Commentary

It has been brought to my attention by my good friend Tim, who tried to leave some comments on the stories below after repeated pestering by me, that it may not be all that easy to do so unless you're already on Blogger.

*

Damn.

I have enabled comments and you should be able to comment as either a Blogger, Anonymous or Other. Only problem is that you won't be able to see them up on the site until I approve them (which I most assuredly will). In the mean time, if you can't get in and would like to speak your brains on my stuff, please email me (no pervs or spam, thanks) at

talkinboutmydissertation@yahoo.co.uk

Sorry it's such a mouthful, all the other versions I tried were gone.

(Yeah, I know, I should do that *at* thing, but the whole address is such a fag to type that I'll take my chances for the sake of people being able to just cut and paste.)

*By the way, you probably don't want to Google for images of "tape over mouth" in a work environment (WHICH I DIDN'T). It's not, ah, safe.

Why you should read Eleanor Rigby

Based on guess which Beatles song, this new novel by Douglas Coupland takes the line about "all the lonely people" and runs with it. Liz Dunn is a woman with basically no friends - she's got a sister, brother and mother who all try to interfere in her clockwork routine, a dull, well-paid job, and has never had a boyfriend, and just to really hammer it home, she/Coupland tells us, frequently, about how unattractive and fat she is.

So far, so meuh. You just know that her regular round of metro-boulot-dodo is going to be busted up good by some seismic event in her life, which in this case is the arrival on her doorstep (metaphorically) of her long-lost son Jeremy. He's charming and handsome and impulsive and sociable, all the things she's not, and of course he teaches her to smell the flowers, see the joy in the world etc. (there's one great scene where he gets her crawling down the central strip of a highway). But this is Coupland, and Coupland's beautiful youths are rarely long for this world, and so it is with Jeremy, who has terminal (primary progressive) MS.

Hmm. While I appreciate the transcendant and fleeting beauty of human life as much as the next person, Coupland really has got a jones for his dying/comatose heroes and heroines, and I'm not sure why he's often so egregiously cruel to his characters. They're always such suffering saints, dangerously reminiscent of little Eva in Uncle Tom's Cabin, whose death I particularly looked forward to when we were reading it in class at school. (Did anyone else find Simon Legree kind of sexy, by the way? Just me then.)

Oh all right, that's a pretty unfair comparison. Coupland is nowhere near that schmaltzy - but he's certainly got a sentimental/mystical streak (see the execrable and nigh-on incomprehensible Life After God) which can often get the better of him. If anyone remembers Mazzo, the cancer patient from The Bumblebee Flies Anyway, Robert Cormier does dying characters a lot more interestingly.

But enough about Jeremy - Liz is our narrator, and she's the one we care about. I thought Coupland's m-to-f ventriloquism was better in Girlfriend in a Coma, to be honest, but Liz as a character remains almost always likable and convincing, although as a woman I'm not so sure. On occasion Liz sounds more like a middle-aged man dressed in a fat-lady suit than I would like her to, and the fact that s/he is constantly going on about her lack of physical charms smacked of the author protesting too much, trying to remind us that yes, the narrator is still an overweight woman.

And who, by the way, ever goes on about their flaws and demerits in real life situations when they can't see the person they're communicating with? Imagine if this happened on bulletin boards, or over the phone: "Hi, I'm John, just thought you ought to know I'm losing my hair and have a below-average size penis." I mean, what? Every single human being on this planet has vanity, except Liz, apparently. Again Coupland errs on the side of saintliness (or rather martyrdom) for Liz; it's pretty dehumanising not to allow your character vanity. And if she's so very, very, unassailably unattractive and doesn't care, what's she doing in high heels? It's not for comfort, that's for sure.

(Hmm. I'm wondering if Coupland has actually been a lot cleverer than I'm giving him credit for and the protesting too much - about not caring she's a minger, that is - is not meant to be convincing, but a sort of cry for help. Hmm. Maybe I'm underestimating Coupland - he's a pretty clever man most of the time.)

Anyway, despite all the nitpickery above, the reason you actually should read this book is because, as usual, it's sleekly and slickly written, the story is interesting and involving, and it just flies by. If you love Coupland you won't be too disappointed (although it's not a patch on the excellent All Families Are Psychotic) and if you don't you'll be surprised (especially after this review, hem hem) by how much there is to love. And either way, I can vouch from personal experience that it's the perfect book for a long train journey.

Story four: The hardest florist in Stockwell

There comes a moment in everybody’s life, thought Pete, just after him and Mike had been kicked out of Stockings, when you have to ask yourself questions. Questions like am I a nice person? And, more importantly, do I care?

New Covent Garden flower market, reborn in the year of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee in a warehouse just off the treeless Nine Elms Road, bursts into bloom at three a.m. every weekday and four on Saturdays. Daisy-like, it opens on the cusp of night and morning, when even the hardest-core clubber is thinking about a breather, or a night bus, at the same time as the first early-shifters are wriggling in their beds, anticipating the alarm clock and the grey, subdued ride in on the first tube of the day.
At four in the morning, most of London, even the West End, is dead, echoless, shining with overnight rain. But New Covent Garden is a wet blaze of rainbow petals and foliage, a land of midnight sun under the arc-lights’ intense gold. People look sharper, brighter, among the petals, behind the dazzle; the strangeness of the hour softens their faces and ebbs the rancour from their raucous voices. Or so it seemed to Pete. But by this stage, Pete was so drunk he was almost sober again, and he could barely understand his own thoughts, let alone express them to anyone else.

He’d been trying to hail a cab for half an hour now, while meandering down through Victoria, its shuttered shops and tea-haunted caffs, and over Vauxhall Bridge more or less in the direction of home. And then he’d remembered hearing about the flower market in class, long ago, some evening when he’d barely been listening; probably flirting with Liz or Heidi or one of the others; maybe twisting sappy, bright brown stems into a lopsided love-heart for one or other of them. Their tutor had asked if anyone wanted to train professionally, become a florist. He’d snorted with derision.
“Yeah, right,” he’d said. “I’d be the hardest florist in Stockwell.”
“You’d have some competition,” she said. She’d been in the bloom business for thirty years and astonished them by telling them about the dawn flower market where all the florists went to buy their stock. In Vauxhall, of all places.

