Credo / Mark Oliver

The Sportswriter

Richard Ford's novel is kind of like Catcher in the Rye for your late thirties. Frank Buscombe, as his life unravels, regularly describes a feeling of 'dreaminess' enveloping him, distracting him from making real decisions and - temporarily - insulating him against the consequences. At the start he has a striking level-headedness, and there is something impressive about how he appears to refuse to tear himself up about how his life as a writer fades away.

Women drive him and seem to be the source of all of his pleasures and problems. Early on, he describes himself as a 'seeker of women'. By the end, when his attempted seductions become more and more shambolic and pathetic - his request to sleep with his ex wife when he is at his lowest ebb, most notably - you just desperately wish for him to find someone he can be grounded with.

His tragic "friend" Walkter Luckett - who becomes suicidal after a gay tryst with a stranger - is obviously a warning that 'there by the grace of God go I'. Luckett, who is more dangerously lonely, clings to Frank, for whom this overture of friendship is unwelcome: "What's friendships realest measure? I'll tell you. The amount of precious time you'll squander on other peole's squanders and fuck-ups.

Frank is a kind of sportswriter that does not have such prominence in the UK - though I guess he is a kind of Simon Barnes, seeing emotional and philosophical messages in sports, though at the same time trying not to be pretentious about it. The sports writing world is skittish and as he roams around in the second stage of the book you want him to be doing something that will anchor him more.

The failure of the Herb interview is very good as it lays open how contrived using sports people as vehicles of inspiration can be when he finds this former star in a wheelchair so bitter and twisted by his career-ending injury.

I found that, as it got nearer the end, it became more and more unbearable to read as his life was unravels, and he becomes lonelier. He seems to try and shore himself up by chasing younger women - even though he knows suchliaisons are doomed - after making a mess of trying to secure more substantial attachments. It is like the sports writing and the womanising both reflect a commitment to the insubstantial.

His life on the road lends itself to him having a series of affairs. It is a nice touch that it is his wife's discovery of letters from a woman who he is not sleeping with which dooms his marriage. Ford shows some restraint in that, and it exemplifies asoulfulness Frank has, which is crucial to the book because you have to maintain some sympathy for him. Early on he got me when he is thinking about going to a different city and how "something hopeful and unexpected can take place". Something like:

"The exhilaration of a new arrival. Good light in a restaurant that especially pleases you . A cab driver with an interesting life history to tell. The casual, lilting voice of a woman you don't know, but that you are allowed to listen to in a bar you've never been in, at a time when you would otherwise have been alone. These things are waiting for you. And what could be better? More mysterious? More worth anticipating? Nothing. Not a thing."

It is the tension between his insistence that "I am fine", and all the signs that he is not, that makes the book so compelling.

"Some life does not give in to a sportswriter's point of view ... though in the end this is all I ask for: to participate briefly in the lives of others at a low level; to speak in a plain, truth-telling voice. to not take myself too seriously; and then to have done with it. Since after all, it is one thing to write sports, but another thing entirely to live a life."

I also like a nearby passage where he talks about how he goes about starting to write an article, where he says "what you try to do is honour  your random instincts, catch yourself off guard, and write a sentence or an unexpected descriptive line - the way the air smelled one day, or how the wind lifted and tricked off the lake surface in a peculiar way that might later make the story inevitable".

[SPOILER WARNING] The final scene is masterful. He has gone into work - where he is valued - and you start to feel him being a little more sure footed, while still fearing he might be sacked or something. He then starts this conversation with a younger woman  who is kind of an intern and you fear he is going to make some terrible fool of himself but it ends kind of upbeat, and open ended, with them going out to lunch. I loved the final atmospheric moment as they leave the office, with Frank not sure if someone can see him in a skyscraper opposite. It reminded me of the graphic novel Jimmy Corrigan when in his veal fattening pen in a skyscraper and is then rescued by a superman character who carries him away through the snow.

I now really want to read the other Buscombe novels.

