2010s

25 Books in 25 Days: #5 Blow Up the Castle

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When I was in Canada last year, Darlene kindly gave me a couple of books – one of which was Blow Up the Castle (2011) by Margaret Moffatt. You can read Darlene’s thoughts about it on her blog; in brief, it’s about three vicars with very similar names (Peabody, Peacock, and Peasly) and tells of their lives. It’s more or less a collection of short anecdotes or witty events, rather than a novel as such, set in 1930s England.

In amongst all the little jokes and curious events, I have to put a word in for somebody mistakenly entering ‘The Lost Slipper’ into an art competition to depict The Last Supper…

Ilustrado by Miguel Syjuco

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I spent a month in the Philippines in 2006, and it’s still one of the best experiences of my life. Hopefully not too much in a gap yah way, but it is my only experience of a country outside Europe and North America. Ever since then, I’ve been intending to read at least one book by a Filipino author – and, indeed, got a copy of Miguel Syjuco’s Ilustrado when it was published (in the original English), in 2010. It’s taken me eight years to read this review copy – and I had to persuade my book group to read it, to get it to the top of tbr pile – but I ended up thinking it was really rather good.

I should start with the caveat that the other three people who read it for book group really disliked it. And it is certainly a quirky novel – but I have a lot more patience with structural experimentation than stylistic experimentation. Nobody needs another Ulysses (or, frankly, the original Ulysses) but there is plenty to be gained from seeing how the structure of a novel can be played with to bring something new. In Ilustrado, the lead character – also called Miguel Syjuco – is on the track of Edmund Salvador. This (fictitious) man was one of the most famous Filipino writers, and has recently been found dead in a river. ‘Syjuco’ (I’ll use inverted commas to distinguish between character and author; apologies if it gets annoying) heads from New York to Manila to find out more about what could have led to it – and to find the elusive manuscripts of Salvador’s rumoured final, enormously long manuscript.

The main thread of the novel is in the third person, following ‘Syjuco’ on this journey. He is a determined, slightly obnoxious character – he sexualises most of the women he meets, obsesses with his quest, and hasn’t got over his failed relationship. But he is also intensely human and (thus?) sympathetic – experiencing the mixed feelings of the Filipino-American returning to his homeland. He is both stranger and familiar, living a life that is disjointed from those of the people he meets with, stays with, eats with.

The airplane comes down low. From above, the city is still beautiful. We pass over brown water off the coast, fish pens laid out in geometrical patterns, like a Mondrian viewed by someone colour-blind. Over the bay, the sunset is startling, the famous sunset, like none anywhere else. Skeptics attribute its colours to pollution. Over there’s the land, the great grey sprawl of eleven million people living on top of each other on barely over 240 square miles – fourteen cities and three municipalities, skyscrapers and shanties, tumbling beyond Kilometre Zero and the heart of every Filipino, the city that gave the metro its name: Manila.

This thread was certainly the most enjoyable part of the novel. It was often quite funny, occasionally slightly broad, but an observant, somewhat beguiling narrative. I felt pulled along by his quest, even when not finding him the most pleasant character – perhaps it is the shared belief in the power of literature, and the need to pursue it.

Alongside this thread, though are others – not parallel storylines, exactly. One is ‘Syjuco’s’ journey told in the third person, as though by an omniscient author. And then there are excerpts from many of Salvador’s writings – whether his gang novel, his autobiography, or ‘Syjuco’s’ unfinished biography of Salvador. There are snippets of very well-judged imitations of Paris Review interviews with Salvador. And there are various paragraphs that tell jokey anecdotes about village idiot types. Thrown into all of them is a lot about Filipino politics (particularly those around when it’s set – which is 2000/2001). Syjuco doesn’t give much context, and expects you to know who the various people are – but a bit of judicious googling would help anybody out there.

Some of these worked really well. The biographical excerpts and the interviews really help to build a picture of Salvador, and give us the context for ‘Syjuco’s’ obsession. The bits from his books, though, seemed a little pointless – they didn’t add anything cumulatively, and felt a bit like Syjuco had included them simply for the fun of writing them. And the stereotyped anecdotes were just a distraction.

And yet, even the parts that felt unnecessary helped add up to the whole. I thought of Ilustrado a bit like an Impressionist painting – up close, the brushstrokes don’t seem to make much sense – but take a step back, and creates a whole picture. To pick another visual metaphor, it was like a collage. I thought the whole book, taken as a whole, worked really well, and quite unlike any other novel I’ve ever read. And yet I didn’t find it indulgent or pretentious – it was still pacey and intriguing. The prose style was well-honed without being showy. And, particularly towards the end, the plot takes centre stage and it all gets pretty page-turnery. There’s even a rather impressive twist that helps put the whole novel into context.

