if Ellroy is developing from something good to something great. He has developed a style of writing immediately recognisable and unintimable. He has secured himself a place in American crime writing that is unassailable. Whether he's going to move beyond that into the world of really great writing, is unclear.

My previous form: the Dudley Smith Trio (The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, White Jazz). American Tabloid. And now The Cold Six Thousand. Each one of these novels follows a very similar trajectory. They start brilliantly, sweep you through first half of the novel at a breakneck pace that may even leave fainthearted souls with heightened pulse rates, before reaching a conclusion that is somehow unsatisfying and questionable. Of them all, American Tabloid is the best, in that it sustains it's berserk pace to the end and its plot lacks the sense of doubt that weakened the Dudley Smith novels.

The Cold Six Thousand is a sequel to it, literally picking up just a few staggering minutes after Tabloid left off. The opening chapters are Ellroy at his brutal, electric best. Here's a sample:

1:50 p.m.
They touched down. Wayne got off first. Wayne stamped blood back into his legs.
He walked to the terminal. Schoolgirls blocked the gate. One girl cried. One girl fucked with prayer beads.
He stepped around them. He followed baggage signs. People walked past him. They looked sucker-punched.
Red eyes. Boo-hoo. Women with Kleenex.
Wayne stopped at baggage claim. Kids whizzed by. They shot cap pistols. They laughed.
A man walked up - Joe Redneck - tall and fat. He wore a Stetson. He wore big boots. he wore a mother-of-pearl .45.
"If you're sargeant Tedrow, I'm officer Maynard D. Moore of the Dalalas Police Department."
They shook hands. Moore chewed tobacco. More wore cheap cologne. A woman walked by - boo-hoo-hoo - one big red nose.
Wayne said, "What's wrong?"
Moore smiled. "Some kook shot the President."

Ellroy's style is immediately identifiable, like a (bloody) fingerprint. No-one else writes like this. It turns some people off. It works for me. If it doesn't work for you then don't read James Ellroy. The Cold Six Thousand is seven hundred pages long, and - apart from a few 'document inserts' (letters and telephone conversation transcripts) - it is all like that.

The novel picks up the story of American Tabloid immediately after that novel's culmination - the assasination of JFK. Wayne Tedrow arrives in Dallas to do a hit. At the same time, JFK is assasinated. The first part of the novel deals with the aftermath of the killing - the capture of Lee Harvey Oswald, the subsequent killing of Oswald by Jack Ruby, various unpleasant actons taken by various characters to disguise The Truth - for this is conspiracy theory heaven, kids - while Tedrow botches the job he was sent to Dallas to carry out. Scene shift to Las Vagas. Howard Hughes wants to own it. The mob want to bilk Hughes. Pete Bondurant and Ward Littel - characters from American Tabloid - are involved in various dealings and operations. A lot of people get hurt. A lot of people get dead, rarely from natural causes. The first half is brilliant. Vicious, cruel, blood soaked, racist, misogynist, preposterous, but brilliant.

There are, however, problems. The first is one of scale. Ellroy decided to bookend his novel with the murders of the Kennedy brothers - JFK at one end, RFK at the other, with Martin Luther King thrown in as a 'Whack two, get one free' bonus. This means the novel is covering a period of about five years, with a long hiatus in the middle. Ellroy's compulsion to have three main characters - every book of his that I've read features three major characters - exacerbates the problem, as it means there are a lot of character hours to be filled. So he thinks about what else is going on in the 1960s, and packs his characters off to Vietnam in the novel's major mis-step. Yeah, it fills up a couple of hundred pages and a few inconvenient years in the middle. And yeah, it lets Ellroy tick off a few boxes on his list of Things That Need To Be Included In The Definitive Novel Of The 1960s - Vietnam, tick, CIA, tick, Heroin trafficking, tick - but it doesn't add to the story proper, it just kills time.