The Sea, The Sea

photo: Bubblepop

I am always embarassed that I do no have that many books by female writers, so was glad to chalk up this great novel from 1978 by Iris Murdoch, which won the Booker prize. Basically the main character, retired tyranical English theatre director Charles Arrowby drives himself half mad chasing after a long lost love he comes across by chance when he retires to a quiet, seaside house.

I tired a little of the main love story but the writing and characters are so good I pushed on through.
Charles is someone who likes being alone and has shunned various women before going mad for Hartley, this lost woman from his youth.

I like that he is not needy at the start; he says he is not disappointed in life. There is a memorable, quite brutal description of Charles's batchelorhood by a rather terrifying character called Rosina, who hates him for taking her away from her husband and then dumping her because she was so awful to be with. She notes that he always tells the women in his life that his link with them is temporary.

Rosina tells Charles:

You've lived in a hedonistic dream all your life and you've got away with playing a cad because you always picked on women who could look after themselves. And my god you told us the score, you never committed yourself, you never told us you loved us even when you did! A cold fish with clean hands! But it was just luck really if the girls survived. You're like a man firing a machine gun into a supermarket who happens to not become a murderer.

I like that end bit! You have to say that is a great similie.

The form works really well - he is sort of writing a journal but comes to describe it as a diary/novel. It is enjoyably spooky at times - him all alone in that house; and things start to get moved around when he is not alone. I also enjoyed the fact that I did not always like Charles all the time - and thought that he did not treat his "friends" very well. Murdoch really captures a kind of arrogance you imagine theatre directors to have - his character just really rings true somehow. I really liked his eccentric eating habits - a fusion of cheap and expensive tastes. He loves food and at one point pays thanks to the daily "gift" of hunger. There is a lot of description of what he eats - for instance fish cakes and hot pickle - and as things unravel and there are dramatic scenes, sometimes she describes snatched, chaotic meals.

'... gold behind gold behind gold'

The sea is always there - a source of inspiration - somewhere where he swims, despite how choppy it is, as if to prove he still has virility and independence. But it is also dangerous and dark and unpredictable. This is from one of the best passages: 

I opened my eyes with wonder and the sky had utterly changed again and was no longer dark but bright, golden, gold-dust golden, as if curtain after curtain had been roved behind the stars I had seen before, and now I was looking into the vast interior of the universe, as if the universe were quietly turning itself inside out. Stars behind stars and stars behind stars until there was nothing between them, nothing beyond them, but dusty dim gold of stars and no space and no light but stars . .  . And the stars seemed to move as if one could see the rotation of the heavens as a kind of vast crepitation, only now there were no more events, no shooting stars, no falling stars, which human senses could grasp or even conceive of. All was movement, all was change, and somehow this was visible and yet unimaginable. And I was no longer I but something pinned down as an atom, an atom of an atom, a necessary captive spectator, a tiny mirror into which it was all indifferently beamed, as it motionlessly seethed and boiled, gold behind gold behind gold. 

'...wet doggy faces'

This novel also has one of the best endings I have ever read - it is both unexpected, and subtle, and moving. I mean the proper ending rather than the more prosaic postscript.

(SPOILER ALERT! DON'T READ ON IF YOU HAVE NOT READ IT: At the end, disconsalate, Charles is by the sea and encounters "wet doggy faces looking curiously upward, four seals, swimming so close to the rock I could have almost touched them". It goes on: "They played a while, gulping and gurlging a little, looking up at me all the time. And as I watched their play I could not doubt that they were beneficient beings come to visit me and to bless me.")

Franny and Zooey

"I mean do you have to be a goddam bohemian type, or dead, for Chrissake, to be a real poet? What do you want - some bastard with wavy hair?"

This is Lane, the boyfriend of Franny, in  JD Salinger's novella, Franny and Zooey. The scene, in which they are meeting for lunch on a weekend, is excruciating in how pretentious and generally dreadful they are.