My enjoyment of Ilustrado was certainly also helped by my (albeit small) familiarity with Manila. I certainly don’t know it in the way a resident would, but I could picture the streets he described, the small places to eat, the homes. And it was all laced a little with my happy memories of being there.  But don’t just take my word for it – it won the Man Asian Literary Prize.

Book group made clear that this is rather a divisive novel – and it’s certainly not the sort of thing I usually read. But I thought it was compelling, original, and well-handled. And I’d love to know any other recommendations of Filipino novels – particularly any that were originally written in Tagalog?

The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson

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I’ve now read three books by Jon Ronson – the first two being So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed and The Men Who Stare at Goats – but the first one I heard of was The Psychopath Test (2011). I seem to remember my brother reading it, or perhaps my friend Mel – either way, it appealed enough to start me hunting for other Ronson books, even if it took me a few more years to finally read this particular one.

Ronson has made a name for himself as someone who explores the quirky and unusual, often meeting and interviewing strange people in his unflappable, mild-mannered (and yet, simultaneously, rather anxious) way. Whether conspiracy theorists, Internet hate figures, or CIA operatives, he treats them with a Louis Theroux-esque genial bafflement. Even while he’s immersing himself in dangerous territory, he comes across rather like a calm observer – even, somehow, when he’s telling us how uncalm an observer he is.

But there can’t be many more dangerous people to meet than those who have been declared psychopaths and imprisoned in maximum security prisons. That’s where Ronson is – initially to interview somebody who alleges he faked his psychopathy to get a lighter prison sentence for GBH, and now can’t convince anybody that he isn’t mentally ill.

(Actually, this comes after a meandering and ultimately rather pointless anecdote about people being mysteriously sent strange little books – I suppose it’s intended to hook our attention, but I found those elements rather over-long and a bit of a distraction from the main theme.)

The Psychopath Test uses the prison encounter as our introduction to the titular test – developed by Robert Hare, it is essentially a checklist to determine whether or not somebody is a psychopath. There is naturally some discomfort in the world that something so drastic could be decided by this sort of test – ending, like a BuzzFeed quiz, with a ‘yes – psychopath’ or ‘no – normal’. Ronson explores the impact of the test, as well as analysing many of the people who have been criminally psychopathic.

And this is where I began to skip pages… I hadn’t really joined the dots, to realise what sort of descriptions would be included. I went in because I’m interested by the psychological aspects – though, unsurprisingly, Ronson also tells us what noted psychopaths have done. And reading about gruesome murders and sexual assaults isn’t really my jam… so, yes, I did end up darting through some of the pages.

More interesting to me were the sections this led to – about psychopaths in everyday life. Because many are not criminals – but simply can’t understand the concept of empathy. And Ronson speaks to those who have deduced that the percentage of psychopaths in the world (around 1%) becomes much larger when considering people in power – especially business leaders. It makes one think… not least because there’s one particular businessman who is rather prominent at the moment, and has never been known to show any noticeable sort of empathy.

More broadly, Ronson looks at the ways in which mental health diagnoses were determined – a frighteningly arbitrary council, seemingly – and how overdiagnosed things like childhood bipolar disorder have become. Not least because, accordingly to the experts Ronson speaks to, there’s no such thing as childhood bipolar disorder. These parts are where the subtitle – ‘a journey through the madness industry’ – becomes much more relevant, and I’d have valued more of a focus on this strand.

So, yes, there are many interesting sections in The Psychopath Test. The reason that it ended up being my least favourite of Ronson’s books isn’t simply because I’m so squeamish – it also felt like it cohered less than the other two I’ve read. His approach felt a little more scattergun, or less carefully edited together. The framing device for the book was (as I’ve said) not a winner for me, and the pacing of his journalistic elaborations doesn’t seem quite right.

The best of the three I’ve read is definitely So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, which is also Ronson’s most recent book – suggesting that he’s getting better as he keeps writing.,

 

Bookworm by Lucy Mangan

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I heard about Bookworm (2018) by Lucy Mangan on Twitter, I think, or perhaps another blog – but as soon as I’d heard the subtitle (‘a memoir of childhood reading’) I knew that I had to read it. I think it was in a Weekend Miscellany. Thankfully Square Peg sent me a copy, and I wolfed it down – it’s very hard to imagine any bibliophile not loving this book. Though I also said that about Howards End is on the Landing, and look what happened there. No matter; I’m going to maintain full confidence with this one.

Mangan was a very bookish child – in the way that only those of us who were also very bookish children will understand. Books were her sanctuary, her new worlds, her adventure, her heartbreak. This total immersion, and self-definition as a bibliophile, is the keynote of Bookworm, and it will make every avid childhood reader thrill with recognition. We feel her pain when reading is socially unacceptable in the playground, and when her parents restrict her reading to certain rooms, to encourage her to be more sociable. (Yes, reading at the dinner table was – is? – banned in my home. And yes, like Lucy I turned to cereal packets or anything else I could read, when desperation hit.)

