Read & Rec'd, December 2005
One Hundred Bullets - Brian Azzarello & Eduardo Risso
I caught the Hundred Bullets bug sometime last year, and have been an addict ever since; I now own every graphic novel in the series and grab the new ones as soon as they hit the shelves. With Brian Azzarello's street-honed dialogue and zig-zag paranoid script, perfectly partnered with Eduardo Risso's odd-angled, brooding illustration, you have here the freshly distilled essence of modern noir. These are stories from the underbelly of American life, voluptuously twining through and around a headlong conspiracy thriller fuelled on the corrupt, same-as-it-ever-was noir blend of sex, violence, power and money. Reading One Hundred Bullets has to be the nearest any of us can get nowadays to the buzz of the old pulp crime magazines of the thirties and forties. The series is a little shaky at its inception, so I'd advise starting at volume 3, Hang Up on the Hang Low, which is as close to a self contained single volume story as you'll get this early in the series (and also won the 2001 Eisner award for best serialised short story). If that works for you, then you'll need to back up and go again from the beginning. The first book, First Shot Last Call feels, by comparison, a little tentative and rough around the edges, but by the time you get to volume 2, Split Second Chance, Azzarello and Risso are really rolling. After that, there's no looking back.
White Man's Burden - William Easterly
I read Easterly's first book, The Elusive Quest for Growth, as part of the background for Market Forces, and found it an odd mix of iconoclasm (Easterly was apparently invited to resign from his post at the World Bank as a result of it) and orthodox neo-liberal economic faith. Now, in White Man's Burden, the same author seems to have found a way to reconcile these two disparate threads to his thinking, by in effect indicting a single common factor - the on-going self serving and patronising intervention of first world power in third world affairs. This indictment is even handed and specific - Live 8 campaigners and the Bush administration come in for equally savage criticism, as Easterly develops a surprisingly simple and robust theme; that the attempt to impose massive international fifteen year plans and huge top down political missions is doomed to failure by its very nature. You cannot invade a nation and impose democracy from the top down, and you cannot "save Africa from poverty" from the top down either. And what Easterly finds so suspicious in both cases is that the plans and solutions which we in the west are so keen to deploy in the third world are usually the very antithesis of what we would encourage or allow in our own countries. This, Easterly argues quietly, will not do. Why it will not do, and what will do in instead, is the meat of a fascinating and impassioned treatise by a man who has been at the sharp end of these issues for much of his working life. Reading it felt like a revelation - though not always a pleasant one.
Vellum - Hal Duncan
This was a real treat - sprawling imaginative fiction with attitude and ambition to spare. Vellum reads like a cross between one of Michael Moorcock's grander flights of anarchic fancy and some of William Burroughs' most feverish imaginings. It also felt weirdly familiar because Hal Duncan outlined the story to me in a noodle house on Sauchiehall street a good year before it was accepted for publication, and it blew me away then too. Sumerian myth echoes cyberpunk frenzy echoes Joycean twentieth century angst echoes fantastical tableaus out of the pages of a Vertigo comic, all playing out across a textured landscape so large your average fantasy novel map wouldn't even make a pimple on the arse of this one. Vellum is a huge book in all senses, a weighty chunk of manic, flash-lit, anti-linear narrative, which doesn't progress so much as spiral in and out of focus, and doesn't end so much as drift to a lulled halt while we all wait with baited breath for the second volume, Ink, which promises to be out early next year. It's a testament to the kaleidoscopic power of the writing that this break-point somehow brings a perfectly acceptable sense of closure for the reader while simultaneously firing you up with desire for the next instalment. This is without doubt the most powerful and startling book I've read all year.
The Dispossessed - Ursula Le Guin
Very flatteringly, I was asked this year to write an introduction for the new UK edition of The Dispossessed, and so thought I'd better read it again before I started prattling on about its sundry virtues. Cue major shock - I'd completely forgotten how deeply this novel moved me when I read it first time around, nearly twenty years ago. It's a curiously quiet tale of a disaffected physicist leaving his anarchist homeworld for the bright promise of fame and funding on another planet whose politics oddly enough will be very familiar to anyone who has lived on Earth at all during the twentieth century. Out of this deceptively simple narrative, Le Guin manages to spin a wholesale political demolition of western consumer culture, while at the same time performing equally merciless surgery on idealised leftism and its failures. The Dispossessed is a shining example of what can be achieved in the genre without having to go begging bowl in hand to mainstream literature. It is unashamedly SF - alien worlds, space travel between them, unfamiliar concepts in physical science, just for starters - but it delves as deeply and compassionately into the human condition as any mainstream political novel I can easily bring to mind. It truly deserves its billing as a classic, of the genre, and indeed of any genre.
