A question, inspired by my reading of Transition, for Sunday Salon menbers who pass by (and, indeed, anyone else!): what books have you read that turned out differently from how you expected?
Author: David Hebblethwaite
Mercury Prize: Sweet Billy Pilgrim – Twice Born Men
Audio: ‘Joy Maker Machinery’
There are several very obscure acts on this year’s Mercury shortlist, but perhaps none more so than the Buckinghamshire trio Sweet Billy Pilgrim. The story is great: Twice Born Men (their second album) was recorded in a shed, funded by selling stuff on eBay; and Tim Elsenburg — the band’s singer, songwriter and producer, who is an office maintenance man by trade — was fitting a toilet seat when he found out about their Mercury nomination. I warmed to them just from reading that, before I’d even heard a note.
And now I have listened to the album… it’s extraordinary. Sweet Billy PIlgrim recall Elbow in some places and even Sigur Rós in others, but their vision is all their own. Twice Born Men is full of rustic, homespun songs that blossom into big, expansive epics. Elsenburg has a charming croon, and the music is full of interesting quirks — if there’s an actual kitchen sink on there, I wouldn’t be surprised.
There’s only one song here that I think is below par (‘Longshore Drift’, which never quite takes off as the others do), which is unfortunate when, with eight tracks, the album doesn’t really have room to put a foot wrong. But the rest is great, and you should check these guys out — I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.
Video: ‘Kalypso’ (live)
Read my other Mercury Prize 2009 posts here.
Mercury Prize: Speech Debelle – Speech Therapy
Video: ‘The Key’
And so we come to the début album by London rapper Corynne Elliott, alias Speech Debelle — and I may be stuck for much to say about it. The thing is, I’m just not into rap. Like jazz, I can’t appreciate it properly; and that’s bound to affect how I judge Speech Therapy. We’ll see how it goes…
Of all the albums on the Mercury shortlist, this must be the most intensely personal. Debelle’s lyrics draw on such experiences as her father walking out on her and her mother (‘Daddy’s Little Girl’), and living in hostels (‘Searching’). ‘This is my speech therapy, this isn’t rap,’ she says on the title track; and there’s a strong sense of catharsis throughout the album. But there’s hope and celebration on tracks like ‘Buddy Love’.
So, Speech Therapy isn’t my cup of tea; but, with its acoustic backing and personal lyrics, it’s a distinctive rap album.
Video: ‘Working Weak’ (live)
Read my other Mercury 2009 posts here.
Heroes in the Wind: From Kull to Conan (2009) by Robert E. Howard
Heroes in the Wind is a new volume from Penguin Modern Classics collecting together fourteen stories by Robert E. Howard, selected and introduced by John Clute. In a way, this development may be surprising: if you’d never read a word of Howard, what would you imagine his stories to be? Escapist potboilers with mighty-thewed heroes, perhaps? In a range of ‘classics’?
Clute asks a similar question at the start of his introduction: knowing what we do about Howard, should we — do we want to — read him? Yes, says Clute, because whatever else Howard was, he was a storyteller (literally speaking the words of his stories aloud as he typed them); and because he had more to say to us than bald synopses of his tales may suggest.
What do I make of that, reading Howard for the first time here in 2009, and being of a similar age as he was towards the end of his career? I cannot be as enthusiastic as Clute, but I do see where he’s coming from.
Let it be acknowledged first of all that the negative aspects we may anticipate — the stereotyping, the bloody violence — are indeed here; and, regardless of the distance of history, they make for unpleasant reading (to put it mildly). But, side-by-side with these, Howard’s fiction has what Clute referred to in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy (1997) as the ‘wind of Story’ — a restless storytelling energy that led to such dynamic passages as this charge into battle led by Cormac of Connacht (from ‘Kings of the Night’):
A wild roar answered [Cormac], and loosing rein he shot down the slope with five hundred yelling riders plunging headlong after him. And even at that moment a storm of arrows swept the valley from either side like a dark cloud and the terrible clamor of the Picts split the skies. And over the eastern ridge, like a sudden burst of rolling thunder on Judgment Day, rushed the war-chariots. Headlong down the slope they roared, foam flying from the horses’ distended nostrils, frantic feet scarcely seeming to touch the ground, making naught of the tall heather…
I can’t deny the sheer kinetic force of such writing. Yet I find myself feeling ambivalent about these stories. I think it’s because I don’t find the positive qualities to which Clute refers to be as prevalent within the tales as I’d have liked.