And then at the end, it is Kill Time again - MLK and RFK get bumped mighty quickly, plus a couple of other bonus deaths. It should be a stormer of an ending, but it feels a bit disappointing. The victims don't mean much within the confines of the novel - none of the main characters are emotionally invested in them, and Ellroy's attempts to convince us that Ward Littell cares, don't convince - so in the end it is just another couple of high profile tap jobs, and the main characters aren't directly involved. It leaves the conclusion feeling curiously underpowered, like you've started a race in a Ferrari, and ended it on a bicycle.

Another problem is that the novel relies heavily on coincidence at key moments. Some of this is just lazy on Ellroy's part - it is coincidence that Littel fails to spot a crucial tail, it is coincidence he sees a revealing photograph - and the feverish police work that made parts of The Big Nowhere exhilerating is replaced by vague freferences to various minions doing the hard work of actually finding and doing, for the main. The much sought Wendell Dufree isn't tracked down by vengance-ridden Wayne's detective work, but by a tip from some off-stage characters.

Even then, there is a power in Ellroy's crazy vision of America in the 1960s that's hard to resist. At the risk of sounding repetitive, Ellroy writes like no-one else, and no-one else writes like Ellroy. Every page contains almost random moments of technical brilliance. Randomly, from page 488:

Truce.
They split the Stardust. They moved into the Cavern. They bought a new TV. Barb sulked and judged. He ran the biz. He ran dope. He ran guns.
Barb worked the Cavern. Barb wore go-go gowns. Barb showed off skin-plus. Dig it: No pinholes/no bruises/no tracks.
Truce.
They lived. They made love. He travelled. Barb flew then. He knew it. Barb flew white powder air.
They lived the truce. He nailed the Shit Clause:
Barb was right - the war was fucked - we couln't win. Barb was right - they had big love - they'd stick and win. Barb was wrong - white horse had teeth- white horse bit to win.
White flag/ceasefire/truce.
He conceded points. He owed Barb. He brought her to Dallas. The truce held. The clause held. The ink ran.

There aren't many current authors who could write a passage like that. Technical experimentation is considered to be dead, rejected by readers and writers alike as Too Hard. Too Hard to write, Too Hard to read. Instead, we get anti-literary sludge about ideas and feelings, identity fiction written in comfort zone prose. But Ellroy's managed to make a lot of people read his technically demanding, anti-comfort zone, Too Hard prose - which shows that failure isn't on the part of the readers as much as the writers. There are people out there who will read stuff that stretches their ability to understand, that doesn't make it easy. For proving this, if nothing else, Ellroy's a significant writer.

Perhaps Ellroy tries to hard. Perhaps 800 pages is 300 too many. Perhaps Vietnam was too big to be worked into The Cold Six Thousand as a diversion. Perhaps it deserves its own distinct treatment by Ellroy. He isn't perfect. He might not even be great. But he is important.

SoCNoc 2009

Um ... okay. So I wasn't gonig to do it. But I will.

The SOuthern Cross Novel Challenge (SoCNoC) is the southern hemisphere's version of NaNoWriMo, scheduled to fall in our winter, as there are no warm summery distractions to pull us away from our keyboards. 50,000 words in the month of June.

I have done SoCNoC before. Just like NaNo, it is a useful learning experience, but one I felt I had out grown. Hell, I'm 35,000 into Traces, 19,000 into Scratches, and making steady progress. I don't need a kickstart or an artificial deadline to motivate me. I'm doin' it, man, already.

But I'm also wearied of Traces and a bit stuck on Scratches. And I've had this really cool idea in the back of my mind for a couple of months. I've even got a title for it. And - important bit - it's not a murder-mystery. It's Alternate Present/Near Furture fiction aimed at teenagers. So completely different from what I usually write.

So I decided it would make perfect material for SOcNoC. I'd be aiming for 80,000 words, so a savage burst of writing in June would see me near almost finished. So I roughed out a plan - it is a fairly schematic story - based on seven major phases, each containing seven minor phases. At 12,000 words for each major phase, that would get me to 84,000 words. And each minor phase would be about 1,700 words - a sniff over the daily minimum to write 50,000 words in 30 days.

