A Spot Of Bother

By Mark Haddon



This is the same bloke who wrote 'The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time' which I read four or five years ago and although I don't remember much about it, I do remember enjoying it. I wish I could say the same for this book, especially because the book was given to me by Pony Girl.

Self-loathing and self-obsessed middle class tossers getting agitated about stuff. That's kind of it.

I wouldn't have one character from this book over for tea.

It's all based around the extended Hall family and the build-up to the daughter's (second) wedding. There's the daughter herself who's a rotten bitch, her son from a previous marriage who talks way too well for a kid in a nappy, her husband-to-be who has nothing going for him except money, the gay son who's a prat, the infedelious bitch-mother and her hairy lover, and poor old Dad, George, who is going insane. He's the main character and perhaps the only one I had any pity for, because at least insanity is a reason and/or excuse for self-mutilation. The rest have no excuse, and if I was meant to feel empathy towards any of them (which I think I was supposed to) then either I failed the author, or the author failed me.

To be clear on this, 'bitch-mother' and 'gay prat' are just my summations. I think Haddon genuinely expected us (the readers) to like these people. But in my mind, they were a bunch of cunts and I was hoping that the last chapter had a line like, "And anyway, a plane crashed into the wedding and they all died except George."

This orgy of neuroses and self-loathing is not for me. It's for people who get it. It's for the people who are like that... who can't make up their mind, commitment-phobes, and yet at the same time they are ubermensches, narcissicsts, and also happen to be paranoid... who in any situation will first establish an esacpe route just in case, the people who play their cards close to their chest and will not or cannot express themselves for (unfounded) fear of retaliation - the people who say nothing at the exact time they should be communicating. They are the people that will love this book, because the Hall family is their template.

At least Token Gay had a small epiphany "... it occurred to him that there were two parts to being a better person. One part was thinking about other people. The other part was not giving a toss about what other people thought." Though we had to wait until page 406 for this twat to turn, and what totally shat me is that his ex-boyfriend, who should have known better, rewarded Pratboy by magically coming back into his life.

In my experience, epiphanies aren't about righting old mistakes, they're about ensuring they don't happen again.

**

Haddon's writing style annoyed me too.

"Of course there were times when she worried. That Katie would never get a decent job. Or fall pregnant by accident."

What's with the fullstops?

He also does a Peter Carey.

"Aiden bawled Katie out... she resigned. And Patsy cried because people were shouting."

'Aiden' and 'Patsy' were never mentioned before that paragraph, and never mentioned again. I call it a 'Peter Carey' because he starts chapters with lines like "The blue jar was on the top shelf." What blue jar? Would it kill you to write, "A blue jar..."? Oh that's right, it's called writing.

But in this book's defence, it was a page-turner. The chapters were mostly very short - two or three pages would be an average, so the scenes were all like vignettes and because they jumped character to character I found myself having to keep reading so as I could get to what happened next. But it was page-turning in the same way Home & Away possibly is (I've never seen it). You watch four episodes in a row, and you have to find out what happens next.

The book was... engaging. I'll give it that.

I didn't hate the book as much as I hated the characters in it.

D.

*

Pony Girl is gone now. Not out of the country yet, but gone nonetheless. I'm a little shattered, and fragile. By jesus I loved that girl.

My family happen to be cracking up somewhat as well (maybe that's why the book resonated so negatively... we're all helping each other, and yet the family in the book were all too self-obsessed to particularly care about one another), I'm work-busy, and I'm lovesick as all Hell.

I'm about 6 books behind on this blog, so be prepared for a few entries. I find it good therapy to rant to strangers, thinly disguising my tantrums as art criticism.

Packing Death

By Lachlan McCulloch



In an earlier blog, I made mention of the fact I read a book solely because the marvellous woman who recommeded it had earlier gifted me some wonderful oral sex.

Similar story here, but just like the Ennuit Mute in my previous post, there was no oral. But there was the lure of it.

See, I had a third date with Project Manager Who Can Do The Splits. Hmm. That nickname is too long. Spiltgirl? Nope, connotations. The Splits? Sounds like a Radiohead album. Miss Splits? Ah, there we go. So anyway, I had a third date with Miss Splits last Sunday night and we went out to a restaurant and afterwards she invited me back to her house for a coffee and I of course said yes. Anyway, we drank coffee and talked and talked and at 11pm, facing a two and a half hour drive to get home, I said, "Well, I better hit the road."

