On Iain Banks

I haven;t always been kind to Iain Banks, but now he's gone and died, grumbles about the quality of individual books tend to fade in comparison to his achievement over all. 

True, a lot of the books were either pretentious student twaddle (Espedaire Street, The Bridge, Walking on Glass) or tired and bloated (Crow Road, Dead Air, Whit). Maybe three or four of them were truly brilliant (Player of Games, Against A Dark Background, Complicity).  Which is more than you can say for most writers.

So what if he never managed to repeat the brilliance of Use of Weapons?  What matters, of course, is that he did it once.  And (at least sometimes) tried to emulate its scale.

Here is Iain Banks' final interview, shortly before his death.  Definitely worth a read, for those who have not already found there way to it.

Really drives home that while he probably wrote too much, too quickly, now that he's gone you wouldn't really have had it any other way; and what a rounded, passionate, honest human being he was, beyond the (rather variable, but all now treasurable) books.

Should sci-fi die?

The blogger Mark Wallace reckons so:

It’s time to abolish a whole literary genre – science fiction must be destroyed. The signs should be taken down from Waterstones, the specialist shops should pull down the shutters and the conventions should be disbanded.

I say this as a fan, rather than an enemy. Science fiction as a genre should be abolished – so it can take its rightful place in the genre where it belongs: literature.

He then goes on to list some works usually classified as science fiction that he thinks are good enough to be go toe-to-toe with general fiction. His Top Five are:

The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick.
A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller.
The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick.
The Forever War by Joe Haldeman.

I have a couple of reservations here. First, if he is forced to nominate two works by Philip K Dick, doesn't this rather undermine his contention that the sci-fi genre contains a wealth of writing as good as anything in mainstream fiction. By name-checking Dick twice, he's really saying either Dick (and a few others) are great writers who opted to write in a genre that is otherwise pretty weak; or his own knowledge of sci-fi is rather limited, in which case who is he to be pontificating on it's value?

Further, if you're going to cite an example of Banks's fiction, why plump for the inferior Player of Games and overlook the monumentally great Use of Weapons?

Use of Weapons IS the most obvious example of Banks's sci-fi that could be described as something more than 'just' science fiction, with its forwards-backwards structure, it's unreliable narrator and its still-impressive-even-after-you-know-about it double whammy twist ending. It's every bit as challenging and inventive as mainstream fiction, whereas Player of Games is just a bit of a space opera romp.

(As an aside, I used to think Banks - in either form - was brilliant, but now I can't be bothered. Most of his straight fiction seems pretty facile. The Bridge is so far up its own arse it might as well be renamed The Bert. Espedair Street is a rather silly bit of wishful fulfillment (Banks kinda wanted to be a rock star, he even wrote the songs referred to in the book), Crow Road and Whit are just a bit rubbish, Dead Air should have been great but wasn't (I suspect it was another bit of wishfulfillment, the wannabe rockstar re-casting himself as a DJ). The only one I still entertain any fondness for is complicity, largely because it was so deliberately nasty, and so very, very angry. And the description of the main character trying to wedge his bobbing erection under his computer desk while he plays a God game on his computer is amusing.

That said, I'm tempted by some of his recent efforts, because he seems to have become stridently political again, and that always gave his writing a bit more of an edge.)

However, Wallace, may have some sort of point. We need to get over the weird snobbishness that seems to exclude a novel like Use Of Weapons from consideration. I think the Whitbread put Harry Potter & The Philosopher's Stone on the short list, but that was probably more about making the prize seem relevant to general book readers, rather than a heroic blow against book-snoots. Otherwise, novels like Use Of Weapons would surely also feature - technically ingenious, imaginatively superb, character driven, full of ideas ... but since Use of Weapons was categorised as sci-fi, and generally ignored by readers (who for some reason didn't think there was anything odd about reading a kids book about a boy wizard at boarding school) it was also safe for prize panels to ignore it.

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.

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.

Fallen Idols - Anthony Burgess and Graham Greene

Burgess, eh? Used to love him. Now I'm not so sure. Can't say why. Something lacking, underneath the artifice and the word play. A sense of him taking not it seriously, perhaps?

Also, he wrote too damn much, too quickly. Most of his novels are just throwaways - a half, or quarter, decent idea flung down in 160 pages or or so, the essential weakness covered up by a lot of clever verbal antics, and rudeness.

