The Arrow of Gold, by Joseph Conrad

I finished The Arrow of Gold the other night, which probably makes me one of the elite in Conrad appreciation.  because if you manage to read that book ... Look, it isn't bad.  In places.

Unfortunately, the places where it isn't bad are the places where the tiresome love interest is not to be seen.  And there are not many of them, and the whole purpose of the novel was to record the romantic tensions between the narrator and the allegedly captivating Dona Rita.  I desperately wanted her to be captivating.  For moments - when the narrator was not directly involved in the story - she was tolerable.  But that is not easy to do.  So swathes of the novel are tedious and pointless and frequently bordering on the incomprehensible.

These sections are thrown into relief by the scenes which don't feature Rita, or where Rita is narrating her own personal history, with the narrator dumbly standing about twiddling his thumbs.

There are moment when the ladies withdraw and the men get on with manly stuff, and that is always where Conrad is at his best.  It is no wonder that his greatest novels are often the ones which are set on ships or other places where women are generally not a concern.  Conrad seemed to find them profoundly puzzling and - as one of my correspondents in the recent guardian discussion pointed out - this rather damages his standing as a great novelist.

After all, if you find fully half the species profoundly incomprehensible, and intercourse (careful now!) with them deeply confusing, then you are rather limiting yourself.

I'm not so harsh, as there are many things that chaps can get up to without having to dally with girls.  But it does count against Conrad that he wasn't smart enough to realise what a dreadful dead end the romantic aspects of his later novels would be. To try and fail once might have been commendable.

To try and fail repeatedly suggests either he was so arrogantly convinced of his brilliant, or he had stopped really caring and was trying to milk the formaula that had - inexplicably - made the equally muddled Chance a best seller.

No Stars

A book with a title that I will not reveal for now

Some books really are asking for it.  Take the one I'm talking about now.  No, I'm not going to tell you the title, not yet.  Not until you're ready.  But to explain.  I picked up a novel, by 'Best selling' auther JA Jance, at my local library the other day.  Two things struck me as soon as I looked at the cover.  Yes, I know.  Never judge a ... but just bear with me, okay.  Cliches are sometimes true.  This book's cover was asking for it.

The first thing wrong with it was the title.  Yes, I know, I still haven't told you what it is yet.  I'm a tease.  The second thing wrong with it was the strapline below the title, which proclaimed this book to be 'A Novel of Suspense', a high falutin' wording that vaguely echoed Conrad's line in titles (Nostromo: a Tale of the Seaboard).  Old Joe could do it of course; but here, proclaiming the book to be 'A Novel of Suspense' only managed to sound both pompous and wistful at the same time.  This wasn't a quote from some gushing hack, mind you.  It was a claim advanced by the novel itself.  Any book promoting itself in such a way is setting expectations that it damn well better live up to.  Paradise Lost, however, does not.

Paradise Lost?  Yes, indeed.  I kid you not.  She called her book that.  Barging fearlessly where angels fear to treat, or something like that, and appropriating a title that might - just might - have a bit of history.

And the funny thing is, it is totally irrelevant.  There's no reason for anything to be called Paradise Lost.  I guess Jance just thought it sounded kinda cool.

The story stumbles along the predictable road of far too many 'series' novels - the tiresome set ups and rehashings of previous entries in the series, the irritating supporting entourage of characters you know you are supposed to love and don't, but which the writer is too enamoured with (or arrogantly thinks her readers are) and the annoying intrusions of the character's personal life into the narrative.  Because, ya know, this ain't a detective story, it's a story about a detective and that means we have to know all about Tough-But-Sensitive Joanna Brady's romantic tribulations and her uneasy relationship with her daughter and ... and, ye gods, if I wanted a family saga I'd read one. 

Plot wise, the novel is very predictable.  The killer becomes immediately obvious applying the standard 'least important character rule'.  This may have been intentional - I'd identified the killer as a prime suspect just because of his prominent placement, then decided he was too obviously a red herring, and devised a somewhat - to my mind - alternative.  Which might be a testament to Jance's powers of misdirection, if it weren't for the crashing sense of disappointment when the killer is revealed.  Scooby Doo did this sort of thing better.

So, no.  Something was lost.  The plot?  My interest?  But not paradise.  It was a long, long way a way from where I was at.

Maniac Magee, by Jerry Spinelli

A few years ago, I read Loser, by Jerry Spinelli. This was on the recommendation of an interweb friend, who was rapturous in her praise of the book. I concurred. Loser is a beautifully done book. Deft in all the right places, heart felt in the others.

Odd to report that Maniac Magee, which I have just read, also by Mr Spinelli and covering some similar terrain, is much less interesting. Maniac Magee is a young lad who lost his parents in a slightly absurd locomotive accident, rejected his grandparents, and became a homeless waif who drifted (or rather ran) through the streets of his home town, touching many lives and changing things in many ways. Which sounds like a brilliant book. Only my summary is loads better than Spinelli's extended version, even if I do say so myself. because the version that Spinelli gives us is an incoherent stream of stuff happening, and - WHEEEE!! - more stuff happening, and - HEY!! - look out, here's some more stuff happening. There's something about a frog; a knot; lots of luridly sketched characters, one of whom is called Mars Bar; there are some bison - or were they yaks? - or something, anyway; and an old geezer with a lifetime of disappointments weighing him down; a sort of Boo Radley character who terrorises the local children; pizza; and all sorts of stuff.

