Eclipse (Stephenie Meyer)

Reading a multiple book series in sequence is always an interesting experience, it really highlights the depths and complexities of the mythology created by the writer, while also allowing the plot to flow from one book to the other without the reader having to try and remember the previous book's events. 'Eclipse' is, for me, the best novel in the 'Twilight' saga. While 'Twilight' and 'New Moon' go in for a great deal of teen angst and tortured romance, perhaps a bit too much for an adult reader, 'Eclipse' leans more towards action, suspense and a more thorough analysis of vampire and werewolf history. And it's all the better for it. On this re-read, I was genuinely absorbed, and some of the prose was actually quite technically proficient to boot.

In 'Eclipse', the dangers facing Bella grow ever more dire. Evil and cunning vampiress Victoria, who still bears a blood grudge against Bella for the loss of her mate James in book 1, sets about creating an army of newborn vampires (it transpires that newborns are stronger than established vampires, in a brute force sense at least) to take on the Cullen coven and allow Victoria to claim her revenge. Meanwhile, tensions heighten between the Quileute werewolf pack and the Cullens, until the threat of the newborns leads to an uneasy truce. All of this is complicated by the rivalry of Edward and Jacob, who both love Bella intensely and uncompromisingly, but know they must work together to keep her safe.

The main plot of the novel, as described above, is incredibly tense, well paced and with just enough information withheld to keep suspense at a premium. The final battle, when it takes place, is absolutely terrific, with some real heart stopping moments. The visit of the Volturi is maginificently creepy, and the ending, where Edward and Bella begin to plan their nuptials, sets us up nicely for the beginning of 'Breaking Dawn' and Jacob's heartbreak and self-imposed exile. There is notably less cheesy romance from Meyer in this one, with only a laboured extended reference to Heathcliff, Cathy and Edgar to describe the relationship between Edward, Bella and Jacob detracting from the enjoyability of the book. There are a couple of really magical passages in this one. Rosalie's description of how she became a vampire and why she believes Bella ultimately giving up her mortality is the wrong choice is the first of these magical moments. Meyer's character development is excellent here, allowing a previously unsympathetic character to gain our sympathy. The second spine tingling moment is Jasper's account of the vampire wars of the 1860s, which ironically seem to have run parallel to the American Civil War. As his expertise in handling armies of newborns is so integral to the Cullens' success in this book, his discussion of this time is truly fascinating. Another notable section that piqued my interest was the growth of the werewolf pack to include Seth and Leah Clearwater and the expansion of our knowledge of werewolf lore that this allows us into. Jacob gets the epilogue, allowing us a different narrator for the first time, and this, too is interesting.

I'd venture to say that this is the book where Meyer realises how best to optimise her formula: enough romance to keep the focus on Bella and Edward's relationship, but enough action to keep the reader busy. This is a very good piece of teen fiction and well worth your time...even more so than the other books in this series. Although my forthcoming re-read of 'Breaking Dawn' may change my opinion (as I ironically remember the most recent book the least well), my current view is that 'Eclipse' is a notch or two above 'New Moon' and 'Twilight'.

New Moon (Stephenie Meyer)

So, I'm now two books into my re-read of the 'Twilight' saga. I had mixed memories of this one. In many ways it's the most "page turning" of the saga, but as memory served, it also contains some of the worst passages of writing in the series, at least if one thinks about it technically, so I was definitely looking forward to reading it again and re-assessing it with fresh eyes.

'New Moon' follows on directly from the end of 'Twilight'. Bella and Edward are together and in love, which Meyer clumsily reminds us of through a whole laundry list of badly conceived 'Romeo and Juliet' allusions. Bella is studying 'Romeo and Juliet' at school. Bella and Edward are watching 'Romeo and Juliet' on DVD. Edward thinks Romeo is a fool. Both wonder if suicide is the only option for a bereaved lover. When people talk about hating the 'Twilight' saga for its schmaltz, passages like this are what make you understand their point of view. Of course, all this sledgehammer foreshadowing is leading somewhere, and when Bella accidentally cuts herself at the Cullen house and puts herself in danger due to Jasper's lower tolerance for the smell of human blood, Edward decides it would be better for Bella if he and his "family" left. In order to achieve this, Edward rather brutally tells her that he does not love her. Bella collapses in the woods in a trance of grief, and so begins Bella's love coma, where nothing is real for her and nothing matters to her. She walks, she talks, but she, to paraphrase 'American Psycho' is simply...not...there. Meyer actually employs an interesting structural device here by having empty chapters with the names of months heading them in order to show Bella's desensitised state. It is only when her father tells her that he is going to send her back to her mother that Bella seeks company to throw him off the scent. Enter her Native American pal Jacob Black, who Bella commissions to repair some motorcycles she found, in order to give her the kind of adrenaline rush she needs to hear Edward in her head...

It's only at this point, for me, where this book moves from bearable to page-turning. In 'Twilight', it was heavily hinted at that the Quileute tribe of Native Americans have a past with the "cold ones" and a link to wolves. Here, Meyer does a great job of revealing that Jacob's friends and then Jacob himself are in fact werewolves mystically created to fight vampires and defend Quileute lands. In establishing the bond of friendship between Bella and Jacob, Meyer creates one of the most famed love triangles in existence. Jacob falls for Bella, but Bella is obsessed still by Edward. And sooner rather than later, she will have to save his life...

'New Moon' does a good job of advancing the plot of the overall saga, but the structure of the book is unsatisfying, with the first third being Bella's misery under the microscope, the second third being the werewolf plot and the final third being the adventure in Italy saving Edward...with each of those sections having a great deal of unnecessary filler that Meyer would've been better off editing out, particularly the endless domestic or travelling sections (how many times do we need to hear about Bella preparing food for Charlie? Do we need an entire account of Alice and Bella's plane journey?). The dialogue is, at times, excruciating, and the worn out James Dean-isms spouted by Edward and Jacob quickly get tiresome. One interesting thing about the book, however, is that the primary hero- Edward Cullen- and the primary antagonist- the evil vampire Victoria- are off screen for the majority of the book. This is a brave decision on Meyer's part, and I think that it works well, because it gives her the space to establish Jacob as a major player.

If you look at 'New Moon' as one section of one giant book, it does what it should, but read in isolation, its flaws are probably greater than its achievements, despite the fact that the werewolf storyline made me want to pump my fist in the air with joy (everyone knows werewolves are cool). However, I think it is important to look at 'New Moon' in its overall context...which is to set up the edge of the seat cataclysms about to strike in 'Eclipse' and 'Breaking Dawn'.

Twilight (Stephenie Meyer)

I first became aware of Stephenie Meyer's 'Twilight' series about three and a half years ago when a lot of the more bookish students I taught began to ask me if I'd read them. It was hard not to notice the sheer popularity of the series, as the iconic cover, its symbolism so redolent of Eve's Fall from Paradise, was in the hands of so many students around the campus. My curiosity was definitely aroused, and I began thinking I should read these books, given they were such a talking point among the kids, and given that any interest in books needs to be encouraged as much as possible by any English teacher. The point where I went and bought the books was the point when the film adaptation of the first book was a month or so away from coming out. I read an article about it in 'Empire' and decided that I would read the books, see the film and see what the fuss was about.

So it was that between October and November of 2008 I read all four books in the series, and thoroughly enjoyed them. Now, I'm well aware that some people would hold them responsible for the bastardisation of literature and the dumbing down of romantic fiction, but Jesus Christ, don't be so serious. Do you know how many young people who were self-confessed non-readers are now avid readers? Do you know how many young people moved on from the 'Twilight' saga to the likes of 'Wuthering Heights' and 'Jane Eyre', not to mention 'Dracula' and 'Frankenstein'? This series, like Harry Potter before it, is literary catnip to young readers, and the value of that is incalculable. I get to see this on a daily basis and believe me, it's really important. If kids are reading, we live in a world worth living in. Which leads me to why I'm reviewing 'Twilight'  now, when everybody knows about it and has an opinion on it, even if they've neither read the books nor seen the films. What with the first part of the last film just having been released, I decided I wanted to re-read the saga before I watched 'Breaking Dawn: Part One'. So here we are.