Miss Splits: What?
Perseus: It's a two and a half hour drive, so I should really get going.
Miss Splits: You're kidding?
Perseus Q: Umm...
Miss Splits: It's the third date!
Perseus Q: Umm... oh, I see, umm...
Miss Splits: Oh, whatever. Jesus.

So in a scramble to change the topic I started to rummage through a pile of books next to the couch. They were all true crime and I started babbling away about how the the whole Underbelly thing interested me because it was so Melbourne and all, and anyway, she hand-picked this one out and said, "Oh, you'll really like this one," and I was too much on the backfoot to disagree so I said, "Oh really?" and she urged me to take it and read it so I did.

So as much as I stuffed up the third date, in order to return the book a fourth date is almost a given. It is scheduled for next week.

Did I mention she can do the splits?

So anyway, the book is a true story written by the undercover cop who infiltrated the Pettingill family and because of his excellent work a fair few drug dealers copped massive sentences. There were plenty of 'wearing wires' scenes and bits where they suspected he was undercover but he managed to talk them around and, you know, a couple of scenes were gripping and all, but I read it in under 4 hours and I've already forgotten the author's name.

Good on him though. I'm glad there's people like him around. He's the real hero. Not some schmuck who gets stranded in an ice cave and waits patiently for someone to rescue him. This bloke is an actual hero. But a writer he ain't. What we need is for supercops like this bloke to tell the story, then get Brian Castro or Christos Tsoilkas to write the story or something.

Still, his matter-of-fact writing style means this book can be consumed in one sitting, and would make excellent company beside the pool / sea / sprinkler / fish pond on a summer afternoon.

I'm not marking it.

The Kite Runner

By Khaled Hosseini



See, I met a girl. She’s from the Mallee Desert and I fell hopelessly in love – I couldn’t control it. It seemed, and time will tell if I’m right (and time will tell if I am wrong) that I had never fallen so quickly or so vehemently over a chick in my whole life.

Here’s why I fell in love.

• She ordered us a gin and tonic each. When I went to take my first sip she reached over the table, grabbed the straw out of my glass, threw it to the ground and said, “You’re a man. I’m not letting you drink out of a straw.”

• As a young girl, living in the Mallee desert, she always wanted a pony. When she finally got one she hated its guts.

• She came to my house. I tried to dress down for once. I wanted to look less like a lapsing goth and more like a man, so I put on a hoody. She walked in and said, “How long have you been wearing hoodys for? Are you wearing that for me?”

• Great legs.

My love even spiralled, exponentially... oh I give up normally. You know those guys that when they set their sights on a woman they keep trying? I’m not one of them. But then I became one of them. Foreign territory. And in the haze of drugs and alcohol out with her one night she recommended this book.

I don’t do best-sellers.

But I was in love.

I bought it at Readings but also bought some highbrow DVD’s and Nick Cave’s latest album just so I came across as the artistic elitist non-hoody wearing lapsing Goth that I truly am.

“Oh yes,” I said to the Readings clerk, “I want a bag.”

I may have liked this book if it was true. But it’s not. It’s FICTION, and it is incredibly formulaic and convenient fiction. If there was a truly accurate word power rating machine it would give this book a rating of 12 – for 12 year olds. It’s written in baby-speak. The story is one cliché loaded upon another and fair dinkum, you could program a computer to write this book. I read its 340 pages in just a few hours (only three sittings) because it is, in literary terms, like a fucking Big Mac. It’s big but it goes down very quickly and you feel cheated afterwards.

There are about 15 twists in the book – though 'twist' may be too strong a word; 'plot development' is more apt – and every single fucking one of them is a cliché. Every character is a caricature. It is Days Of Our Lives: Kabul. The noblest character in the book is too noble to be real, and the evil character is just Darth Vader in a turban. The main character is a cry-baby sook, a bore, a non-sexual two-dimensional cliché-ridden nuff-nuff with as much beguilement as a kitchen tap.

The most insidious habit Hosseini employs is a reminisce of earlier chapters. It’s filler, like pickles in your Big Mac. It’s like he decided that he needed to ‘pad’ some sections out and so he did so by giving us a rundown of what we’ve already read (like what the 7pm ABC news does at about 7:15pm every night). Here, I’ll do the same to fill out this review.

“I sat down, lit a cigarette and sipped a water. I remembered reviewing a Colette book. I remembered strongly the time that I gave an Andre Morton book a rating of D Minus. I remembered when I called Hosseini, the writer of The Kite Runner, a nuff-nuff.”