Through the chapters, Mangan takes us from her earliest reading memories until the end of childhood. To be honest, the tales of picture books interested but did not beguile me. I don’t remember which picture books I read – except the Mr Men, and I don’t think they got a single mention in Bookworm. Was Mangan born slightly too early for them? But once we got onto other books – well, firstly it was a nice surprise to discover that I have read more classic children’s literature than I’d supposed – but mostly, it’s wonderful to read how well Mangan describes the all-encompassing experiences these books were.

Enid Blyton gets a section (hurrah!) – without a doubt the defining author of my childhood. Narnia gets a section, as do Little Women, Roald Dahl, Richmal Crompton’s William books, and both books that Rachel and I are discussing in the next episode of the podcast – The Secret Garden and Tom’s Midnight Garden. Even Sweet Valley High, with which I was obsessed for a couple of years. Even if you haven’t read these books, the enthusiasm with which she remembers them is a delight, and mixes frothy enthusiasm with plenty of reflection and contemplation. Occasionally the tone becomes a little too self-consciously Caitlin Moranesque, and the odd sentence reads a little awkwardly – the bookish kid trying to fit in with the cool gang – but most of the time she isn’t trying stylistic tics; she’s just revelling in the absolute joy that books can be. (There are also one or two tedious moments against Christian faith, and one truly shocking anti-Catholic moment that should certainly have been cut, but I’ll tidy those under the rug for now.)

Along the way (because it is a memoir of sorts, after all) we learn about her character, her friends, her family. I loved the way her father would occasionally suggest a book, with a subtle gleam that acknowledges that this is a book he loved in his childhood. I loved the depiction of a slightly anxiously moralistic child, who definitely didn’t want to read anything anarchistic or rule-breaking in books (no thank you Fantastic Mr Fox). It reminded me of my own fastidiousness as a child, that made me unable to enjoy The Twits (the idea of the food in the beard still makes me gag).

And mostly I just loved with a wonderful nostalgic journey this. I love any book about reading, but one about the world-opening potential of reading to a child is rather lovely. And it’ll certainly lead you heading straight for the children’s section of the library, to relive all the classics that filled your world and expanded your imagination however many years ago.

The Book of Forgotten Authors by Christopher Fowler

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Mum and Dad got me The Book of Forgotten Authors (2017) by Christopher Fowler, and I went to hear him speak about it earlier in the year – the only reason I didn’t buy a copy there was because it felt inevitable that somebody would get it for me. What could be more up my street than a collection about forgotten authors? (Based on a long-running column in The Independent, no less, which I did read occasionally.)

What makes an author forgotten? The title of Christopher Fowler’s book is inevitably a challenge to the reader – have you forgotten these authors? have you? – but it is slightly awkward to start off with Margery Allingham. Ask somebody to name five Golden Age detective novelist and, if they could get to five, I’d be very surprised if Allingham didn’t appear. Apparently Fowler’s method included checking with a circle of literary friends, and considering an author for inclusion if less than half had heard of them. It’s as good a method as any, but somehow authors like Barbara Pym, Edmund Crispin, and Georgette Heyer got through the net – I’d argue that if your books are all or mostly in print, you don’t make the grade for ‘forgotten’.

But I’ve started with the exceptions – I should say that I hadn’t heard of about half of these 99 authors, and that’s a much more impressive average than most of the ‘authors you don’t know’ lists. And I’ve read books by 15 of them – so plenty more to explore.

Somewhat coincidentally (unless Fowler requested it from the Bodleian… which I doubt) several of the authors mentioned were focuses of my DPhil thesis. E.M. Delafield, John Collier, and… Frank Baker! Yes, Baker gets a chapter, and I will love anybody who writes

Of his fifteen novels, Baker’s masterpiece is the enchanting and timeless Miss Hargreaves, which really deserves classic status.

Fingers crossed this mention brings Miss Hargreaves new fans, along with Barbara Comyns who also gets a chapter (oddly as Barbara Comyns Carr – her real name, though E.M. Delafield appears under her penname rather than Elizabeth De La Pasture).

Fowler manages to pack a lot of enticing detail into very short chapters; the punch and tautness that made them columns serves them equally well in this compendium form. And having them in alphabetical order is a nice touch – had they been thematic, it might have all got a bit samey, but this makes for a nice assortment of tantalising suggestions – Pamela Branch, Dino Buzzati, Margaret Millar, and Cynthia Seton being the ones I wrote down to explore. (Anybody read them?) And, unlike Martin Edwards’ equally tantalising The Golden Age of Detective Fiction, it’s easy to find at least some works by most of these authors.