Planning is something alien to me, but it seemed appropriate fro this story. It is strange to think that - in theory at any rate - I can identify where in the stroy the 50,000th word will fall - in Phases 5/1, provisionally titled 'The Tough Guys,' where the group of major characters find themselves trapped in a small town menaced by a motorcyle gang.

That said, Phases 1/1 - 'Bread' - took me 2,000 words, with space for more if needed. But having too many words is not a problem.

Alice Munro wins Man Booker International Prize

From the Independent:

Short story author Alice Munro was announced as the winner of the third Man Booker International Prize today.

The award, worth £60,000, is given every two years to a living author for a body of work that has contributed to an achievement in fiction on the world stage.

It is handed out to a living author who can be from any nationality and who has published fiction either originally in English, or whose work is generally available in translation in the English language.

The prize was first awarded to Ismail Kadare, from Albania, in 2005, and then to Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe in 2007.

Munro, 77, who lives in Canada, said: "I am totally amazed and delighted."

It's interesting to see that Scotland's James Kelman was on the list - the only British writer who featured. Kelman is a writer I've previously endorsed, but on reading You Have to be Careful in the Land of the Free, I'm having to reassess my opinion. It was that disappointing. Others have raved about his latest novel, Keiron Smith Boy, which I have not read.

Carpingly, I'd note that neither of the two previous winners, Kadare or Achebe, have impressed me. I read one novel of Kadare's - really a squence of short stroies linked to the hsitory of Kosovo - and while it impressed me at first on looking abck at it it seemed very wordy and hollow. Achebe I have multiple problems with. First of all, the one novel of his that I have read, Anthills of the Savanah, I disliked intensely. Secondly, his comments on Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness suggest he's either something of a fool, or a knave more interested in establishing his reputation.

So perhaps the Man Booker International is a bit of a booby prize. I'm not very familiar with Munro's work, but I've always been vaguely sure she's a good writer, and probably worthy of winning something or other. So good on her.

55,190

That's me for the month.

Most of the 15K written this month was on Traces. As I said earlier, this was not what I was expecting at all. And I can't work out how I did it, as I've moved the plot forward about two inches.

I had a big brainstorm as I typed, and just put my thoughts and ideas about where to go next into Donna's head. Which cheered her up, and made me feel that All Is Not Lost.

Interesting

Rafael Escalona, singer/composer: born Patillal, Colombia 27 May 1927; died Bogotá, Colombia 13 May 2009.

The singer and composer Rafael Escalona was a national icon in his native Colombia, known as "el maestro" of vallenato folk music from the northern Caribbean coast. His ballads, sung to the traditional backing of European accordion, African-style caja, or bongo drum, and Native Indian bamboo guacharaca percussion, inspired many internationally known Latino singers, including Julio Iglesias, Gloria Estefan and his fellow Colombians Shakira and Carlos Vives. Escalona also made a lasting impression on another compatriot (and close friend), Gabriel García Márquez. The author mentioned Escalona as a resident of the fictional town of Macondo in his Nobel Prize-winning novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, and said that Escalona, and his music, had been an inspiration for the book.

"In a way, the novel is a 400-page vallenato," García Márquez once said, comparing Escalona's blend of true story and the fantastical with his own "magical realism". Towards the end of the book, García Márquez wrote: "In the last open saloon... an accordion group was playing the songs of Rafael Escalona, the bishop's nephew, heir to the secrets of Francisco el Hombre." The latter figure (Francisco the Man), a legend in vallenato music, was said to have been a musician who beat the devil in a duel of accordions.

(Read full obituary)

Only saw this in the Independent today, coincidentally it is Escalona's birthday.

4708 ...

Creeping towards the target. I've switched back to Scratches for the last few nights. Forcing the narrative to a point where I can introduce some new characters, potential suspects. So I've get to write about them tommorrow. Things happen when new people walk through doors (whether or not they are carrying a gun) so hoopefully this will get the narrative moving.

With Traces, I've got nerves. I'm about to intoduce a character that is significant, and who has been referred to many times before. ANd I'm scared of making it either too dramatic or too anti-climactic. Ach well, we'll see how it goes when I get the hankering to pick up that story again ...