Except he can drag these reminisces for about a page at a time.

This is what I have learnt from reading The Kite Runner:

1. That I was right to avoid best-sellers

2. That reading a book recommended to you by a woman you love is polite, nice and even a little flattering, but it is not seductive. To seduce a woman, you need to spend less time reading their books, and more time, you know, seducing them. Particularly ones that get given ponies and then hate them. It’s a metaphor. Though she recommended the book to me, she will begrudge me for reading it. I ain’t going to be sending this blog link to her, that’s for sure.

These are valuable lessons, and thanks to The Kite Runner I have learnt them. I give it a D.

Waiting For Godalming

Waiting for Godalming
By Robert Rankin

Corgi, 2001

There is no way on Earth I would ever consciously choose to read this book or any book like it. But, when a very attractive and intelligent woman, only minutes after giving some of the best oral sex a man will ever have in his life, says, “Will you read this book?” the correct answer is “Yes.” Because I’m a bogan. So I read it.

It belongs to a very very nerdy corner of the book world that I label ‘Comic fantasy’. It's a genre as alien to me as Nicaraguan Modern Jazz. Now, coming from a diet of miserable European 19th century realist novelists as I do, I tend to avoid any novel in the ‘comic’ or ‘fantasy’ section of a bookstore. This one is both, so it’s a double whammy, but like I said, the chick was hot.

Every single fucking line of the book was ‘funny’. As the very attractive and intelligent woman put it, “Like ‘Flying High’”. That’s not to say I laughed at every line. In fact, I only laughed at about five lines. The humour comes at a cracking pace, so much so that Rankin lets the storyline, complex as it is, degenerate to the point of irrelevancy.

This book is about the gags, not the story, though the story is quite loaded. It includes a ghost-seeing machine, the murder of God (who looks like Richard E. Grant), evil hairdressers, Devils on the Earth, God’s illegitimate children, insurance fraud, Jewish virgins, an ongoing satirical dig at cliché-driven spy thrillers and lots of London cabbie in-jokes.

It’s somewhere between ‘Flying High’ and ‘Carry On Heaven’.

Rankin has an audience. He must do, there’s heaps of his books available, and I can see why people like him. He’s harmless. He’s funny. He’s cute. He’s lighter than a feather, and you can read his book on a plane or in the never-never land of ‘almost asleep but I’ll just finish this chapter’.

The jokes slide over the reader with ease. Thinking is optional. For example:

Fangio seemed lost for words. ‘I’m lost for words,’ he said.

You got it? That’s the gag. And they’re everywhere.

Here’s another one that features heavily; the gag where Rankin gives an insight into his writing process.

But let us now return to Icarus Smith, who is about to have a little action. A great deal of action, as it happens.
But no.
Wait.
Let us not return to Icarus just yet. Let us instead return to Lazlo Woodbine...

“Hahahahahaha! Hilarious. The writer is inviting us into his process of structuring the narrative, but here’s his genius: He actually does know what he’s doing but he just pretends he doesn’t for the sake of the gag! Hahahahahahah!”

Whatever.

Sigh.

The best scenes were the ones involving the detective who referred to ‘dames’ and wore a trenchcoat. He insisted on his life being a cliché, even insisting that the book ends with a shootout on a rooftop. He made me smirk on occasion.

My biggest laugh was his description of his favourite pub; a ‘proper’ pub...

It served proper flat ale in proper dirty glasses. Had proper full ashtrays... There was proper unswept lino on the floor and proper unmopped vomit in the gents. There was a proper one man band called Johnny G who performed there on a Tuesday night. And proper drunken louts who threw proper light ale bottles at him when he did.

Well, maybe it’s not that funny after all. I did giggle a few times through the book, but really, I was mainly waiting for it to end. The last four chapters were shit.

The shame of it all is that the storyline, fractured as it was, could have been more gripping if he could have just toned down on the constant gags. Sometimes, situations are funny enough that they don’t need to be sullied by a cheap wordplay, or another joke that was the same as the four on the page before it.

Having said that, it would make for a funny movie. And that’s where a story like this belongs – on a screen. Not on a bookshelf.

All in all, it was okay. I suppose. Maybe a bit less than okay. It gave me something to do.

I give it a C Minus.

And now that I've just finished one absurdist comic fantasy, on to another absurdist comic fantasy... the second half of Genesis.