Neither of which would be a bad thing if there was a sense that Burgess wrote the novel for any reason other than maintaining his quota of books for the year.

It is hard not to be drawn towards Burgess the man. There is so much about him that is endearing and bizzare. Most famously there is story of how he came to be a full-time, professional writer - diagnoised with an in operable brain tumour, he cast about for different ways that he might provide for his wife and (as then unborn, and tragically never born) child. As he'd had a couple of books published by this time, he decided to try to write a book a month in the months remaining to him. He failed, but he did manage to crank out three or four, and - more importantly - he also failed to die. Infact, he kept on failing to die until 1993. This, and other legends, make it easy to like the man and forgive the problems with the books.

Only it has been suggested that most of the legends are just that - legends, invented by a man with an urge to create stories and myths about himself. His brain tumour and medical death sentence appear to be one of these little fibs Burgess told over the year (1). Which just leaves us with the boooks, which are a mixed bunch, always very clever and written with great brio, but usually seeming a bit hastily put together, lacking in a developed plot and the sense that the author was really interested in them as anything more than an excuse to show off his vocabulary.

There are exceptions. The Malayan Trilogy (Time for a Tiger, The Enemy in the Blanket, Beds in the East) are vey good and there is a real sense that Burgess connects with his characters situations - probably because he is writing at least semi-autobiography. While I haven't read Man of Nazereth describing the life of Jesus, the sequel, Kingdom of the Wicked, is also very good. Here Burgess is addressing big stories and huge characters, and he seems to respond to the task.

While I have little time for Enderby the flatulent poet whom everyone else seems to regard as a masterful creation, the third (or was it fourth?) in the trilogy (or was it quartet?), Enderby's Dark Lady is worth reading. The good news is it isn't strictly necessary to read the earlier books in the sequence as various irreversible things happen to Enderby in books one and two, and then are mysteriously reversed in book three (or was it four?). His book about Shakespeare, Nothing Like the Sun is excellent, perhaps his best. Again, he is engaged, the intellect and the word play being used to describe one of the few people he seemed to admire almost as much as Anthony Burgess. A Dead Man in Debtford, describing the life of Marlowe, is also very, very good, for the same reason.

His great big not-quite-Booker-winning book, Earthly Powers, I am not sure about. The first time I read it I was sixteen and did so to annoy my mother - because the book's main character is homosexual and this had convinced her that Burgess must be "of that ilk" (I can still remember her saying that) and this might corrupt and taint me. At the time I thought it was brilliant. Re-reading it a few years ago, I'm no longer sure. Thee is a lot about it that is excellent, but a lot of it is just the typical Burgessian froth and frot, spread over several hundred pages instead of a hundred. It deals with big important themes like love and faith and art and blah blah blah blah but doesn't really have very much to say about them. The climactic revelation about the fate of the Toomey children shocked an sickened me the first time around. The second time, the scene seemed very mishandled and written like a bad comedy.

So yeah, Anthony Burgess, I don't know if he's good or bad or not.

As for Graham Greene, all in all its a bit like the Burgess thing. I used to like him, Hell, I used to love him. Now I don't. Why not? Don't know. But when lovers fall out, it isn't usually pretty or reasonable or rational. And I used to love Greene. I even blamed (?) him for my loss of faith at one stage, though I was sixteen at the time and prone to saying silly things. Where did it go wrong?

Introduced to Brighton Rock in secondary school, I quickly read most of his other major works - my parents had a compendium of five or six of his novels, and several gorgeous orange backed penguins. I lived and breathed The Heart of the Matter, The Power and The Glory, The Quiet American, A Burnt Out Case, The Honorary Consul and the other 'major' novels. I can even remember feeling very upset when he died in 1991.

At university I even wrote my dissertation on his religious novels - "Bakhtinian Readings of Graham Greene' or some such piffle. By this time I'd read most of the famous ones and was polishing off the minor works - Travels With My Aunt, The Captain and the Enemy, Monsignor Quixote and so on. I didn't think much of them but I didn't let that worry me. I recognised them as what they were - minor fluff, not to be taken seriously and not compared to the great work that Greene had done before. Though it is interesting to note that it wasn't until my university years that I read The End of the Affair - and I disliked it intensely, for all that it is rated as one of his best. I loved the alienated brooding of Bendrix, but I choked on the absurd religious elemnt of it. Which is interesting, in light of what was to come.