7272

... is the number of words I need to write before the end of the month to hit my target of 55,000 words. Most of the words written this month have been on Traces, whih I wasn't expecting. Scratches is stalled - I want to make some revisions, which will open up a few more plot possibilities. traces, on the other hand, is in the 'open phase' - my investigatior is on site and talking to people, and I haven't started to close in on the solution, so there is lots to write about. True, a lot of it is flab - I took 500 words to get her from the foot of a short driveway tot he door of a house, andother 500 to get her into the living room, and tonight's 500 was the start of a conversation. But it feels good - much better than the misbegotten bar sequence I worte last week. It will need to be slimmed down, but that's not important at this stage. Interesting ideas and comments are finding there way intot he narrative, which is what this is all about.

Iain Banks / Iain M Banks

Iain Banks and Iain M Bans are one and the same. The presence of the 'M' indicates the work in question is science-fiction, its absence contemporary fiction set in the real world, more-or-less. Both names belong to a hirsute Scottish author who at one time seemed to promise great things but who now barely barely registers with me any more.

I've read a lot of Banks's work over the years - I'm shocked at how much. He might be lazy, but he's certainly busy, producing work of little notice, while resting on the laurels he earned in the 80s and early 90s. A shame to see how he seems to have settled for prolific mediocrity

Here are potted reviews of what I've read of what he wrote. As noted above, I've pretty much stopped reading Banks and I'm scared to re-read his older stuff in case it spoils it, so I might be a bit vague on detail. I've respected Banks's decision to distingush his sci-fi from his mainstream work, and the order within these categories is, I think, chronological.

As Iain M Banks:

• Consider Phlebas - Good. A shameless space opera set in the Culture universe. This was Banks in his grand phase, his titanic imagination working over time. Good characters, human and machine, cunning plot and grand settings. **
• The Player of Games - Another very good thing, though I discern a totalitarian streak in the Culture novels that I find a bit uncomfortable. Okay, maybe the Culture is run by super-intelligent computers, but aren't they just behaving like a bunch of neo-cons intent on 'regime change'? Still, put aside the philisophical navel-gazing, and it's terrific story. **
• Use of Weapons - Probably his best work as either Iain Banks or Iain M Banks. A mammoth space adventure, following one man's quest for redemption. Nicely structured forwards-backwards narrative, a terrific main character, a stonker of a twist and then (because when Banks was good he was really, really good) an second stonker just to leave you seeing a galaxy load of stars. ***
• The State of the Art - So-so short stories. Some good, some mediocre. No stars
• Against a Dark Background - Interesting sci-fi, set in a non-Culture environment. Much more restrained than previous sci-fi outings, and bleak on a galactic rather than an individual scale. I think I remember that the conclusion is weak, but it is still a good effort and worth reading. *
• Feersum Endjinn - Banks's attempt to be Anthony Burgess is interesting more than successful, but still just about hangs together. *
• Excession - A worthy Culture novel, with interesting and well realized machine characters. Banks was still trying at this stage, still challenging himself. *
• Look to Windward - Not bad in itself, but a definte diminishing of scope and ambition. Returning to The Wasteland for his title signals the triumph of the repetitive and lazy over the original and exciting. No star
• The Algebraist - Tediously long and convoluted tale that leads nowhere. Stale space opera with a long, drawn out quest segment. No star

As Iain Banks:

• The Wasp Factory - Strange little gothic tale. Yes, we all loved it when we read it when we were too young to know better. Take my advice and preserve it as a cherished memory, don't re-read it. Oh, and don't make the mistake I made of looking at the last page to see how many pages there are. Rather spoils it. *
• Walking On Glass - Deeply odd multi-narrative tale that doesn't really work for me on any level. I suspect he was trying to imitate Alan Garner's fabulous Red Shift, and failed absolutely. Yes, 'tis very strange, but strangeness in itself doesn't make for a worthwhile read. No star
• The Bridge - Like The Wasp Factory, on first encounter this many-stranded tale is stranfggely fascinating and I loved it at first. From a more mature standpoint, it strikes me as contrived, pretentious, show-offy and silly. Very studenty, which is probably why it is so beloved by students, but now it seems arid and smug. Just like Walking On Glass seemed suspiciously like Red Shift, The Bridge reminds me too much of Alastair Gray's mad and brilliant 1982, Janine. *
• Espedaire Street - The big disappointment of my re-reading of Banks. I enjoyed this maudalin tale of prog-rock excess when I read it the first time. I recall re-reading it with pleasure, but another visit proved one too many. It no longer seemed convincing, either as a chronicle of rock'n'roll excess, or as a tale of Davey Weir's personal salvation. And the idea of a sort of Scottish Pink Floyd taking the world by storm is less credible than Banks' more esoteric sci-fi imaginings. No star
• The Crow Road - The start of Banks' strange fixation on family sagas. Nothing much of interest here. THat is to say, nothing overtly bad, but nothing that makes me want to jump up and down and say "You've got to read this!" No star
• Whit - In effect, another family saga and very undistingushed. Very high 'Why bother?' quotient. You could perhaps justify reading this or The Crow Road, but I wouldn't recommend both. No star
• Complicity - I hoped this signalled Banks turning the tide in his battle against mediocrity, but it turned out to his last stand. I enjoyed Complicity. Clunky, obvious and flawed, but the sustained rage and disgust - at pretty much everything from Bon Jovi to Margaret Thatcher - made it enjoyable. Helps if you were fascinated by the Civilisation computer games in the 1990s. **
• Dead Air - Banks sinks into utter irrelevance. Writing about something as shocking and relevant as the terrorist attacks of September the 11th, he botches it, settling for an irrelevant and indulgent story about a banal prat mouthing off and getting himself into petty trouble. Unsuccessful on every level. No star

Dead Air by Iain Banks

Dead Air was published in 2003 (1). I got excited about it, even though I had detected a falling off in Bank's output prior to that. Whit, The Crow Road and (as Iain M. Banks) the increasingly vapid sci-fi of Against A Dark Background, Look To Windward and Feersum Endjinn.

So Dead Air might not mark the exact point where Banks went bad (doesn't that trip nicely off the tongue?) but it is so remarkably bad that it deserves special mention - though it is hard to know where to start.

With that in mind, it makes sense to start at the beginning - right at the beginning, I mean, with the blurb:

A couple of ice cubes, first, then the apple that really started it all. A loft apartment in London's East End; cool but doomed, demolition and redevelopment slated for the following week. Ken Nott, devoutly contrarian leftish shock-jock attending a mid-week weddng lunch, starts dropping stuff off the roof towards the deserted car park a hundred feet below. Other guests join in and soon half the contents of the flat are following the fruit towards the pitted tarmac ... just as mobiles start to ring, and the apartments remaining TV is turned on, because apparently a plane has just crashed into the World Trade Centre ...

Sounds good, doesn't it? It sounds pretty intriguing, in fact - decadence and disaster, the high of petty wilful destruction supplanted by horror in the face of wilful destruction on a grand scale. Well folks, this is about as good as it gets, and to be frank I already have problems. Yes, with the blurb.

The apple, for example. Is it mere coincidence, or is the apple (which ends up splattered) ment to symbolise, in some cool and metaphorical way, the splattering of New York, the BIG APPLE. Maybe I'm trying too hard here?

But there's more - what about our characters name: Ken Nott. In Scotland, 'ken' is slang for 'know.' 'Nott' = 'naught' = 'nothing.' So we have a character called 'Knows Nothing.' Banks, it seems, has decided to yoke 11th of September, 2001 up with that stalest of literary conceits, The Voyage Of Self Discovery. Next week: Nick Hornby uses the genocide in Rwanada to illustrate how one man comes to terms with his divorce.

I don't have a problem with his use of 11th of September, 2001, as the starting point of a novel. I don't expect that day to be pondered and discussed on sit-coms, but if you are writing a serious novel then it is okay to approach the big and terrible subjects. In fact, it is an obligation, especially if you're one of Britain's most ferocious novelists, intent on laying into the orthodoxy that it is okay to annihilate people as long as they are Arabs, and that Dubya is the defender of civilisation, then you might as well start at Ground Zero.