In between the chapters about specific authors are enjoyable, slightly longer essays on particular themes – rivals to Poirot, deservedly forgotten authors, authors who were rediscovered (ironically, I’d heard of none of these). His love of literature and of unearthing bygone gems is genuine and delightful.

The problem with knowing quite a lot about some of these authors is that I could see quite a few errors. Some are typographical (Julian Maclaren-Ross becomes Juliane Maclaren-Ross) but others show a dubiously casual research. He writes about E.M. Delafield’s five Provincial Lady novels (presumably being fooled by the American republishing of Straw Without Bricks as The Provincial Lady in Russia, which it emphatically isn’t); he says the film adaptation of Miss Hargreaves was cancelled because WW2 started, which would be tricky given that the novel wasn’t published until 1940. These small things did make me wonder how much Fowler had got wrong about the authors I didn’t know anything about…

But, let’s face it, I’m not going to remember all the details, so it doesn’t necessarily matter if they aren’t all completely accurate – what it has done is given me a list of authors to look out for, and a smile on my face that some of my much-loved authors have had another moment in the sun. If you love new recommendations, and reminders of more obscure favourites, then use your Christmas book vouchers to settle down with this one in the post-Christmas indulgent phase.

My Life With Bob by Pamela Paul

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The first book I grabbed from my Christmas haul was, as I predicted in a previous post, My Life With Bob by Pamela Paul (2017), which my parents got me and which was one of the really difficult-to-resist books under Project 24. It was every bit as good as I’d hoped, though not quite in the same way, and I wanted to make sure I reviewed it before New Year in case it ends up on my Best Books of 2017 list. I haven’t decided the list yet…

The ‘Bob’ of Paul’s title is a book of books – that is, the list of books Paul reads, which she starts as an earnest teenager in high school. It has been filled in over 28 years, taking her up to her current life – as the editor of the New York Times Book Review, living with her husband and children in New York. And it is the thread which is drawn through this book – which is somewhere between an autobiography and a book about reading. (It’s also a lovely book – not just this fun cover, but it has deckled edges. Mmmmmm.)

I have kept a list of the books I’ve read since 2002, when I was 16. I write it in the back of each diary, and then (once the year is over) I also write them alphabetically by author in a set of notebooks designed for the purpose. Suffice to say, I’m not baffled by Paul’s desire to keep a list of her books, but apparently some people have been:

Though I’d never shown him to anyone, I’d told a few people about Bob in the past. This turned out to be a dicey proposition. Not everyone loved my Book of Books. “Tallying up books like the ticking off of accomplishments,” one boyfriend said accusingly, as if I’d admitted to quantifying parental love or indexing my inner beauty. “Hurry up, go note it in Bob,” he’d gibe every time I close a book, as if the act of recording invalidated the entire experience. Were the books truly being read for their own sake or in pursuit of some goal that sullied the entire enterprise?

“What does this tell you if you don’t remember anything about the books themselves?” another beau asked, suggesting an expanded Bob with a page for my impressions of each book in its stead. This Bigger Bob lasted for two books, the relationship not much longer. “You’re not seriously going to allow books on tape, are you?” wondered a third, scornfully. Competition, jealousy, misunderstandings, risk. Perhaps it wasn’t worth the bother.

How many of you keep lists of the books you read? I rather suspect it’s nearly all of you – because the sort of person who writes or reads a book blog isn’t likely to let that sort of information just disappear. Honestly, I’m more shocked that people recklessly finish a book and don’t make a note of it anywhere. Crazy.

I’ve read quite a lot of books about reading – it’s probably my favourite genre – but I’ve read one or two recently that only tread the surface; that either are a bit facile about how books can affect a person, or that act as though reading were their discovery entirely. Paul writes perfectly about reading. She understands that books are not an adjunct to a life, or solely an entertainment activity. The identity of ‘reader’ is all-consuming; books surround and define us, accompany and sate us, reward and disappoint us. The reading life lives parallel with our ‘real’ life, but the two overlap and inform one another – indeed, they become inseparable. And from an early age, picking books from her local library, Paul sees this.

We see Paul as a young reader, trying the classics for the first time; we see her as the child of divorce, taking advantage of her father’s willingness to buy her books (as her mother was one of those just-borrow-from-the-library types). We see her learning to understand her own literary taste – I will say that I never quite understood what Paul’s taste is, other than encompassing dark, difficult books. Perhaps she is too eclectic to have a single taste. Along the way, Bob is there to record what she reads – which, in turn, reflects her moods and activities.

Where Paul writes about reading she is, as you may have gathered, extremely relatable. In a world before Harry Potter, there was no widespread fad for pre-teen reading, and she was in the all-American world where outdoor sports and camping were considered normal fare, not reading. I loved discovering everything about her love affairs with books, even if we don’t learn all that many of the books she has delighted in over the years – each chapter is named after one, which features, and there is certainly a liberal sprinkling of titles, but it’s a small percentage of the total. What I’m saying is that I wanted a list of all of them, OK? At least as a sort of internet appendix, please-and-thank-you.

