The Blind Assassin (Margaret Atwood)

As regular readers of this blog will know, I am a re-reader of almost obsessive proportions. I can't resist dipping into old favourites on a regular basis, because I do find that every time  re-read a book, I find something new that I hadn't noticed before. Plus, it's just an enormously pleasurable thing to do. If you enjoyed it once, you should enjoy multiple times, at least that's my view.

I have been an avid fan of Margaret Atwood for many years now. She's one of the five or six authors who I read everything by, so she's very special to me. I first encountered her writing during A Level English Literature, as I studied the seminal dystopian novel 'The Handmaid's Tale', and from then on I gradually tracked down her other books and read those too. 'The Blind Assassin' was the first Atwood novel that came out after I'd heard of her, so it was something of a momentous publishing event for me. It came out in 2000, but I was a poverty stricken student then, unable to justify spending money on beautiful hardbacks, so I had to wait until the autumn of 2001 to buy it in paperback in a promotional student evening at Borders in Brighton just as I was starting my PGCE. Despite the fact that teacher training is an arduous and time consuming process, I still found time to read regularly, and this book kept me on the edge of my proverbial seat during that first reading. Since then, I'd read it on another two occasions, but not since about 2006, so when I was scanning my bookshelves about a month ago for reading matter, I decided it was about time I read 'The Blind Assassin' again.

Generally speaking, there are two types of Atwood novel: those that deal with gender politics and destructive relationships ('The Edible Woman', 'Surfacing', 'Lady Oracle') and those that are more dystopic in flavour ('The Handmaid's Tale', 'Oryx and Crake', 'The Year of the Flood'). 1996's 'Alias Grace' was an interesting departure in that it examined an infamous Canadian murder case of the 1840s, and interrogated more thoroughly the relationship between history, fiction and truth, while not abandoning Atwood's interest in the female identity. I therefore see 'The Blind Assassin' as a continuation of Atwood's literary interest in Canadian history, since the majority of the novel takes place in the years immediately before and after the Second World War. The book says a great deal about how Atwood sees Canada's development as a nation and a great deal about class, gender and power also. I see 'The Blind Assassin' as Atwood's second best novel, chiefly because her earlier books dealing with women and relationships, as much as I love them, tend to come across as a little petulant and a little too obvious. Certainly, her work in the late 1970s and early 1980s can often appear like self-plagiarism (a female narrator and protagonist fights to preserve their identity in the face of a challenge from patriarchal authority), especially if one reads them in sequence. What we have with 'The Blind Assassin' is a far more subtle, meaningful and balanced examination of the position of women in Twentieth Century society, and most importantly, it gives a much truer account of how the phenomenon of love fits into all the gender politics. It helps that the writing itself is also more natural, the words of a writer who knows her craft fully. 'The Handmaid's Tale' will always be her most profundly powerful work, for me, but few books speak of the heart and from the heart like 'The Blind Assassin' does.

A beautifully memorable prologue that begins "Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge" establishes the novel being framed as the memoirs of Iris Griffen (neé Chase), a former heiress and society beauty, now aged and fallen from grace following a series of contrversial incidents that occurred around and immediately after the war. It becomes clear fairly early on that these memoirs are intended for the eyes of Iris' estranged niece Sabrina, though there are also many asides directed at Myra Sturgess, the daughter of the servant who brought Iris and her sister Laura up. The memoirs tell the tragic story of the Chase family, once prominent yet honest industrialists who fall on hard times come the depression, causing Iris to be married off to a business rival for an injection of capital, only for that business rival, Richard Griffen, to turn out to be a dishonest shark and a bully, with eyes not only on Iris, but also the sensitive, strange and stubborn Laura, only fifteen at the time of Iris' marriage. Interspersed with this reflective first person narrative is the eponynous novel within a novel 'The Blind Assassin', purportedly written by Laura Chase before her suicide, a modernist masterpiece telling the story of an affair between a young society woman and a sharp-tongued man on the run. Within that novel is also another story, a pulp tale told to the nameless young woman by her lover, about a blind assassin on a fictional planet full of exotic fictional elements with strange names. A further layer is added by the inclusion of historical artifacts like gossip columns, obituaries and newspaper reports which both foreshadow and shed light on the story told us by Iris.