None of which adds up to very much in the end, and leaves one with a disquieting sensation of not actually having not actually read the book at all, moments after the final page is finished.

No star

Rain Dogs and Love Cats by Andrew Holmes

You are probably familiar with the phenomenon. You start to read a book, and it is really good. Really, really good. You read perhaps half of it, before exhaustion forces you to stop and rest. The, when you return to the book the next day, it somehow seems to be diminished.

I don't know what might cause this phenomenon, or if it has a fancy, official name. Perhaps it is the result of tiredness, returning to the book when you're still feeling worn out from the exertions of the previous night; perhaps it's because you can have too much of a good thing, and even sugar starts to sicken after a few tablespoonfuls; or perhaps there are writers who specialise in creating riveting first halves of novels, but less skilled at finishing them off. Whatever the cause, Rain Dogs and Love Cats by Andrew Holmes is afflicted. It started well, kept me engrossed until I eventually had to stop and rest; and, when I returned the next day, seemed so much less than it had before.

It's a tale that might have been pirated from Chandler or Hammett. Charlie Watson's brother, Leo, dies in mysterious circumstances. Charlie has a hunch more to it than the police think. Charlie decides to poke about a bit, and discovers his brother had a second life, masquerading as a private detective, and there is, indeed, more to it than the police think. Only, rather than being set in San Fransico in the 20s, it's set in modern, middleclass suburban London, and instead of a shambling PI with a bad liver and a broken heart, our hero is a DJ with a wife and a new baby.

(The Tom Waits reference is deliberate, and relevant, by the way. Read on!)

First the good. Holmes can certainly write. He's got a wry, humour style that is easy to read with out being facile. he's got an eye for observation of people's foibles, the wear and tear of relationships and the intricacies of everyday life, particularly in its intimate, sotto voce miseries and joys. Holmes is probably sick of being compared to Nick Hornby, but - bluntly - he asks for it. Charlie exudes the same geekish, near autistic degree of self-absorption as Rob Fleming in High Fidelity. Charlie doesn't run a record store, but he does work as a DJ and Holmes even uses song lyrics to title the chapters. That's just asking to be tarred with the Hornby-lite brush. Still, Holmes amply demonstrates he can capture the desperation and frustration in every crappy life. And he can draw on the powers of darkness when it suits him, crafting dark and ominous scenes and loading innocuous ink on paper with menace. I don't think any parent could read the opening lines without a shiver of anticipatory horror:

She shouldn't have put the little one in the paddling pool. Not when she was so tired from night after night of 3 a.m. feeds and splintered sleep. Worse than that, she had been drinking.

Not long after, he sketches a scene where some scarily feasible young thugs run amok, egging each other on to trash a graveyard. It's the stuff of modern middle class nightmares, and well done. It seems, for a little while, that we're going headfirst down a very dark, nasty tunnel.

Then, suddenly, Holmes pulls back. Instead of the dark neo-noir nightmare we're promised, we get whimsy. We get, I dread to say, something closer to the cloying cuteness of the Mobile Library mysteries, rather than James Ellroy or David Peace. Holmes seems to recoil from the dark, silky textures he's found and prefers the lighthearted comfort of a pigs ear - in this case, the pig in question being Empress Of Blandings, the redoubtable sow described by PG Wodehouse. Instead of cynicism, bitterness and despair, we get ... silliness. Unnecessary, pointless silliness.

Take the dog. Look, the whole book hinges around Leo's efforts to find a dog. Now, that isn't a codeword for a stash of drugs or a dead body or a missing heiress. It's a dog. And the dog is called Charles Laughton. And - even worse - that isn't even a throwaway gag, it turns out to be fairly important in yoking together the two plot strands that constitute the mystery elements of the story, one of which is quite interesting, and the other, well, is about a dog.

Or there's the pointless absurdity in making the dead brother a *cough* professional Tom Waits impersonator. Now, the reason I picked this book off the shelf was because of the title. I figured any book referencing Rain Dogs in the title, and which features a brother who impersonates the great man, must have been written by a Tom Waits fanatic and would be imbued with the essence of Waits: darkness, hopeless (probably whisky fuelled) romance, bitter regret and the despair of chucking out time. Alas, no. It's entirely frivolous. Leo might as well have been a George Michael impersonator. Or an accountant. The Waits references are simply a schtick, a gizmo, a lure to people like me who are drawn to anything Waitsian.

The book is loaded with such stuff, and it wears thin pretty quick, especially because there are times - when Holmes plays it straight - that you can forgive the silliness, or convince yourself that he knows what he's doing and he'll make it all make sense in the end. So when it doesn't, and you realise that all the frivolous nonsense that glutterred up the story was just frivolous nonsense that glutterred up the story, you feel extra betrayed.

It's almost like Holmes had set out to write a dark urban thriller, albeit one set in the middleclass suburbs. He must have thought it would be interesting to add all these rococo elements, so he could show off his mastery as he wove magic with his unlikely ingredients. Then he chickened out, and was left with a poor farce around a double, or even triple, tragedy. Because people die in this book. Several of them. A young girl is coerced into performing in porn. Years of madness and despair are laid bare for us. There's nastiness in here, but none of it seems to mean anything at all, beyond an opportunity for Holmes to crack a few grating, smug jokes.