All of this was fun and fascinating, as I’d expected. What I expected less was Paul’s active life. Unlike some readers (ahem, me) who haven’t lived particularly adventurous lives, Paul read a book which persuaded her to walk an exciting path – in her case, buying a one-way ticket to Thailand. She lived in Thailand, she travelled around China. She went to France a dozen or so times. Bob went with her, and the chapters about these experiences merge the life of the reader with the life of the adventurer – and intriguing and well-told mix. It is unlike any travel account I’ve ever read, because the locus remains always literature.

And that’s before we get to the chapters about her less-than-a-year-long marriage.

Paul writes extremely well about any experience she turns to, whether that be her relationship with her father, working in a bookshop, travelling across Asia, or realising she wanted a divorce. The idea of tying it together with Bob works brilliantly, and reminded me a lot of another book I loved: Sheila Kaye-Smith’s All the Books of My Life. What a wonderful book that was (note to self: re-read). The only parts I found hard to swallow concerned Paul’s disdain for roles in marketing – where she worked on her way to being an editor – but, sadly, I have found quite a few editors who love down on marketers.

Any author who loves reading as much as I do is going to beguile and enchant me, particularly if they can write about it as brilliantly as Paul does. Throwing in her intense and interesting life just enhances this all further. It’s a great read, and I recommend it to anybody who loves books about books. And, let’s face it, that’s all of us, isn’t it?

Coral Glynn by Peter Cameron

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When I was staying in Toronto, Darlene (of Cosy Books) very kindly gave me a couple of books – one of which was Coral Glynn by Peter Cameron (2012). The book rang a bell from her blog and from Thomas/Hogglestock’s, and it sounded like it should be up my street – though there was always the danger that (being a modern novel written by an American about 1950s England) it might wander into the sort of England only seen on BBC America. That is, would it be too Downton for its own good?

Well, luckily, I really enjoyed it. That is more to do with Cameron’s writing and subtle, gradual depiction of character than about his version of 1950s England – which is, indeed, rather like a picture postcard (though there is the threat of new semi-detached houses encroaching in the environs of the colossal house that the hero, naturally, lives in).

But I am getting ahead of myself. Here are the opening paragraphs of the novel:

That spring – the spring of 1950 – had been particularly wet.

An area at the bottom of the garden at Hart House flooded, creating a shallow pool through which the crocuses gamely raised their little flounced heads, like cold shivering children in a swimming class. The blond gravel on the garden paths had turned green, each pebble wrapped in a moist transparent blanket of slime, and one could not sit on either of the two cement beaches that flanked the river gate without first unhinging the snails and slugs adhered to them.

The excessive moistness of the garden was of no concern to anyone at Hart House except for the new nurse, who had arrived on Thursday, and had attempted, on the two afternoons that were somewhat mild, to sit outside for a moment, away from the sickness and strain in the house. But she found the garden inhospitable, and so had resolved to stay indoors.

The new nurse (as you might have started to suspect) is Coral Glynn – she is there to care for the old lady of the household, who has a terminal illness. She is greeted by the taciturn son and heir, (Major) Clement Hart, and the ill-tempered, suspicious housekeeper. In rather an unexpected manner, Coral becomes key to the household – though local tragedy causes disruption here. And with those coy words I shall say no more about the plot.

Despite being light and endearing, there is a sensitive portrait of loneliness and uncertainty at the centre of the novel. Coral is brave and headstrong in some ways, but is orphaned and alone, and unaccustomed to friendship. Besides the Major are his married friends Dolly and Robin – Dolly is a vivacious type who immediately becomes bosom buddies with Coral (or tries to) while Robin is affable but has his own burdens to bear. We soon learn, in a touching aside-scene, that Robin and Clement had once been in love. It adds further dimension to the novel, but it does throw the novel a bit, since scenes between Robin and Clement are the only ones which aren’t focused through Coral’s perspective, so far as I can recall.

The plot rolls on, and Cameron combines the nuance of the characters’ relationships (and, particularly, Coral’s attempts to understand the world she finds herself in – and develop a personality that she feels comfortable with) with an intriguing story. The latter rather collapses, and I wasn’t convinced by the ending, but the journey was rather wonderful – it feels nostalgic without being too fey, and Cameron is a really good storyteller. It’s rare that I prefer a book set in the 1950s to one written in the 1950s – the same goes for any decade, not just the ’50s – but I did rather love reading this one. I’d be interested to see how Cameron writes when he’s not looking across an ocean and into the past, but if his understanding of character is maintained, then I’d like to read him writing about 21st-century America. If he has done?