Pete reckoned that inside there’d at least be a café, or a burger stand or something, and that some food would help him think. It was cold now, and last night’s mizzle still hung in the wet indoor air, freshening the blooms and dewing the florists’ faces with rainwater sweat. The lights on the striped stalls glistened in rain-jewelled hair and scarves. Even Pete’s black wool overcoat, bludgeoned with daily use, sparkled.
It had almost been a good night. Him and Mike and Ash, just like old times. Ash’s wife was pregnant. Mike was getting married, thinking of leaving London. Nothing like old times, in fact, come to think of it. Pete had bought a bottle at the bar and greeted them with fake-punches.
“Lads,” he’d said, “tonight we’re drinking to forget!”
They’d asked him what he wanted to forget and he’d just shaken his head and grinned. Whatever it was, he’d forgotten now. His plan had clearly worked. Under the hard yellow pub light, they’d looked balder and fatter, Ash’s gut straining against his Thomas Pink, Mike’s thinning hair like buzz-cut baby fuzz, his scalp sweating and shining underneath.
He’d always carried a picture of the three of them in his head from Bolivia, where they’d spent their summer after university trekking and camping and doing drugs and other stupid shit that made him wince with fear and pride when he thought about it now. The boys in the photograph were lean, tanned, careless, up for it. They were laughing at the camera. The people at the table no longer looked like the same ones in the photograph. They looked like the target audience for over-25 nightclubs. Like dads on the razz. And now the camera was laughing at them.
That was when Pete realised it was going to be a heavy night.

He wandered slowly, meditatively, past a stall bursting with roses, every scent and hue, crammed together in explosive abundance, scarlet, ivory, apricot; petals striped like paint-dribbled walls and graduated like a dawn sky, butter-gold to salmon-pink. The smell of sap and waxy petals; the naive Turkish Delight sweetness of heavy-headed tea-roses, pale and faint, then rich as chocolate when you bent your head down as though to kiss them. Pete stopped and stared, transfixed.
Naturally, the main reason he’d done the course was because it was a sure-fire way to pull, but he’d always liked flowers; their delicate perfumes and juices, the astonishing softness of petals between your fingers, the abundant uselessness of them. Like women, he’d said to Mike and Ash after the first week of class. He’d meant it as a joke – obviously, of course he had – but Mike had looked embarrassed and Ash had muttered something about watching what he said. Pete didn’t know when, or how, they’d got so humourless. His fellow novice flower-arrangers, the women especially, had laughed at the very same punchline when he’d said it in class. And if the girls could take a joke, why couldn’t Mike and Ash?

“Can I help?”
The girl who ran the stall poked her head between a couple of tall bunches and cocked pertly, like a pigeon. She had black hair and eyes, and soft pink cheeks which almost matched the petals framing her. He thought of telling her that she looked like a rose between two thorns, but wasn’t sure she’d get the gag, or the reference. She looked very young. She might get offended.
“How much for ten?” he asked.
“This is wholesale. The smallest bunch is twenty.”
He felt in his pocket. Was that a screwed-up note, or a credit card receipt? Did she take cards?
“All right, twenty. The dark red ones.”
He’d need some sort of gift for Liz when he got home. Most questions could be pre-empted by presenting her with a huge bouquet. She wouldn’t have got in until two or three, anyway, what with her flight times. Jet lag would keep her awake. He could say he’d spent the evening watching telly, couldn’t sleep, then had a romantic impulse and walked down to Vauxhall to get her some flowers. To remind her of how they’d met. Yeah. It was the sort of thing she’d believe he’d do. It was the sort of thing he would do. He was doing it, wasn’t he?
He handed over his note – a twenty – and got a tenner back. The flower-girl’s red fingers were warm against his, for an instant. He blinked.
“You sure that’s the right change, love?”
“Yep, it’s a tenner for twenty, twenty quid for fifty.”
“You got a special offer on, or do you just like my face?”
She smiled despite herself, if only at the ridiculousness of the idea, and looked down.
“No, it’s always this cheap. Wholesale, like I said.”
He smiled his thanks and walked away carefully. Not bad, considering. No slurring, no swaying; he took pride in it. Luckily, he’d always been able to handle his drink. So had Mike and Ash, once, but tonight they’d had to send Ash home in a cab when it was barely past midnight.
“Night night Cinderella.” Pete had sung, waving at Ash’s slumped figure through the rain-dashed taxi window.
“That’ll be the last we see of him once Nadia drops the sprog,” Mike had said, morosely. And Pete knew that it was true.
After that, Mike had got drunk and sullen very quickly. He’d sworn his head off, voice rasping and snagged like a broken tooth, when the bouncer wouldn’t let them into Spearmint Rhino. Stockings came later. Pete had had to drag him back down to Soho, to Bar Italia, where he fed Mike espresso and water. He’d wondered idly, mutinously, when it had come to this; the booze buzz just hitting you, the good times starting to roll, and the next thing you knew the club had closed, it was spitting tepid rain, and you were spoon-feeding caffeine to a piss-eyed thirtysomething at a wet outside table, where you had to keep catching the cups and glasses so they didn’t slide off the tabletop and smash on the ground. Who made me your fucking fielder, he thought, staring angrily into Mike’s glazed and wandering eyes. But just for a second. Beer gave him a temper like a flash fire. He was all right now. Pete was always all right.