It is an excellent book, which I have been meaningto read for years. The theme is about academic and maverick intellectual precocious brilliance and the strains it has on a group of  young siblings in Manhattan who used to be on a radio show for child geniuses  (cf The Royal Tenenbaums). The eldest and brightest, Seymour, committed suicide.

Franny is very troubled and has become obsessed with a religious book and something called the Jesus Prayer, which I think is something which you are supposed to internally chant continuously, the idea being that you should continuously show your devotion. "Something happens after a while," Franny  says, "and you are praying without ceasing."

The idea reminded me of a line from HG Wells, quoted in Colin Wilson's The Outsider, in which he basically says that the rational thing would be to work furiously at finding answers to life's questions - not to sleep but to strive urgently and continuously.

Franny and Zooey is kind of steeped in this sadness that seems to well up among some intelligent people when they know a few things, and perhaps know more than most about how bad things are, and they don't really see any point in anything. (SPOILER WARNING) The ending is moving - Zooey, Franny's brother, tells a story about  how Seymour used to tell him to shine his shoes before going on the show for the "Fat Lady".

He says that this picture of the Fat Lady set in his mind with her probably "sitting on a porch all day, swatting flies, with her radio going full blast from morning till night."

Then he says: "There isn't anyone anywehere who isn't Seymour's Fat Lady ... Don't you know who the Fat Lady  really is? ... Ah buddy. Ah, buddy. It's Jesus Christ buddy."

And the idea consoles Franny. I guess she is comforted by the idea that some of the yearning sensibility  of  a kind of divine connection in the ceaseless prayer which she was seduced by - which is clearly madness - is already there in the real life and people all around her.

It was interesting to read it some 15 years after first picking up The Catcher in the Rye, which, when I was a teenager, my mother originally confiscated from my shelf (could there have been a more powerful way of making me want to read it?).  Some of the notions about phoniness also resonate in Franny and Zooey and many of the characters - but not the terrible Lane - are acutely sensitive in a way that Holden was. Both books also ask questions about how, as you get older, you chose to live your life.

War Reporting for Cowards

You have to love that photograph: a study of misery. Chris Ayres is the Times' LA correspondent and his memoir covers how he began by doing work experience at the Times after doing the City journalism course and somehow went from there to being an embedded war reporter sitting in a Humvee with a group of US marines on the front lines during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The first chapter is called How to Deal with a Dead Media representative - a line taken from a section of a book that an officer has with him about the embed scheme.

My friend Simon, who also went to City and recognised some of the names in the book, recommended it to me, and it is very funny. Ayres explains how he could not say no to his posting to go to war because he was too much of a coward to say he did not want to go.

He writes about how the 90s were the years of the war virgins, and how that all changed on September 11 2001. Ayres, who was the paper's Wall Street reporter at the time, was in Manhattan on 9/11 and went down to the World Trade Centre after the planes hit. He saw people falling to their deaths and was close to dying himself when the towers collapsed. As Simon commented to me, as Ayres is going down to the towers, he is nervous about having to do interviews with real people rather than "lift and view", lifting from the New York Times and viewing news channels - the modus operandi of many a foreign hack.

The intro of his piece was: "At first w ethought it was burning debris falling from the upper floors of the World Trade Centre. Then we noticed the debris had arms and legs."

The trauma of the attacks is followed by fear of the anthrax campaign; some people in his office become affected. He makes relentless visits to his doctor and feels like he has a great new start when he is moved to LA to report on the celebrity fluff and the "economics of the celebrity fluff". Then he gets the call saying they want him embedded in Iraq. There is an hilarious scene where he goes to a Beverly Hills outdoor equipment shop with a list of stuff he needs sent by the Pentagon.

The guy at the store asks him if the war is going to happen and he explains that if someone like him is buying all this stuff from someone like him then "we can safely assume it is going to happen ... I don't think there is any doubt at all".