Rain Dogs and Love Cats could have been very good. Instead, it was just very disappointing. And its flaws were not flaws of over-arching ambition, pushing too far in the manner of David Peace; they were the flaws of cowardice, of safety seeking and the cheap laugh.

No star

White Riot by Martyn Waites

There are some good things you can say about Martyn Waites's White Riot. First of all, he's taken the title from a song by The Clash, and it's an established literary fact that any book that does so must - at least - have a good title. In fact, as he took the title of another novel from a Nick Cave song (The Mercy Seat), and another from The Pixies (Bone Machine) we can probably go as far as to say that Waites has excellent taste in music generally.

Second, he's got the cojones to take on a searing topical, controversial issue: racial and religious tensions in Britain, suicide bombers and the rise of extremism all feature in White Riot. Even better, he does it from an broadly progressive point of view, rather than opting for mere sensationalism, or pandering to prejudices. And - unlike a lot of progressives - he likes an bit of gore. No simpering middle class handwringing from the sidelines. Within the first few pages, some poor chap has had his luckless head kicked right in, and that's just the start.

But that's about it.

And, unfortunately, each of those virtues is also a weakness; and there's a more fundamental (pun intentional) problem as well. While I think an evening spent drinking with Waites, listening to his record collection and Setting The World To Rights (there's a few hint's he's a whisky man as well, another plus), would be a very pleasant use of time, a couple of days spent reading his book isn't. Unfortunately, he's just not that good a writer.

So, anyway, we're in the North of England. A young Pakistani man is found brutally murdered. Another dies in a botched attempt at a suicide bombing. Skinheads prowl the streets, looking for victims. The neo-fascist National Unity Party and equally dangerous Islamic counterparts square off. meanwhile, former 70s radical Trevor Whitman is receiving nasty phone calls from someone who seems to know a lot about his past. Too much.

Plot specific stuff aside, this is a novel in a serial - the title page bruits it as "A Joe Donovan thriller", a claim that leaves me somewhat cold. Joe who? Sorry, you'll have to try harder. Someone or other - I think it may have been Truffaut - suggested great titles sound familiar even the first time we hear them (which doesn't explain the very blah Jules et Jim). think The Blair Witch Project. Or White Riot. Or The Mercy Seat. The original songs, I mean, not the patchy thrillers dressed up in their finery. There's a frission of recognition even if you've never heard of them before. But "Joe Donovan" doesn't do it for me. Didn't he have some hits in the 70s? Does this explain the music obsession?

Now, I am not a fan of the modern tendency to franchises. I appreciate they have to happen - readers and writers both like to have familiar names and faces, and watch the narrative of the investigator develop over many books. We are now in the MacDonalds and Starbucks era of crime writing, however, and franchises are deliberately constructed from the start, rather than allowed to develop with at least the appearance of organic growth. Let it be remembered that old Phil Marlowe only ever appeared in a handful of novels. Sherlock Holmes cross dressed his way through a few more, and a gazillion short stories, but he didn't drag his personal problems into every one of them. Apart from his crush on Irene Adler, he didn't seem to have any issues to confront. But nowadays the characters and the issues precede the story. Perhaps, the issues preced the characters.

Anyway, this is a serial novel, and it does not wear it lightly. A good deal of time is spent refering back to the previous novel, The Mercy Seat. Joe Donovan has a son, who was abducted, and when we first meet him, he's a mess, a grief racked, obssessed mess, trying to trace his missing child. Fair enough. His fixation has lead him to disband his 'Information agency', Albion, alientating his colleagues, Peta, who bear their own scars from previous novels - Amar, literally, bears scars and is almost crippled at the start of the novel - though he seems to recover quite dramatically as the story progresses, his injuries fading into the background.

This is another thing that irks. The Albion team smack of the CSI / NCIS / House ensembles. What happened to the lone knight errant stalking the mean streets? True, the knight might have been allowed a squire for company, but now-a-days he seems to be accompanied by a whole gaggle of annoyingly 'vivid' characters, whether he stalks the mean streets of some American city, a hospital or Newcastle. Which is a problem in the limited scope of a novel, when the multiferous characters also have such riven backstories and so many personal challenges to confront, beyond the ones placed in their way by the villans of the piece - who barely get a look in for chapters at a time, so busy are Donovan and his entourage slaying their own dragons.

The entourage further complicate matters by being, well, teeth grindingly awful. They seem to have been designed as a (hem) Representative Patchwork Of Modern Britain. So, apart from Joe himelf, whose gruff exterior hides a decent and progressive soul (but who is tormented by the loss of his son and family), there's Peta, who is a tough chick in a man's world (Who is battling alcoholism and has some major family issues to confront); Amar a smart Asian techie (but who is recovering from serious injury and assessing his life. And he's gay, of course.); and Jamal, who is young, funky and black (But has a troubled past of his own). So we've got a white bloke, a white chick, an Asian man and a black kid. It's painfully obvious Waites is striving to cover all his PC, Cool Britainnia bases. But at the same time, to make these characters more than just tokenistic by ladling Troubles over them. Which simply doesn't work. And far, far, far too much of the novel (and this review) is spent watching these characters deal with thier Troubles. it's tiresome, and - ironically - this attempt to make the characters deep simply makes everything shallow. There are too many characters, they are too confronted, we don't really feel much for them. And there's a plot as well? Oh, do I have to invest in that, as well?