I feel I should also defend the series against three other oft-held complaints: one, that it's badly written;  two, that it ruins the literary/mythical construct of the vampire; and three, that it isn't as good as the Harry Potter series. Well look, Meyer's prose style is not likely to be mistaken for George Eliot any time soon, but it's certainly not bad, particularly in the later books. And if it is occasionally overwrought and brimming with angst, bear in mind that this is a book ostensibly written for teenage girls. It's entirely appropriate for that audience. To address complaint number two, the glut of vampire myths from around the world leave any writer plenty of room to play around with the conventions. In my view, Meyer does some very original things with the source material and should be applauded for avoiding the 90s cliché of the "rock star" vampire. And as for the third, well, 'Twilight' is a very different beast to 'Harry Potter' and I'm not sure you can compare them directly. What I will say is that 'Twilight' moves much quicker and is much more economically plotted than Potter is. And if we're comparing stylistics, well, as irritating as Bella's first person narrative voice can get at times, it's certainly no worse than Rowling's bombastic omniscience in the later Potter books. Ultimately, I like both series because they got kids reading and because they're a fun diversion for an older reader taking a break from literary fiction. Because nobody can spend all of their time reading Goethe, after all.

The plotting and world creation is certainly the strongest element of 'Twilight': even if you're a sceptic, open the book, read the first chapter, and I defy you not to want to find out what happens next. For real. Bella Swan is a clumsy, broadly average, academic and underconfident Junior in high school. She moves from Phoenix, Arizona to Forks in the Pacific Northwest to be with her father, the local police chief, due to her mother marrying a baseball player who moves around regularly to find a spot with a Minor League team. Bella finds the idea of Forks mortifying. It is small, tight knit, rural and above all, rainy- in fact, the rainiest place in mainland America- so her adjustment is difficult. At the local high school, where the school population is the same size as her Junior Class back in Phoenix, she quickly becomes aware of a mysterious group of students who stand aloof from the rest of the school. Eerily beautiful, they fascinate her from the get-go. After becoming lab partners with the most striking of their number, one Edward Cullen, a series of strange events first estrange them but then bring them together. Eventually, Bella comes to an inescapable conclusion: Edward and the whole of his "family" are vampires. And she is in love with one.

'Twilight' makes use of literary tropes from all over the canon. Edward Cullen, tortured and noble, rude but charming, seems based on a synthesis of two creations of the Bronte sisters, Edward Fairfax Rochester and Heathcliff. Edward's decision not to feed on humans echoes that of Louis de Pointe du Lac from 'An Interview with the Vampire'. Bella's own clumsy yet forthright nature is just like Jane Eyre's, while the general sense of Gothic gloominess and mystique is familiar from 'Dracula'. The end section, meanwhile, where the obsessive hunter James explains his dastardly plans to Bella while she's helpless, seems to come straight out of the playbooks of various Bond villains. However it's the original touches Meyer adds that make this book more than the sum of its parts, and the way everything knits together is very satisfying.

Lord knows, 'Twilight' is never going to win the Booker of Bookers or anything. It isn't that sort of book. But there is room on the library shelves for all types of books, and it's important that teens have something accessible and memorable to read. Think about how bad children's literature used to be. Nowadays, there's much more to pique their interest, and thank goodness for that. So I forgive 'Twilight' for its cheesy dialogue, slim characterisation and overwrought emotions...because when it comes down to it, this book is a damned fun read. And there's nothing wrong with that.

Up In The Air (Walter Kirn)

There is no better birthday present than a well chosen book, in my opinion. Obviously, friends of mine are well aware that a good book is a present I will relish and thus I tend to end of with a backlog of books to work through. Walter Kirn's 'Up In The Air' was given to me by a wonderful friend of mine with excellent taste in books as a belated birthday gift almost two years ago, so it is with pleasure that I write this blog post, having finally got around to reading it and having rather enjoyed it. Appropriately enough given the subject matter of this novel, I began reading it on a plane, and was thus instantly in synch with the mood of the narrative. Ryan Bingham is a "Careers Transitions Counselor", a catchy euphemism which essentially means he helps companies to cut costs by shedding staff and then counselling said staff so that they do not feel agrieved by their dismissal. Ryan hates this job, but enjoys one aspect of it: the constant air travel he undertakes to complete his assignments. Ryan feels at home in "air world" in a way that he doesn't on the ground. The rituals, the food, the small talk at twenty thousand feet, he loves it all. He even loves the bland runway hotels he sleeps in and the identikit airline club lounges he drinks in with acquaintances he meets in "air world". Our hero has no need of friends and no need of a house (he let the lease run out). All he cares about is one thing: racking up one million frequent flier air miles before he quits his job at ISM. At this milestone, he will sit back and reconsider the path that his life has taken. As it turns out though, reaching this milestone is more complicated than he could possibly have imagined at the outset of the narrative, and it's the path he walks to reach his target which is important, rather than the  moment itself.

The narrative voice of 'Up In The Air' instantly appealed to me, chiefly because it is the kind of voice I'm so used to from some of my very favourite works: a kind of disengaged, emotionless, matter of fact monotone. This type of narration is perfect for a book of this nature, not only because it fits the character addressing the reader, but also because it gives a realistic sense of what it is to live in the way that Ryan Bingham does. It's also interesting to note that, as is common in postmodern fiction, the plot is a series of loosely connected events that only matter in so far as they help us to better understand the protagonist. Some of the obstacles that get in Ryan's way as he attempts to it his million include potential sexual partners, his sisters (one of whom is getting married in Ryan's final destination city but insists on creating a crisis that takes Ryan off schedule), his employer, clients and a mysterious corporation who may or may not be headhunting him. It's all perfectly readable, although one does get frustrated by Ryan's empty existential outlook at times.

One of the few disappointing things about 'Up In The Air' was the ending, which to me, came rather too far from left field and somewhatinvalidated a lot of the good work that went beforehand. It's also true that the author doesn't necessarily fully explore the reasons behind Ryan's obsessive quest. All in all, this is a stylish little book, but one that lacks substance and, ultimately, a bit of heart. It is, however, certainly worth reading, just as people have told me that the film is well worth watching. Now that I've finally read the book, I may well track down the film...

Beginners (Raymond Carver)

First of all, dear readers, I must apologise for the lack of posts recently. Although I finished re-reading Raymond Carver's 'Beginners' over the Atlantic Ocean on the way home from Chicago at the end of October, I simply have not found the time to write about it. Ok, obligatory blogger's apology done with. Now, to business!

This is a very special book to me for a number of reasons. I first read it in October 2009 on a train home from Birmingham, having bought it from Borders in the Bull Ring, after I had visited a very dear friend of mine for the first time in an age. The seventeen stories contained in the volume held me, obsessed me, and inspired me to change my own prose style. Revisiting it two years later seemed a no brainer.

Moreover, the story behind this book is a fascinating one. When Carver submitted these stories to his editor and mentor Gordon Lish in 1980, they were cut down to the "linguistic bone" and became Carver's most famous collection 'What We Talk About When We Talk About Love'. Some of the original drafts were cut by as much as 78% for publication. Character names were changed. Titles were changed. Tess Gallagher, Carver's partner, who had loved the original stories, was horrified at the changes. Carver dedicated 'What We Talk About...' to Gallagher and promised one day to republish the original stories. As of Carver's death in 1988, this had not happened, and so Gallagher put her trust in William L. Stull and Maureen P. Carroll to restore the text. This process took twenty years, with the text finally being published in September 2009.

Having read 'What We Talk About...' many years ago, I was struck by how much richer and more human the extended versions of the stories are. From the first story 'Why Don't You Dance?', I preferred the 'Beginners' versions to the 'What We Talk About...' versions. In these restored narratives, Carver has the space to develop the motivations of his characters, the breadth to run the gamut of emotions. There is a wisdom and a profound sense of dignity about 'Beginners' that I think 'What We Talk About...' lacks. It isn't that the stories in 'Beginners' are of a completely different style- he was naturally a writer with an instinctive sense of economy- but they are less extreme in the staccato sentence structures and more assiduous about letting the reader know who these people are.