The experience of being in the Humvee, is, of course, terrifying and when he finds a way of getting away from the front after nine days, he takes it. While he is out there, the book evokes the fear and the surreal, dark comedy.  One of the marines can't believe Ayres has a big blue kevlar vest and tells him he is the only blue thing in the desert and that snipers will probably think he is a top general. The same guy also likes pressing the vest, which says Press in white letters. "I'm pressing!"

In the end, he becomes brave enough to be able to say that he wants to leave and he says he feels stronger for losing his war virginity. One US blogger, Frenchy of Frenchy's Book Club, says the problem is "Ayres was only embedded for nine days!" but goes on to praise the descriptions of being in Iraq, and says " I have to give Ayres credit, at least he's brave enough to admit he is a coward".

Careers in journalism can be quixotic. Ayres, who is way way more successful, is about the same age as me, and is from Northumberland, not a million miles from Durham, where I grew up. I have never really been anywhere dangerous. I was in Belfast just ahead of the Omagh bombing in 1998 and remember going, a week earlier, to the scene of an earlier Real IRA bomb at another market town - Ballymena?  - that was the same size but miraculously nobody got badly hurt. And I remember being freaked out by the wreckage and being up close to teenage British troops with assault rifles.

I also went to a mini riot in Portadown near the Garvarghy Road and watched loyalist marchers throw missiles and petrol bombs towards a line of police officers between them and some Catholic houses. A fortnight later, in exactly that place, a petrol bomb hit a police officer in the face and he died a few days later.

Obviously I did not see anything  equivalent to a war. But, it's funny, reading the book - and despite identifying strongly with the notion of a cowardly/ self preserving approach to that kind of journalism - it did make me rather hanker to get out into the world a bit. Although, I, like Ayres, am not very keen on ending up in an al-Qaida webcast, not that there is a big danger of that working in Clerkenwell. And I note what he wrote about how being in Iraq as a journalist meant you were ten times more likely to be killed than a coalition soldier.

I reported on a police raid of crack houses for the Guardian three years ago - and got to be in a police van with the woo woos on.  I think maybe that's about the level of danger I'm after.

A poem is a city

  Bukowski 
  Originally uploaded by gibridehome.

A poem is a city
a poem is a city filled with streets and sewers
filled with saints, heroes, beggars, madmen,
filled with banality and booze,
filled with rain and thunder and periods of
drought, a poem is a city at war,
a poem is a city asking a clock why,
a poem is a city burning,
a poem is a city under guns
its barbershops filled with cynical drunks,
a poem is a city where God rides naked
through the streets like Lady Godiva,
where dogs bark at night, and chase away
the flag; a poem is a city of poets,
most of them quite similar
and envious and bitter...
a poem is this city now,
50 miles from nowhere,
9:09 in the morning,
the taste of liquor and cigarettes,
no police, no lovers, walking the streets,
this poem, this city, closing its doors,
barricaded, almost empty,
mournful without tears, aging without pity,
the hardrock mountains,
the ocean like a lavender flame,
a moon destitute of greatness,
a small music from broken windows...

a poem is a city, a poem is a nation,
a poem is the world...

and now I stick this under glass
for the mad editor's scrutiny,
the night is elsewhere
and faint gray ladies stand in line,
dog follows dog to estuary,
the trumpets bring on gallows
as small men rant at things
they cannot do.

Charles Bukowski

___________

I came across this poem in the film Factotum, which is based on the famous cauliflower-faced poet ("lying in the gutter staring at the stars" division) and dependable patron of LA's bars and flophouses. The poem is better than the film, though it has a few good lines: "All I want to do is get my check and get drunk". I've read a couple of his books, including Women, which seems to include an encounter with a new lady about once every page and a half, and want to read Post Office. For some reason I have always been put off by the fact that his books always seem to cost a small fortune.