The plot? Well, beyond the summary above, it's pretty meat and two veg stuff. Dark Powers are stoking racial tensions to their own ends. The story relies on two massive coincidences (at least) to work. One, a crucial character has to have a chance encounter with a member of the Albion team. In the other a crucial character has to have a chance encounter with a member of the Albion team. You see how this works? Now, that sort of thing might be okay in the opening chapters, to get stuff moving - but the second encounter takes places in the heart of the novel. Worse, What Is Going On is pretty obvious from about the midway point. The only amusement after that is afforded by trying to second guess yourself as the plot trundles forwards, and the bad news is that there isn't actually any stunning surprise revealed in the final chapters - it really is as obvious as all that.

Which might have been quite clever in its own way, but it isn't. There was one possible twist Waites could have included. It seemed obvious to me, after I'd spotted what seemed to be the far-too-obvious possibility that turned out to be what-was-actually-going-on-all-along. But Waites eschews this possibly more interesteding twist - and, even worse, he blandly, directly mentions it, so the luckless reader isn't even left with that shred of possibility to cling to.

All these problems wouldn't matter quite so much if only Waites was a better writer. Hell, Raymond Chandler deployed some shonky plots in his novels - one of them even turned on that most nonsensical of mystery cliches, The Unrecognised Twin. But he could write, so we didn't mind. Oh, and we only had Marlowe to worry about, not a gaggle of characters all competing for our attention and emotional commitment. There's a blah, couldn't-really-be-bothered quality to the prose. The point I first thought Things Might Not Be Going Well was on page 9 - PAGE NINE - when the luckless Sooliman Patel is beaten to death. As the blows rain down, "He thought of his mother, his family. Tried to imagine their lives with out him. Their grief." No you fucking didn't, sport. When you're getting beaten to death with baseball bats studded with nails and razors, you don't lie there thinking beautiful thoughtd. You writhe on the floor, weeping and shitting yourself, gibbering and begging for the pain to stop. Then a couple of pages later, Sooliman's remains are discovered:

Marion screamed. And kept on screaming.

She was still screaming when the ambulance arrived twenty minutes later.

Over done, much? Hammer Horror called. They want their tripe back.

The whole book feels like it needed to be scoured by a vindictive editor. Apart from dubious descriptions like the above, there's some truly astonishingly bad figurative language. At one point we're told a tousled Trevor Whitman looks like "Wayne Coyne after a particularly intense Flaming Lips gig." Oh, really? I've never been to a Flaming Lips gig, intense or otherwise. I've no idea what Wayne Coyne looks like. If you're going to make pop culture references, at least make them broad enough for people to reconise (Another time, less absurdly but more blandly, he's a "Walking Gap Ad"). Nonsense like this clutters every page; it is almost like Waites decided to pad his word count by adding idiotic similes into every third paragraph.

And sometimes, the writing is simply incompetent:

Fenton, suitably chatised, shrank backwards. Natrass said nothing until he was out of earshot.

Wait a minute. How can he shrink back out of earshot, yet remain in the same room? Donovan and Natrass are not whispering surreptitiously to each other. They're talking Fenton is going to be able to hear, unless he leaves the room. Which needs to be stated.

So, as I said, I think an evening spent drinking with Waites, listening to his record collection and Setting The World To Rights (there's a few hint's he's a whisky man as well, another plus), would be a very pleasant use of time.

Do you think he'll be asking me round?

The Devil's Footprints by John Burnside

This book was a great disappointment. Some books can be tedious, banal and incoherent without being disappointing. If you expect a book to be those things - if, say it is written by Wilbur Smith - then you won't be disappointed. You'll get all that in spades.

But I expected a lot of The Devil's Footprints. I was vastly looking forward to it. Everything boded well. A menacing title, a nice cover (black and white, embossed, with the author's name and title in blue - very stylish), an intruiging setting, and an intruiging blurb which suggested a lot about the malignant lingering nature of evil and how the land itself can be imbued with wickedness. And all I get is an interminable account of a middleaged plonker ruminating about stuff. Very, very dull reading and thoroughly inconsequential.

There is a plot, of sorts, or at least a haphazard collection of half plots, but which don't really seem to come together into anything much. An an old folk memory is recalled, about the night the Devil walked through Cold haven; a family tragedy is described; the narrator, an ostentatiously self absorbed nonentity, describes his links to the family hit by tragedy; his relationship from some years before with the suicidal mother who immolates herself and two of her children because she has become convinced her husband is the devil; his earlier, less pleasant role as target of her brother's bullying; and his suspicion that he might be the father of the surviving child of the conflagration. All of which sounds like it might amount to something; none of which does.

No star

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?

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

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.

The Seventh Scroll by Wilbur Smith

Unless I do something really stupid, like read another book by Patricia Cornwell , then Wilbur Smith's The Seventh Scroll is going to be my worst read of the year (1). In fact, I can only think of two books I have disliked to the same degree - Melvyn Bragg's Credo and Iris Murdoch's The Bell. Wilbur Smith being compared to Iris Murdoch? Truly, strange bedfellows.

Where to start with The Seventh Scroll? First things: its length. Size isn't everything, but when we're talking about truly, reprehensibly bad writing, dull plotting and cardboard characters, then size suddenly becomes very important. The Seventh Scroll has a lot of size, a harrowing 486 pages. Bricks are smaller, and more readable.

