Books of the Week: February
February, 2020, second month done.
These are the books, which kept us going.
Book of the Week #5
Robert Harris.
The Second Sleep.
This week I have been living, well existing, in purgatory.
That space between hell and heaven, infinitely less enjoyable than either.
Why?
Well, I was due an upgraded phone, so like the magpie lover of shiny things, I indulged.
But this has left me in this half light, no (connected) man’s space of iCloud backups, which I check on a regular 5 minute basis to see if 8 hours has become 10 or more.
It is my only connection with civilisation, the world outside, so here I am sat trapped, palatially wrapped wondering about all the excitements going on.
Now, it’s my own fault, I know, I should have backed up before, and I’m fastidious about backing everything else up, but phones? Not for me.
The price I am paying, perhaps wasn’t worth the prize.
Of course, I have been out of the house, done things, seen people, but none of it matters, because I didn’t have that shiny bit of metal and glass in my pocket which announced that I was pleased to see the world.
This shiny thing, soon to be replaced by a slightly less shiny, more matte, midnight green thing, has an apple with a bite taken out of it, a symbol in Robert Harris’ ‘The Second Sleep’ of the ancients. Those without god, and proof to Harris’ church that technology rather than god will kill us all.
Perhaps a fictional exaggeration, but certain forms of technology do pervade, enhance and play with our lives.
I can’t think of a single other thing I would be so enthralled to the backing up of and I thought I wasn’t that bad, had set rules, no phones in bedrooms etc, etc.
Instead, here I stand staring, willing, hoping that soon I can see what wonderfully awful outfits have been posted, checking on injury news for a game not played for another two weeks, or browsing for yet more stuff, I neither need, nor will buy.
Which is in part why Robert Harris’ The Second Sleep, this week’s BotW, hit such a note.
In typical Harris-ian fashion the first 80 pages I read and question whether I could be arsed, then tore through the next 240 odd with delight. It’s a skill, the questioning and intelligent, thriller, fiction equivalent of an album ‘grower’.
This time, rather than Greece, the papacy or even some chaps in WW2, we are dealing with the future, a post apocalyptic future which is rather like the past – or highly trendily present for those who escape to country then back to Hampstead on a Monday.
England plunged into darkness 800 years hence, a land in the throes of a new dark age, electrical and philosophical, a land where ideas which are contrary to an authoritarian church see people banished to Wilton.
Our hero, a young priest, sent to bury a colleague in the provinces, and work out whodunit and well Adam meets Eve.
A simple descent from piety and into love? No, far too elegant for that, for along the with plotting, thrills and mud covered spills, a message about fearing a world ruled by dogma and the true vulnerability of society regardless of how sophisticated we think we are.
It’s still backing up, 13 hours left now…
Book of the Week #6
William Finnegan.
Barbarian Days.
This week, a re-reader. But a must.
I blame me pulling on pair of washed out, battered made in USA jeans (soz), playing Pacific Ocean Blue by Dennis Wilson and Graham Nash’s Songs for Beginners on repeat. A bit of sunshine and my hair worn down.
So William Finnegan’s Barbarian Days, the sporting book of the last decade, in fact just one of the books of the last decade.
A man’s life told across the world, through his need to surf.
How jumping on a board, hitting and riding waves, sometimes getting hit off, helped a man form and allowed Finnegan to make sense of how odd it is to be alive.
Taut, tense brilliance
Book of the Week #7
William Fever.
The lives of Lucian Freud: The restless years,1922-1968
Lucian, oh Lucian, the bad boy of British art, well one of.
A man whose complex nature and artistic sensibilities have enraptured critics and the public.
But what was the making? William Fever’s part one of his two part dive into the mind and life of Lucian Freud succeeds in showing the human side, one which makes the art even more intriguing and beguiling.
A breathless run through Freud’s early years, based on an initial set of interviews which became daily phone calls and an understanding that the books were to be published post Freud’s death.
Often that’s because either the material isn’t great, untrue or the subject’s personal worry for lack of public interest. This, is great. Witty, sharp and badly behaved, we see Freud emerge from schoolboy to well that boy, at it’s heart the constant question being posed, born or made?
In Freud’s case, it’s a mixture, the name helps, but it’s the unshackling of social norms which helped push the art beyond technical achievement and aesthetic extreme prettiness and firmly into the realm of the greats.
Book of the week #8
Bret Easton Ellis
White.
A few years back, I was in Italy buying sunglasses . At the grand sunglasses event, with no expense spared, lunch.
The sort of communal leisurely lunch that often leads to business being done.
On the walls to one side, an advert for a brand’s next campaign, with some 40 something male looking out into space, thinking, pondering and using his sunglasses as an aid.
I thought it was cool, Bret Easton Ellis, the ultimate chronicler of luxurious consumption fiction being used to sell luxurious Italian made sunglasses.
The person sat next to me didn’t know who it was, until I said ‘American Psycho?’.
American Psycho, not the film (which is very also good), is a watershed moment for contemporary fiction, the fiction of the now, just 30 odd years ago. Written in clear, crisp, factual sentences which horrify.
The imagery from rats to clothes, food to New York life, was designed to get under the skin, to show a world, that from afar could be paradise but up close was fetid.
This has been BEE’s calling card throughout his career, creating a world which feeds sometimes directly, often obliquely into modern consumer journalism, whether Vice or GQ, Telegraph or Grazia.
Everything he writes, is a must.
So this, the first collection of non fiction for Easton Ellis, not something you have to like, nor agree with – on lots of levels I did neither and then sometimes I did – but, if you want to partake in this world, he ought to be read, to be understood, to be debated.