What's wonderful about the book is the way that it takes on its themes with such sensitivity and gravitas. Iris is completely uncompromising about the way her ageing body is failing her, discussions of which inform her envy of the young and her own reminiscences of her youth. Rarely have the mechanics and terrors of old age been analysed in such a poignant yet brutal way. Canada's place in the world is put into perspective several times in the novel: in Iris' account of how the fictional town of Port Ticonderoga came to be, with the way Toronto high society is represented as a kind of desperate facsimile of London high society, in the descriptions of Iris' dastardly sister-in-law Winnifred and her flapper friends trying desperately to do whatever is "in" elsewhere in the world. Canada in the twenties, thirties and forties is shown as parochial and backwards, yet not immune to the pressures of the era. The Wall Street Crash, The Great Depression and the fear of Communism all feature prominently, and there are brief echoes of the strife that would tear Europe apart, too. Atwood weaves these enormous historical events seamlessly into Iris' narrative, showing the impact such large events can have on the individual. The position of women is of course central to the novel, with both Iris and Laura, in different ways, struggling against the lives that have been mapped out for them. Other female characters- Winnifred as the power behind Richard's throne, the bohemian artist Callie Fitzsimmons as the lover of Iris and Laura's father Norvall Chase, the indefatigable servant/surrogate mother Reenie Hinck- show the different paths a woman might take within the era, making the novel a kaleidoscope of female possibility. Ultimately though, this is the story of how Iris lost and then regained her independence, but only at a terrible, terrible cost to herself and her sister, and the aching sadness of this would turn even the hardest hearts to doughy softness, as would the overarching love story between the two protagonists of the novel-within-a-novel, a twist in the tale which is obvious very early on, but nonetheless enormously affecting. The last pages of the book are some of the saddest you will ever read.

I am so glad I re-read 'The Blind Assassin'. It's beautifully written, impeccably controlled, sheds light on an important part of twentieth century history and provides us with one of the greatest fictional love stories ever told. The lessons of the novel- seize the day, allow no regrets, protect oneself from the predations of the unscrupulous, remember those who have gone- have always stayed with me, and I think they always will. Reading Atwood is always an emotional rollercoaster, and always leaves me profoundly sad and philosophical for a long while afterwards, but such things are meant to be felt. This is a clever book and a book full of feeling. It's essential reading for everybody.

Cloud Atlas (David Mitchell)

David Mitchell is one of those rare writers who can conjure enormously complex postmodern narratives which, when read, actually come across as brilliantly simple and organic storytelling. It's not, of course: I can't even conceive of how much research, travel, plotting and planning went into this book. It's an absolute literary behemoth, the type of book that leaves you walking away shaking your head at the sheer audacity of it. I suppose that Mitchell shares this quality with his nearest analogue, the great Salman Rushdie, but then, Rushdie was always a little too wrapped up in his own brilliance, whereas Mitchell seems admirably modest and unassuming. It somehow makes his books even more likeable.

I start this review with that preamble because I'm not even sure of how to start summarising this book for you. It has so many layers that I could still be writing about 'Cloud Atlas' tomorrow and not be close to finishing. So I guess I'll try and give you the short version. As with Mitchell's debut novel 'Ghostwritten', 'Cloud Atlas' consists of a series of interconnecting stories that are thematically and textually linked. The conceit of the novel's structure is that each character reads or watches the narrative of the previous character, but each narrative is interrupted halfway through. As the sixth arc closes in the middle of the book, the story arcs are closed in reverse order until the reader ends with the story that began the book. We thus move both forwards and backwards in time, towards the ultimate philosophical revelation that everything changes but humanity's essential selfishness does not. Furthermore, each of the protagonists in the book possess a comet shaped birthmark, indicating that they are one soul being reborn into different physical vessels. It is truly a wonderful experience to join the dots of Mitchell's narrative framework and yet also get caught up in each individual story.