It had been a twelve-week course, and he’d wasted the first six pursuing Heidi, a sharp-fringed radical playwright, one of the youngest in the group but getting nowhere fast. After a long, circuitous night in the Nest, she’d finally taken him home. She’d been almost too pissed to speak, although not to shove him heavily onto the futon and go at his neck like a cat shaking a mouse. At the next class, she’d confessed over beige machine-coffee that she had a boyfriend. Not that you could tell. Liz had been a better long-term prospect overall – more predictable. Unhappier, by a slender margin. Elegant. And she didn’t keep secrets from herself, or from anyone else.
Pete still thought of Heidi, occasionally, when he had a spare moment in the showers or punishing the treadmill at the gym. He had dark, vague memories of their night together, although he wasn’t completely sure that some of them weren’t drawn from dreams. Pete had extremely erotic dreams. Sometimes, if he was lucky, they stayed with him through the day, shivering through his body at unexpected moments, catching him off-guard, like a whiff of last night’s aftershave. She’d been springy, musky, like a rutting fox. One night only though. Not worth it, otherwise. Like freesias, heady Heidi didn’t last.
He’d found the class on the Hotcourses website. It ran every Friday evening for three months in some Institute of Further Education in far-flung Richmond, and was administered by Goldsmith’s College. He’d been lonely and not afraid to admit it. All his mates were shacked up, married or engaged or, God forbid, starting a family, and he had a lot of catching up to do if he didn’t want to end up as the sad fucker in the corner of the pub staring bleakly at the big screen for the rest of his life.
He’d tried a reading group, but he’d hated most of the books, which had rendered him virtually silent every week – after all, everyone got a chance to choose a novel for the group to read, so criticising people’s favourite writers was taken as a personal attack. Shame they’d all had such shit taste, though. The most attractive women always chose the worst books, he noticed. Grace, the trophy wife, had made them wade through some post-apocalyptic cod-philosophical shite. Millie the grad student had chosen a comedy fantasy novel – presumably as a joke, or to show that she wasn’t an intellectual snob. He’d left the group after they’d voted seven to five that the Christmas party should be fancy dress, with everyone coming as their favourite literary character.

He chased the smell of bacon and chips down an alley loud with carnations and tulips. Turning right, Pete lingered at a stall that sold freesias and arum lilies. The lilies were heavily perfumed, elegant, leggy, expensive; the high-class call girl of flowers. Easy to display, too; you only needed one or two stems and the vase was full. He bought freesias.

Flower arranging, the brilliant, barefaced incongruity of it, had been a stroke of genius. It had allowed him to be at once a rare commodity, cherished and unique, constantly solicited (as poor Nicholas sat back, ignored and amused) for the “man’s perspective”.
“They treat you like a fucking orchid,” Nicholas had told him when they stepped outside together for a fag. “Like you’re the only bloke here.”
Pete had shaken his head, embarrassed. Not that he had any problem with his unique position. He was more than tolerated; he was a privileged spy in the house of women. He thought, as he stood amongst a gaggle of them, nose buried in the ubiquitous metallic tea, listening with a fierce attention he never displayed in class, of those journalists who trained and shipped out with troops to Iraq. Embedded, they called it. Bedded more like, if he had his way. And, over the next few months, he did.
He’d clocked the married women at once. Even the ones who didn’t wear weeding rings, for whatever reason, had something about them. A reserve. A lack of need. They weren’t as hungry for his attention as the others, the singletons and the divorcees. Liz he’d found hard to gauge. She wore a wedding ring, but on the wrong hand. Was she divorced? Separated? He’d wondered briefly if she maybe had a girlfriend.
There was a pub around the corner from the college – the Eagle’s Nest, right opposite the bus stop, so that when a few of them had taken to going out for drinks after class there would always be one or two glasses left half-finished on the table as people saw the 65 coming and leapt out to flag it down. It turned out, over the course of a few conversations, a few nights of understanding nods and delicate enquiries, that Liz was married after all. It was to Pete’s credit that he’d moved in on her anyway, correctly guessing that if she was spending her Friday nights wrapping stems with a bunch of desperate housewives in South-West London, her relationship probably wasn’t going too well.

He turned a corner and caught the early-morning sun blazing through the high, grimy eastern windows; its raw brassy yellow hurt his eyes. The tubes must have started again by now; the sounds and light were becoming fuller, more familiar. The roses and freesias ached on his arm. He felt like a diva at the end of an opera, swooning under the weight of flowers.
At the largest stall in the market, decked out like a painter’s palette with vivid swathes of gardenias, gerberas, poppies, chrysanthemums, irises, pansies, hollyhocks, daisies, sweet peas, Sweet Williams and many other varieties whose names and colours twitched sleeping memories, he discovered that they took cards, and bought several bunches of the freshest and brightest blooms. The stallholder gave Pete another bag and improvised a sort of quiver so he could carry them all. Pete had no idea what he was going to do with them, but he was petal-drunk, and knew that somehow he’d make it work.
Liz would love it; would love him for it. A bushel of blossoms said spontaneity, generosity, romance. And their anniversary – or what he reckoned was their anniversary, although, to his secret disappointment, they hadn’t discussed it – was around now. They’d been together for a year: she deserved a flat full of flowers. They both did. Congratulations and celebrations – wasn’t that how the song went? Mike and Ash had told him, barely joking, that Liz deserved a medal. She’d kept him on the straight and narrow for longer than anyone. He was almost starting to like it.

Pete considered there to be four cardinal virtues: loyalty, honesty, charity and bravery. Although he was pretty sure he was all right on most of them (well, maybe not honesty so much; but he’d always been honest with himself and that, he reasoned, had to count for something) bravery was the one he prided himself on. It was a brave man who’d take a challenge like Liz head-on, pursue her, woo her, and eventually win her; but it took exceptional daring to do it while knocking off two other classmates at the same time.
Pete’s average looks weren’t a problem – women distrusted men who were too attractive, thank God – but he still had to soften them up first, get past their sleaze defences. Had to prove to them that he was a nice guy, but not the kind that finished last. It was a fucking tricky balancing act, frankly, but he had it down. The best way was to make friends first. First came the trust, then the lust. A blurred and beautiful image faded into his head of women falling into his arms like ripening fruit, like freshly cut flowers.