You know when you read a book, and you bounce down the first page, all Bambi enthusiasm, waiting to get hooked in, to become fascinated by the characters or the sweep of the story or the intracy of the plot or the way that the writer batters new stuff out of the English language? That is what I was like with this book. I thought I should read something by Wilbur Smith, as I've been snottily turning up my nose at his books for years. Fair play compelled me to see if my high brow derision was merited - Hell's bells, I am alimp wristed liberal and believe in all hose fine principles like innocent until proven guilty. I was doing this man wrong by prejudging him. I also have a lemming-like streak, which I mentioned before in relation to Patricia Cornwell, that makes me make intermittently misguided reading choices in an attempt to bond with the common folk. Never, ever again. Until I read The Da Vinci Code, at least.

But, anyway, about the bloody book. All right, so it is big. The plot and the characters are hopeless. Rider Haggard did this sort of thing 10,000 times better, long, long ago. Save yourself the ordeal and re-read King Solomon's Mines. It is shorter and better.

Briefly: Royan, half English, half Egyptian and very hot, survives a savage assault that leaves her elderly Arabic husband dead. they were working on an archaelogical project relating to the mysterious seventh scroll, which might locate the lost tomb of Pharaoh Momose. She seeks help from a dashing English adventurer type, and together they locate the tomb in the face of opposition from the nefarious types - the ringleader is of course German - Hell bent on their destruction.

None of this would be terribly bad if it wasn't so drabbly written. I think it was about page 6 or 7 that warning bells started ringing, when the elderly Duraid is murdered. It was just horribly flat, badly paced, lacking tension. I was suddenly struck by a longing to read an Haggardian adventure story writen by Ian MacEwan. Think how much fun that would be. Or pretty much anything else. But not, never, another word by Wilbur Smith.

Never the less, I ploughed on. Royan flees Egypt and enlists the help of the aforementioned adventurer. He is - get this - an authentic English aristocrat, complete with double barrelled name (Sir Nicholas Quenton-Harper. Not Quentin, you understand, but Quenton) who delights in shooting game birds and rare antelope but still styles himself a 'conservationist' - which means that he winces at the thought of cutting down ancient trees but doesn't actually not cut them down. Sir Nick is a gentleman, which means he doesn't shag Royan, though she does allow him to get to to fool around a little bit more than is ladylike, which is probably down to her hot Arab blood. Everyone else is at it, of course, especially the black characters, who are portrayed various as foolish, lazy, stupid, drunk or horny. And there is an evil Russian as well, who we know is evil because he debases his woman. And the aforementioned evil German mastermind, who is also, naturally, sexually deviant.

Crude, offensive stereotypes aside (did I forget the sleazy, untrustworthy Arab?), the novel is very badly written. Characters talk - and think - in fully, uncontracted, non-colloquial language, no matter how grim the circumstances. Since Smith has already got plenty of words he should have been merciful and spared us a few by allowing his characters to say "Don't" instead of "Do not." I am sure Roayn and Nick were very well raised, but surely even they would have used the odd contraction especially when fleeing for their lives for the umpteenth time?

There is one almost-good joke in the book. Wilbur Smith puts himself in it as a character, referred to as a writer of books redolent with sex and violence. As a passing wink this might have worked, but he decides to hammer home the point by repeating it several times, perhaps feeling his readers are too thick to get it. More likely, they are simply comatose.

Beneath the smug author photograph inside the dust jacket, I am told that Smith dedicated his last 20 novels to his wife Danielle. If they are all of this quality, then she should be insulted.

NO STARS

1 - The year in question was actually 2005. This review was posted on an MSN book review group, that has since been deleted. It is reproduced here because I'm very fond of the gleeful viciousness of it. God, I hate that book.

The horror! The horror! A review of The Secret Life Lazlo, Count Dracula by Roderick Anscombe

I’ve always had a guilty fondness of horror stories – the tendency of these stories to be full of heaving bodices and ravishments and sexual license appealed to me in my teenage years, and any honest man will admit (and any woman confirm) no man stops being a teenager, ever.

I can’t even begin to list all the horror stories that I have read, from the respectable (Dracula, Frankenstein, Poe, Lovecraft et cetera), through the somewhat respectable (Stephen King) to the utterly unmentionable – where titles and writers blur into an endless montage of bared and rended flesh, cliché and nonsense. Ah! The joy of it all.

“Re-invention” is a dirty word to my mind. It usually entails some smart arse grabbing someone else’s laurels and trying to make off with them. Which brings us to The Secret Life Of Lazlo, Count Dracula, by Roderick Anscombe.

This is a re-invention of the Dracula story. It is, in a trivial way, emblematic of the problem with modern literature – which, as I see it, is that writers are too damn knowledgable to be able to write. Shakespeare wasn’t familiar with Freud or Neitchze, but that didn’t stop him writing a psychologically perfect illustration of the Oedipus complex (Hamlet) and brilliant examinations of power, its mis-uses and its consequences there-of (MacBeth, Richard III, Julius Ceasar). He just wrote it, damn it. In these postmodern times, however, people are too well versed in too much to do anything as simple as write it, damn it. They have to cram all sorts of stuff into the story, without thinking about what is already there. Dracula is perfect as it is. You could talk for days about the imagery and subtext, the fear of contamination, the allure of the other, Dracula as a supreme Oedipal figure who can only be killed by driving a phallus, sorry, stake through his heart. What we don’t need is a psychiatrist turned writer to do it for us.