The Right Nation - John Micklethwait & Adrian Wooldridge
I did a shitload of background reading for Black Man (US title Thirteen) and much of this was concerned with the flavours and faultlines of American politics. There's no shortage of material out there on the subject, most of it chilling in its implications (try Chris Mooney's The Republican War on Science, just for one) but the fascinating thing about The Right Nation is that its authors are resolutely cheery about the bad news. Perhaps not so surprising, they do after all both write for The Economist, which is a publication you can readily imagine running glowing editorials back in the thirties on all the free market potentiality of cheap (read slave) labour in Nazi Germany. Then again, these days I find it's often far more thought provoking to read non-fiction by people whose ideas you disagree with than to let yourself be lulled by the reassuring rhythms of those you applaud. (I would read The Economist for this very reason, but I'd have to steal it from a newsstand every month, because I sure as shit ain't gonna give those motherfuckers any of my money... ahem), anyway... Micklethwait and Wooldridge do a very fair and detailed job of explaining the rise of the Republican right over the last fifty odd years, and many of their cheery conclusions I have used to fashion not so cheery imagined outcomes in the political topography of Black Man. The Right Nation is a finely written survey and an invaluable manual for anyone living on the same planet as America.
The Stormwatcher - Graham Joyce
I've been a Graham Joyce fan for a while now, in a quiet sort of way, but this one came in well over and above expectation. And it didn't hurt that I came by it in a second hand book store in Spain whilst on an introspective, away-from-it-all self catering holiday, personal circumstances that mirrored quite closely the general setting of the novel. As with most of Joyce's stuff, the supernatural elements in his fantasy are pared down to an almost homeopathic dosage, and much of the time you could be forgiven for thinking that this is just a down-to-Earth - albeit lyrically told - tale of a group of British thirty-somethings holidaying and squabbling in the Dordogne. But it's not. Something far darker is at work here, something that succeeds time and again in giving you (well, me, anyway) shivers more appropriate to the most chilling moments of Japanese horror. A masterwork of understated menace and pathos, and for my money the best of Joyce's novels so far by far.
Persian Fire - Tom Holland
I've always been fascinated by the history of the Persian (Achaemenid) Empire, ever since I read a short story by Poul Anderson called 'Brave to be a King', which deals with time travel and the first Persian king Cyrus the Great. At sixth form level I wrote an extended research essay on the Achaemenids, and was, like many of the historians I read as sources, impressed by how remarkably well the Persians stacked up against the much vaunted Greeks in terms of civilisation and civilised behaviour. Now, as Frank Miller's 300 makes its way from comic book to movie screen, and we prepare ourselves to see the battle of Thermopylae distorted into a simplistic vision of Greek (read western) democracy and civilisation standing against a barbaric, Mordor-like horde of evil eastern invaders, it's helpful to have a book to hand that sets the record straight. Holland's scholarship is undoubted, his passion for his subject matter is evident throughout, and his account of the events leading up to the great clash for the future of Greece is painstaking in its detail. There are no comicbook or Hollywood heroes here - only the schemings and struggles of ruthless men all bent on carving out fame, fortune and dominion for themselves, and the stories of the desperate, no quarter battles they fought and died in. It's an even handed and brilliant piece of work, and will leave you with a rather more sober and balanced view of things than you're likely to get from Miller et al.
Disgrace - J. M. Coetze
This came highly recommended - I mean, the guy has won the Booker prize twice, and picked up the Nobel in 2003, but more to the point a friend whose taste in literature is somewhat wider-ranging and more patient than mine suggested it to me. I was a little dubious at first, it seemed like a classic mainstream 'A' list effort where nothing much happens and we all wander about angst ridden with the shape of our comfy middle class lives. In fact, far from it. Disgrace is by turns brutal and achingly sad, and though it does take off from the aforementioned comfy middle class perspective (albeit in a South African context), this is described with a searingly clear-eyed economy of style that leaves no room for angst or self indulgence. Thereafter the book veers immediately into altogether deeper and more unpleasant waters. In all fairness, I have to say that Disgrace seemed to flag a little towards the end (and it's not a long book), but overall it was excellent, well paced and thought-provoking, filled with brilliant characterisation and flawless dialogue, and written with a curiously compassionate detachment which I've not come across often in fiction. It fits into that set of novels I'd describe as unexpected memorable outings - books that take you places you hadn't expected to go, places you in fact maybe didn't even especially want to go, and then bring you back subtly changed by the experience. I'll be back to sample some more Coetze sometime soon, but right now I've got to get on with Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day, and that by all accounts is going to be a mighty beast to wrestle to the ground.