Then we driffted apart for a while. Perhaps we should have left it at that, but I tried to rekindle the romance a frew years ago, picking up a copy of A Burnt Out Case from the local library. it had always been a favourite. But now it sucked. Abysmally. What had once seemed charged with pathos and beauty and terror was just ... dull. And very schematic. And really, obviously, trying too hard to make itself seem important.

Since then, Ive been too scared to re-read any more Greene. I'm afraid that the other greats will seem just as bad. Particularly the other favourites - The Heart of the Matter, The Power and the Glory, The Human Factor. What if they two are as dry and worthless, second (though it might be third or fourth) time round?

Recalling another of his novels that I admired, The Quiet American, published in 1955 and seeming to predict every American foreign policy misadventure between then and now, made me think - what if Greene had resisted the temptation to write all these banally sanctimonious Catholic novels, and written more in the line of the The Quiet American?

Greene was always characterised as being a writer torn between Catholicisim and socialism, though I think that is simplistic - the socialism never really seemed like anything more than ideology he paid lip service to to shock and annoy his fellow Catholics (and vice versa, I suspect). But what if he had thrown the mumbo-jumbo out and written more politically, more journalistically? It is an interesting thought, and I for one, as a disillusioned Greene-ite, wish that he had.

And yes, the title of this post is a bit of a Greene in-joke.

1 - From the wikipedia biography of Burgess, viewed on the 10th of December, 2008. It should be noted the claims are not verified, however. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Burgess#Borneo)

James Kelman

Since Alastair Gray has put himself out of the running (1), James Kelman can now lay claim to the crown of 'Most Important Living Scottish Writer' - should he care for such a title, which I rather doubt.

I have read three of his novels, plus short stories (2). Since that trio includes THE WHOLE of the near unreadable Translated Accounts, it surely qualifies me as Kelman's most devoted reader, and world authority on his works. Come on! Who else has actually read the whole damn thing?

Other that Translated Accounts, I've read How Late It Was, How Late and A Dissaffection. Both are good, though it was a long time ago and I'm struggling to recall enough to make a spirited defence of them.

How Late It Was, How Late won the Booker Prize a few years ago, back when I was naive to imagine that this particular trophy actually meant something.

At the time, it was TERRIBLY controversial, because Kelman's fondness of the word 'fuck' and all variations thereof proved too strong for some folk. One newspaper calculated that the word occurred more than four times a page. How did they work that out? What poor bugger had to sit there and count how frequently James Kelman swears? It has been a long time since I read it, but I remember it being being very intense and bleak. The other two are clearer in my mind, so I'll focus on them.

I recall A Disaffection as reminiscent of Dostoevsky's Notes From Underground, only coarser, longer and set in Glasgow.

The main character, Patrick Doyle, is a pissed off 29 year old teacher and he is fustrated sexually and careerwise. Sometimes you want to scream at Patrickbut this is a testament to Kelman's ability to make his character seem real, because real people are like that. The final scenes of the book - basically an all day piss up with his brother and his brother's mates, when he should be teaching, interrupted by the arrival of his brother's wife, culminating in a long walk home in the rain - are brilliantly poignant. Kelman must be the only writer who could imagine a trudge home in the Glasgow rain, with a strong liklihood of a kicking from a couple of belligerent cops, seems at all redemptive.

Translated Accounts is a very strange book, composed of fragments of first person narratives, translated by a person or persons who have only a limited familiarity with English. Here are the final lines, which I think are stunningly good:

I cannot say about a beginning, or beginnings, if there is to be the cause of all, I do not see this. There are events, I speak of them, if I am to speak it is these, if I may speak. (1)

And now, a digression ... I remember reading some spurious comparison between Alastair Gray and Kelman, to the detriment of the latter on the grounds that Kelman is limited by his decision to write in dialect (ducks Kelman's haymaker - he dislikes the word intensely) and his concentration on dull realism. This is bullshit. Kelman's concern is for with the unrepresented, and those who are made to be silent.