In a nutshell: Drac isn’t a vampire, he’s an ordinary aristocrat with a fondness for rough sex, so rough that his dates don’t often survive. He dabbles in the infant science of psychiatry which allows him to ponder on his condition in a tedious manner. It isn’t the psychological brooding that annoys me, but the poor quality of the writing makes it very heavy going. Anscombe might be a qualified psychiatrist, but if this is anything to go by, his case studies make poor reading, and leave the reader feeling skeptical.

I’m not one to rush to judge too quickly. It wasn’t until page 178 that I became infuriated, when the good Count asks a friend ‘and that’s where we come in?’ – an odd phrase for a 19th century Hungarian aristocrat to utter. Of course, once I decided I was not ‘bored’ but ‘infuriated’ by the book, I showed it no mercy. I started folding pages over (after a conversation with my wife as to the practicality of using her lipstick as a highlighter) to mark things that annoyed me particularly – and I count a further 19 folded up corners. 20 blunders might not sound a lot, but remember this is from halfway through the book, and they are only the outstandingly bad examples. Add on top of that a poor quality of writing, staging (the characters seem to spend most of their time at breakfast) and plotting (not content with the violation and murder of four women, Anscombe throws in a plague, a treasonous conspiracy and a murder investigation).

The book is full of sloppy writing. We are told that one woman wants to ‘Show that she wears the pants.’ Again, an unusal ambition in 19th Cnetury Europe and an even more anachronistic styling. A few pages later, this woman and Mrs Drac have ‘Hit it off.’ Talking to the dogged Inspector Krause, probably the only convincing character in the book, Drac declares ‘if you look here and here you will see the small flaws which are the mark of manufacture – which however, superior, can never match the careful application of the craftsman to his art.’ Try saying it – people just don’t talk like that, particularly people who use phrases like ‘And that’s where we come in?’

I’m not going to list all of the top 19 Bad Things. I will, however, ask if you, knowing that your husband had killed two young women, would invite a third to stay at your home and watch indulgently while she flirts with the monster? Mrs Drac does just that. And, because I can’t resist it, the topper. As I have said, this is a book that has been written badly. Worse, it seems never to have been re-read either by the writer or by anyone else – perhaps I am the first person to have read it. If it had been read by an editor, and that editor had not been rendered unconscious by the overwhelming monotony of the prose, surely the phrase ‘Grief does not come naturally to her nature’ would have been struck out? 'Naturally to her nature'? There is so much of this sort of thing.

Vampires are so on-the-money, with spooky castles, dark capes, wolves, bats, oodles of sex, how is it possible for it to go so horribly wrong?

NO STAR

Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maughan

I enjoyed the film of The Painted Veil, though mostly for the amusment of watching Edward Norton and Naomi Watts pretend to be terribly proper English people. The plot clunked along from one fairly predictable point to another. It was pretty to look at (Particularly Ms Watts), unchallenging but at the same time just slightly better than the usual period costuumer-in-an-exotic-location fluff. Perhaps the book would have felt been less by-the-numbers, and as they say, never judge a book by its film adaptation. Look what the bastards did with Joseph Conrad's Amy Foster. And that was only a short story.

So, in the spirit of Finding Out More, I read Of Human Bondage. As the luckless curate said, part sof it were excellent.

The first two chapters are perhaps the most pathetic (in the true meaning of the word) I've ever read. Perhaps they are a touch sentimental by modern standards, but the writing is controlled but at the same time empathetic.

Alas, the rest of the book slides quickly down into a morass of awfulness and never manages to drag itself out.

Those first two chapters deal with the orphaning of the main character, Philip. After the death of his mother, he is sent to live with his deeply priggish uncle, a minister, then attends boarding school where he is bullied and mocked because of his club foot. He tries various professions and decides to become an artist in Paris for a while. After he fails tin that endeavour, he returns to England, completes his medical training, but falling in love with a trollopy tease of a waitress and is drawn into an arid, loveless, potracted relatinoship with her.

The whole thing is very banally pretentious. Various theories or philosophies for life are put forward, giving the affair a rather studied (and shallow) European air. But Sentimental Education this is not - though I suspect Flaubert's novel was very much on Maughan's mind when he wrote Of Human Bondage. There's nothing here that is interesting or remarkable. The philosophy is bland and superficial. The psychology of the characters dull and the action sluggish.

What dirt and nastiness Maughan permits is decorous and prim - ironically, this studied unpleasantness precisely the sort of thing Philip rails agains. Maughan is obviously trying to show his readers something of the grisly little world they try to ignore, but chickens out - surcumbs to his own conventional respectability - rather than present them with the real, unalloyed unpleasantness of life. Obviously, one can rebel against bourgeois conventions and morality, but only so far. I can't recall anything very interesting about how it was written - after a hundred pages or so I switched off, though I kept turning them in the hope of finding something to reward my perseverance. It is fustrating, though, to think that while Maughan was moving his stuffy litle marionettes in their quiant little comedy, Joyce had already written Potrait of the Artist and was at work on Ulyssess.