Women didn’t look at him as much since Liz; he seemed to have faded, somehow, into the background. Or perhaps he just wasn’t trying as hard. And all those meals out and nights in didn’t help; it was harder and harder to motivate himself to go to the gym when Liz and lasagne and a bottle or two of Bordeaux were waiting for him at home. What was the point of pushing himself towards washboard abs he’d never have? By the time your shirt came off (unless it was a particularly wild night) the woman had already made up her mind. He thought about the girl in Stockings. She’d certainly made up her mind. Decisive, like Liz.
He trudged home, the sunrise behind him, until he hit Stockwell. It was somewhere around six when he got in, because Mehdi’s was opening up, but the flat was still empty. More flight delays, terror scares and whatnot. Sometimes if she was exhausted after a trip she just checked into a hotel airport and slept it off. He’d come back that evening to find the kitchen table arrayed with strange new spirits and national foods, like a stall at a harvest festival. She always brought him back presents.
Pete staggered up the narrow stairs, bowed under the mass of petals. There was no message on the home phone, but she never called that number anyway. She’d have left a message on his mobile, wherever that was now. Somewhere outside Stockings, probably.
Fizzing with new energy, he filled the lounge, the kitchen, the bedroom with bloom. He worked diligently, slicing the stems at diagonal angles, prinking the petals and arranging the flowers in complementary colourways; blue and yellow, pink and white. He propped them in vases; then, when he ran out, in pitchers and jugs, raiding the under-sink cupboard. He cherry-picked the recycling and placed single stems of red roses in empty wine bottles on the stairs, one on each tread, all the way up. Such a lot of bottles.
The remaining flowers he strewed on the bed, ripping handfuls of petals off the more tired and broken roses and scattering them over the duvet and floor. It was a gesture of thankfulness and propitiation, disguised as romance. In the dark crack of his heart, Pete knew it was gratitude that moved him, not love. He didn’t mind admitting that he was grateful she’d still have him. Ash and Mike were just amazed. He was dog-tired, almost hallucinating, by the time he’d finished. All-nighters were hitting him harder and harder. His head bobbed and jerked as he stripped off his socks and crawled into the mussed sheets. He felt exhilarated, but exhausted too, like after drugs, or sex. Or stairs, these days.
He closed his eyes and the darkness span. He shouldn’t have done that nasty coke Mike had scraped up from somewhere. He shouldn’t have smoked that pack of Bensons in the club. Liz would smell them on him. She’d probably scent the cigarette smoke even before the roses. Like a sniffer dog, she was. Those wide silent eyes. Those narrow otter nostrils, the finely calibrated instrument of her small nose. She had a profile like a Victorian cameo. Like that other girl tonight, that girl in the club, in Stockings.
He shouldn’t have tried to chat her up. Stockings wasn’t a place for conversation. At least he’d known better than to touch her while she was giving him a dance, but he certainly shouldn’t have followed her into the Ladies afterwards. But she’d reminded him of Liz – of the Liz from photos of twenty years ago, a young Liz he’d never known. He felt jealous of Liz’s past. He wanted to have been there. But he hadn’t had much luck explaining that to the bouncer on the way out.

Pete woke at midday, his head dry and mouth sticky like a pub floor. The light piercing the blinds hurt him. Through narrowed, swollen eyelids, he saw red petals spattering the floorboards, peppering the wizened, half-eaten pizzas still in their boxes, the carrion of fried chicken. The bedroom was carpeted with crumpled newspapers and plastic bags. From somewhere came the sharp reek of vomit. He brushed at his face and torn rose petals came away on his fingers, dark and bruised. The sickly odour of freesias rose from the musty bedspread, making him gag.
And now he remembered why Liz wasn’t home yet. She’d told him last week, just before the business trip. She’d managed to pack everything she needed into two bags and a suitcase, and she wasn’t coming back.
That was what he’d been drinking to forget. That was it.

Why you should read The Penelopiad and The Pleasure of My Company

The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood

Part of a (possibly aborted) series in which slender, high-end hardbacks based on classical tales or texts were commissioned from well-known authors. Average word count seems to be about 50,000 (the length of a Mills and Boon novelette or intercity train journey) and cover price is £12.99. However, despite this book's quality and appeal to Atwood completists, I doubt Canongate made their money back once they'd spunked most of the budget on hiring Maggie.

Anyhow - for those who don't know much about the classics (me) this is a sparky revisiting of the Odyssey from a female perspective, told in contemporary language by the dead Penelope as she wanders in the asphodel fields of Hades.

There's an amusing running gag about Penelope's jealousy of her beautiful cousin Helen and a real compassion for the women left behind which bleeds through the writing, but it's high-class fluff, essentially, which someone of Atwood's talents can and probably did knock out in a fortnight, and everyone involved knows it. The sort of book you'd give to your mother to make her feel clever. In fact, my mum's getting my copy. And it's not even Christmas.



The Pleasure of my Company by Steve Martin

Steve Martin is in my good books. Apart from starring in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, still one of the funniest films of the 80s, and film noir spoof/homage Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid, he's also the best celebrity novelist I've ever read. Stephen Fry during the period of The Liar and The Hippopotamus is a close second, but loses points for allowing Making History to suck so very, very much. When love comes in at the window, talent flies out of the door, indeed. And The Stars' Tennis Balls was a shit Dumas rip-off with a shit title, too. Although Bookblog found it "intsteresting" (sic). Sort it out, Fry.

Anyway, back to Steve. The first novel of his I read was called Shopgirl - a sensitive, quiet little love triangle story which was about as far from the sort of thing you might expect a Hollywood comedian to pen as it was possible to be. I was really surprised and pleased by it, and in fact had to check that it was the same Steve Martin. It was. Shopgirl's now a film, which
a) I fully intend to watch on DVD
b) gives me hope for a film of The Pleasure of my Company, which would be brilliant, like The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time meets Sideways

The hero of The Pleasure of my Company is called Daniel Pecan Cambridge, and he's a thritysomething loner who suffers from something between OCD and Asperger's, to the extent that it takes him forty-five minutes to get to the shop down the road because he can't do kerbs.
There's some back story, there's some love story, there's magic squares and the Most Average American competition, but mostly what I love about this book is the way that Martin inhabits the voice of the narrator. It's completely readable and completely convincing: a Curious Incident for grown-ups. If you can find it, buy it.