The Disaster Artist by Greg Sestero and Tom Bissell

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My friend Mel and I have a history of buying each other the same presents. One Christmas we both (without consulting each other, but having set a £1 budget for gifts) bought each other a wind-up man on a penny farthing. This birthday (our birthdays are six days apart) we both got each other the non-fiction book The Disaster Artist (2013) by Greg Sestero and Tom Bissell.

This one is perhaps less of a coincidence – we have both enjoyed the so-bad-it’s-good film The Room, and its a genre of films, indeed, that we love. There’s nothing quite like watching a movie that defies logic in its staggering ineptitude, and if you can find one where the writing, acting, directing, audio, visual, and scene-building all combine into being a horror show of terribleness, then you’ve hit the sweet spot. Such, if you don’t know it, is The Room. Here’s a (fan-made) trailer…

The history of this 2003 ‘masterpiece’ is a bit bizarre – the lead actor/director/writer Tommy Wiseau funded it being screened in a cinema for an age, and had a billboard advertising it for five years in Hollywood. Over time, it became a sleeper cult hit – the twice I’ve seen it were at special screenings at a cinema in Leicester Square, where people fling plastic cutlery at the screen, join in with many of the lines, and dress in costume. But how did it get made, and what was behind so many of the odd choices in the film?

The world is likely to become a lot more alive to this film soon, as The Disaster Artist is a film coming out in the next few weeks – but it is based on this book by Greg Sestero (who played Mark, the second lead actor) and a journalist Tom Bissell – by which we can probably assume that Bissell wrote most of it and Sestero’s contributions were in interview form, but who can say.

The Disaster Artist wisely jumps between two timelines, rather than being entirely chronological, so that we get chapters about the making of The Room from the outset – interspersed with chapters which show how Greg and Tommy met, and the story of their friendship. It is an odd one. They met in an acting class, and became oddball friends. Greg was a young, handsome man embarking on an acting career against the advice of his parents; Tommy was a loner who refused to give his real age, nationality, or where he’d acquired enormous amounts of wealth from – and, to this day, he won’t say those things.

An unlikely friendship developed, though every step would be a huge warning flag in a film about a stalker. Tommy let Greg use his apartment, which had almost no furniture, but wasn’t happy if Greg spoke to any other friends. He would drive Greg around until late at night, and get upset if he asked too many questions. He was clearly jealous when Greg started to have minor success as an actor, and would ramble to him for hours on the phone about it all.

Somehow Greg agreed to make a movie with him.

Undoubtedly, it’s the chapters about The Room that are the most entertaining (if you’ve seen it before, at least). Tommy’s behaviour is entirely bizarre – Greg’s involvement on screen only came about because Tommy wanted to replace the original second lead. Rather than fire this unfortunate (or perhaps fortunate) gentlemen, though, Tommy just filmed the same scenes twice – one with Greg, one with this guy – but didn’t use film for the latter. Eventually, shockingly, he was rumbled.

Tommy would ask for sets to be dismantled then demand they be put together again. He filmed on a terrible alley set, despite there being an available alley immediately next to it – because this is a ‘real Hollywood film’. He wouldn’t let anybody deviate from his nonsensical script, and he auditioned actors by screaming “you’ve just won a million dollars!” at them, and hoping they would act in response. And, despite his script-despotism, he couldn’t remember his own lines – it took him over thirty takes to deliver this 13-second scene:

The Disaster Artist is a hilarious and fascinating exploration of how appalling scenes came to be as they were, how the crew was replaced twice, and explains enigmas like the ubiquitous framed photos of forks, and an actor being replaced halfway through the shoot. Alongside, it is also a portrait of a man so unusual that he would be unbelievable in fiction. Because Tommy Wiseau seemed delighted with the result of his efforts. We don’t comprehend him because he is impossible to comprehend. But we see something of the frustrating composite that Greg saw. And they must still at least speak to each other, as they’ve made a new film: Best F(r)iends. Greg’s written this one…

The one major flaw in The Disaster Artist is that it’s written with the assumption that Tommy was the sole problem with The Room. Occasionally Sestero will acknowledge that (say) the sound guys were terrible, but blames this on poor guidance and lack of experience. More awkwardly, he doesn’t really acknowledge that his own performance in The Room is pretty shoddy. Yes, nobody else comes close to the surreal ineptitude of Tommy Wiseau, but Sestero ain’t great either. There were plenty of bad cogs in this machine.

In the end, Wiseau is something of a sad figure – lonely, driven by desperate ambition that can never be fulfilled. But Sestero makes him seem more like a man so deluded that he is protected from realising how much his dreams have failed. And, indeed, have they failed? I’d love to read a book that shows the aftermath of the film – how they dealt with its unexpected and slightly warped success – but, however that fame has manifested itself, Tommy Wiseau has undoubtedly made a film that has brought joy to millions. This is a unique Hollywood story.