I have discovered on Google Video, something called the Bukowski tapes, which apparently is a four hour documentary  on him , broken  up into 52 segments. In this one he talks about getting rooms and how he fantasises of making the one landlady fall in love with him so he could have her cook for him, and he could laze around. (Interestingly, I just noticed you can download Google Video in files for iPods - maybe I should stack up some Bukowski segments).

He was born in Germany in 1920; his mother was German and his dad was a Polish American and the family later moved to LA. Bukowski died in 1994, which was not a bad stretch given his boozing - in Women he speaks about running at 300 hangovers a year, which is a terrifying thought. He seems to be one of the most autobiographical writers, writing and living hand to mouth.

Factotum ends with this, a kind of manifesto, as Matt Dillon's Bukowski character watches a stripper:

If you're going to try, go all the way. Otherwise don't even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives, jobs. And maybe your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery, isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance. Of how much you really want to do it. And you'll do it, despite rejection in the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you're going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods. And the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It's the only good fight there is.

The Snack Thief

  The Snack Thief 
  Originally uploaded by fled is that music.

I tried to join a book club tonight at my local library. I have wanted to join one for years and this was my chance. I arrived a few minutes late and the woman at the desk said I had just missed the book group who meet at the library then move elsewhere, to somewhere with tea and cake, I now imagine.

"Did you see the group of ladies?" she asked.

I had seen five or so middle aged women going out the library when I arrived. "You might be able to catch them."

I raced outside in hot pursuit and chased round a corner. But they had got into a car and I suddenly lost my nerve. Going to a book group was one thing but stopping a car full of people I did not know, like a highwayman, was another. The ladies also looked quite big. And I was not sure I would fit in, literally and figuratively.

So, I trooped him and Credo will have to be the repository for my thoughts on the book club's book of the month, Andrea Camilleri's The Snack Thief. The book is an Inspector Montalbano Mystery.

The story is about a guy who is stabbed to death in a lift who has been having an affair with his Tunisian cleaning lady who meets him in his office for tri-weekly trysts ... only he may be being blackmailed and his death linked to a Tunisian fisherman who is shot by a Tunisian patrol boat while on an Italian fishing boat.

But what it is really about is the inspector, a gourmond who is summed up by the figure in the dustjacket eating dinner while a mysterious man looms in the distance.

It seems the key to making a good detective is that they must have some sort of passion, like women or gambling. Morse had his classical music, bitter and classical cars. I think Rebus is probably a boozer. Montalabno is a hopeless foodie.

In one crucial scene near the end, the inspector is facing a shady character in his own home, and is in some danger and conduct the whole confrontation while eating. He does not invite his quarry to share, save for allowing him to get his own glass of tap water.

"Montalabno felt his rage growing; one more word would surely have been a mistake. He reached out with one hand, brought the dish of ice cream nearer, and began to eat."

Camilleri uses a dizzying number of names. I scrawled them out on the back of the book as I read and I think there were almost 40 names by page 40. Many of them never appear again. Perhaps it is a self-conscious device: you are bamboozled by so many characters and feel a disorientation akin to trying to work out who the culprit is. The sense of mystery is driven forward by so many red herrings.

Like many detective mysteries it uses the device of starting out with two seemingly unconnected murders, and then they slowly come together.

He is a comic creation, of course, for example he convinces one official to help him by pretending he is throttling him and calling in two officers. It is all somehow done with a style and lightness of touch that softens the comedy and makes it kind of like the sun that shines through this compelling invented world. And you guess that you learn a little about Italy and the Italian temperament, the bureaucracy and the corruption are there, alongside the pleasantness of Italian life.

I started out thinking that it was just entertainment, and not literature, and I still think this more or less, though it is very well done. It does make you think about certain questions of morality, and the ending is surprisingly moving as he tries to avoid seeing his father on his deathbed.

I can see how you could fall a bit in love with Montalabno. You start out thinking he is a nightmare and rude but then he slowly wins you over with his brilliance in spotting various clues. There also something betwitching about how he sabotages his promotion - he is, in a way, a man happy in his own skin. Any time spent in his company is a great pleasure and I may well read some of the mysteries.