Yes, I know: other people’s readings should have no bearing on mine; but this is one occasion where what I’ve read about the book (namely Clute’s introduction) has influenced how I read the book. I don’t actually think that’s a bad thing here, because Heroes in the Wind is Clute’s book as well as Howard’s; and I feel it’s only right to pay attention to his views on the material he has compiled.
Clute’s introduction is, incidentally, a fine example of what an introduction should do, which is to provide context and illuminate the book in a way that enhances the reading experience, rather than obviating it. How many times have you seen an introduction to a work of ‘classic’ fiction that starts with a warning like: ‘This introduction makes the plot of the book plain’ — or that does exactly that, but without the warning? Not here, thankfully.
The main positive qualities of Howard’s stories that I take from Clute’s introduction are the dynamism of telling which I noted earlier; and a certain sense of bleakness that gives the tales more of an edge. I see both of these qualities in the stories themselves; the trouble is that, too often, I found myself noticing them intellectually, rather than feeling them emanating from the prose (admittedly, this was more often an issue with the latter quality than the former).
The stories of Heroes in the Wind are grouped into three sections. The first contains early sword and sorcery tales with a number of protagonists, notably the Atlantean Kull, King of Valusia, and the Pict Bran Mak Morn. Though there is an energy about these pieces (they include ‘Kings of the Night’, from which I quoted the passage above), I get a sense of it being held back. In part, I think this is because the characters are held back somewhat (most especially Kull, who longs for the days when he was a warrior, free to roam); and of course Howard had less experience as a writer then.
What I think comes through most strongly in these first tales is a sense of horror at what lies beneath the skin of reality: most of them involve an encounter with supernatural entities from beyond (on a historical note, it’s fascinating to see how much thinner the line the line between sword and sorcery and horror could be eighty years ago than it is today). There’s also a recurring theme that time and civilisations will pass, that we are ‘the jest of the gods’ – but the full force of this didn’t come across the same.
The volume’s second section moves away from sword and sorcery; and it’s here, in ‘Graveyard Rats’, that I find Howard really hitting his stride. This is a horror story which begins with a man being driven insane when he finds his dead (and buried) brother’s head on the mantel and goes on to unravel what happened, and why. The momentum of this piece never lets up, and Howard smartly plays on our expectations; but I wouldn’t go so far as Clute does in calling it ‘an oneiric vision of how the world claws its victims into obedience and death’ — I don’t find the story quite as powerful as that.
Also in this section is one of the collection’s longest tales, ‘Vultures of Wahpeton’. John Middleton, the sheriff of Wahpeton, hires a Texan named Steve Corcoran as his deputy to deal with a mysterious gang known as the Vultures. But there’s more to the situation than meets the eye: Middleton is actually the leader of the Vultures, and makes a deal with Corcoran to double-cross the gang and split a hoard of gold. And the intrigues continue… Again, Clute is a good guide to the story — ‘we are left with a sense of the profound entrapping starkness of the world’ — but, also again, I do not feel this as strongly as he suggests. There is a bleak moral complexity to this piece: ‘Vultures’ could as well be a metaphor as the name of a gang; and, thanks to his background, even Corcoran’s moral code is more elastic than one would anticipate from a ‘hero’ (even taking into account historical distance). Yet, I keep coming back to that same stumbling-block: that something stops me experiencing this on a deeper emotional level. I’m coming to think that I just don’t find Howard’s pulp style very effective in this regard.
On to the final section, and Howard’s most famous creation — Conan; and, straight away, I feel that the ‘wind of Story’ blows more strongly here than it did through the earlier sword and sorcery tales. Conan is a freer protagonist, and Howard’s telling is freer; ‘The Tower of the Elephant’ demonstrates marvellously what its genre can offer: the unceasing forward motion of the quest, and the fizz of strangeness and magic. I don’t think it works quite so well when we don’t travel directly with Conan (or Howard’s secondary protagonists)– for example, there are passages in ‘A Witch Shall Be Born’ in which past events are reported, and they don’t have the same impact as when we are ‘there’, so to speak; but, at his best, Howard is every bit the storyteller that Clute’s introduction promises.
