They Shoot Sharks, Don't They?

There was a brief lull in the phone interview; a quiet crackle on the audio file as I played it back. Wells Tower had been talking about the writers whom he admired, people like Barry Hannah and Nicholson Baker; authors who write beautiful, fibrous sentences. Then he mentioned someone I’d not only never read, but had never heard of. Hence the pause. I assumed that the writer concerned, Charles Portis, was obscure; a cult American writer, perhaps, one of those writers’-writers; instead, reading my pause for ignorance, Tower helped me out: ‘He wrote True Grit,’ he said.

With the Coen brothers' Oscar-nomination-sprayed version currently doing the rounds, and a glossy-coated tie-in edition stacked up in Waterstone’s 3 for 2, it looks like Portis may be ripe for reappraisal – though this is only possible through Hollywood’s patronage. No matter what the quality of the prose, without the 1969 film adaptation starring everyone’s favourite race-baiting, bullet-shitting, former-Marion, John Wayne, there’s no doubt that Wells or the Coen brothers wouldn’t have found a copy in their local Barnes and Noble.

Despite writing five novels over a period of twenty-five years, Portis’s name has been completely overshadowed by the film that gave John ‘I believe in White Supremacy’ Wayne his only Oscar. I haven’t seen it. I can honestly say I’ve never watched a John Wayne movie – probably because I’m afraid I’ll be brainwashed into shooting wild animals, having suspect views towards all people who don’t shoot wild animals, and walking like I’ve just been anally penetrated by a Stars and Stripes dildo – but it must be okay: it’s kept Portis in print ever since.

True Grit belongs to a shady subset of novels; novels that owe their continued publication to their movie interpretations. It’s an odd roll call of the overlooked and the awful, a club that includes Peter Benchley’s Jaws, Robert Bloch’s Psycho, Jerzy Kosinski’s Being There, Mario Puzo’s The Godfather and James Dickey’s Deliverance. Actually, they’re mainly awful. Especially Jaws, a book so cock-clenchingly bad that the true horror lies in the leaden, barely readable prose, rather than threat of a barely believable man-eating shark.

For the most part, these books don’t really deserve the longevity they have enjoyed. They might have provided the inspiration, but read in relation to the films that they’ve spawned, they are a very poor cousin. A cousin you don’t even like. A cousin, in fact, that makes inappropriate jokes at Christmas and once hit on you when they were drunk.

Of this rather grubby genre, there is one book that doesn’t pale next to the resultant film. They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? by Horace McCoy.

It takes less time to read the book than it does to watch the 1969 film version; but despite its brevity it remains a brutal, intense and provocative psychological thriller. Set during the Great Depression, the book centres on Robert and Gloria, two lost and broke would-be actors, competing in a marathon dance competition. It is an uncompromising read, in that McCoy seems determined to undermine reader expectation at all times. The novel opens with Robert’s trial for Gloria’s murder, and there is no mystery: he definitely did it. There is no conventional narrative arc, no growing appreciation of each other, no suggestion of love blossoming. Instead, as the competition becomes more gruelling and more grotesque, McCoy offers no respite to the misery.

There are some great lines in They Shoot Horses... – Gloria’s suggestion that they ‘go to the park and hate a bunch of people’ king among them – but it is the compelling oddness of the narrative which really resonates, the slow descent into madness, the claustrophobic atmosphere, the sense of it never ending. The film version is similarly bleak, but though the story follows the same shape and arc, the sheer ugliness and despair of McCoy’s book make it a quite different experience. It’s a very quick read, and is by no stretch of the imagination perfect; but it refuses to be any short of memorable. Read the book, then watch the film. Don’t read Jaws. Ever.

Befriending Bruce Chatwin

My best friend and I met at university; or more accurately we met in the bars and clubs of the city where we were supposed to be studying. He cut, as he would later say, quite an extraordinary figure: especially on the dance floor where his exuberance and enthusiasm for everything from Pavement to the Pet Shop Boys was exhausting even to watch. I did not like him; nor he me. We barely ever spoke to each other, and would eye each other suspiciously when in small groups.