Why you could do worse than read London Revenant

Published by the wonderfully named Do Not Press, who appear to specialise in noir, splatter, horror, crime, thrillers, dark fantasy and books by "reformed career criminals", this is a sometimes rather nicely written, if oddly plotted, slice of gritty urban noirish subterranean conspiracy mystery/thriller with extra grit.

The author, Conrad Williams, has, I suspect, a background in horror and is as happy as a pig in gore when producing juicy chunks of London-A-Z-meets-Texas-Chainsaw-Massacre prose, where the streets and routes of the capital are described with as much fetishistic loving care as the slicing off of somebody's face.

Like all good Londoners (adopted or native) Adam Buckley, Williams's narrator, is obsessed by the underground - not just the tube, but the catacombs, ghost stations, bomb shelters and subterranean rivers that underscore the city, and also by the idea that there could be a whole civilisation - other world, even - in those miles and miles of tunnels. So far, you may well say, so Neverwhere. But what will make me part with my £2 (knocked down from £7.99 at the remainder bookshop in St James's Park station, fact fans) I hear you cry?

Well, it's quite pacy and involving - and it's always a weird little thrill to read books featuring tube crashes and undead tunnel-dwellers who push commuters in front of trains when you're sitting on the tube. And the hero has narcolepsy, which is reasonably interesting as a character trait, if a complete red herring. And there's a fair amount of sex, some semi-kinky. And if you're a Londoner, and reading about places and things you know (especially Underground stations) gives you a raging hard-on, you should definitely keep this one next to the toilet - Williams has most certainly done his research. Although not, you know, into the faceknife scene. I hope.

In fact, the only problems I have with London Revenant (apart from the fact that I'm not too orgasmic about the title) are that:
a) I'm about 15 pages away from the end and I can already tell that it will suck in comparison to the rest of the book (I will come back and recant if I'm wrong)*
b) The author, who usually has a rather fetching way with similes, allows this one to slip through on page 217: "sadness settled badly into her face like cheap moisturiser"
c) It's not by this, rather sexier Conrad Williams, and therefore I can't in all conscience post a picture of the tasty twin.

Oh all right then.



* Update: it did suck, but not as hard or in quite in the way I expected, although the monster did come back (check) and the hero didn't get back together with the ex-girlfriend we didn't really care about him getting back together with (check)
On the plus side, there was also a nice reincorporation and explanation of a bottle-shaped graffito the narrator keeps seeing all the way through.
On the minus side, there was a pretty left-field late revelation that three of his mates are imaginary. Which was fairly unnecessary, as a plot point, and didn't illuminate much. Seevn out of ten for effort, I reckon.
Would I read another one? Yeah, if it was two quid and wasn't quite so full of ick, shit (Williams is a big fan of filth of any sort) blood and imaginary friends. (I expect that'll be in the running for his next cover quote now ...)

Story Number Three: Cuckoo

I've basically given up on doing things week by week since starting this new job, as the hours and my energy level when I get home are wiiiildly unpredictable. Plus, I also have a life and can't be spending every non-working hour God sends tapping away in the semi-darkness for the good of my MA.

Anyway - on with the story. As usual, (misquoting Russell Brand on Big Brother's Big Mouth, for which apologies) phone us! text us! email us! comment on us! - we only write it so you can read it. And here it is.