Now, it is not fair to compare a book to Ulyssess and say, "It isn't Ulyssess, so it is no good." If all books were as experimental, dense and byzantine as Ulyssess, book sales would be even lower than they are and illiteracy would be a necessity for keeping a blanced mind. But one can, fairly, compare a book to its contemporaries. When we do that, it's pretty obvious that Of Human Bondage was written twenty years too late - it is too old fashioned, uninteresting and blandly written compared to other books published in 1915 which are nowhere near as radical or unreadable as Ulyssess (1). I would take The Valley of Fear - or even Tarzan - over Of Human Bondage. And that's just the popular fiction. Never mind that D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Kafka and Ford Maddox Ford all had considerable books published that year.

NO STAR

1 - '1915 in Literature,' wikipedia article, viewed 10th of December, 2008. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1915_in_literature)

From Potter's Field by Patricia Cornwell

Occasionally, I dip my toe in the pool of popular literature, and the strange thing is I persist in doing this, even if almost every time I do, it either gets scalded or bitten off by a pike.

My most recent exercise in toe dipping involved From Potter's Field by Patricia Cornwell. I worship Tom Waits, and he wrote a song called 'Potter's Field' and I though the novel might be related to it in some murky post-modernity way. And anything to do with Tom Waits must be brilliant, or so I thought.

I should have borne in mind the Rod Stewart covers of his songs, that are just naff reprises of the original. I should have been more circumspect and thought - there is glory, and then there is reflected glory, and then there is stuff that is nothing to do with anything at all glorious. You have to approach these things with caution. The part of me that continues to have faith in human nature maintained that so many people revered Cornwell that she couldn't be bad. The more cynical side thought that popularity must equal bilge. Numerous evidences could be cited in support of the second proposition, and alas, precious few in support of the former.

From Potter's Field joins the multitude, I am afraid. Cornwell is not a bad writer as such - but Potter's shows she is a poor plotter and her characters don't act or speak in a believable manner.

Her plotting is based on withoholding of a key piece of information or action. The classic example of this is The Hound Of the Baskervilles, where Conan Doyle keeps Sherlock Holmes off stage for most of the novel, and once he turns up he reveals everything in 5 minutes. All crime stories rely on withholding, to some extent. It wouldn't be much fun if the criminal admitted to the crime on page 5 - though then we might have space for a proper investigation into motive for and consequence of the crime, both of which rarely feature in crime literature, and particularly in From Potter's Field. But there is withholding that works, and then there is withholding that doesn't. In this case, it is the latter, I am afraid.

In Cornwell's case, it is the crucial plot element could have been realised at almost every point - characters talk about it early in the story, then seem to forget about it for a couple of hundred pages, until the bland and unlikable Kay Scarpetta remembers it and decides to put it into effect, at which point the plot resolves itself in a most helpful manner. This wouldn't be too awful if the narrative that filled the intervening pages was exciting enough. Dashiell Hammett deliberately withholds the identity of the killer in The Maltese Falcon until the end, to generate suspense. It doesn't matter, because the reader is caught up in the tale that he doesn't realise he is, essentially, been told a shaggy dog story. But in From Potter's Field, there is little suspense and little of interest, and because the essential action has been foregrounded and then neglected, the characters just seem slightly dumb.

NO STAR

On Beulah Height by Reginald Hill

I'd previously read Singing The Sadness by Reginald Hill and though I wasn't uncritical, I generally quite liked it. I figured - charitably - that the intrusive jokiness I detected was a purposeful affectation, perhaps even a character trait. Perhaps Joey Sixsmith really did think everyone he meets looks like a star from the Golden Age of Hollywood. I was inclined to be charitable and was happy enough to pick up On Beulah Height, featuring 'tec team Daziell and Pascoe, which is held to be one of his better efforts.

On further investigation, I am sad to report this is not the case. The stylistic bum notes are no affectation. 'Tis ingrained, as Shakespeare had it.

On Beulah Height is a book about child murder, which is a very serious thing to write about. Hill uses the killing of children to make crap jokes. It's not that he is an atrocious writer - when he writes straight exposition he is streets ahead of Ian Rankin, for example. But he butts into his narrative with asides that are meant to be funny, with irritating regularity. It is intrusive as it disrupts the flow, and offensive, because this is a book about dreadful things.

For Agatha Christie, a bodywas simply a pretext for a smug bourgeoise type to demonstrate how clever he or she was in solving the mystery (and hence how clever Christie was for pulling the wool over everyone's eyes). She did it very well, and her murders had a innocence about them - murder was an after dinner game for adults, it was never sexual and never involved children. Christie's books were so removed from the real world that it is churlish to criticise them as exploitative and cruel. At the other end, writers like Hammett and Chandler also made murder into entertainment - but it was always something grim and nasty, carried out by depressingly real people for horribly mundane purposes.

Hill writes about the nastiness, but in a supercilious and annoying way that makes me angry. As I said earlier, he can write competently enough, though I note an irritating fondness of the exclamation mark and the elipsis, villans of punctuation best left behind with short trousers and acne. Hill over-writes to an extent that would make Iain Banks blush. Sometimes it is almost impossible to work out what he is trying to convey, he is so busy showing us how clever he thinks he is. Key scenes are ruined by throw-away jokes and snide comments.