James Bond, Britain's consolation

  Casino Royale Poster 
  Originally uploaded by Stair of Juno.

I have to confess that I did not really know as much as I should have done about the Suez crisis. There is a great piece in this week's Economist outlining what happened 50 years ago. What caught my eye was a section about how Anthony Eden recuperated from the crisis in Ian Fleming's house, Goldeneye, in Jamaica. The Economist says:

"It was an appropriate choice, as it was Fleming who was to mythologise the new relationship in his James Bond novels. The first, “Casino Royale”, was published to little attention in 1953, but the series took off in the years after the Suez crisis, offering some sort of literary consolation to a country coming to terms with its new, humbler status. The partnership between Bond and Felix Leiter, a CIA agent, reflected the way the British now liked to see things, the one suave, smart and endlessly resourceful, the other with a lot of money and a slightly plodding manner."

I think Tony Blair might sometimes fancy himself a little as a James Bond figure. He does sometimes where those Paul Smith shirts with silouettes of women on the inside of the cuff.

I read Casino Royale earlier this year, and really enjoyed it. I have seen the trailer for the film and don't really recognise half the scenes from the novel, which is quite a tight story with most of the action happening in the casino. The first lines of the book are fantastic:

"The scent and smoke of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning. Then the soul-erosion produced by high-gambling - a compost of greed and fear and nervous tension - becomes unbearable and the senses awake and revolt from it."

Young Adam

  Young Adam 
  Originally uploaded by fled is that music.

Alexander Trocchi’s novella has a gripping plot revolving around a blocked writer/ bargeman in Scotland whose ex-girlfriend accidentally slips fatally into a river while he is with her; an innocent man is put on trial for murder.

Adam, who has the soul of a drifter / literary outsider, struggles with his conscience about whether he should intervene but worries he will only end up in the dock himself.

He is a paid hand living cheek by jowel on a barge with Leslie and his wife Ella, who he starts an affair with the day they, coincidentally, fish the dead woman out of the water.

The development of the affair, in such cramped quarters (his little room is right next to the marital bed), is compelling because it seems so risky and vulnerable to discovery.

Adam’s unease at admitting he was with his ex-girlfriend when she died seems to chime with his general unwillingness to commit to any kind of responsibility in his life. He lived with her earlier on, before they split, and she supported him as he tried, and failed to write some kind of original type of book. She tells him he should have been rich. His background as a kind of working class intellectual, forced to take manual jobs, means that he is basically geared towards surviving first and foremost – principally surviving the noose. He often wonders about going overseas.

After the affair is discovered he is quietly horrified by Ella’s remark that “We seem to have settled for one another”, and he fears she is encroaching on his identity.

I am a rootless kind of man. Often I find myself anxious to become involved with other people, but I am no sooner involved than I wish to be free again. Ten years ago I walked out of a university one spring morning with a small overnight bag. I never returned. Since then I have worked when I needed money, because I felt like moving, because I had to break out of a situation in which, though the necessities of life were provided for me, I felt myself being crushed.

You are left thinking that his life would have been much better if he had stayed with his girlfriend. He survives and retains his independence, but his lack of connections to anyone, even though it is cloaked in the tough glamour of the outsider, seems a desparate way of living.

He fails to write and seems to find only release and transcendence in seduction (the book was first published by Olmypia Press in Paris in 1954 and must have been pretty racy stuff then). It is like he channels his difference from those around him in the working class world into a sexual attractiveness – a consolation for his position as a kind of Jude the Obscure, and maybe one of the mechanisms that is trapping him there. There is a memorable custard / S and M sex scene.