The themes presented by Carver include divorce, alcoholism, death and relationships. It is interesting that many of the concerns of America in the late 1970s and early 1980s are represented so frequently, with characters attending analysis and Alcoholics Anonymous. There is a sense of middle America and its fears, the way security can be ripped away in a moment. Several of the best stories are extremely dark and sombre in tone. In 'Tell The Women We're Going' a pair of men who grew up too quickly turn an afternnon of pool and drinking into one of rape and murder. 'So Much Water, So Close To Home' concerns the discovery of a body and the suspicions and rifts this creates in a small community. One of the very best stories, 'A Small, Good Thing' tells the story of parents who unexpectedly lose their son in protracted circumstances against the backdrop of menacing phonecalls from the baker who made their son's uncollected birthday cake. The ending to this one, however, is markedly more humane, heartwarming even.

Elsewhere, 'Gazebo' is an extended dissertation on alcoholics in relationships with each other, the title story 'Beginners' contains a masterful and extended dialogue section from which Lish first found the "what we talk about, when we talk about love" line, and 'Where Is Everyone?' is a first person narrative from the perspective of an alcoholic divorcee who hates his ungrateful children and takes refuge with his mother. All of these stories are incredibly subtle and moving, masterfully paced and beautifully written. Only a couple fail to satisfy: 'Pie' doesn't seem to go anywhere and 'Distance' seems to drag a little.

I found this to be a deeply satisfying re-read. The stories were certainly as good as I remembered them being, and it certainly helped pass the time on a long and tedious plane journey, just as it had originally helped pass the time on a long train journey...at any rate, this book comes highly recommended, particularly if you are a fan of Carver and his spare style...I'm convinced that if you read this, you'll see that his original uncut stories are in fact better, and that Gordon Lish did readers a disservice with his swingeing cuts of 30 years ago.

Everybody Loves Our Town: A History of Grunge (Mark Yarm)

Unless you were living under rock for the entirety of the early 1990s, you'll know all about Nirvana, the band that emerged from the provincial backwater of Aberdeen, Washington to bestride the musical world, led by charismatic enigma Kurt Cobain, equally in love with The Beatles and underground 80s punk, a genius songwriter who, it would seem, never wanted to be famous and ultimately succumbed to his personal demons, becoming one of the most famed and lamented rock 'n' roll suicides of all time. Since that tragic event, Nirvana's legacy has been one of t-shirt designs and slightly distasteful hero worship from the generation that followed Nirvana's orgiginal fanbase. Everything surrounding that time seems to have become distorted, warped, in the same way as with The Doors and Jim Morrison, or The Beatles and Lennon, or even with Amy Winehouse...

There have, of course, been many Nirvana biographies, from those cut and pasted from interviews with the press, to those claiming to be "official". There have been films and biopics, live films and reissued box sets. Every milestone anniversary is accompanied by those iconic pictures of Kurt Cobain, panda eyes boring into the camera lens. What these artefacts have failed to do is to fully contextualise Nirvana within the movement they were part of, that is, grunge. The other bands that found success immediately before and after Nirvana's landmark 'Nevermind' have often been ignored as the cult of death grew up around Kurt and a kind of redemption story formed around drummer Dave Grohl's new band, Foo Fighters. So what about those other bands? How did such a rich and diverse musical scene grow and thrive in the provinces of America's Pacific Northwest? How did Seattle suddenly become the centre of musical universe? These are the questions that Mark Yarm seeks to answer with his laudable tome 'Everybody Loves Our Town'.

The book is an oral history that seems to have the primary purpose of reminding people that there was a lot more to grunge than Nirvana. The author- or more accurately, editor- of the text begins with a note on the term "grunge". There have been many stories about how the term was coined over the years: the best guess, judging by chapter 17 of this opus, is that Mark Arm of Mudhoney found it in a 1970s music paper, used as an adjective when discussing guitar tone. He then used it when writing fake hate mail about his own high school band, Mr Epp and the Calculations ("Pure grunge! Pure noise! Pure shit!"), which later led to record label Sub Pop using it to describe Arm's second band Green River ("ultra loose GRUNGE that destroyed the morals of a generation"). Some time after that, music journalist Everett True was flown out from London to cover the emerging Seattle scene and used the word to describe the scene. Suddenly the word was everywhere, so much so that this word, with its richly evocative phonetics, was suddenly being applied to everything from bands to clothing. Which bands were grunge? Is the word only applicable to bands from Seattle, or also to more recent bands that have emulated the sound? Why did kids who called themselves "grungers" in the early 2000s not actually listen to grunge? It is a fascinating subject, and the interviews conducted by Yarm over a three year period tell a tale that is never anything but compelling.

Yarm's structure is largely chronological, which gives the book the page turning quality of a best selling novel, and also allows one to develop a widescreen sense of how the scene evolved. We start with the "proto-grunge" band The U-Men, who the major players in the scene that followed were avid fans of. Following their tale, we meet the members of Green River and Malfunkshun, who would later break off and combine into three of the quintessential grunge bands: Mudhoney, Mother Love Bone and Pearl Jam. Next we meet Soundgarden, the first grunge act to achieve major label success and in many ways the most stable of the bands in that scene, and then Screaming Trees and TAD, both of whom were largely responsible for the classic grunge "look" of flannel shirts and longjohns under jeans (Chris Cornell of Soundgarden explains this clothing preference as being partly to do with the area's inclement weather, partly to do with the cheapness of such gear and partly because of the fact that many band members from the scene had worked manual labour in local industries like logging). We hear all about the young Kurt Cobain (described by Melvins' Dale Crover as a "funny motherfucker") who by all accounts was not the tortured artist everybody would like to think of him as. We learn about the development of Sub Pop records, equally as fascinating as the tales about the bands that appeared on their infamous compilations. Later, we read about the almost ludicrous success of Soundgarden, Nirvana, Alice In Chains and Pearl Jam, and the consequences of that success, ranging from heroin addiction to fatherhood to dealing with the rapacious mainstream press. Even during these sections, the multiple voices that make up the narrative ensure that the book never indulges in mythology or a glamourisation of rock star excess.

What really stands out about this book is the intelligence, DIY culture and originality of the musicians of Washington state, and the passion and integrity with which they recount their experiences. There's no self-pity or navel gazing from these people, even though, as a reader, you know that tragedy is around the narrative corner at almost every turn. Some of the passages about death are just heartbreaking, and yet the focus lies on remembering those people for the friendship they gave and the music they made. The deaths of Andrew Wood of Mafunkshun and Mother Love Bone, Stefanie Sargent of Seven Year Bitch, Mia Zapata of The Gits and of course Kurt Cobain himself all cast a shadow over the scene and how it is remembered. Two of Yarm's interviewees, Mike Starr, formerly of Alice In Chains, and Ricky Kulwicki, of Fluid, tragically died just before the publication of 'Everybody Loves Our Town'. Of all of the reflections on tragedy though, I was most touched by Jerry Cantrell of Alice In Chains' description of his band's vocalist Layne Staley: "people realise what the guy contributed and the amazing talent that he was...nobody's ever gonna know personally what kinda fuckin' guy he was. We do, and he was so fuckin' cool and badass." I think that says it all.

There's no doubt that the massive strength of this book is that it is told by those who were involved. There's no narrative bias or editorial comment to distract the reader from the multitude of stories that are told. As a text, it has told for the first time the story of a movement that had so much more to it than Nirvana, as great a band as they were. When I finished this book high over the Atlantic Ocean on my way to America, I determined that the first thing I was going to do when I got back was get on Spotify and listen to all of the bands I had read about. It's been an interesting couple of weeks of listening. This weighty oral history comes highly recommended to anyone interested in bands, music, but most of all, friendship.

Babylon Revisited (F. Scott Fitzgerald)

F. Scott Fitzgerald has long been one of my absolute favourite writers, both for the economical beauty of his style and for the sense of slow burning tragedy that ghosts through the pages of his books, a kind of prophetic spirit warning that fast times cannot last forever; sooner or later, somebody has to pay the bill. However, I'm far more au fait with his novels ('This Side of Paradise', 'The Beautiful and Damned', 'The Great Gatsby' and 'Tender Is The Night') than the huge array of short fiction he produced between the early twenties and his premature death in 1940. It was therefore entirely serendipitous that I discovered this collection of three of his most bittersweet stories in the book cupboard at school and decided to take it for the for the train journey home a couple of weeks back.