The stories span such a range of historical periods and regions that it's impossible not to be impressed, especially as Mitchell manages to make each of them seem entirely authentic. He also experiments with a multitude of genres: a journal, a series of letters, a crime thriller, a burlesque, an interview and an oral memoir. His characters are equally diverse, as are his locations. We start with Adam Ewing, an American notary on a voyage across the Pacific from Australia to San Francisco who is, unbeknowst to him, being preyed upon by a charlatan doctor. This section is probably the most humdrum but it introduces one of the novel's defining philosophical conceits: that man inherently preys upon those weaker than himself. This is seen in the way Ewing witnesses the colonial rapacity of the English and the Dutch, as well as the recounted story of the island people the Moriori, who were themselves colonised by the Maori, who proved themselves "apt pupils" in the dark art of colonialism. It is also evident in the way Ewing himself is taken advantage of by the man he thinks is a doctor and his friend. Ewing's journal is read by the would-be composer Robert Frobisher in the early 1930s while he is staying at the Belgian chateau of the syphlitic composer Vyvan Ayres and working as his amanuensis. Frobisher writes to his friend and lover Rufus Sixsmith of the way in which he has inveigled his way into the graces of Ayrs' wife as well as how he is funding himself through finding rare books and selling them to a broker on Greek Street. The novel's title is taken from this section, as Frobisher is writing a musical work of his own, 'Cloud Atlas Sestet', six interconnecting movements which endlessly descend and ascend, much like the characters in the novel do. Frobisher's letters to Sixsmith are read by the protagonist of the next section, Luisa Rey, an investigative journalist embroiled in the attempts of an all powerful nuclear energy company to cover up the fact that their new reactor could be unsafe and cause a disaster. The strongarm tactics of the energy company throw light into the darker side of capitalism. The Luisa Rey mystery is read in the early 2000s by Timothy Cavendish, a hapless vanity publisher who happened on a huge hit after his gangster client killed a smug book reviewer. Cavendish escapes the attentions of his client's brothers only to wind up in a dictatorial nursing home, having been tricked into thinking it was a hotel by his brother. Cavendish's struggles are seen  by Sonmi-451 as a film after she escapes her life as an indentured fabricant worker at Papa Song's (a thinly veiled analogue for McDonald's). This section comes across as an even darker version of Huxley's 'Brave New World', as all work in Nea So Copros (Korea) is undertaken by fabricants who are brutally executed after 12 years of service. This dystopic world is brilliantly rendered through Sonmi's recollections of her life as a server and a her later life as a revolutionary. Mitchell cleverly uses brand names already in existence as eponyms: so personal televisions are "Sonys" and coffee is "Starbucks". The rapacity of capitalism in this section is portrayed as all consuming, leading inevitably to the end of humanity as we know it. I have always been a huge fan of dystopian fiction, so this section had me on the edge of my proverbial seat. The recording of Sonmi is watched by the next viewpoint character, Zachry, a tribesman on Hawaii whose tribe is threatened by the even more primitive, but very warlike Kona. Zachry is visited by Meronym, a member of the last known advanced society. Zachry's people worship Sonmi as a deity, without knowing anything about her history. This section is written in a form of broken English argot, which like any such effort (Orwell and Newspeak, Burgess and Nadsat) absolutely takes you in once you get past the initial page or so.

The finale takes the entire second half of the novel and is by turns dazzling, elegiac, haunting and triumphant. Having to wait for the conclusion of each narrative makes you want to turn each page that bit quicker. It's a book to obsess over, a book to devour and yet a book to savour too. I've noticed that there has been something of a backlash against this book in recent years, almost as if the universal acclaim it won when it came out is now seen as somehow indecorous. I cannot for the life of me imagine why anybody would not see this novel for what it is: a dazzling postmodern gem and a book which will be regarded as the undisputed classic of the 2000s. This is a book which will be studied and thought about for many years. I already want to re-read it.