Cuckoo



Night. Quiet. A haze of moonlight seeping through the thin curtains like blood through gauze. The breathless, foetid-fresh smell of a child’s bedroom.
Mummy stands, her hand still on the doorknob, touching it lightly, like a chess player lingering over an uncertain move. She can hear her own hushing breath as her eyes adapt to the soupy darkness. She can’t hear his, though, which means that he is awake and pretending to be asleep for her benefit. She wonders when he will learn deception, how to mimic the pale snores and gasping snuffles of true sleep. She learned early on, aged six or seven, and remembers thinking that she was a very clever little girl. She still pulls that trick sometimes, when Daddy comes home late and she doesn’t want to speak to him. She does a very good imitation of a peaceful sleeper, which is ironic, as her own slumber is often violent and disturbed. She still suffers from the nightmares of her childhood.
“Nicky?”
He doesn’t respond. She pictures his large blue eyes upturned to the invisible mobile dangling from the ceiling. Ships and balloons and trains and planes and cars. He loves machines, motors, anything that can get you from place to place; he’s not fussy. She moves further into his room, letting go of the doorknob but not closing the door behind her. The landing, too, is dark, but already she can see more, make more sense of the grainy, pullulating shadows. She tiptoes forward and kneels softly on the thick carpet, her head near his. Only the crack of tendons in her knees gives her away. She senses him flinch at the snap, or her nearness, she doesn’t know which. She lays her hand on his forehead and strokes back his soft, fine hair. Warm and clammy, but better than a few hours ago. Less feverish. He is still pretending to be asleep.
“Nicky,” she whispers, “are you feeling better now?”
He does not move, does not answer, a hot, angry little corpse.
“I’m sorry you couldn’t go to the fair, sweetie,” she says. “You had an awful temperature. We couldn’t let you, really.”
Silence. He’s sucking in stiff shallow breaths, lying motionless, rigid with righteousness. She thinks she can make out the rise and fall of his ribs, and is reminded of dogs panting, or mice; the smaller an animal, the faster it breathes. If you could listen to a mouse’s heartbeat it would blur into a constant high thrum.
“Mummy and Daddy couldn’t go either,” she says.
Instead they had enjoyed a rare, relaxed dinner at home over a bottle of wine, both keeping an ear out for the baby monitor. Nicky had wept and grizzled and yelled as far as his sore throat allowed, and even though they had said he could watch the big fireworks on the TV in his room as a special treat – and the big fireworks were bound to be better than the modest local bonfire night, Daddy had assured him – he had refused. It wasn’t the same. He wanted to be there.
Mummy remembers how much Nicky had loved November 5th last year: the smell of wood-smoke on leather jackets, the creamy, salty taste of fire-blackened chestnuts, the crowds coddled in scarves and warm coats, flush-faced beneath the sudden light of exploding stars. How everybody had looked younger, guiltless, in the glow of flames and fireworks. And the games, the fairground stalls; the hot, slapdash smell of carnival food, the lights in the darkness, people shouting to one another over the barkers and fluorescent music, breath billowing like dragonsmoke.
“Silly Nicky,” she says, “don’t sulk now. You can go next year.”
How can she have forgotten the yawning scale of childhood time and space, when a year might as well be a million, where the bottom of the garden is the end of the world? She hasn’t forgotten that Nicky hates being called silly.
“I’m not silly,” he says fiercely, forcedly, reluctant to break his silence but stung into defending himself. She smiles at his profile in the darkness.
“Of course not, sweetie. Sorry. Just ill and a bit tired.”
A grumpy pause.
“I wasn’t even that ill. I could have gone.”
Time to be strict, she knows. She hardens and deepens her voice. How much of parenthood is play-acting, storytelling.
“Yes, Nicky, you were. You were burning up.”
“Like a bonfire,” he says, sulkily.
“Exactly like a bonfire,” she says, brisk and businesslike. She modulates her tone again. “A cross little bonfire. But I’m glad you’re feeling better now.”
“A bit,” he admits, a grudge in his voice. She reaches out to where she knows the bedside table to be and places the beaker on it gently.
“There’s some water,” she says, “and if you want anything in the night we’re just across the landing. You go to sleep now.”
She leans over to kiss him on the forehead but he stops her.
“No,” he says.
A weird cold washes through her.
“No what, Nicky?”
“I can’t go to sleep without a bedtime story. I want a story.”
His tone is plaintive, and she realises that of course, because he had been dozing on and off with the temperature and the fever, they have not followed the usual night-time ritual. He hasn’t been put to bed properly; of course he can’t sleep. His night-light, a rubber bulb that glows a soft angry orange when pushed into a plug socket, has not even been switched on.
“I’ll have to turn the lamp on, then.”
He twists away from her as though from a fire.
“No, it hurts my eyes.”
“Well, darling, I can’t read you a story in the dark. Mummy needs light to see.”
“Can’t I have a new story?”
“What sort of story?” she asks, playing for time, wondering whether she isn’t too tired to make up a satisfying tale at this time of night. Calling Daddy won’t be much help; Nicky complains that his stories are boring.
“A story about Bonfire Night.”
“Guy Fawkes?”
He shakes his head; she sees the movement and hears his hair flap vigorously on the pillow.
“Boring. We did it at school.”
He’s only been going to nursery school for a year or so, but he is already world-weary, blasé about painting and reading and break.
“Oh. Well then.”
“A new story,” he insists. She sits back on her heels, then eases the cramp in her calves by manoeuvring into a cross-legged sitting position on the carpet by the bed. Her mouth is exactly on a level with Nicky’s ear.
“All right then,” she says, not at all sure of what she is going to say next. She feels a brief flash of the vertiginous terror actors must experience when they dry on stage.
“What’s it about?” he demands.
“Bonfire Night.”
He wriggles impatiently. “And?”
“A little boy.”
“A little boy like me?”
“A little boy very much like you. He had big blue eyes, and messy blond hair, and he had a Mummy who was very much like me.”
“Oh good,” Nicky says, approvingly. Her confidence is buoyed like a balloon on an updraught. Write what you know, isn’t that what they say?
“Once upon a time – on a night very much like tonight, in fact, a November 5th not very long ago at all, the Mummy of this little boy decided to take him to see the fireworks on the village green.”
“Was he ill?”
“No,” she says firmly. “He was a very healthy little boy and had absolutely no temperature at all, which was why she decided to take him.”
“Did his Daddy come too?”
“No, darling, the little boy’s Daddy was away at work that weekend, in France. But he wished he had been there, and so did his Mummy, especially after what happened that night.”
She hears him stir, tense, curl himself up into a tight little ball of delighted anticipation. Now she’s got him.
“What happened?”
“We’ll see. I’ll tell you about the bonfire night first.”
“All right.” A fire, almost as good as a mystery; not quite.
“There was a huge bonfire. Blazing.”
“How huge?”
“Very. Bigger than Daddy.”
“Bigger than a house?”
Mummy considers.
“No, not quite as big as a house. Maybe as big as the garden shed. But very big and very hot, with flaming sparks shooting out of it, and wood glowing red-hot so you couldn’t go too close to it without your hair crisping up and your face going bright red.”
“Really hot?”
“So hot you couldn’t toast marshmallows.”
“Why not?”
“Because they wouldn’t melt, they’d just explode in pink smoke.”
“Cool.”
And the fireworks were the best fireworks you’ve ever seen. They’d been brought all the way from China where people had made fireworks for thousands of years.”
“Thousands …” Nicky says softly, impressed.
“They were in the shapes of stars and moons and wheels and planets –”
“Were there rockets?”
“Yes, and when they exploded they filled up the sky with sparkling rain in gold and silver and blue and green and pink.”
“Rainbow rain,” says Nicky.
“Yes, rainbow rain. Like glitter. And the bang was so loud that the church wobbled.”
Nicky giggles.
“But before anyone could watch the firework display, first of all the little boy and his Mummy went to the fairground and had a go on all the games.”
“All of them?”
“Every single one.”