Hill's characters seem thin and uninteresting. Characterisation is done with a sledgehammer - a character from Newcastle is not only called Geordie (fair enough, people might call him that), but his speech is littered with clunky 'Geordie-isms.' Hill also seems peturbingly concerned with his female character's sex lives - we are told a great deal about Mrs Pascoe's stupendous breasts and we meet Shirley Novello in the confessional, owning up to having shagged some bloke five times. Pascoe himself is a dull prig. Even the bloated and buccolic Dalziell is only intermittently interesting or convincing, but even his would-be gargantuan presence he is obscured by what seems to be a cast of thousands. The plot is spread thinly between a half dozen protagonists, and that is only the 'goodies.' Gone are the days of the mercurial loner stalking the mean streets in endless rain. I know that modern police work is not about one brilliant individual engaged in a philisophical quest disguised as a murder story - but if we have to spend so much time with all these folk, at least make them better company.

The books flaws don't end there, however. There is a structural weakness. The problem is that the central event of the book - the murder of a little girl - is witnessed, no by one person, but by two. One of these people immediately and conveniently lapses into a coma before they can give the game away, and the other simply bites their tongue, for no convincing reason. Hill then brings the first witness out the coma, just in time to resolve everything and paper over the holes in the plot. Worse, he used exactly the same device in Singing The Sadness - putting a crucial witness incommunicado until it becomes absolutely necessary for them to speak - because Hill can't think of any other way to sort out his stew of red herrings.

But wait - there's more. Thinking about the second plot strand of On Beulah Height, I realised that for the fifteen year old mystery to remain unsolved required YET ANOTHER character to have remained unconvincingly silent all these years. Sorry, but no, this just doesn't wash. This isn't a mystery, it is a mess. Yet it is acclaimed as a fine novel, an exemplar of the modern mystery genre. It is not.

NO STAR

DVD review - MacBeth (1997)

MacBeth (1997). Directed by Jeremy Freeston and Brian Blessed. Starring Jason COnnery and Helen Baxendale.

This was part of a box set I bought recently, a triple bill of Shakespearean tragedies -MacBeth, Hamlet and King Lear (reviews of the other two to follow). I watched MacBeth first because it is one of my favourite plays by Shakespeare, and I've been curious about this version for some time.

MacBeth, I've always thought, is the most accessible of Shakespeare's 'Great Period' plays. Compact, focused, with heaps of violence, it should have been the play most open to screen adaptations. I'm not aware of a really good rendering of the story, however - the best effort being Orson Welles's vigorous shoestring version. To the list of MacBotches we must add the Connery/Baxendale effort.

(It seems it was not a 'film adaptation' at all, but a TV version that was given a theatrical release, post Luhrman's Romeo + Juliet and Branagh's Hamlet. That might explain some of its flaws, but doesn't excuse them.)

It starts well, with a feisty battle sequence with pleasingly grisly witches looking on. Poor old Gray Malkin and Paddock are cut from the opening scene, but they aren't alone for long. In quick order they are joined by the bloodied Sargent and his account of the battle, the treachery of the Thane of Cawdor, the luckless master o' the Tiger, even MacBeth's meeting with Duncan when he is invested as thane of Cawdor. All of these had virtues that plead like angels trumpet tongued against the dark damnation of their sending off, but sent off they are. These aren't the only cuts, either. This is MacBeth in a hurry.

From the opening battle we are pitched directly into MacBeth's encounter with the witches, which is well done. Brian Blessed, curiously, directed the witchy sequences, and he has great fun with the special effects as MacBeth and Banquo are told of their fates. Jason Connery as MacBeth is awkward, obviously unsure what to make of the verse. Graham MacTavish as Banquo, on the other hand, is capable, making his lines natural and easy. Within a few minutes of Connery's mumbling, the viewer is struck the urge to see the roles reversed and MacTavish in the title role. No wonder MacBeth felt he needed to kill him.

These first few minutes marks the high point of the film. From there we move to Helen Baxendale receiving word of her husband. She's as lost as Connery, and denied the beard that he gets to hide behind. Her "Unsex me here" invocation of evil is embarrassing, not unsettling. There are some reasonably clever touches - MacBeth's "We will speak further" is not a sign of his hesitancy in the face of his wife's wicked ambition, but his attempt to silence her prattling as he throws her onto the bed.

The acting of the leads is the biggest let down. Connery's method consists of staring glazedly about the screen while he mumbles his monologues via voice-over. Baxendale looks pinched and neurotic. An attempt to do something interesting with "Is this a dagger?" - the fantastical dagger is a shadow cast by a cross on an altar - falls flat due to Connery's poor delivery and sloppy direction, which mars the production throughout. We accompany Lady MacBeth back into the murder chamber, where she gets to stab the reviving Duncan, but the effect is comic, not dramatic.

Big scenes are botched - the appearance of Banquo at the feast is made incomprehensible through attempts to mix subjective rendering of MacBeth's delusion with what those around him see, or don't see. The second meeting with the witches is even less coherent, and the prophetic visions are confusing. Timing seems to be an issue here - Banquo's banquet is the centrepoint of the play, but the film moves rapidly towards conclusion after it, giving it an unbalanced feel and no scope for the intricacies of the riddles MacBeth is caught in to be appreciated, or for his descent into madness to be convincing. Another crucial cut is the scene where Malcolm tests MacDuff, and MacDuff learns of the murder of his family. This robs his revenge of most of its emotional force - and the character of a lot of the screen time. He's a virtual stranger when he turns up to kill MacBeth.

A point for trying. MacTavish's Banquo earns another. The first few minutes garners another. But that's all. From then on it's sound and fury blah blah blah.

NO STAR