I’d like to conclude by returning to a subject I mentioned in passing at the beginning — are these stories really escapist? I suppose, before I started Heroes in the Wind, I was expecting to find bracing adventure stories within. What I found was something slightly different, something that I don’t feel is quite so well suited to being read for escapist motives; because these stories seem all too mindful that there is ultimately no escape. In this context, the fight of the warrior reads like a frantic attempt to beat back the inexorable tide of reality — the kind of bleakness to which Clute refers. [EDIT 9th Sept: I’ve been made aware that my wording here is not as clear as it could be, so I’ll clarify. I was talking about escapism because it’s an accusation often – and often unfairly – levelled at fantasy. Howard’s fiction isn’t like that, which, in my view, is wholly a positive attribute.]
In the end, I have to say I’m rather ambivalent towards these stories as a whole; I see what’s good about them, but there isn’t quite enough of it in them for me. But there’s more to Howard’s tales than first appearances suggest; and his heroes will live on. I think it’s good that we have Heroes in the Wind as an overview.
Mercury Prize: Lisa Hannigan – Sea Sew
Video: ‘I Don’t Know’
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County Meath’s Lisa Hannigan was, of course, Damien Rice’s singing partner, until he sacked her last year. But Hannigan is, I’d say, a much better singer than Rice, so a solo album from her was always going to be an intriguing prospect. I’d heard a couple of Hannigan’s songs, and they were catchy, folky numbers; and her performance on Later… with Jools Holland outshone all the others in that particular episode. So I was expecting Sea Sew to be good.
But it’s not good. It’s brilliant.
Listening to See Sew reminded me very much of the second Reindeer Section album, which grew on me by stealth until it became one of the most treasured records I own. I think there’s a very good chance that Hannigan’s album will do the same. Yet it’s hard to convey in words just what it is about Sea Sew that’s so extraordinary. Yes, this is a set of ten folky pop songs through which floats Hannigan’s delicate voice, singing her convoluted, oblique lyrics. And yet… there’s so much that that description doesn’t capture.
There’s the variety of sounds that Hannigan manages to encompass, from the bounce of ‘I Don’t Know’ to the quiet menace of ‘Keep it All’. There are the many subtleties, such as the way ‘An Ocean and a Rock’ bobs up and down on its melody like a boat, or the way that ‘Venn Diagram’ and ‘Teeth’ soar upwards so unexpectedly and magnificently.
(I must also mention the sleeve and lyric sheet, which were hand-sewn by Hannigan and her mother. Now that’s dedication to your art, a dedication that resounds throughout the music, too.)
Let me put it this way: I cannot listen to Sea Sew without ending up with a smile on my face and an uplifting feeling inside. I wish all music would evoke that strength of feeling, and I’m enormously pleased that I’ve found another album which does.
Video: ‘An Ocean and a Rock’ (live)
Read my other Mercury Prize 2009 posts here.
Link: Jeff VanderMeer on genre ‘culture wars’
Just wanted to share this insightful post by Jeff VanderMeer, in which he argues against drawing lines in the sand between ‘genre’ and ‘literature’. An extract:
I just want smart and savvy and, yeah, I veer between wanting simple and wanting complex, of loving and appreciating a novel that gives me traditional pleasures and then loving and appreciating a novel that has no interest in giving me those traditional pleasures but something else just as pleasurable instead (to avoid using false oppositions like “entertainment versus literary”) and there’s nothing pretentious or pulpish about that.
I would tend to agree with that.
Confessions of a Fallen Angel (2008) by Ronan O’Brien
A childhood brush with death leaves the (unnamed) narrator of Ronan O’Brien’s Dublin-set first novel with the kind of ‘gift’ he could do without: dreams of his best friend drowning. Convinced that these dreams are prophetic, he tries to avert the fatal events; but inadvertently causes his friend’s death — which occurs in exactly the manner foretold. A few years later, the visions return, this time showing the death of Mrs Horricks, the old (and later retired) librarian whom the boy has befriended. In due course, the dreams again come true — at the same time as an innocent mix-up over a defaced library book escalates into an incident that lands the narrator in a young offenders’ institution.
Upon his release, the young man (now aged 19) manages to get a job behind the bar at a rough pub named Happy’s. It’s here that he meets his soulmate, the beautiful Ashling; the two fall head-over-heels in love and, in short order, marry. But we know (because the narrator has already told us) that it will end in tragedy: our man dreams of his wife’s death, and destiny proceeds as before. The loss of Ashling sends the protagonist into a downward spiral of depression and alcoholism, and he is placed in a psychiatric unit.