The titular story concerns the aftermath of the Lost Generation's sojourn in Paris during America's boom years. During this time, Fitzgerald reminds us, tips of hundreds of francs were thrown to waiters and bell hops with gay abandon, and life was one long boozy lunch that never ended. The crash in 1929 has changed this as the protagonist of the story, Charles West, returns to Paris, sober and now living in Prague, where he has gone into business. His daughter, Honoria, has been under the care of his wife's sister and her husband since his wife died as a consequence of one drink filled night too many. Fitzgerald masterfully rouses the reader's sympathies as a contrite Charles spends a heroic amount of energy trying to convince Helen and Lincoln to grant him his daughter back. Nobody will believe he has changed, not them and ironically, not his old drinking buddies, Richard and Lorraine, who spend the entirety of the story trying to get him back into bad habits. The whole story is a masterpiece of subtle and controlled tension.

'The Cut Glass Bowl' concerns a marriage gone wrong, society beauty married to a careless and brusque older man. The tension inherent in the partnership is symbolised by a wedding gift, an enormous cut glass punch bowl which becomes a motif of pure ostentation and excess, and ultimately a vehicle for tragedy, as it claims something from each of her beloved children. This story is perhaps less subtle and more direct, but it captures the feeling of entrapment in domesticity and societal convention very nicely.

The final story, 'The Lost Decade', absolutely reeks of poignance, with a man being shown around an office he used to work at and wondering at the advancements in architecture since he first left the company. Fitzgerald elucidates the feeling of dislocation felt by the man concerned and also the confusion of the youngster showing him around, until it becomes clear that the new/old man lost an entire decade to alcoholism, a fact that is especially poignant given that Fitzgerald himself fought and lost a battle against the bottle himself.

These three stories give an incredible insight into The Jazz Age which is the backdrop to all of his literary works. What I found most interesting was the parallels between the post-crash years presented here and the current financial crisis our own world finds it in, all of the soul searching and reflection on the wastefulness of the boom years. These stories are the flip side of 'The Great Gatsby', tales of diminishing returns as opposed to ostentatious largesse; small tragedies as opposed to giant ones.

Inverting The Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics (Jonathan Wilson)

You may notice, if you've been reading this blog for a while, that I have so far reviewed only fiction. However, I have catholic tastes when it comes to reading material, and so, having had a brief internal debate about whether I should include non-fiction reviews or not, I decided in the affirmative. I love football, therefore I read about football, and thus, I am writing about football.

Sports writing has been on the up and up for some time now, with a whole host of academic, scholarly, meticulously researched books hitting the shelves and catering for us sports afficianados who want, as the epigraph of this book has it, to "understand the causes of things". Anybody who thinks that sports journalism is all raving red top articles will be swiftly disabused if they read a text like Jonathan Wilson's 'Inverting The Pyramid'. 

Narrative poems, during the Renaissance, would precede the poem itself with "the argument" a short summary of the poetic matter about to be presented to the reader. Wilson's "argument" in this book is that the game of football is less about players than the systems they perform in. Throughout the history of the game, a well drilled side of average players has almost always beaten a side of stars with no direction. In pressing this line of argument, Wilson traces the entire history of player formations and the tactics encouraged by those systems, and from this comes the title of the book: in football's early years, teams played a 2-3-5 formation which formed, when viewed from above, a pyramid. In these early days, defending was viewed as negative and contrary to the spirit of the game, and so only two outfield players, the "full backs" were tasked with defensive duties. However, as time has gone on, more players have been added to this defensive unit, so that the pyramid has been "inverted" (when the British press bemoaned Terry Venables' "Christmas Tree" in the run up to Euro 96, this is what they were railing against, a continental system adopted in preference to 4-4-2).

Wilson's analysis of the trends and historical antecedents of parts of the game we now take for granted takes him across the footballing world. He starts in Victorian England and then moves on to Montivideo in the early Twentieth Century as he traces the genesis of the pyramid system. He then progresses to café culture Vienna, where the "Wunderteam" first experimented with players shifting positions to confuse the opposition. Meanwhile, in England, Arsenal's Herbert Chapman shifted a man back into defence, thus creating the "W-M'" formation (so named because of the shape the players made on the pitch) which soon became ubiquitous. In the aftermath of the Second World War, Hungary became the best side in the world, humbling England 6-3 in 1953 as their players effortlessly shifted into areas England did not expect them to. Brazil was the home of the next tactical change, as 3-2-5 became 4-2-4, leading to their world cup triumphs in 1958 and 1962. Alf Ramsay, in 1966, created his "wingless wonders", an example of what Wilson terms "The English Pragmatism", while the World Cup of 1970 turned out to be the last time a team rolled their best players onto the pitch, told them to play, and triumphed. Total Football is the next subject on the agenda, a chapter Wilson shares between Ajax, Holland, Dynamo Moscow and the Soviet Union, as the principles of this vision of the game seemed to develop independently in two different locales. The comprehensive historical survey of the game's tactics ends with a discussion of the inevitable move back towards attacking players who can unlock massed defences.

One of the biggest strengths of 'Inverting The Pyramid' is its ability to move from continent to continent. Wilson has a particular affinity with Eastern Europe, and his discussion of Valeriy Lobanovski's Dynamo Kiev is particularly enjoyable and comprehensive, while he also goes to great lengths to explain the development of football in Argentina and Brazil. Another strength is his illumination of the great characters behind the tactics, from Jimmy Hogan, the great exporter of football expertise to Central Europe to Helenio Herrera, master of Catenaccio, the defensive system whose influence on Italian football persists to this day. Wilson's insights into all of these diverse characters give the book a real humanity, a warm beating heart beneath the cool, sophisticated skin of the prose.

For anybody who loves football, this is a must read. Not only is it brilliantly researched, well written and full of wonderful detail, it sweeps across a hundred odd years of football history while never losing sight of the argument made in the preface- that tactics are everything. Once you've read 'Inverting The Pyramid', you may well find yourself agreeing.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (John Le Carré)

One Christmas a long while ago, perhaps the Christmas before I went to university, or perhaps the Christmas of my first year, BBC repeated the seminal television adaptation of John Le Carré's Cold War spy yarn 'Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy'. My parents, who had watched it when it was first on television in 1979, were tremendously excited by this. I was lukewarm in my enthusiasm, but I sat and watched it with them and was enthralled. I didn't have time to read the book sadly, as I was either in the middle of A levels or in the first year of an English degree with an extraordinarily lengthy reading list, but it was one of those books I always wanted to get around to. Finally, the motivation came in August, when, at a screening of 'Rise of the Planet of the Apes', I saw the incredible trailer for the new Working Title cinematic adaptation (see it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TvdqRvCwGg) and in a fit of excitement and anticipation, immediately ordered the novel from Amazon.

The plot is notable for its gritty realism; like noir writing, this form of literature relies on tension and a patient build, and 'Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy' is absolutely masterful on this count. Le Carré totally swerves reader expectation by beginning his tale in a minor public school, where a new French master, a man named Jim Prideaux, has been hired. Witnessed through the eyes of his young charges, it soon becomes obvious (though not to them) that he is a former spy. We then cut to a day in the life of forcibly retired spy George Smiley, a middle aged book lover whose wife has left him. After a frustrating day in which he lost a prized book at his club, he is suddenly recruited to track down a mole who has penetrated the heart of the Circus (the London headquarters of SIS) by Oliver Lacon, the Civil Service liaison to Mi6. This mole may have been responsible for the failure of the operation in Czechoslovakia that led to Prideaux's shooting, capture and interrogation at the hands of the Soviets, as well as the fall of Control, the former head of the Circus and Smiley's friend, who died soon after his removal from power. The Circus mole, Smiley surmises, must be one of four men: Percy Alleline (a dour Scot, heading up the Circus in the aftermath of Control's dismissal, "Tinker"), Bill Haydon (flamboyant, sophisiticated, intelligent, the darling of the Circus, "Tailor"), Roy Bland (a left wing academic in charge of intelligence gathering in Mother Russia itself, "Soldier") or Toby Esterhase (a Hungarian who aspires to be an English gentleman and is in charge of the "lamplighters" department, "Poorman"). Smiley's investigation unpicks every strand of Operation Testify until he is sure about the identity of the mole and contrives a trap...