It was, however, a lazy enmity: later we would tell the story of our friendship as though in those early years we had hated each other. We didn’t. We circled each other, shared friends and tended to admire the same kind of girls, but we were standoffish rather than rude. My perception of him – loud, attention-seeking, a little childish – was both absolutely on the money and hopelessly off mark. I had rushed to judgement, and regret those years of antipathy: they are lost to us now, and though well over a decade has passed, I do wish that I had got to know him sooner, rather than the later we subsequently found ourselves in.

The experience of this friendship has made me somewhat tardier to make judgements on people I meet; less inclined to form an opinion and stick to it. But in terms of reading, I am stuck – like my nineteen-year-old self – with trenchant beliefs about writers and their works. This I seem unable to shake. There are two pillars to my snap judgements: writers I have read and disliked, and writers I have heard about and feel certain I would dislike.

The first is a difficult one to get over. Like spending a dreadful, soul-sapping evening with a newly found acquaintance, reading an author for the first time and hating their work is hard to forget. My distrust and violent reaction to Martin Amis is forged in my experience of Money – a book that should have come protected in rubber, the amount of times I threw it to the floor. No matter how many people tell me that London Fields or Dead Babies is worth reading, no matter how many times I read one of his essays (particularly his early work) I just can’t get past that first introduction. Money has its moments, but only in the same way that a date seems to be warming to you, or you to them, only for your companion to call you a fat, worthless bellend as the coffee’s poured.

The second category is much the worse however. These are writers whose reputation precedes them and before even touching one of their books, I feel I know what’s going on inside. Hearing academics, critics and writers talk about the genius of Henry James has made it impossible for me to even imagine picking up one of his novels; Howard Jacobson’s public persona has put me off his work so much that I couldn't even get past 40 pages of The Finkler Question; Norman Mailer’s wearying masculinity proved a block to ever getting to grips with Harlot’s Ghost or The Executioner's Song., Hemingway, ditto.

Up until about a month ago, the first name on that list of pre-judged authors would have been Bruce Chatwin: a writer, so it always seemed to me, so linked to his untimely death, so pored over and prodded in biographies and letters, so aesthetically concerned and cold, so full of the privileged musings travel bores inflict on interminable parties, that I could never countenance reading any of his slim output. How that changed is, like the start of all good friendships, hard to pinpoint.

I was having one of those moments where reading had become taxing. There was a stack of new and seemingly interesting books piled up in the living room, but nothing really stood out. I had a debut novel to review, but had plenty of time to file, so I spent a few minutes before setting out for work scanning shelves, picking out titles and putting them back. My bookcases are still confused after a recent move, so things were not aligned as usual. In one of the haphazard piles on the shelf, I noticed Utz, Chatwin’s last novel, published in 1988. It was a Picador copy that I barely remembered owning, and the jacket was old-fashioned and somewhat nicotine stained. But it seemed to fit with what I was looking for: something elegant, slim and hopefully diverting.

I read most of Utz on a steely, rain-suggestive afternoon outside of a pub in Hull. Unlike the northern weather, it came as something as a surprise. This was a novel of rare grace and skill, of precise descriptions, of Jewish folklore, Communist state control and the mania for collecting. There is humour too, a wry eye for the absurdities of people’s lives both hidden and lived in the collective gaze of the world. It was bewitching in a way that I had not expected, effortless in its literary chicanery, and crowned with a conclusion steeped in mystery. There is little in the way of plot – it essentially boils down to the attempted discovery of the location of the eponymous Utz's cache of rare porcelain figurines – but that is immaterial when the quality of the prose is as refined as Chatwin’s.