“What was there?”
She tries to remember from last year. All that springs to mind are the gentler, less exciting attractions, the stuff of Victorian nostalgia; the hook-a-duck stall, the hoopla and tombola, the lucky dip. She thinks of other fairgrounds, all the festivals and carnivals of her life.
“There was a … ghost train. And a rollercoaster, just for one night, that looped around the bell tower twice and finished on the cricket pitch. And there were stalls selling toffee apples and popcorn and candyfloss, blue and pink and yellow candyfloss, and hot dogs and hot chocolate and chestnuts and it all smelled delicious and amazing. And there was a shooting gallery, too, where you had to get three shots right in the middle of the target to win a goldfish, or a toy lion, or a cowboy hat, or – ”
“What else?”
Mummy is running out of inspiration.
“There was a hall of mirrors, and a darts game, and hoopla.”
“What’s hoopla?”
“It’s where you have to throw a wooden ring over a pole to win a prize.”
“What prize?”
“Well, there were all sorts of stuffed toys, great big ones, nearly as big as the little boy himself. Every animal you could imagine. Kangaroos and elephants and giraffes. Whales and dolphins and dinosaurs.”
“Bears too?”
“Of course.”
“Bears like Big Bear?”
Mummy involuntarily glances to where Big Bear sits, a fuzzy patch of blacker darkness in the shadowed corner. He is propped up in Nicky’s half-size blue rocking chair, unmoving and silent, his weighted forepaws resting on the arms of the chair like the clenched fingers of a hanging judge.
“Just like him,” she says. “All hanging from the ceiling where nobody but the stallholder could reach.”
“Did Mummy play the hoopla?”
“Oh yes,” she says vaguely, “eventually.”
“What did she win?”
“Ah,” says Mummy, cryptically. “That’s a very good question.”
Nicky scrunches himself up with excitement.
“Why?”
She takes a deep breath and wonders.
“Because when the little boy and his Mummy were going through the fair, the little boy saw the blue candyfloss and wanted some. He’d never seen blue candyfloss before.”
Nicky scoffs. He’d seen it last year, ages and ages ago. He’d eaten so much of it that he’d been sick in the car on the way home. The sick hadn’t been as blue as he’d hoped.
“So, anyway, the little boy was quite a bit littler than you and he was in a pushchair to that his legs didn’t get tired.”
Again Nicky, normally robust to a fault, looks smug in the near-dark.
“And while his Mummy was talking to the stallholder and waiting for the blue candyfloss to give to her little boy, guess what happened?”
Nicky cannot imagine.
“When she looked down at the pushchair again, her little boy was gone!”
Nicky gasps with excitement.
“Run away?”
“No, Mummy says firmly, “although she did think that for just a second, because he’d vanished like a puff of smoke. But what made her realise that the little boy hadn’t run away, that he’d actually been kidnapped, was what was in the seat of the pushchair instead of him. What do you think it was?”
Nicky shakes his head dumbly.
“Go on, have a guess.”
“A ghost?”
“No.”
“A little girl?”
“No.”
“A candyfloss?”
“Now you’re being silly. Shall I tell you?”
“Yes.”
“It was a large stuffed bear, almost exactly the same size as the little boy she had lost. He had soft brown fur like Big Bear, and shiny black eyes like Big Bear, and big heavy paws too. In fact –” she cocked her head at Big Bear, silent in the chair, still and dumb, “– he was very, very much like Big Bear in every way.”
“What did she do?”
“Well, first of all she screamed. She screamed very loud, so that everyone turned around and even the carousel stopped in surprise. And then she started pushing the chair with the bear in it all around the funfair, running over people’s toes and bumping into them, spilling their drinks and their hot dogs and crying and shouting that somebody had stolen her son.”
Nicky’s eyes are wide and luminous, glowing pale grey at her in the iron-coloured shimmer of the room.
“What did they do?”
“Do? They got out of her way. They thought she was mad, poor woman, running through a fairground screaming and weeping with a stuffed bear in a pushchair. But she wasn’t mad. Someone really had stolen her son and put a soft toy in his place.”
“Why?”
“It’s called a changeling.”
“What’s a changing?”
“Do you remember the story of the Ugly Duckling?”
Nicky looks uncertain.
“Yes …”
“Like that. Except that because all eggs look the same, the ducks didn’t know he was a swan until too late.”
Nicky absorbs this. He is beginning to relax a little again: the Ugly Duckling, after all, has a happy ending, like all good stories.
“What happened then?”
“Well, she started going up to all the stallholders, to ask if they had seen anything, if they’d seen somebody carrying her little boy. She described him in every detail but nobody had seen anything. And just when she had almost given up, she came to the last stall.”
“Which stall was it?”
“It was the hoopla. The throwing-rings game, remember?”
Nicky blinks and nods. His face, which this morning had been flushed with fever, is milky pale. He lays his head back gently on the pillow, not moving his eyes from hers for a second.
“And guess what she saw dangling from the ceiling of the stall, hung up on a hook like the straps of his dungarees, looking very confused but perfectly all right?”
Nicky smiled.
“Her little boy!”
Mummy strokes his warm soft cheek.
“Clever you. That’s right. So what do you think she had to do?”
“She had to win him back?”
“Exactly. She couldn’t get past the stallholder to rescue him, because the stallholder was big and strong – bigger than Daddy – and he wouldn’t let her. He said he had no children, and that he needed a son to help him on the stall, and that if she couldn’t win her little boy back fair and square, he would raise the child as his own and all she would have to take home was a stuffed bear.
So he gave her three hoops and told her she had to get all three over the pole to win her boy back. Normally you only have to get one ring over to win a prize.”
“All three?” Nicky’s eyes were wide with indignation.
“Yes, because the little boy was the top prize, the most precious thing, and so she had to be extra good to win him back.
So she narrowed her eyes, took a step forward and squinted at the pole, measuring the distance. She took the first ring in her hand – and even though her hands were shaking and her heart was shivering, she threw it straight and true and it rattled down over the pole easily. The same thing happened with the second ring. But just as she was throwing the third ring, she felt something soft touch her leg, and she jumped and screamed. She had forgotten all about the bear, and it had fallen out of the pushchair against her leg. Or at least that’s what she thought at the time. When she jumped she let go of the ring and it bounced and banged around the pole – it almost looked as if it might still just go over, but then it bounced one last time and fell down on the ground.
She had lost, and the stallholder laughed a terrible laugh and told her to keep the bear, that it could be her booby prize. She tried to climb over, to rescue her son, still dangling from the ceiling by his dungarees, but the stallholder pushed her away and none of the onlookers would help her. She stumbled away, sobbing, with nothing but the pushchair and the bear.”
“How did she get him back?” asked Nicky curiously. For she must have got him back. He was here, wasn’t he, with her now?
Mummy’s eyes are glazed a little with tiredness. In the twilight of Nicky’s bedroom she looks far away, like someone in a mirror.
“She didn’t, Nicky,” she says quietly, gently. “She had to take another little boy out of his pushchair while his Mummy was buying a toffee apple. She put Big Bear in the little boy’s place and hoped that the other Mummy wouldn’t notice. And she didn’t. Not until it was too late anyway.”
She glances across at Big Bear’s corner. “Big Bear came back, of course. Followed them home. He needed a Mummy too.”
Nicky blinks. Mummy glances at her watch, its face, like hers, unreadable in the darkness. Then she suddenly smiles wide. He can see her teeth and eyes gleam.
“Well, it’s time to go to sleep now, Nicky. Good night and God bless.” Mummy stands up, knees crackling like firewood, and leans over to kiss Nicky on his dry lips. As she moves towards the door, she flicks on the nightlight. Two sparks of orange flame ignite in the rocking-chair corner, where Big Bear’s shiny black eyes outstare the night. Mummy yawns and pauses as she opens the door of Nicky’s bedroom.
“Silly Mummy,” she whispers tenderly, “I forgot the most important part. They all lived happily ever after.”
And she closes the door behind her softly.