Probably the first thing that springs to mind when writing about this book is that it is certainly not "genre fiction" or "low culture" in any way. John Le Carré is a literary master who just happens to have written about what he knows, which happens to be espionage during the Cold War. It is, from the start, beautifully paced and masterfully plotted (I expected this), but what was more unexpected is how subtle and nuanced the narrative voice is, an omniscient third person narrator who dips in and out of character's heads with the facility of George Eliot, filtering thoughts, feelings and perspectives to form a jigsaw of events which eventually, painstakingly, reaches a climax which is itself beautifully understated. The entire novel burns with a quiet intensity that demands attention. Meanwhile, large chunks of recounted monologue build the characterisation of the various protagonists, as well as filling in the labyrynthine backstory. The huge swathe of tradecraft jargon adds authenticity and colour to the narrative, and the dialogue makes each character's foibles apparent very cleverly.

 All in all, this is quite simply a classic, as far away from the crash-bang-wallop of James Bond as it's possible to get, a gritty tale made all the more poignant because of the defections of the real life "Cambridge Five", who Le Carré knew personally. The world-weary and cynical manner of the protagonists reflects a world of stalemates and uncertainties; this is not a book about heroism, it is a book about mental puzzles and one-upmanship, about ambivalent loyalties and bruised egos. Highly recommended.

Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad)

Back in the first year of my English degree, I was, like most undergraduates across the country embarking upon the study of the literary canon, required to read Joseph Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness'. As I remember, that particular week was a reading week, and I read the novella on a coach between Exeter and London, and I wasn't greatly impressed by it, at first. It seemed to me to be a fairly dull travelogue based plot without much of a pay off. Two weeks of seminar discussion and essay writing failed to make me see what was special about this book many critics see as the first genuinely "modern" novel. Here's the thing about books though: sometimes their effectiveness takes a while to gestate. Such was the case here. With each passing year, my attitude towards the book softened, until I was pronouncing its genius and recommending it to students and friends. C'est la vie.

'Heart of Darkness' offers many possible avenues for discussion. It is a critique of colonialism (or not, more on that later), a look at the darkness at the heart of humanity, a satire, a masterpiece of tense, concise storytelling and the inspiration behind multiple works of film and fiction, not least Francis Ford Coppola's sprawling Vietnam epic 'Apocalypse Now'. The narrative is framed by an un-named narrator who begins and ends the novella upon the trading ship Nellie, which sits at anchor upon the River Thames. One of the sailors on board, an inveterate storyteller named Marlow, remarks that the Thames was once "one of the dark places of the earth", the end of the known world for the Romans who came here in the first century, inhospitable, strange, cold and filled with hostile, savage natives. This leads him to begin to discuss colonialism, how when one looks into the fact of it, there is much that is unpleasant, with only the idea of promoting civilisation to redeem it. All of this is preamble to a tale Marlow wishes to tell about his time as a river captain of a steamer for the Belgian Congo Company. It is this tale that makes up the majority of the novella, with the first narrator merely existing as a means of pointing out Marlow's unreliability as narrator.

Marlow, upon taking up his post in the Belgian Congo, finds that there are several obstacles in performing his role effectively. The other white officials are untrustworthy and conspirational, his ship is in need of repair, and everybody is talking about the charismatic Kurtz, an ivory trader of legendary status, popular among the natives and with a number of skills that seem rather apocryphal (it is claimed that he is a great painter, a journalist, and a musician, among other things). This section of the book contains many subtle criticisms of the colonial experiment: a French warship shelling an invisible enemy, a former company worker who beat a tribal chieftain with a stick in front of his family, the greedy intrigues of the men at the various stations. Marlow describes a veil of optimism and naiveté lifting from his eyes as he realises what he has gotten himself into. The next section takes place upon the mighty river itself and is a masterpiece of tension and atmosphere. The motif of darkness continually recurs, a metaphorical reference to the human soul as well as a nod to the unknown nature of Central Africa in the Nineteenth Century (Africa was, of course, known as "The Dark Continent" throughout this era). Marlow's mission is to find and retrieve both the mysterious Kurtz and his ivory, but when he finally arrives at Kurtz's remote station, things are not quite as anybody had expected...or perhaps others suspected and had not told Marlow...the denoument here is one of the most famous in literature and an absolutely spine tingling moment. I suppose it's indicative of the need of youth for instant gratification that I found the build to this irksome as a nineteen-year-old, but find it genius now...

'Heart of Darkness' has caused much debate in the academic fraternity over the years, not least due to Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe's assertion in the 1970s that the book was inherently racist, because it denied the black Africans in the novel both language and culture. He argued that they appear as a homogenous, savage mass, as background texture, as parody of the European idea of an African. While these criticisms are, to an extent, true, I still think the overall effect and intent of the novella is to expose the "scramble for Africa" as the hideous, cruel, greed driven enterprise that it was. Marlow's tone is scathingly ironic when he discusses the colony and its administration and Conrad himself remarked that the Scramble For Africa embodied the "vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience and geographical exploration".

Ultimately, there's so much rich, metaphorical detail in the journey to the heart of darkness- physical and figurative- that Marlow undertakes. The language is enigmatic and open to interpretation throughout, the characters equally so. At the heart of it all- at the heart of the novella, at the heart of the jungle, at the heart of darkness- is Kurtz, too physically debilitated to confirm or deny what Marlow has heard about him, but an emphatically charismatic man even on his death-bed, taken out of the village he had made his home, the evidence of his reclamation of his own savagery all around him. It is a compelling picture, one that has stayed with the modern writer ever since. It was true all along: Conrad really was the instigator of modern fiction.

The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oscar Wilde)

Each year, my second year A level English Literature students are required to undertake a Period and Genre Study as part of their coursework requirement, and have a great deal of free reign in selecting texts to focus on. Once they've chosen their focus texts, they have a summer to read and prepare notes, with the essay writing starting in earnest in September. The wonderful thing about this is that it forces me to re-read a great many classics so that I can properly advise my students as they write their responses. This year, two of my students have chosen to write about one of my favourite books, 'The Picture of Dorian Gray', so without further ado, here are some interesting points raised by my recent re-read.

Fin de Siècle literature is full of seedy locations, corrupt aristocrats, heady excesses and supernatural events, and in many ways, Oscar Wilde's only novel has come to be seen as the archetype of this paradigm. At the beginning of the narrative, a talented portrait artist, Basil Hallward, is showing his new masterpiece to his friend, Lord Henry Wooton. The art work in question is a portrait of an extraordinarily beautiful young man named Dorian Gray. Lord Henry, a dandy and aesthete, is fascinated by the picture, and despite Basil's protests, proceeds to befriend him and corrupt him. Lord Henry makes two key interventions in Dorian's life which prove to be extremely fateful. Firstly, he makes the seemingly offhand remark that the painting will always be young and beautiful, while Dorian will age. This drives Dorian to make a wish almost reminiscent of a fairy tale: that all of the ravages and corruptions of time will be visited on the picture, not upon him. Soon after Dorian mistreats his innocent theatre actress fiancée, he notices the painting has changed. There is now, around the mouth, a cruel twist. Extraordinarily, Dorian's petulant wish has come true, but he should have been more careful, especially given Lord Henry's second intervention, which is the gift of the "yellow book", a French novel full of salacious questing after new sensations. Dorian embraces the philosophies of this book (which, although never named, is Huysman's notorious 'A'Rebours', which also fascinated Pete Doherty of The Libertines and Babyshambles, with similarly corrupting effects, some might say) and becomes more and more embroiled in secrets and scandals, which are darkly hinted at, but never seen "on screen" until fairly late in the piece (in this, Wilde's book follows closely the methodology of the novel it most closely resembles, 'The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde' by Robert Louis Stevenson' which involves a similar identity displacement). Despite all of his crimes, Dorian remains the same physical specimen he was when Basil first committed his likeness to canvas. His soul, however, is a different matter.


The enduring appeal of 'The Picture of Dorian Gray' is not hard to understand. It is at once a social satire of Victorian polite society (though a rather darker one than any of his comedic plays), a Gothic tale of human corruption and an analysis of the dangers of obsessing too much over beauty and youth. The truth that Wilde hints at is that beauty and youth are powerful because they are fleeting. Extended into middle age, they become parodic and unpleasant qualities, and of course the activities Dorian chooses in pursuing his journey through eternal youth make him a great many enemies as well as causing the eponymous picture to corrupt in the privacy of the locked room it resides in. The Ancient Greeks and Romans knew the danger and indignity of an obsession with one's own beauty, as evidenced by the myths of Adonis (who was loved by several quarrelling goddesses and then killed by a wild boar sent by the jealous Artemis) and Narcissus (who fell in love with his own reflection and died of starvation) and Wilde reminds the modern world of late Ninteenth Century London that this remains true.