For so many years, to me Chatwin belonged to a group of writers I just felt were not for me – Naipaul for one, Paul Theroux another. But Utz put me more in mind of Sebald; a sense that the novelistic form just wasn’t quite enough for Chatwin. The first impression was, as with my best friend, the wrong one: but with books, time is more forgiving. They always give you a second chance.

The Proof of the Novel

The first advanced reading copy of a book I was ever given was Tourist by Matt Thorne. It was a flimsy blue thing, thin and the text still had the editor’s annotations in the margins. I liked the fact that a decision had been taken to change a character’s name and it was there for all to see; I liked the fact that I was reading something before anyone else had a chance more, however. It was the beginning of not quite a love affair, not quite an obsession: but still proof copies do something to me that even the most beautiful of books can’t quite muster.

Yesterday, the proofs arrived for Ten Stories About Smoking. A pair of them arriving on a bike from North to South West London. I held the parcel for a while and suppressed the urge to rip open the package right there. This was something that required some reverence, some quality time. So I headed to a bar which I knew would be empty and ordered a beer before opening the jiffy bag.

The proofs came in a red jacket, the usual Picador style of Times New Roman title and author. They were stunning; astonishing. I read one forgetting that I’d actually written the words inside. I thought about my bookshelf at home, the shelf which holds all the Picador proofs I’ve accumulated over the years. The uniform design meant that my book would not look out of place next to Don Delillo or John Banville, Cormac McCarthy or Tim Winton. It would fit right in, part of a strange kind of set.

The best proof copies are the ones that are designed this way. Jonathan Cape has been doing the same thing for years. Jacket images, finishes, unusual fonts are great ways to hook people, but with advance copies you get to see those books naked: there are no clues to be gleaned. The only thing you’re left with is a blurb and the text itself and that is oddly liberating. The decision to read is based therefore only on your reaction to the text itself. It’s a great leveller, and one that has made me read writers I perhaps would ordinarily have dismissed on account of my reaction to the positioning of the book.

Proofs are for geeks: though they are the true first editions most of the time, they don’t have the same kind of value as the finished article. And yet this is the text that the reviewers have read, the text that those early buyers may have skimmed through. They are often poorly made, throw-away items, but that just increases my passion for them – and the thrill of their arrival has not diminished over the years. In fact when I look at the ARCs of the new Jonathan Franzen, the new Will Self and the new Paul Auster it’s hard not to want to wade right in and read them straight away; though if they were the finished versions I would find it easier to wait. It’s still that feeling of reading before everyone else, I guess, that feeling of being there first – and knowing that what you might be reading is the next great novel.

For those left behind. . .

Now that the longlist for the Booker Prize has been announced two things will happen with grim, tortuous inevitability. Firstly, newspaper articles will appear comparing the sales of the 13 novels with Katie Price or Dan Brown’s latest paperback; secondly, possibly in the same article, someone will express surprise that a favourite (McEwan, Amis, Rushdie) didn’t make the cut. Both are as irritating as each other. The first is simply spurious and pointless – and something I've mentioned before – the second just as frustrating, for a number of reasons.

McEwan, Amis and Rushdie do not need the publicity to sell copies of their books, so why there seems to be a need to mention the ‘surprise’ of them not being on the list is beyond me. It is no shock to me that McEwan and Amis didn’t get further; this is a strong year and even their most fierce proponents must concede that these are books unlikely to unite a body of judges. The real story, for me at least, is the ones left behind. Those writers who don’t have the platform that these three writers have, but must have had high hopes of making it onto the list. It’s for them I really feel; I can’t imagine how galling it must be to think you’re in with a shout only to fall at the first hurdle.

Of course awards are imperfect; they are only the opinions of four disparate people, yet when it comes down to it, what greater barometer for the enthusiastic reader is the Booker list? Bitch, moan and piss about it all you like, that list gives a book a massive base to go at. Sales will inevitably increase; a writer’s profile will be already heightened. The problem is, however, if you don’t make the list. What happens then?