He has also been accused of misogyny, a charge often levied at male who write about males subjects, though curiously often aimed at females who write about females. It is a libel that can easily be put to rest. Though most of his narrators are male, he is concious of an excluded 'female voice' (ducks anouther swing from Kelman) and highlights this in the closing pages of A Disaffection. The first speaker is Patrick, well pissed. The second is his sister-in-law, Nicola. Kelman doesn't like quotation marks and the paraphenalia of bourgeois grammar. Live with it:

Pat waited a few seconds before speaking. What I mean there about Elizabeth is she's got a sense of peace. John has it as well right enough but I think she has it more. It's a real sense of peace.

Pat. Women have to listen more than men, that's why they've got a sense of peace as you call it; they're used to listening - that's what they have to do all the time, listen to men talking. Yet to hear them you'd think it was us did it. And not only listen to them, women have to watch them all the time as well, they've got to study their moods, they've got to see its alright to speak if this is the bloody time you can ask the question or no, is it the wrong time and you'll have to wait because half the time men just areni willing to listen to something if they don't want to hear it, it gets you down. (2)

Back to Translated Accounts. It is, I think, the ultimate realsiation of what Kelman has been trying to do with his linguistic guerilla warfare. Reading it a few years ago, I tried to work out what his goal was. I came up with three options:

First of all, by writing a novel that tetters on the verge of incomprehensibility, he is trying to make the reader actively create the narrative from the fragments he has provided. The reader has to create the characters and action in his head. If so, he has failed dramatically, because the novel is too resistant to this sort of exercise. The reader will simply give up in fustration. That said, there was one sequence which I read as describing a building crowded with refugees, which gave me the heebie-jeebies. But, with reflection, I don't think that was what he was trying to do.

Second, he might be attempting - by making the setting, characters and conflict anonymous - to describe some universal experience of displaced or opressed persons. The anonymous characters who flit through the ... (words fail. Novel? Story? Collection?) ... the accounts might be Palestinians and Israelis, or Sandinistas and Contras, Jews and Nazis, blacks slaves and their owners, or Glaswegians fighting against English tyranny. If this was his purpose, however, he failed again as the book is so incoherent that it is impossible to draw any sort of narrative or structure out of it. It isn't anyone's experience.

Which brings us to option number three, which is, I think the correct one. I think Kelman has been trying to respond to the critics who bemoan his obscenity and his refusal to write in anything approaching Standard English (pah!). Translated Accounts a story taken out of its natural reister and translated into a hideous non-language by computer mediation - a bit like running Zola through Babelfish. It is, to all intents, unreadable and incomprehensible - which is the point. I think Kelman is trying to show us that a story or a character must be described in its natural voice. To do otherwise is to bastardize it and to make it - from an intellectually and artistically honest point of view - as deadly and meaningless as the mangled accounts that he has produced. So the Accounts themselves are almost a shaggy dog story - it isn't the accounts that are important, but the fact that they have been translated. They've been taken out of their natural register, an immediately cease to be relevant, interesting or important.

If that was what he intended to do, he's suceeded magnificently. But it is a Phyrric vistory, because the book isn't any more readable just because it is meant to be unreadable.Though I would be interested in reading an alternate version, Untranslated Accounts, to see what was actually going on.

1 - This review was written a couple of years ago. Gray has produced another book since, so perhaps he is not as out of the race as he appeared to be a few years ago.
2 - And since writing this, I have read Kelman's You Have to be Careful in the Land of the Free, which was a major disappointment.

The thing about Ian MacEwan

... is that he is a great writer, but he is too much like Whoopi Goldberg.

That requires some explanation, I feel. So let me explain.

Whoopi Goldberg is a great actress. Speilberg's adaptation of The Color Purple may be flawed (arguably, less so than Alice Walker's book) but Goldberg's performance is brilliant. Her career since then, however, has been marred by her inability to choose good scripts. Burglar, Jumping Jack Flash, Clara's Heart ... Whoopi is game, but was too willing to waste her talents in unworthy vehicles.

Ian McEwan suffers from a similar affliction. Though he's a great writer, he seems to be squandering his talents. He never seems to produce convincing books, or even books that are good but flawed. Rather, his books seem to be poor with occasional flashes of brilliance. Because good McEwan is like nothing else , these occasional fits of inspiration are often the part that gets reviewed -the fairly weak book attached to them is overlooked.

McEwan's work seems too focused on small things. A middle class couple menaced by a lunatic (Enduring Love), a middle class family menaced by war (Atonement), a middle class family menaced by a lunatic (Saturday) ... you see what I am getting at? Without reading his latest, On Chesil Beach, it doesn't sound promising. It was described by the Guardian as describing the "trauma of a honeymoon in Dorset on the brink of the sexual revolution". This doesn't bode well.