The Prague Cemetery (Umberto Eco)

One of the most thrilling times of my life was the two years I spent studying A level History under the tutelage of an incredible, eccentric, brilliant Italian woman who brought the turmoil of the Nineteenth Century to life in vivid detail. We focused particularly on Italy, Germany, France and Russia, discussing diplomatic scandals, failed revolutions, empire building, wars and nationalist fervour at great length. That love for Nineteenth Century history has never left me, and I still read around the subject regularly to this day. One fascinatingly poisonous current of cultural ideology that ran through the century was the growth of Anti-Semitism, a current that led inexorably to Hitler and the Final Solution in the mid Twentieth Century. From pamphlets detailing Jewish conspiracies against the Christian world to the growth of Social Darwinism, the grim path to genocide is easy to trace. With all of this in mind, when I picked up the masterful Italian novelist and semiotician Umberto Eco's latest novel 'The Prague Cemetery' and found that it was about these events and how they came to be, I was desperate to read it. I duly placed it on my Christmas list and my mother duly obliged. Having been absorbed in it for the past fortnight, I'm very glad I asked for it. This is a quite brilliant book.

'The Prague Cemetery' is a picaresque historical novel with a notably postmodern structural conceit. The Narrator (note the capital 'N') begins the tale by observing a seedy area of Paris surrounding Place Maubert, in which an elderly gentlemen is sitting down to write. At this point, this observed man, the main character of the novel, Captain Simone Simonini, takes over, writing about a crisis of identity in a diary on the advice of an "Austrian Jew" (who turns out to be the one and only Sigmund Freud, at that time working on his theories in Paris). This crisis was precipitated by the discovery of a cassock and wig in his apartment, a fact that confused and disturbed him. It transpires that Simonini has an alter ego, the Abbé Dalla Piccola, who alternates writing in the diary whenever Simonini has recounted an event incorrectly or whenever he has recounted some crime the priest wishes to chide him about. The narrative is thus split between the Narrator, who "interprets" the writings of Simonini and Dalla Piccola whenever they become too feverish or convoluted, Simonini, whose recollections of his life in espionage, forgery and villiany drive the plot forward for the majority of the book, and Dalla Piccola, whose horrified and moralistic didactism seasons the narrative at key points, until the two alter egos are ultimately reconciled at the end (the implication being that Freud's suggested therapy has worked).

Simonini's story begins with his obessessive hatred of the Jews, created by both the stories of his grandfather, an eminent man of Piedmont, the foremost kingdom in Northern Italy in the mid Nineteenth Century and also by the Jesuits who were his tutors. So vivid are these warnings about the Jews that Simonini "dreamt about [them] for years" and believes them to be "vain as a Spaniard, ignorant as a Croat, greedy as a Levantine, ungrateful as a Maltese, insolent as a Gypsy, dirty as an Englishman, unctuous as a Kalmuck, imperious as a Prussian, slanderous as anyone from Asti" as well as "adulterous through uncontrollable lust" which apparently, for Simonini, accounts for the large population of European Jews at the time the novel is set. This section is incredibly well written by Eco, bringing across as it does the fanaticism of the zealot and the irresistably comic voice of Simonini which carries the reader through a whole swathe of European events. After a meeting with Freud and some other Pyschiatrists at a restuarant, Simonini begins the tale of his life in a fashion almost reminiscent of the Bildungsroman, with a series of events in his early adult life leads to his recruitment into the Piedmontese intelligence service. And it is at this point that things get really interesting.