Coincidentally, I read a New Statesman piece today by Ryan Gilbey about Michael Mann’s new film, Miami Vice, which dwelled on similar themes about heroic loners. It said Mann’s films held up this kind of character, who he said seemed most happy when living alone in minimalist flats, but criticised him for having a lack of “emotional maturity”. Gilbey says Mann depicts families as entanglements; Mann seems to want us to admire the professionalism of Tom Cruise’s loner assassin in Collateral. Gilbey also quotes the memorable line by the Robert De Niro villain in Heat who tells how he was once advised that you should always be able to walk away from anything in your life in 30 seconds. A credo which, apparently like Young Adam’s, is rooted in survival.

So there you go: similarities between the outsider hero of the barges in 1950s Scotland and Crockett and Tubbs.

Trocchi's style is sparse; there are great moments of characterisation. Adam, a seemingly hopeless womaniser, has sex with Ella’s sister Gwendoline and then she picks up her cigarette, which she has left smouldering in the grass. Her mouth is described as being like “blood on porcelain”.

It is a short, tight direct book, which evokes a powerful atmosphere very economically. Raymond Carver said that it was important to write as "subtly as a waterstream" and even though there are such broad plot strokes as a death of a lover, an affair and a dramatic trial, the texture still feels light and earned.

Incidentally, the film of Young Adam, starring Ewan McGregor, which I saw a few years ago when it came out, is one of the most faithful adaptations of any book that I have ever seen.

A Confederacy of Dunces

  Ignatius Reilly 
  Originally uploaded by Sir Velvet.

The terrible fact of author John Kennedy Toole's suicide looms large over the book. It was published 11 years after he killed himself, apparently devastated by his failure to publish his work. Having read the book, you get the feeling though, that he might have had some appreciation of the grim irony of the fact that it went on to be a literary comedy classic.

My friend Truff had highly recommended it to me. It is, of course, also namechecked in the fantastic Sideways movie, by the main character, the failing writer who identifies with Toole.

I liked the book but did not love it, although you have to love Ignatius J Reilly, who is unarguably one of literature's  great comic characters. I think, though, that it was the plot which I had a problem with - it did not pull me through enough. The characterisation of Igantius is great but, I don't know, he does become a little predictably horrible. It is funny, but not hilarious.

I laboured with the plot a bit in the middle of the book but I did enjoy the ending. I like the final lines about him kissing his friend's pigtale with his wet moustache, which just sounds outrageously unpleasant. I liked the stuff about Ignatius keeping his wordy journals and filling countless big tablet pads with his pseudish writings. I like to think it also evoked New Orleans well. Apparently people dress up as Ignatius and he is quite well known down there in the French Quarter. I can see how people could fall in love with the character - the problematic valve, the hat ... the unspeakable glove.

And yet I don't really think there was much in there that really stirred my soul (unlike, say the great New York Times's piece by Anne Rice about the city following Katrina). It will be interesting to see if I think about the book over the coming days. I do though feel a little glad to be released from it and from Igantius's sweaty paw.

The New York Trilogy

  The New York Trilogy 
  Originally uploaded by clownsaw.

It is fantastic how Paul Auster's book subverts and, as the dustjacket says, "transforms" the genre detective story. The way the stories run into each other and ask questions they don't full answer is enchanting, and escapes being frustrating.

The relationship and merging between the writer / private dick is interesting, and a great device. It is about how you can get lost in a "case" or a story, or a city.

I loved the bits about the Tower of Babel, an amazingly powerful story I had heard before but never really thought properly about. Using it with a story about a man who kept someone in the dark to grow up to try and create a "pure" unfallen language was a tour de force.

The final story with the Nietzschean figure Fanashawe, who has turned his back on what he once loved because he needs to live differently to other men, captured me the most. The family duty v personal dubious voyage of discovery theme I am strongly interested in. I also like portraits of ubermensch, and the catastrophes their decisions make.

It also really captures something of the city and you get a sense of walking around it with the careful use of street names. Something of the gritty glamour of New York. The noir glamour. It expertly balances story development with descriptive observation. It defies cliche and echoes something of Delillo's paranoia and conspiracy theory obsession. It is of that great tradition of readable literature.