One of the books I tipped to make it on the list was The Canal by Lee Rourke. It felt to me like the kind of novel that the Booker prize was invented to recognise and champion. That it didn’t is disappointing, but not a disaster. It is a novel that will find its own audience – perhaps not in the mass-market, but an audience all the same. It’s more of an issue for established names, with huge publisher expectations, where a longlisting is realistically the only way to guarantee a return on the investment.

Gerard Woodward’s superb Nourishment is the kind of book I’m talking about. Deft, brilliant and astute, it is to be published slap bang in the middle of Booker season, which means it’s going to have to get some pretty special reviews and get huge promotion to get any kind of sales. For all the joy that the longlist brings to someone like Lisa Moore, it spells pretty dire news for novelists such as Woodward – especially as he’ll be vying for attention not only with the 13 but the non-eligible big, literary books of the autumn such as To The End of the Land by David Grossman, Freedom by Jonathan Franzen and Nemesis by Philip Roth.

So while I’m happy for David Mitchell, Tom McCarthy and Damon Galgut, I’m also feeling for the ones that could so easily have joined them. I just really hope that the Booker noise and bluster doesn’t push out books like Nourishment or even the new DBC Pierre (which is much better than you might think). It’d be good to see those books keep afloat even without the Booker life raft.

For what it's worth

My Booker Longlist predictions

1. Thousand Autumns – David Mitchell
2. C – Tom McCarthy
3. Skippy Dies – Paul Murray
4. The Long Song – Andrea Levy
5. The Canal – Lee Rourke
6. Nourishment – Gerard Woodward
7. Trespass – Rose Tremain
8. Solar – Ian McEwan
9. Even the Dogs – Jon McGregor
10. And this is True – Emily Mackie
11. The Finkler Question – Howard Jacobson
12. Room – Emma Donague
13. The Slap – Christos Tsiolkas

Death of a Dream

In the summer of 1997, sandwiched at some point between the grinning, overwhelming optimism of Blair’s Britain and the outpouring of self-imposed grief for a dead princess, I was forced to sell my guitar. It was a black Gibson copy; cream scratch-plate, caramel coloured tone dials, a pair of scuffed humbucker pick-ups. The strings whiskered out from the tuning pegs and the black Ernie Ball strap held it comfortably low around my groin. I played it through a miniature Marshall amp, the sound muffled and fuzzed, and tried to master the chords to songs I loved, the results a messy, halting squall of atonal, arrhythmic noise. I was, and remain, a shockingly unmusical person, and a shitty guitarist.

Even though I’d long been aware of my staggering ineptitude at plank spanking, selling that guitar was no less painful. I put an advert in the Liverpool Echo and a kid called me up the same day. That evening his mother drove him to my flat and we both watched as he picked up the guitar, tuned it without the aid of an electronic contraption and adjusted the bass and treble. He sat on the edge of the bed and played Blackbird with a confidence and aptitude bordering on the precocious. He said that he liked the guitar’s look and sound, but that the amp was a bit underpowered. He paid in cash; his mother looked sort of proud. I bet he slept with that guitar in his bed that night.

An imaginary life ended with that transaction; a parallel existence of tour buses and drunkenness, willing girls and sweaty clubs. It was as hopeful a notion as becoming world speedway champion or having a major retrospective at the Tate. The delusion, however, worked because of its own entirely fictive basis. I could have the dreams of singing a post-punk inspired cover of Neil Diamond’s "Beautiful Noise" at the Manchester Academy, or smashing up a guitar at CBGBs precisely because they were impossible. Had there been any chance at all of it happening, I’m not sure it would have been quite so much fun.

I thought about this a lot as I read Tim Thornton’s all-too-painfully-recognisable Death of an Unsigned Band. Over the last decade I’ve spent a lot of time with good friends in good, unsigned bands. Being on the periphery allows you to share in their world, but such vicarious dreaming is tempered by the fact you’re not at its centre – it’s your poor friends who are checking the prison-wall style notches against their bands’ name as people enter the gig; it’s them who are treated like shit at sound check; and them who ultimately end up chasing promoters for a few quid after providing the drums for yet another four-band show. For all the excitement of playing and recording, I’ve always thought the pay back was somewhat slight.