The diary, shared by the two alter egos, takes the reader through many of the momentous events of the Nineteenth Century (Garibaldi's conquest of the Two Sicilies, the reign of Napoleon III, the Franco-Prussian War, the Paris Commune, the Dreyfus Affair) while Simonini, egged on by most of Europe's Intelligence Organisations, begins to write, commision and edit a number of texts which describe a secret meeting between rabbis in a cemetery in the Prague ghetto in which they hatch a conspiracy, apparently involving masons, Jesuits and Satanic ritual, which will topple the Christian nations. The idea is that one man, Simonini, is actually responsible for the infamous 'Protocols of the Elders of Zion', published in 1905, the book that a young Adolf Hitler read and described as his warrant to wipe out the European Jewry. This is much more than dry historical fiction, however. There is a kind of bathetic, ludicrous humour that leaps from the page, with all of the real life historical figures being somehow absurd. The system of espionage and counter espionage among major European powers is endlessly satirised by the way Simonini is often hired to do the same job by multiple agencies. The loose ends are tied up in a satisfying ending, but the ending is completely left open. This is a true "novel of ideas" and its ambition and scope is quite staggering really. 'The Prague Cemetery' shows how easily and alarmingly ideas about race can lead to terrifying, chilling consequences, with Eco even noting in an endpiece that all of the figures in the novel bar Simonini and his priestly alter ago were real, and even Simonini is a collage of several real people who helped to spread the Anti-Semitic message around Europe. As a character, Simonini is a true work of art: a bravura anti-hero, a malcontent, a glutton obsessed with fine food, a murderer, a forger, a spy, a liar, a disguise artist and a master storyteller.

This book is a demanding but utterly rewarding experience, the kind of book that makes you wish that more authors put in this kind of effort and scholarship. It gives a reader everything they could want: scope, drama, humour, acutely observed characters, beautiful prose, grand locations, a page turning plot full of conspiracy and mystery, and of course, beautifully striking orange and black cover art....I'm such a sucker for a good cover.

Umberto Eco, my cap is officially doffed to you. Everybody should read your book. Immediately.

Hotel World (Ali Smith)

Postmodern works of fiction are always something of a gamble for a budding author. Playing with elements of form, structure and language is not for the faint hearted. For female writers especially, comparisons with the likes of Toni Morrison, Jeanette Winterson and the grand dame of them all, Virginia Woolf, can be very unforgiving. Back in 2001, 'Hotel World' by Ali Smith was nominated for both the Orange Prize and the Booker, and I remember the hype surrounding it pretty well. I think I read the first chapter in a Sunday supplement soon after graduating from university that year, and from then on it was one of those books perpetually on my theoretical lists of "to reads". Back in November last year, my girlfriend decided she wanted to buy Smith's other major novel 'The Accidental', as she'd read somewhere that it was a modern classic. I responded by saying that if I were her, I'd start with 'Hotel World'. Soon after, she returned from a trip to London, drunkenly bearing a copy of 'Hotel World' for me and a copy of 'The Accidental' for her. I plucked it from the shelf last Friday, and a week on I am extremely glad to have finally read it. This is a very moving novel indeed, exceptionally clever but never pretentious, a novel worthy of Smith's laudable influences.

The novel is set in and around one branch of the ubiquitous Global Hotels chain, tracing the experiences of five women connected in some way to this sprawling monument to Capitalism. Each section has a different female narrator and a title taken from, or aping, the name of a grammatical tense (past, present historic, future conditional, future in the past, present). Each section is seemingly stand alone, only coalescing into a complete narrative in the final lines of the book. In this way, it very much resembles William Faulkner's 'The Sound and the Fury'. As I said previously, books like Faulkner's are a tough act to follow, so it's a testament to Smith's skill as a writer that she pulls off her ambitious experimentswith such applomb.

The first section is narrated by the ghost of Sara Wilby, a teenage hotel maid who, in a horrific accident some time before, plummeted six floors to her death in a dumbwaiter she climbed into for a bet. Sara's section concerns the intangibility of life and the way in which one never feels more alive than in the moment of one's death. The second section is from the point of view of Else Freeman, a homeless woman with a chronic cough who was once interviewed by a newspaper for a crass "what's in homeless people's pockets?" feature. She begs outside the branch of Global in which Sara died and is usually driven away by hotel staff who see her as off-putting to guests. At the end of Else's section, a hotel worker gifts her a room for free, both out of pity for her and out of a sense of disgust that the hotel has so many unused rooms. This hotel worker, Lise, is the focus of the next section. Sometime after allowing Else to have the room, she has had a nervous breakdown and is attempting to fill in a medical form. While doing so, various memories of her time in the hotel surface, giving a sense of how the place runs day to day, with guests meaninglessly checking in and out, a parade of shadowed faces, a metaphor for modern life. The section also illuminates Sara and Else's stories, revealing details that help explain the previous sections. Section four is filtered through a paying guest, Penny, a hotel reviewer who becomes embroiled in a peculiar and prolonged exchange between herself, Else and a teenage girl attempting to take something out of a wall. This girl turns out to be Sara's sister Clare, whose section follows next, a first person narrative broken in syntax and coherency, the stream of consciousness representing in heartbreaking terms the depth of her grief. Finally, the novel ends with a tale from a girl from a watch shop where Sara went to get her watch repaired. The two girls were attracted to each other, but neither could act on this first flowering of love and now the watch girl does not know that Sara is dead and that is the reason she never claimed the watch back. She dreams of one day tracking down Sara and showing her the watch post repair, which she has been affectionately wearing in the interim period as "she and S.Wilby have similar sized wrists". It's a beautiful section with which to finish the book.