Stylistically, the book is very far removed indeed from the stuffy tomes that held sway over the mid-point of the century. The prose is direct, striking and full of seductive irony, and the dialogue, particularly in any scene involving Lord Henry, is often laugh out loud funny, being of course full of Wilde's trademark epigrams. The characterisation is rather two-dimensional, with Basil being the sensitive and emotional artist, Lord Henry the ultimate Wildean aesthete and Dorian the corruptible innocent, but as the book is essentially a moral fable, this isn't too much of a problem, especially when one considers how radically and refreshingly different this approach must have been after nigh on seventy years of novels which essentially trace a single character's entire life journey from birth to marriage or death.


In concluding this little look at a well loved classic, I can only say that this is one of those books which is a joy to re-read, one that has had an enormous cultural impact on the past 130 years, and one which never forgets that examining morality and examining the essential absurdity of life are not mutually exclusive. I'm looking forward to seeing what my students make of it...

Notes From Underground (Fyodor Dostoevsky)

This book blog was born in March and began with an analysis of Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel 'Devils', a book that I found compelling and ignited in me the desire to get to grips with Dostoevsky as often as possible. It is therefore entirely apt that five months of successful book blogging later, I've returned to the works of Dostoevsky, specifically, to the short novel 'Notes From Underground', which, like 'Devils', examines the way that Romantic Liberalism leads inevitably to Nihilism. In the case of 'Devils', this transition is metaphorically elucidated through a father, Stepan Trofimovich and his son, Peter Stepanovich, but with the earlier 'Notes From Underground', Dostoevsky has his narrator describe his current feelings of disgust at the futility of man attempting to build the symbolic utopian "crystal palace" through enlightened social consciousness and then move towards narrating three episodes which led to his current nihilistic world view.

Part one of the novel, then, is the ranting, self-pitying, diversionary "notes" of a nameless former civil servant of around forty. He attained the rank of Collegiate Assessor in the Tsarist civil service (a well-paid rank equivalent to the rank of major in the army), which he quit immediately upon receiving a hefty bequest in a relative's will to descend "underground", that is, separate from society and its stupidity, as he perceives it. He poses a number of questions in this introduction which he will come round to addressing in the anecdotes that form part two. Firstly, why do most people find revenge virtuous and just, and easily find the means to take it, when he struggles to find meaning in the act of revenge and only pursues it through meaninglessly spiteful and petty acts? Secondly, why do people find such pleasure in pain and in describing it to others? Thirdly, why are we struck with inertia at crucial moments? Finally, what is civilisation and what is our relation to it?

These questions lead into a series of episodes which occurred twenty years before, events which helped to turn the narrator into the Underground Man. The first episode, rendered by Dostoevsky with typical humour and irony, concerns the narrator obsessively attempting to take revenge on an officer who physically moved him out of his path without a word, only to find that the officer has no idea that the narrator's chosen method of revenge (a shoulder barge in the street) has even happened. The second surrounds a dinner some school acquaintances of his have for one of their number who is leaving town. Despite the fact that he hated them at school, the narrator inveigles his way into the gathering, only to behave towards them with scorn and contempt until they leave to visit a secret brothel without him. The third episode follows on immediately after the dinner, and finds our anti-heroic narrator visiting the brothel; his acquaintances are gone, but he strikes up a conversation with one of the prostitutes and unintentionally sleeps with her and then tells her his vision of society's ills. His behaviour in all three episodes shows a sort of bizarre juxtaposition of bravery and cowardice; bravery because he will not compromise just to fit in and cowardice because he never takes action in the way that he steels himself to. Alarmingly, I rather recognised myself throughout the narrator's misadventures! In any event, these reminiscences give the reader a succinct summary of why the narrator has separated himself from contemporary life.

What is most striking about this novel is the way the idea, tone and style have influenced so much of the literature that follows it. In interrogating Russia's flawed obsession with Determinism, the author anticipates his own 'Devils'. By charting the way that pleasure can be obtained by spreading one's pain, he lays the ground for 'Crime and Punishment', while Dostoevsky's critical response to Chernyshevsky's idealist socially utopian novel 'What Is To Be Done?' is a thread that runs through all of his late masterpieces. The figure of the man underground has been used by- amongst others- Ralph Ellison, whose 'Invisible Man' takes Dostoevsky's concept and applies it to the plight of African-Americans in the post-war United States. The absurdist humour and nihilist themes of Dostoevsky's book are used by Joseph Heller in 'Catch 22', particular in Yossarian, the air captain who points out the essential ridiculousness of the air warfare he's involved in: you'd have to be mad to fly, but recognising this fact simulataneously means you are sane enough to fly. Bret Easton Ellis uses a quotation from 'Notes From Underground' as one of the epigraphs to 'American Psycho' as a way of pointing out the fact that he intends to critique 1980s America in the same way as Dostoevsky critiqued 1860s Russia. Looking at the style, it is so strikingly minimalist in many ways, full of stark, short sentences and proclamations of disgust, self-aggrandisement, self-laceration and poetic social awareness. In Dostoevsky's chosen prose style and narrative voice, one can see how Camus, Sartre, Hemingway and Ellis were his successors and imitators. 

This is a truly important text in the development of modern fiction, and, indeed, modern consciousness. The Underground Man is a compelling narrator, utterly brutal in expressing his views, acting as both a vehicle for Dostoevsky to satirise Nihilism and also as a means to criticise Social Determinism, which he loathed. It's short, tightly focused, experimental and hugely enjoyable. Of all the many European authors of the Nineteenth Century, I feel that it is Dostoevsky who has most influenced the novelists of the Twentieth and Twenty-First centuries. A grand claim, I know, but when one reads his books, one sees how truly influential they are. 

Taming The Beast (Emily Maguire)

For my first read of the summer, I decided to revisit a novel I bought and read four years ago. As well as the provocative title and cover image, 'Taming The Beast' possessed the kind of dark love story that habitually piques my interest. My recollection of my first read was that I genuinely enjoyed it. Strangely, second time around, I did not enjoy it at all, bar the odd passage. Funny how time changes one's perceptions. Perhaps there are some books that shouldn't be re-read after all.

The plot itself is rather clichéd, although attacked by the writer in a feisty and direct manner. Sarah Clark, a prodigy and a nerd, experiences sexual awakening in a high school English class in suburban Sydney, where Shakespeare and Donne lead her directly into the arms of her teacher, Daniel Carr. The prodigy takes to sexual studies the same way she took to academic studies, and soon enough their affair is all consuming and dangerously violent. Carr flees to Brisbane with his family, leaving Sarah only memories. This part of the novel is uncomfortable to read, but mostly well written, with the exception of the shoehorned quotations by prominent writers that make their way into the dialogue and narrative. Sarah is clear about the choice she is making, and her strength and conviction go a long way to making this a believable love story.

It is in part two that Maguire goes wrong, on reflection. The story picks up some years later, with Sarah now a twenty-one-year-old honours student at university with a reputation for sleeping around. Her affair as an adolescent has turned her into a rampant nymphomaniac who has no interest in tenderness or affection. She studies hard, screws hard and lives in a spartan flat filled with beer cans. Her life is balanced somewhat by her childhood friend Jamie, who has her best interests at heart, but his own girlfriend's pregnancy and his own feelings for Sarah lead to complications, even before the inevitable re-appearance of Daniel Carr...

The concept behind 'Taming The Beast' is promising, and part one gives the impression that Maguire has really thought about the controversial subject she is examining, but sadly this good work goes by the wayside as cliché after cliché is relentlessly rolled out, from the way that young men like Jamie get trapped into fatherhood at too young an age to the negative way that all of Sarah's friends view her carnality. The sex scenes occur with such regularity and with such depressing amounts of detail that they soon lose all power. You are literally anaesthetised to them after thirty pages, and yet Maguire never lets up- most of the book seems to be laboured descriptions of vaguely edgy sex. The dialogue and interior monologues of Jamie and Sarah are particularly excruciating, and upon his reappearance, Daniel becomes a pantomime villain rather than a genuinely complicated and ambivalent figure.