McEwan seems to be stuck in a rut. His books books are always

a) too short,
b) too middle class, and
c) beset by a sense of smallness.

These failings are all interwoven and (mixed metaphor alert) feed off each other.

McEwan's books have always been short. Enduring love was a middling 247 pages. Amsterdam was a trifling 208 pages. On Chesil Beach weighs in at just 166 pages. Black Dogs was 178 pages long. Atonement was more substantial, at 371 pages, but the relative epic quality this imparted to the book just serves to highlight how slender the others are.

Quantity does not necessarily mean quality, of course. There is nothing wrong with short fiction. A short intense novella, like John Banville's The Sea, or his even better The Book of Evidence, can provide as much satisfaction, trouble, puzzlement or whatever you crave from fiction, as a far bigger book. Bryce Courtney has mastered the expanded style of fiction - he uses as many pages in one book as McEwan might in three or four. Whether his novels are better than McEwan's are, of course, entirely a matter of personal taste.

I am worried, however, about McEwan's tendency to write short, focused novels. It seems to me that by doing so, and doing so repeatedly, he is limiting himself. By necessity, he focuses on striking incidents and short time frames - Saturday covers the events of one twenty four hour period, unsurprisingly. Atonement ranged far across time and space, but did so in clinically discrete sections. Enduring Love focused on the relationship between two middle class people and a psychopath. It is arguable that McEwan is allowing himself to focus on (pretentious phrase alert!) the intimate signifigance of moments, with a forensic level of detail, and that is all very well. But that seems to be all his does now.

As for the charge of McEwan's books being too middle class, the truth of this should be apparent from a survey of his characters and his readership. Perowne is a surgeon - a neuro-surgeon at that. The menaced couple in Enduring love are both successful careerists. The family in Atonement have a big country house and SERVANTS, for Heaven's sake. Characters sport names like Briony, Clarissa, Cecilia and Pierrot. Perowne's children are, respectively, a jazz musician and a poet. This wouldn't be a problem if it was just one instance - ther is nothing wrong with a book set in a middle-class milieu, modern or old, but since he keeps returning to these environs, it is again a limit on his creativity, his licence to explore life in all its forms and all the places where it lurks.

At least part of the reason for might be that McEwan is a writer-of-choice among the middle classes themselves. These are the people who buy his books - self-absorbed professionals and wannabe intelligensia, who would quite like the idea of their children (often named things like Clarissa and Pierrot) growing up to be jazz musicians or poets. They like reading about themselves, or the sort of people they would like to be, and gain a vicarious thrill from the intrusions of ugly, violent reality into the lives of characters the identify with so strongly. The real challenge, which McEwan seems reluctant to take up, would be to carry his readers out of their comfort zones and into a world that is unfamiliar to them.

This brings us to the sense of smallness that I identified earlier. This is partly a function of the limited scope of McEwan's preferred form, the novella, and his focus on characters drawn from the middle class, or upper middle class. But there is something else apart from that - a lack of ambition on his part, a failure of desire to venture into uncomfortable, unfamiliar ground as a writer. This is a significant failing of all for a novelist - choosing the comfortable and familiar over the risky and new. He does not seem interested in pushing the envlope further. It could be argued that he is trying to perfect one thing, but that seems a deathly pursuit - revisiting the same tropes, shaking them up or rearranging them in the hope that this time, they will fall perfectly into place. Perhaps this is why McEwan's prose has a detached quality, even as he describes the most thrilling sequence - he's bored, at some level, by what he is doing.

What McEwan needs to do is blow his boundaries sky high. Shakespeare wrote great plays that reeled from taverns to court to battlefields, combining ribaldry with calculating ruthlessness, heroism, stupity, venality and everything else - in one play.

McEwan should take note, and instead of writing another novella about the troubled middle classes, he should try something different. A huge book, covering the whole of society in all its ugliness, the model used by Dickens, Flaubert, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Or put his ability to write unforgettable scenes to full use by writing a war novel - the Dunkirk sequence of Atonement hinted at how brilliantly he could do this. Or even follow John Banville's lead and try his hand at genre fiction. Something new, rather than another clinical exercise of his undoubted gifts in the same style as before.