The themes of this book are grand ones: grief, fate, love, existence. These themes function within the microcosm of one branch of Global Hotels, but of course they also apply more widely, and that's the beauty of the book. I found the writing to be, at times, heartstoppingly beautiful, particularly in Sara's section, Clare's section and the watch girl's section. The stream of consciousness never seems forced, the modernist tics like Sara's "Wooooooohoooo" to represent her fall to death never seem overly gimmicky. I feel that Smith has certainly tackled some big questions about what it is to be alive in the twenty-first century, and has managed to ask a lot of interesting sociological questions in rather an interesting way. 'Hotel World' is certainly worthy of the hype it garnered at the time of its publication, and indeed of its place in the book displays of "prominent female authors" it often finds itself in. Recommended.

Fight Club (Chuck Palahniuk)

The best writers, to my mind, always have something meaningful to say about the societies that spawned them. Fitzgerald chronicled the decadence of the Jazz Age, Steinbeck the grim graft of day to day survival during the Great Depression. Orwell looked at the political currents of his day and imagined how they might turn out in the future, whereas Atwood examined Feminism and Anti-Feminism alike and how these two movements truly affected women. The trick that Chuck Palahniuk pulled off with his debut novel 'Fight Club' was to illustrate in graphic, lucid fashion the crisis of late twentieth century Western masculinity. What happens, in an age of soaring divorce rates, when a generation of men are raised only by women? What happens when white and blue collar workers are disenfranchised and ignored? What happens when Capitalism sits enthroned above us, a grotesque, bloated idol we cannot escape?

This is undoubtedly a novel of big ideas and part of its genius is the simplistic, hypnotically cinematic way in which they are delivered to the reader. The novel starts in medias res, with the un-named narrator atop a fictional sky-scaper with a gun in his mouth. The man who holds the gun is named Tyler Durden, and he has taught the narrator much about anarchy. It is from this predicament that the narrator's reminiscences about Tyler Durden and the Fight Clubs unfold. Palahniuk has stated in interviews that his inspiration for 'Fight Club' was 'The Great Gatsby' and you can certainly see why: the disciple tells the story of his hero, whom he loves despite his tragic flaws. The twist here, as I'm sure everybody knows already, is that the narrator is Tyler Durden. Tyler is a personality created by the narrator who could do all of the things the narrator wanted to do and could not. Ultimately, Tyler takes control of both of their destinies in a way which is never anything but compelling. The staccato syntax and choral repetition of certain phrases give the novel a unique feel, as does the flat, emotionless, pitiless fashion in which it is narrated. This is nihilistic reportage even Camus could be proud of.