My guess is that Maguire wanted to tell us that true love is neither pleasant nor polite, that it is a raging, inescapable conflagration that destroys all in its path. Her implication seems to be that Shakespeare and his cohorts thought this too, and she rolls out a whole laundry load of quotations from the Sonnets and 'Othello' to prove her point. I hate it when writers try to prove their erudition by telling the reader what they've read. It hardly ever comes across well. The third person narrative is unbelievably embarrassing at times, with the filtering through the primary characters usually hitting the level of a mid-1980s problem page letter to Just 17. The prose style picks up again in the last few pages, but by then, it's too late.

I really wish I hadn't re-read this book. Although it was a nice easy read to get my eye in for a long six weeks of work free reading, going back to it spoiled the positive memory I had of it. I suppose that one's perception of a book is sharply bound up in the memories of the time it was read in, and four years is most certainly enough time for the rose tinted spectacles to be removed. So I can definitely tell my twenty-seven-year-old self that he was wrong for enjoying this book first time round. It starts promisingly and ends powerfully, but the long middle section is just embarrassing really. If you want to see this kind of storyline done well, try Zoe Heller's 'Notes On A Scandal', which I feel like re-reading to take the bad taste of this out of my mouth.

A Song of Ice and Fire (George R. R. Martin)

For as long as I can remember I have been a reader. The written word enchanted me from my earliest days, and that love for reading of all sorts led me all the way to an English degree and a job teaching English. Books are my life in many ways, and this blog is a way of celebrating that fact. Most of the books I have reviewed would be classed as literary fiction, the kind of thing I studied in my degree, the kind of thing I teach teenagers on a daily basis. I love the canon, I love the challenging nature of literary fiction, and I'm eternally glad that my path in life was defined by that fact. However, long before university, long before I knew the difference between high and low culture, long before I knew what was considered "literary", there was one kind of book I loved to read more than any other. From around seven to around seventeen, I devoured hundreds of works of fantasy literature. My love for this type of literature has never, ever gone away, either.

It all started in a primary school classroom in a small town in East Kent on a rainy day in the late 1980s. Forced to play inside of a lunchtime due to the inclement weather, two friends of  mine introduced me to the Fighting Fantasy series, a series of books that doubled as games. You chose your own adventure and battled fearsome beasts on your way through a perilous quest filled with ingenious traps. They were like crack to an imaginative seven year old, and I read through them voraciously. Soon after, I discovered Tolkien, first 'The Hobbit', then 'The Lord of the Rings' and finally 'The Silmarillion'. I read the Forgotten Realms series (a particular favourite of mine being the Finder's Stone trilogy by Kate Novak and Jeff Grubb). I read David Eddings' Belgariad and Mallorean quintets. I read Terry Brooks. My favourite series of all, as my late teens arrived, was Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time...but by then I was about to start a degree and fantasy literature was something of a guilty pleasure, to be read in holidays or perhaps on a weekend when my study schedule was light. 

Fast forward to the early days of my teaching career, the summer of 2004 to be precise. I found myself without reading material one free evening and took a wander down to Borders, which, in Brighton, used to open until nine. I was perusing the fantasy section and my eyes lit on George R.R. Martin's 'A Game of Thrones'. Now, years before, an acquaintance at university had recommended the series A Song of Ice and Fire to me, but I had entirely forgotten until then. I picked up the book and read the Prologue. Soon after I was walking to the counter. Two days later, I returned to purchase 'A Clash of Kings', book 2 of the series. Three days after that, I was buying 'A Storm of Swords'. At that point, 'A Feast For Crows' was still a year and a bit away from publication, so I had to content myself with re-reading the first three books. Martin's series had me well and truly hooked. When 'A Feast For Crows finally arrived, that was devoured a manner similar to the title. Then a six year wait for the next book commenced. That was torture.

Unless you've been living under a rock, you'll know by now that HBO optioned the series for a television show, which hit screens in April of this year under the name 'Game of Thrones'. While it is, no doubt, a highly laudable piece of television, beautifully shot and well acted, if you love the show but haven't read the books, you're doing yourself out of experiencing Martin's world fully. There's so much you miss out on, inevitably, as any screen adaptation, especially one that adapts a fantasy book as rich as Martin's, has to cut an awful lot out. 

What with one of my favourite books in the world being adapted for television, and what with the fifth volume of the series 'A Dance With Dragons' finally being released, with much more fanfare than with previous books, I recently embarked upon a comprehensive re-read of the first four books in time for the release of 'A Dance With Dragons' last Tuesday (July 12th). It is my intention here to do some justice to the sheer enormity of Martin's achievement and explain to the uninitiated why these books are a must-read. For the initiated, I hope to touch upon the themes, moments and characters that are most important to me. This blog post is a labour of love. I'll try and keep spoilers minimal and circumstantial.

So, where to begin? A Song of Ice and Fire is set in an alternative world, a world where seasons can last for a decade or longer, but which otherwise appears to be extremely similar to Medieval Europe. The political and social system is entirely feudal; the King is given homage by the Lords of the Great Houses, each Great House has the fealty of their "bannermen" (lesser lords who live in that given geographical area), and the bannermen are in turn served by knights (heirs and younger sons also have knighthood conferred upon them), who are served by smallfolk (who spend a distressing amount of time being "put to the sword"). The continent most of the action takes place on is called Westeros and is roughly the size of South America. In its antiquity (that is, three hundred years before the start of the series), it was unified by the conquest of Aegon the Conqueror, a scion and survivor of a lost empire named Valyria (roughly analagous to the Roman Empire) which had been consumed by a "doom" some years before. Aegon and his sisters had the advantage of owning and controlling the last three dragons of the Valyrian freehold, which allowed them to subdue most of the continent in short order, despite having a comparatively small army. Following the coronation of Aegon as the first king of a unified Westeros, the Targaryen dynasty was established, its heraldic sigil a three headed dragon, red on black, its seat a new city raised at the site Aegon and his sisters landed at (King's Landing). 

Following their conquest, the Targaryen dynasty often married incestuously to "keep blood lines pure", but this of course led to a certain degree of unpredictably in the line of kings; indeed one central character remarks during the series that when a new Targaryen arrived into the world, the gods tossed a coin to see whether he would be great or mad. This increasing tendency towards unpredictability eventually led to a mad king, Aerys II, a cruel, paranoid monarch who feared his own son as much as the great lords who looked upon him with contempt. Following a controversial tournament where the son of the mad king, an impressive young man named Rhaegar, won the honours at the joust and named the betrothed of another man the Queen of Love and Beauty. This single act began an avalanche of dire and dramatic consequences. Rhaegar and Lyanna Stark disappeared, leading Lyanna's hotheaded brother Brandon to asume that she had been kidnapped. He rode to the capital with a group of companions, shouting for Rhaegar to "come out and die" but he was not there, and they were imprisoned for threatening the royal family. Mad King Aerys then demanded the fathers attend court to answer for their sons' crimes. Both fathers and sons were summarily executed, including Rickard Stark, Warden of the North, Lyanna and Brandon's family. Following this incident, Aerys called for the heads of Lyanna's betrothed, Robert Baratheon (a great lord in his own right, but at this point a ward of another great lord, Jon Arryn) and Eddard Stark (following the deaths of his father and older brother, also now a great lord). Jon Arryn, Warden of the East, refused to give up his wards and raised his banners in rebellion. The following year of warfare, with around half the realm staying loyal and half joining the rebellion, forms the backstory of the first novel, and indeed subsequent novels. The rebellion ended with Robert Baratheon winning a mighty victory at a battle on the fords of a great river where he killed Rhaegar Targaryen. He ended up sitting the Iron Throne, with the mad king dead and Rhaegar's children dead, due to the last minute arrival to Robert's cause of House Lannister, who opportunistically picked the winning side and sacked the capital on Robert's behalf.

It is this incredibly rich backstory which underpins the series and makes it such a rewarding experience to read. One is always anxious to find out the next tidbit of information (even in book five, we are still finding out more about the backdrop to the Rebellion, and we still don't know everything, with one particularly infamous detail still not revealed). What makes this series so different to other fantasy epics is the fact that it is so gritty and based in historical reality. After all, fantasy always epics have incredibly detailed backstories, that's the nature of the genre, but A Song of Ice and Fire has all the political complexities of real historical conflicts like the Wars of the Roses, the Thirty Years War, the Norman Conquest and more. This is ultimately a series about people, with all their flaws, mistakes, triumphs and failures front and centre. There are no elves, goblins, orcs or anything of that sort. The series is primarily about dynastic conflict...but there are some otherworldly elements, namely dragons (who everyone believes to be extinct) and the Others (creatures of ice who command armies of frozen undead who everyone believes to be a myth) and, at least to begin with, these two elements stay under the radar while the human conflict takes centre stage.