Death of an Unsigned Band captures this tension with acuity, and in doing so creates a set of characters who are at once engaging, flawed and utterly recognisable. The episodic, interview-style approach perfectly suits his subject and Thornton cleverly keeps their personal stories in the background – the effect suggesting that Russell, Ash, Karen and Jake are only really living when they’re being the band. The consuming nature of such ambition is well drawn, and the drab period of musical history in which it takes place – the 2000/1 of Coldplay, Travis and Turin Brakes – only serves to make their hopes and dreams appear so much more cruelly dashed.

What marks Death of an Unsigned Band out is its refusal to pander to obvious narrative arcs, there are no tedious explorations of the nature of fame, nor is there a token drug problem or a thinly disguised Yoko. It’s an honest depiction of the way thousands of people spend their weekends and week nights – playing clubs and bars, thinking that this time it might happen, that the A&R guy might chuck his chequebook their way – and is pitched just right for a summer read for anyone who’s spent their money to see their friends play, or been one of the ones doing the playing. Despite that memory of the guitar, I know which side of the stage I’d rather be on.

The worst sentence in world literature

I recently wrote my first negative review in a national newspaper. It was a for a book that I didn’t exactly hold out much hope for – it concerned the problems of a white, middle-class writer on the verge of turning forty – but I was determined to give it the benefit of the doubt. Within the first fifteen lines, however, the author had used a sentence that to me remains a kind of literary bête noir; a turn of phrase which without fail causes me to shudder. What upsets me about it is its prevalence, despite its utter redundancy: a sequence of words easily found in airport pulp novels, aspirational literature and everything in between. The book was bad enough, thank you all the same, without this abhorrant sentence, and its close cousins, being repeated several times.

Now I do have some bugbears when it comes to literary fiction. I groan if rivers are brackish, I wince if sunlight slants through a window, and harrumph loudly at salt and pepper hair. These are words and descriptions that exist only in one medium, in much the same way that the words pooch, bonk and fury are only used in tabloid newspapers. But I can forgive these for many authors, but what I can’t accept is the following sentence, and it should be struck from any script ever. Okay. Loud exhalation of breath . . .

“I can remember it just like it was yesterday.”

It makes my arm itch just looking at it.

You see, the problem with it is that one of redundancy. This sentence is normally either appended to the end of a description, or prefixes one. Either way it is unnecessary. In a first-person narrative, one can only narrate what you remember: so what is the point in telling the reader that they remember it like it was yesterday? What is gained by this? Apart from a sense of over-arching importance, obviously. It means nothing, it’s just marking time: authors surely should have a bit more confidence in the reader's ability to work out that the narrator remembers something pretty well, considering they fucking wrote about it.

Perhaps it’s a device to ensure that readers aren’t panicked into thinking half way through that the narrator might just stop and say “Actually, I can’t really remember where I was going with this. A young girl? Picnic, lightening? It rings a bell. Have I told you the one about the university professor?” In sales, they call these dog words; the things you say while you’re working out what to say next to close the deal. In literature it’s the most empty way of feeding the page.

Not only that, it’s misleading. We understand that remembering something as though it was yesterday, is to suggest that it is still livid in the mind. Except, this is complete balls and piss. I can recall things from fifteen years ago with far greater clarity than the events of yesterday (pub? Football? I can’t even remembered who scored). Ask any old giffer what they had for dinner yesterday and the quality of life during rationing and you’ll get chapter and verse on using chipfat for Brylcream and the delights of powdered egg along with a shrug and a guess that they had pie and mash for dinner the night before.

I propose the phrase be outlawed in literature. Is there anything worse? I mean, really?