When he’s released into society once more, the narrator decides to sell his house, and unwittingly ends up moving next door to Norman Valentine, a violent thug he first met back in the young offenders’ institution. He meets — and, over time, finds that he cares deeply for — Valentine’s abused wife Chloe, and daughter Zoe. Then our man provides the evidence that leads to Valentine’s arrest for assault; and the dreams come back, foretelling the death of Zoe. Will tragedy strike once again, or can the protagonist defy fate at last?
The great strength of Confessions of a Fallen Angel is the portrayal of its central character and his journey through life. It is quite disarming at first to discover that this lively, amiable narrative voice belongs to someone who has seen so much of life’s darker side. But what O’Brien does so convincingly is to show how an intelligent, fundamentally decent lad with a sharp tongue could fall through the cracks. School doesn’t really interest the boy, then his stepbrother wrecks the library book; one thing leads to another, and he ends up where he does, instead of on the more successful path one senses he could have taken had life worked out just a little differently.
Another aspect of the plot that I thought rang particularly true was the way our man falls in love. This happens twice, and each time is subtly different. The first time, with Ashling, O’Brien captures the whirlwind of ‘true love’, and just about succeeds in making it nearly as wonderful to read about as it is for the characters to experience (though it does feel a little too sickly at times). The second time the narrator falls in love is with Chloe, but it’s love of a different sort (though no less genuine) — not the intensity of falling for ‘the one’, but a more gradual flowering of attraction. One gains the impression that O’Brien is a skilled observer and depictor of life.
As a character, the narrator comes vividly to life; his sharp wit is especially welcome, as it undercuts even the bleakest episodes of his story, and maintains a constant thread of hope. O’Brien’s secondary characters don’t have quite the same depth (perhaps inevitably, as they’re all viewed through the lens of his narrator), but some leave quite a strong impression — in particular the librarian who replaces Mrs Horricks (he’s something of a comic cut, but you’ll surely have encountered people like him); and Norman Valentine, the kind of dangerous individual one wishes didn’t exist and hopes never to meet.
O’Brien gives his tale a light dusting of fantasy, which ultimately soured it for me a little. The narrator’s dreams aren’t a problem: they’re just a harmless plot device. But the author’s use of the afterlife gives the novel (particularly the ending) something of a fairytale aspect that O’Brien doesn’t manage to reconcile with the harsh reality of the protagonist’s life. It makes the ending feel cosier than it really is. Nevertheless, Confessions of a Fallen Angel shines brightly as a character study, and is a fine début.
SHORT FICTION REVIEW: Jupiter XXIV, Iocaste (April 2009)
I have a review up at The Fix of the April 2009 issue of the science fiction magazine Jupiter. I won’t say much here, as it’s all in the review; but this particular issue has stories by David Conyers; Gustavo Bondoni; Andrew Knighton; A.J. Kirby; James McCormick; and Gareth D. Jones.
Mercury Prize: Led Bib – Sensible Shoes
Video: ‘Sweet Chilli’
Led Bib are a jazz act from London; and the difficulty I have writing about Sensible Shoes — their third album — is that I’m not much of a jazz person. I haven’t the first idea how to describe or evaluate jazz; so I’m concerned that anything I say about the album here will come across as silly, naïve, or damning with faint praise — none of which I want. I think the sleeve notes say it best when they describe Sensible Shoes as ‘a cataclysmic offering of free-jazz, jazz-rock, avant-skronk, funk-rock, noise-metal and whatever else [the band] can lay their hands on.’ With that, I’ll let the music here speak for itself.
Video: ‘Squirrel Carnage’ (extract – live)
Read my other Mercury Prize 2009 posts here.
My favourites of 2009 so far…
I know we’re some way past the halfway point of 2009, but I wanted to do a mini-review of the year so far, as I’ve read so many great books this year that I’d like to highlight the best once again. So these are my top five reads of the year so far (all had their first UK publication in 2009), in alphabetical order (click the titles to read my reviews):
Keith Brooke, The Accord
Eleanor Catton, The Rehearsal
Rana Dasgupta, Solo
Margo Lanagan, Tender Morsels
Adam Roberts, Yellow Blue Tibia
An honourable mention goes to Ken Grimwood’s Replay, which is my favourite pre-2009 book that I read for the first time this year. All six books are excellent, and I woud urge you to seek them out.
(Of course, I don’t just blog about books on here; so, for the sake of completeness: my favourite fiilm of the year so far is Franklyn; and favourite album of the year so far is Kingdom of Rust by Doves, which I will get around to blogging about eventually…)
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