The novel begins at a point fifteen years or so after the Rebellion. In the far north, a force half penal colony and half retirement home for knights, known as the Night's Watch, guards an enormous wall of solid ice, seven hundred feet high. As far as they are aware, this wall is to keep out the "wildlings", a savage group of raiders loosely based on something like the historical Picts (with the Wall being analagous to Hadrian's Wall). However, this was not the real reason the Wall was raised, historically speaking. At the beginning of the novel, three rangers from the Night's Watch come across a creature known as an Other, a cold being at whose hands death becomes as frozen undeath. Two of the rangers are killed, while the other is so terrified he deserts. At this point, you'd be forgiven for thinking that the entire novel would pick up on this event. But no, the above backstory is woven in amidst a royal visit; Robert Baratheon visits his childhood friend and battle companion Eddard Stark to offer him the office of Hand of the King (a kind of chief counsellor role) after the sudden death of their beloved Jon Arryn. He is initially reluctant to accept, but does so when suspicions about Lannister involvement in Arryn's death are raised in a letter sent by his sister-in-law, Jon's widow. As he leaves for the capital, his bastard son Jon Snow goes to the wall to become a brother of the Night's Watch. Meanwhile, the last scions of the ousted Targayen dynasty, Viserys (who styles himself Viserys the Third) and Daenerys (born during the rebellion) are across the sea on the eastern continent. Viserys plans to win back his father's throne by wedding his sister to Khal Drogo, a Genghis Khan type horselord who commands 100, 000 mounted warriors. These three storylines- the wall, the intrigue at King's Landing and the Targaryens across the narrow sea- form the backbone of 'A Game of Thrones'.

I should at this point discuss the narrative structure of the novels. Each chapter is filtered through the point of view of a named point of view character. Through their eyes, we see the events unfold, and their differing perspectives allow Martin to knit together his vast tale. Fans of the series each have POV characters they love and POV characters they love to hate. In the first novel, the POV characters are the honourable Eddard Stark, Lord of Winterfell, Warden of the North and Hand of the King; four of his six children (pretty, courtly thirteen year daughter Sansa, fierce, willful, tomboyish ten year old daughter Arya, naive and adventurous eight year old son Bran and his fourteen year old bastard son Jon Snow, ironically far more like his father than the rest of the truborn children are); his wife Catelyn, who will do anything to protect her family; Tyrion Lannister, a shrewd, intelligent dwarf who doesn't share too many of his ambitious family's flaws; and Daenerys Targaryen, a shy girl who begins the novel under the yoke of her petty, cruel brother Viserys but subsequently goes on an extraordinary journey.

Martin originally planed to tell the entire story through the arcs of just those characters, but subsequently changed his mind. The second book requires the addition of Davos Seaworth as a POV character, a man who was once a smuggler but who was rewarded for winning through a naval blockade to provide Robert's besieged brother Stannis with onions and salt fish to keep his garrison going. He provides a window into Stannis, which is important to the second book. The other POV addition in 'A Clash of Kings' is Theon Greyjoy, once Eddard Stark's ward, now despatched back to his father's Iron Islands with an offer. Theon is a much hated character by most fans, but he elicits my sympathy, somebody who was taken from his home as a hostage and belonged to neither land. In 'A Storm of Swords', Jaime Lannister, the undoubted pantomime villain of book 1, gets a POV which may change your mind on how you view him. Samwell Tarly, a Night's Watch companion of Jon Snow also gets a POV as he gets to work on a masterful piece of political manouevering. Once we get to 'A Feast For Crows' and 'A Dance With Dragons', there are many more POV additions, too numerous to go into here, but all of which increase yet further the richness and complexity of the narrative. You'll drink in every detail, I promise you.

The series began in 1996, and is currently slated to have two further books added to it to complete the story. Since 'A Storm of Swords' came out in the year 2000, Martin has encountered infamous problems with the two most recent books which have tested the patience of a small but vocal group of fans. The novel after 'A Storm of Swords' was due to be called 'A Dance With Dragons' and Martin had originally planned for a five year gap in the timeline so that his younger characters could age enough to be convincing players in the destiny of the world. However, this only seemed to work for half the characters; the rest seemed ready to continue their storylines straight after 'A Storm of Swords'. Martin also found himself relying too much on flashbacks to fill in what had happened in Westeros over that time period. This delay led Martin to scrap these pages and start again with an "interim" book, 'A Feast For Crows'. This too was plagued by problems, and with several deadlines missed, Martin infamously decided to release the storylines he had completed, which all happened to be based around the southern half of the Seven Kingdoms. The storylines in the north and over the sea were to be filled in a short time later by book five, which would use the title 'A Dance With Dragons'. The two books would thus be companion volumes which ran alongside each other. Unfortunately, following the publication of 'A Feast For Crows' in October 2005, more problems plagued him, and an even longer wait than for the previous book commenced. Fans at this point began to run out of patience and accused Martin of being disengenous about his work ethic. I never felt that way myself, but I must admit it was a long six years!

Finally, following the success of HBO's television adaptation, which brought a whole new audience to the books, 'A Dance With Dragons' was released to huge fanfare and hype. In the end, the novel didn't just parallel the timeline of 'A Feast For Crows', it extended a little beyond it, and several of the POV characters from Feast began to pop up again towards the end of 'A Dance With Dragons'. So far, fan reaction to the book has varied somewhat. Personally, I loved it. The developments, plotting and suspense are all first rate, and there's time for yet more world building. Some are worried that this book brings the series no closer to its epic finale, but I am more than happy for there to be as many books as needed. The more George R.R Martin I get to read the better. Certainly, there are lot of cliffhangers this time around, perhaps too many, but I rather get the impression that this is due to the intervention of Martin's editor, who was apparently concerned that the book would be impractical to bind if it got much larger. The 150 or so pages taken from the end of 'A Dance With Dragons' will now form the basis of the next volume 'The Winds of Winter', for which we will hopefully not have to wait quite as long...

It's hard to explain why I love these books so much because there's so much in them, so many things that separate them from lesser fantasy works. I love the characterisation, which is so well observed. Characters all have convincing motivations and behave in the way they do due to the trials and tribulations they suffer. Martin is notoriously cruel to his characters, especially those with a point of view. Beautiful characters are physically scarred in such a way as to be mentally scarred too. Characters already ugly, like Tyrion or Brienne of  Tarth, are scarred and become even uglier, yet more beautiful on the inside. Another thing Martin is infamous for is killing off central characters, even POV characters. I won't spoil who dies for you, but the sheer open mouthed shock you feel is incredible. I mourned for days over several of my favourites who bit the dust! I love the world Martin has created, so vivid, entire cultures, faiths and geographical regions described in painstaking detail. I love the way Martin has adapted the real life medieval institution of knighthood and placed it in Westeros. Each lordly house has its own heraldry, motto, castle and traditions. I adore the descriptions of banners, shields and surcoats and the men who sport them. The descriptions of battles and sieges are epic, even when they take place "off camera". There's sex, lust, lies, incest, betrayal, blood, fire and torture. There's plotting, counter plotting, characters whose honour won't let them plot but somehow get drawn into the plotting. Martin creates songs, all the food served at numerous banquets, even bits of languages. He weaves together revenge arcs, personal growth arcs, a world in peril arc and manages to critique gender relations, slavery, feudalism and the sort of people who want the power to govern but can't do so effectively. The sheer mind boggling level of detail means that repeated re-reads are wonderfully rewarding. Most of all, these books are rollicking good reads, real page turners which happen to have been written extraordinarily well.

In concluding an epic blog post for an epic fantasy series, I would just like to urge everyone who reads this post to read A Song of Ice and Fire, especially if you enjoyed HBO's version of 'A Game of Thrones'. With season 2 being filmed shortly, you have a golden opportunity to read 'A Game of Thrones' then 'A Clash of Kings' and get ahead of the game. I promise you, you won't read a thing more enjoyable or fascinating. These are books for obsessives, and the army of GRRM obsessives is destined to grow, just as the Others' army or reanimated frozen corpses continues to grow in the series...