A Life of My Own by Claire Tomalin

StuckinaBook All , , 6 Comments

This evening I went to Blackwells to hear Claire Tomalin talk about her latest book, and it reminded me that I have yet to write about it. So… well, I suspect you’ve worked the rest out for yourself. Here we are, and here we go.

Since I moved house, I’ve had to start driving to work. Driving for about 40 minutes and walking for half an hour, actually, which has given me an awful lot more time for audiobooks and the like. I already listen to a lot of podcasts, but this has spurred me on to trying audiobooks more actively – starting, because why not, with Claire Tomalin’s A Life of My Own (2017).

I say ‘why not’ – I can actually give a pretty good reason why. I’d signed up for a trial with audiobooks.com because I wanted to hear The Disaster Artist by Greg Sestero. And it turns out that the recording was only available in North America. Doh! (I have subsequently been given and have read the book – watch this space.) So I had a credit to use… and my first thought was: who would I want reading to me in the car? The answer, naturally, was Penelope Wilton. And when A Life of My Own came up in the search results, I remembered that I’d been keen to read it. I might talk more about the crooked path of audiobook selection another day…

I’ve only read two of Tomalin’s many biographies – on Jane Austen and Katherine Mansfield – and, other than knowing about some of her titles (and the fact that she’s gone for enormous, much-biographied names like Hardy and Dickens), didn’t really know anything else about her. Oh, except that she is married to Michael Frayn, and is the grandmother (or, as it turned out, step-grandmother) of twins who used to run a YouTube channel, called Jack and Finn. It was quite fun going into an autobiography ‘blind’, as it were.

The problem with audiobooks, of course, is that I don’t have any quotations to share, and I can’t flick back through to see what I wanted to write about. But I do recall that she starts by talking about her parents – which I almost invariably wish any biographer would skip, since I’m not that interested. With an autobiographer, it is a least coloured with a real human connection – whatever the opposite of ‘dispassionate’ is (because ‘passionate’ doesn’t feel quite right – and it’s with genuine emotion that Tomalin describes her mother’s musical genius, her parents’ hasty courtship, and the bizarre honeymoon she learned about properly from her father’s latterday memoir, during which it became more or less clear that the marriage was a mistake.

Tomalin has a great gift, in this autobiography, for describing people and her relationship with them with complete honesty which is subjective (for how it could not be) yet never feels unfair. She writes about how her father disliked her, and it seems like the scrupulously just conclusions of somebody who was weighed the evidence properly. She has an emotional response to this, but the description is arrived at honestly. The same is seen in her marriage to Nick Tomalin – a man who the reader (or listener) cannot help intensely disliking, given his violence and selfishness, and his many affairs, but Tomalin has no bitterness – she tells us what happened and how it affected her, but clearly still loved him in some way, and excellently portrays the complex emotions and feelings she has towards his memory.

I wanted to read A Life of My Own because I thought it would be fascinating to learn about the craft of writing biographies. My main criticism of the book is what a small part this plays – almost all her books are tidied away discretely and discreetly into a single chapter, and I would have loved to hear more. As some form of compromise offering, there is plenty to fascinate in descriptions of her rise as a literary editor at the New Statesman and the Sunday Times (and the sexism she faced – not least in her supremely unqualified husband having the job before she did).

But Tomalin’s own life is so full and so expertly shown to us that it is certainly an acceptable substitute. As well as describing her upbringing, schooling, and marriage, she writes brilliantly about parenthood – the highs and the very low lows. I don’t know how she managed to write about her daughter’s suicide attempts, which ended with a successful one, but she did so extraordinarily movingly – and writes astonishingly about loving somebody with inescapable depression. Unsurprisingly, this period of Tomalin’s life was not discussed at the event I attended, but it is done with bravery and, yes, honesty in A Life of My Own.

It is such moments that show, I think, Tomalin’s skill as a biographer coming through. She knows that she cannot shirk periods like this if she is to portray her whole life – and something of the biographer’s objectivity weaves its way constantly through the subjectivity. It is deftly handled throughout.

Perhaps almost any life is fascinating, if written about well, and Tomalin’s indisputably is. And to her, I suppose, her success as a biographer is of less interest than her family, so it makes sense that she writes so much better and so much more about that. Go into the book with the right expectations, and I predict you’ll find it brilliant. And if Penelope Wilton is reading it to you, so much the better.