There are a number of explicit criticisms of contemporary society that the novel makes in rapier fashion. We have become obsessed by greed and personal gain. We do not question the actions of our leaders. We do not experience the pain of others, nor care about this fact. The insomnia of the narrator is a metaphor for the way in which we sleepwalk our way through our lives, allowing things to happen to us, rather than making things happen. Our narrator cannot feel any kind of emotion, so attends self-help groups, where the second hand emotion gives him enough peace to sleep. Little does he know that this will lead to the birth of Tyler, which will forever change the way he deals with the world in front of him. The explosion that tears its way through the narrator's condo, destroying all of the carefully collected Ikea furniture and "tasteful" art is a punch to Capitalism's kidneys; forced to rebuild his existence from scratch, the narrator, aided by Tyler, chooses to transgress society's boundaries: to live in a rickety, written off house in the paper packing district, to give no thought to possessions or wealth, and most importantly, to fight on Saturday nights in the dingy basement of a bar. Palahniuk tells an anecdote in the Afterword about having a black eye that nobody ever asked him about. He figured that in the modern world of work, what you did in your own time did not interest anybody. They would not want the salacious details. We live in a sanitised world where nobody wants to know the ugly truth about anything. This is where the idea for 'Fight Club' comes from. The first and second rules of Fight Club are "You do not talk about Fight Club" because when they are at Fight Club, these men are not the same worker drones they are in the week, and the work they do at Fight Club gives them the self-confidence and calm to cope with anything: "Nothing can piss you off. Your word is law, and if other people break that law or question you, even that doesn't piss you off."

This transgression strikes a chord with young, directionless men all over the country. This is the point where Tyler becomes a messianic figure and the second stage of the process begins: Project Mayhem, an anarchist backlash against the establishment which takes the form of increasingly destructive criminal acts, until the narrator becomes uncomfortable with this, which is how the narrator finally discovers that he is Tyler Durden. Even his love interest, Marla Singer, a fellow support group emotional parasite, has known him as Tyler Durden. And Tyler's works will live on after him. The narrative is, at its best, dizzying and hypnotic, with each repeated phrase, rule or homemade recipe for destruction leaping off the page, signposts of madness, or of truth.

This was another re-read, and, like 'Trainspotting', a book which has been somewhat overshadowed by an excellent film adaptation. If you've seen the film, which most people have, you'll know what happens, which is why I've indulged in more spoilers than I typically would've done in a review, but even so, when you read the book, it is still shocking, still breathtaking. I think this is due to the savage, deceptively simplistic prose and a narrative voice as distinctive as anything in literature. So if you have only seen the film version of 'Fight Club', I urge you to read the novel. It is a late twentieth century marvel, and most importantly, it speaks with great clarity concerning the times in which we live.

Trainspotting (Irvine Welsh)

Anyone that knows me well knows that I am a chronic re-reader. I am one of those readers who knows their favourite books intimately; I can turn to a favoured passage at will, I'm able to quote a killer line to an assembled throng in the pub or staff room in the blink of an eye. Every time you approach a work of literature anew, you find something different to love or to think about, and this, I think, is the primary reason I so often peruse my bookshelves and choose an old friend to read. Sometimes these repeat reads are motivated by a reminder of those books that pops up on television or by a memory of a choice scene that suddenly springs to mind. Sometimes I just don't fancy making the effort to read something new. As my teaching career has gone on, the latter reason has come into play more and more. It's a mentally exhausting and insanely busy profession, and I don't have the time I used to have. In fact, part of the reason for starting this book review blog was to force myself to read books I hadn't read before. I suppose I've done quite well, five previous entries, all on books I was reading for the first time. This is my first re-read review since I started No Trick Dispels. So I guess that with the preamble over I should get on with the review proper.

I wanted to re-read 'Trainspotting' because I'd recently read two other Welsh books, one good ('Filth') and one disappointing ('Ecstasy') so it felt logical to revisit his masterpiece to see what makes it tick. There's been so much written about this book (and the attendant, box-office busting film adaptation) that in a way it's difficult to add anything, other than my own observations. I worried about this for all of thirty seconds, but then I remembered that that's the point of a blog anyway, and I stopped worrying.