Why you should be a bit disappointed by Tom Stoppard's Rock and Roll

So, anyway. after my long absence from this blog, due mainly to my getting a new job with longer hours (boo) and better pay (yay!) I thought I'd ring the changes a bit by providing a theatre review, because my entire cultural life is not limited to books. Oh no. Although after watching Stoppard's latest, I'm rather thinking it ought to be.

On Saturday it was my father's birthday (or near enough) and to celebrate we did the traditional thing, i.e. went to a matinee of a West End Play. (We're awfully cultural, my family - about four times a year, on each of our birthdays). I have theatre buddies for this sort of thing usually, but we'll get standing tickets at the Donmar or £10 Travelex bargains for the National instead of expensive stalls seats. Oh to be young and poor in London.

I am legendary among my family for being late to the theatre. The irony is, I am almost never late for things I have personally chosen to see, when they start at a reasonable time, i.e. in the evening. But to cut off half my Saturday daytime (which is the only day of the week I can go shopping, for a start) in favour of sitting in a darkened auditorium with a grizzled clutch of baby boomers who all remember Pink Floyd and the Sixties, not to mention one or two who look like they were probably on the Titanic - well, all I can say is that Rock and Roll, Tom Stoppard's latest outing, had better be pretty good.

And (despite the fact that I had to listen to most of the first scene through a door, arriving as I did five minutes after curtain up) it was. Pretty good, that is. Not great; not, despite Sinead Cusack reading Sappho and dying of cancer (you know it's Stoppard when ...) terribly moving or engaging; not, despite the ending which tries its hardest to make an afternoon in the theatre feel like a night at a Rolling Stones gig, particularly exciting. Full of the usual Stoppardian intellectual exchanges on MAW (meaning, art, whatever) without the customary level of wit and humour.

Jan, a wild-haired Rufus Sewell, is our Czech hero. It's 1968 (although we swiftly flip through to 1990 by the end of the play), tanks are rolling into Prague and art rock group the Plastic People of the Universe are being censored. This is Serious Stuff. In fact, it's politics – specifically Communism (hello Brian Cox as a curmudgeonly, unrepentant leftie Cambridge Don OH CHRIST THE PREDICTABILITY I CAN'T BEAR IT). And like almost all polemical/political theatre I've ever seen, the political bits are at best dully didactic, at worst a spanner thrown into the works that brings the whole juggernaut juddering to a halt.

I didn't care or know very much about the Prague Spring (apart from what I've read in Milan Kundera) when I went into this play, and I didn't care or know much more when I came out again - and I feel as though that's fundamentally wrong. Shouldn't Stoppard be trying to make us care, not only about the politics, but about the characters? I counted eleven actors (which included a couple of doublings, such as Sinead as her own daughter) when the curtain rose for the bow, and I think that's just too many for a two-hour play, especially when at least seven or eight had major roles.

The whole thing felt fragmentary, knocked together, and not in a good way; as though Stoppard had torn a few photos out of the family albums from 1968-1990 and made a rather slapdash collage with characters linked by a spiderweb of dotted lines (Esmee is in love with Jan, but Jan is sleeping with Magda. Magda doesn't know Lenke, Jan's ex-girlfriend, is having an affair with Tom, Esmee's father ...)

What does rock and roll have to do with it? Well, Jan's a music buff and has a room full of albums which the Czech authorities take and destroy. Is that the sound of the world's tiniest electric violin, playing just for him, do you think? He has a number of tedious and repetitive arguments with his friend/room-mate about censorship and artistic freedom as applied to rock groups. Extremely loud Pink Floyd is blasted over scene changes. Stoppard's masterpiece this ain't.

But, likesay, it's pretty good. It trots along nicely, and the regular politicky bits (Why I Have Not Left The Communist Party, How To Build A Democratic Socialist State, What I Did In My Cambridge Holidays) function rather like Channel 4 commercial breaks - five minutes to check your watch, admire the ceiling fresco and browse the programme. And it has got some funny bits in it. The actress playing Sinead's 16-year-old daughter is excellent and the character well-written and believable. Tom sensibly avoids a kiss moment when the love subplot is finally resolved at the end. Sinead gets some nice wigs, Rufus has had some Czech accent practice; Brian can add another curmudgeon to his repertoire and will probably be allowed to keep the cardigan.

But what is it for, after all? Rock and Roll is a pleasant afternoon's entertainment for pensionable Floydians, but it didn't rock my world, and I was left slightly puzzled, slightly disappointed (particularly after Arcadia and The Invention of Love) and really very unsure as to what, if anything, Stoppard is trying to say.