 

Jacob’s Room is Full of Books by Susan Hill

StuckinaBook All , , 17 Comments

Jacob's Room is full of booksI was an enormous fan of Howards End is on the Landing by Susan Hill – a book all about her year of reading only books from her shelves that morphed into a series of short essays about anything and everything to do with reading. It was bookish, opinionated, and (I thought) an inevitable delight to anybody who loved reading. About that I was wrong – it divided people – but I have re-read and re-loved it, and have been waiting eagerly for the sort-of sequel for as long as I’ve known it might be a thing. Jacob’s Room is Full of Books (2017) was never in doubt as one of my Project 24 books.

I’ve been following the development of the book with interest. Ages ago, I saw Virginia Woolf is in the Kitchen listed on Amazon, and asked Susan about it on Twitter – yes, she confirmed, it was sort of a sequel to Howards End is on the Landing, but only about women writers. At one point it became Jacob’s Room is Too Full of Books, with a cover design on Amazon. Who knows when that changed, and when the title was changed, but what we’ve got instead is ‘a year of reading’ – she follows the calendar from January to December, talking about what she’s reading and what she’s thinking about, interspersed with notes on nature and life. The title doesn’t make sense (yes, Jacob’s Room is a novel by Woolf, but where Howards End is on the Landing and, indeed, Virginia Woolf is in the Kitchen can describe the place of books in the house – Jacob’s Room is Full of Books doesn’t mean anything, and will confuse anybody who doesn’t know the Woolf novel) – so, yes, it doesn’t make sense. But I don’t care. I still loved this book and raced through it in a handful of days – even while trying to savour it.

Though the calendar year structures the book, Hill darts all over the place. Sometimes for a moment merely – she throws in the thought ‘does Donald Trump ever read books?’ in a line or two – sometimes at greater length. She talks about the authors she loves, from Dickens to Ford Madox Ford to Ladybird Books. She talks about the literary scene – judging book prizes, getting into hot water in columns. She writes about the writer’s life. She writes quite a lot about things that aren’t connected with books, particularly flora and fauna. It’s wonderfully conversational and far-ranging – not as siloed as Howards End is on the Landing, but equally delightful to dip in and out of. Every page will have something to engage with. I couldn’t help picking it up and indulging when I should have been reading something for book group or the podcast. I loved it.

There are definite flaws. Hill repeats herself – the same points come up almost word-for-word at different times about (say) whether or not you can ‘catch’ a writing style – and there are silly errors (88 Charing Cross Road should have been caught – and somebody at the publishers will feel red-faced about putting an apostrophe in Howard’s [sic!] End is on the Landing on the dustjacket). Some of the paragraphs end in with that sort of trite beat that I find so frustrating in fact or fiction. This kind. To prove an argument. Perhaps.

And, yes, Hill is extremely opinionated – which is anybody’s prerogative, of course, though it is refreshing when she admits that she could be wrong about something. I can be very opinionated about books myself, but the only times it annoyed me a little were when Hill seemed to think her opinions were fact – or when she claimed that ‘nobody’ read such-and-such author. On almost every occasion, I had read that author. And this… well, gosh.

The Olivia Manning trilogies have grown in stature since they were first published – as some books do. They have already stood the test of time and I am sure they will go on doing so, while novels by many of her female contemporaries have all sunk without trace. Ivy Compton-Burnett, anyone? Kay Dick?

What a bizarre thing to say about Ivy Compton-Burnett! Not only is she (to my mind) one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, she is also in print with NYRB Classics. No mean feat, so many decades after she wrote – and hardly sinking without trace.

But this is, really, one of the things I find so beguiling and enjoyable about Jacob’s Room is Full of Books. Hill may be a little more strident than I can bring myself to be, but it’s still wonderful to hear from somebody who cares so passionately about books, who has read avidly for so long, and (incidentally – but truly incidentally) has met so many of the people she’s talking about. Some people complained that Howards End is on the Landing felt name-droppy. It didn’t to me, and this doesn’t, but perhaps others would find it so? Anyway – Hill and I do not share a taste at all, though there are overlaps. We both love Dickens and Woolf, for example. Our experiences with To The Lighthouse are so similar that I wrote ‘yes! yes! yes!’ in the margin. But there are definite divergences. She writes so enticingly about The Masters by C.P. Snow that I almost wanted to go and hunt it out – despite having read it earlier in the year and finding it one of the most boring, pointless books I’ve read in years. She – as mentioned – does not properly appreciate the genius of Ivy Compton-Burnett.

But disagreement makes bookish discussion all the more engaging. Obviously it’s not a duologue – though I suppose I could reply on Twitter or something – but it feels like a deep, thorough natter about books. I could have done with more about reading, more specifics about books, and perhaps a bit less about birds and whatnot (though plenty will welcome those seasonal variations) – but I loved what I got. Susan Hill has a strong personality, or at least a strong persona, and this book couldn’t be written by anybody else – but I hope she writes at least one more in this series. For now, I’m thrilled to be able to put this one next to Howards End is on the Landing on my books-about-books shelf.