It's important to point out, of course, that 'Trainspotting' the novel is a very different beast from the film that made it so famous. While the film is a linear narrative focused around Renton, the novel is narrated by many characters, as well as a filtered third person voice from time to time. There are many characters in the novel, who, sadly, did not end up in the film, including Rab "Second Prize" McLaughlin, Begbie's wife June, escapee Stevie who has managed to successfully get out of Leith, and teenage goth Nina. The character of Matty got fused with Tommy for the purposes of the film (although Tommy gets HIV in the novel, he is still alive in his council flat by the time the books ends- it is Matty who is the victim of Toxoplasmosis). Renton is a considerably less attractive figure, completely alienated from any kind of emotion beyond disgust (one particularly infamous moment that didn't make the film has him screw his pregnant, recently-widowed sister-in-law in the toilets of a hotel after the funeral of his brother). The genius of the fractured narrative is that it forms a kaleidoscopic, dissonant choir of dysfunction. Sometimes the individual stories seem to bear little relation to each other, but each one contributes something to our knowledge of life in Leith. What Welsh was able to do, which nobody had been able to do previously, was give a voice to the disenfranchised of Leith, a generation of working class youth who were offered nothing and responded with self-destruction. The anger and resentment at the chattering middle classes of Edinburgh and the swathes of tourists in town for the festival seeps through the narrative like a weeping sore. This isn't exploitative or pornographic literature, it's social realism that feels almost Dickensian at times.

It's a common misonception that 'Trainspotting' is "about" heroin. In fact, it encompasses so many aspects of the human condition, from births to deaths, from joy to despair, from comedy to tragedy. Heroin use is certainly a key plot marker and structural device (the novel's parts are entitled Kicking, Relapsing, Kicking Again, Blowing It, Exile, Home and Exit) and in a kind of homage to William Burroughs, there are short sections called Junk Dilemmas (#63 to #67) describing some of the realities of heroin use. There's also the fact that the final act of the novel sees the gang selling drugs rather than buying them. Renton's final betrayal of his friends is expertly done, much better than the film, which I felt overdramatised this part. It's Renton's understated opportunism that nakes that section work so well.

Another tired cliché about this book is that the dialect sections are "difficult" to follow. Only if you're a moron. The rhythms of Leith-speak are beautifully rendered and add another layer to Welsh's portrayal of the everyday realities of life amongst what the Victorians called the "submerged tenth" of society. Reading the novel again, I think it's the dialect that truly makes the book the punch to the solar plexus it is. In particular, Renton's observation about Begbie gets me every time: "He really is a cunt ay the first order. Nae doubt about that. The problem is, he's a mate an aw. What kin ye dae?" The characters' idiosyncracies are beautifully observed throughout, with Mark's pseudo-philosophising and anti-Scotland diatribes, Spud's describing himself and everyone else as "cats", Sick Boy's imagined conversations with an approving Sean Connery and Stevie's discomfort at returning home all rendered with a sure and memorable touch.

Welsh has often been hailed as the writer who best transferred to page the spirit of the punk generation, and this is evident in Renton's contempt for those who invent a positive national identity, with his famous observation that Scotland is the lowest of the low because it is "colonised by wankers". The cultural and historical references are spot on here, in a way that they aren't in his later works: they are seamlessly worked into the fabric of the plot rather than shoved in your face. An Iggy Pop gig attended by Tommy, Hibs and Hearts struggling against the Old Firm throughout the 1980s, Thatcher's criminally anti-working class policies, the yuppie boom in London, Edinburgh's transformation to respectable tourist destination, all are flawlessly observed. This novel is a seriously important historical document, in a similar way to Fitzgerald's 'The Great Gatsby' or Waugh's 'Vile Bodies'.

In concluding this review, I would like to recommend that everybody re-reads a favourite book from time to time. I've often taken this habit to extremes, but it's well worth the effort when a book is this good. It took me only two days to re-read this book, and my respect for it has only increased as a result. 'Trainspotting' is one of the best books of the Twentieth Century, of this I have no doubt. If you've only ever seen the film, you seriously need to read the book. The parts you remember from the film are rendered in stunning, visceral prose and the parts that didn't make the film are hidden gems. Throughout the three hundred and fifty or so pages, there's not a single bum note played. With all this considered, it's perhaps not surprising that Welsh has found it hard to match this towering achievement of a debut novel. Classics never get old. I'm certain I'll be re-reading this again before very long.