This isn't what Banks does, however. I was expecting something dark and terrible, exposing the hypocrisy of our leaders and our casual disregard for human lives other than our own - something akin to Complicity (an earlier novel by Banks that I still maintain is good), maybe featuring rightwing conspiracy, anthrax, asylum seekers and the realisation why all these civil rights curtailed after the 11th of September 2001 were important in the first place. I had hoped for RAGE – if the horror 11th of September, 2001, and all that has followed it, can't jolt Banks out of his lethargy, what can?

But we don't get any of this.

What we get is the uninteresting life (social and sexual) of Ken Nott. He hangs around with black people (who have comedy accents) so we ken Ken is cool. He has sex with many people, far more than his apparent charms would merit. Must be that irresistible Scottish accent ... Banks can't be arsed with a proper plot, so instead he throws together three different strands, hoping this will generate some sort of narrative suspense, so that when bad things start happening we are meant to be on tenterhooks, waiting to find out who is behind it all.

So, plotless. Poorly written as well. When he can be bothered, Banks can write prose that seems to have a physical impact. Complicity, a similarly badly plotted, clunky thriller, was partially redeemed by the sheer fury that Banks vented through its pages. In Dead Air, the prose is just flabby and dull. There are two big scenes towards the end that are meant to thrill, but it is very hard to feel bothered. Banks rambles, he ambles. He can't resist making chortlesome asides and wry comments that drain any tension that describing someone in mortal danger might have had. He even has the cheek to steal from his own earlier books: he takes time out from his narrative to explain that the process of holding onto the edge of a wall and lowering yourself to the full extent of your arms before letting go is called 'dreeping' in colloquial Scots - very informative, but he had imparted the same information in Espedair Street. Likewise, he describes the 'Not Proven' verdict, unique to Scottish Law, in almost exactly the same manner as in Whit.

Credit where credit's due, however. Once, just once, Banks shows us a bit of the old magic. To save anyone else the chore of sifting through the whole book for it dross, I reproduce the offending material here. I expect it to be excised from future editions, leaving us with absolutely unmitigated crap:

... there was a reliable-sources statistic that Phil discovered the other day; that every twenty-four hours about thirty-four thousand children die in the world from the effects of poverty; from malnutrition and disease, basically. Thirty-four thousand, from a world, from a world-society, that could feed and clothe and treat them all, with a workably different allocation of resources. Meanwhile, the latest estimate is that two thousand eight hundred people died in the twin towers, so its like that image, that ghastly grey-billowing, double-barrelled fall, repeated twelve times every single fucking day; twenty-four towers, one per hour, throughout each day and night. Full of children.

And that's it. That really is it.

All of which has lead me to speculate: is Banks up to something? At times the book is so awful that I think it has to be deliberate. In some mad, incomprehensible way, is Banks actually trying to insult his readers, and the sentimentality and veneration already built up around 11th of September, 2001. Is he teach a lesson to those how bought the book because of the shiver of horror that date inspires, trying to punish them for their unseemly interest in the catastrophe?

Or following the logic of his diatribe, above, is 11th of September, 2001 only worth a crap book, whereas the 34,000 children might be worth something better? Is Banks really that spectacularly bonkers? It is tasteless to use the 11th of September, 2001 to give you shitty book an air of gravitas and urgency. How much more so how much more so to make your book deliberately shitty and irrelevant, to confound the reader's ghoulish interest in the tragedy?

If Banks is trying some sort of moral conjuring here, then he fails, managing to do a disservice to both the victims of 11th of September, 2001 and the thousands upon thousands who die everyday through our indifference. But surely, he isn't trying to do that. I must be mad to even think it. Please someone, tell me I am mad.

NO STAR

1 - I wrote this a while back, 2005, I think. I get a bit pretentious towards the end, but, oh well, there's plenty of ire in there and I can't be bothered editing out the guff to make myself look better than I really am.