(Some Of) The Books I Read In 2014

Follow a dozen critics, or writers with an independent-published novel behind them (a lovely thin volume to brag over), on Twitter, and believe me - you will have clicked on blue text, the hyperlink to personal blogs, where there will be a picture... This picture will show you a dozen books, stacked and lined with show-off marks of use.

It’s the end of the year, and I shall follow these forty year-olds; here are the books I’ve read in 2014, best at the top, worst at the...

I have read more books than those that you see above, but they were not at hand. The best books I have read are there, and that’s all that matters really. I’ve also chosen to not include the many I’ve failed to penetrate fully, but I will list a few of them here, I’ll get to you lot eventually: Gravity’s Rainbow, Infinite Jest, Neuromancer (was naff really), Crime and Punishment, Parade’s End...

To start off, Zoe Pilger’s first novel, Eat My Heart Out. I didn’t like it. After months of reflection and thought, I actually think it’s awful. The book has received a lot of acclaim among the broadsheets and the likes of Jonathan Gibbs (didn’t quite get to you Jonny, but I will, I will...), and I can understand why. The prose occasionally bubbles, but never threatens to really spit consistently enough to burn me, scold a reaction. It’s a feminist book, I read. But is it? The veneer of ironic detachment (as seen in the cheap, ‘punny’ title) and sarcasm gives the novel a sheen of nihilism that does not convince either - it doesn’t say anything to me, it settles nowhere. We are given a series of set pieces with a hit-rate not strong enough to tip it into positivity for me. Shit covered rooms, public self-harm, the book tries too hard and does nothing. If the Pilger name were not there, I’m not sure Zoe would have got a deal for this book, perhaps the next one...

I spent the first half of this year wondering whether I hated Ned Beauman for being a public-school, son-of-a-publisher, hipster twonk, or that I actually liked his fizzy prose. I think I fall into the latter. I read The Teleportation Accident after Glow (which we’ll talk about later), and my further research assured me the former would prove to be stronger than the latter. I disagree. The first 100 pages of The Teleportation Accident, where we follow our feckless protagonist as he flounces around 1930s Berlin and Paris, looking to get laid, entirely ignorant of the monstrous political overtones of the era, are fantastic. But Beauman loves plot; whereas I’m not sure he can do plot, at least satisfyingly so. He writes a lovely sentence and is bloody funny, and the first half of this book are the strongest pages he has published to date. The rest was just too messy, too disjointed.

I didn’t want to read The Rehearsal. Eleanor Catton, in my eyes, was gifted 2013’s Booker ahead of the ‘more worthy’, Jim Crace. So I’ve since viewed her work with needlessly derisory glances, eugh... But The Rehearsal is fantastic. I read it for a module in my last year of university, and the vagaries of the narrative excited me, as did Catton’s admirable androgyny of voice. I was ultimately disappointed with where the novel went - I wanted the book to be more fantastical, more obtuse than I believe it actually ended up being.  It is very good though, in spite of that, especially so when we consider that Catton was just 23 on the novel’s publication.

And we’re back to Ned Beauman, with his latest (and the final book on this list to have been published in 2014) - Glow. Again, it was when reading Beauman’s first fully contemporary set novel, a conspiracy-thriller-cum-hipster-rave-narrative, that I encountered these largely class related difficulties. When angry and dismissive, I read the book as a textual artefact of middle-class gentrification of London’s inner-city. Raf (Beauman’s protagonist) only holds, and tenuously at that, loose jobs; he floats in and out of gangster showdowns, he somehow affords designer drugs and beds beautiful, exotic women, all the time, appropriating working-class colloquialisms and cultural reference points. I was forced to throw away my prejudices however, due to the sheer enjoyment I got from Beauman’s style. He is a limited writer, but for every misjudged, cringe inducing line, there are three delightful similes or shining images. Maybe it’s sentimentality, but Beauman’s London is one I know - I have lived the fox-ridden, red-eyed sunrises that litter the novel; I’ve stayed up too late and done stupid things in dodgy areas. Beauman’s a writer with potential. I look forward to what he does in the future.

I had never read Zadie Smith. I’ve been reluctant to engage with a writer who, unlike most, has invaded the public consciousness due to her earlier works that James Woods labelled as ‘hysterical realism’. N/W sounded different, it sounded modernist. And as you might have guessed by now, form and style interest me personally far more than the twists-and-turns of plot. The opening pages of the book are indeed very Joycean, all abstractions and tone, a burning North London presented to the reader with a strength of vision fantastic to witness in a mainstream English novel. Interestingly, Smith is at her best in the book when she is stylistically engaging with formal experimentation, but equally at her worst when she attempts to take the narrative into similarly left field situations. As good as the scenes when one of the characters is walking home through a city so vivid and there are, sections where we have a painstakingly signified ‘normal guy’, talking emotively with a bizarre ex-lover and broken-heiress type figure atop a roof in Soho, or the class-guilty lawyer’s, almost random, threesome - these jar and disrupt the unity of the novel. Though it’s encouraging that this book is out there, with such a high profile, it fails to touch the beauty of my number one, a book that came out in the same year (2012) to Smith’s novel...

Samuel Beckett is my favourite novelist; his novel Murphy has been integral to my early reading and writing. This year I read his first published book of long-form fiction - More Pricks Than Kicks. The short-story collection is Beckett at his most unrecognizable. The hallmarks of Joyce are obvious, and Beckett is not concerned with creating realistic characters or even place - the Dublin featured in the short-stories is secondary. What there is to love in this book is the joyous time Beckett is clearly having with his diction and voice. As early as it is, Beckett is finding a niche, finding an idiom for his characteristic gallows humour and singular prose. Nowhere is this to be found clearer than in the first story of the collection - ‘Dante and the Lobster’, which is surely one of the greatest short-stories of all time.

Once could doubt Ford Madox Ford’s legitimacy as a modernist novelist should one consider Joyce and Woolf’s experimentation to be the defining feature of that movement. But to do so would be foolish. Like Lawrence, the wonder of Ford’s fiction is in the subtlety, in the progression from Henry James’ and Knut Hamsun’s ‘psychological fiction’ from the generation previous. Ford’s The Good Soldier is a masterpiece of character study and perspective. Nothing we are told by the narrator can be taken for granted. Morality is subjective and lived experience becomes as loose as a petal caught in the breeze. The unreliable narrator has practically become cliché - but please don’t let that put you off Ford’s slim novel. It’s a wonder of literature.

To be a young writer in the twenty-first century, is to be an individual intimidated and in awe of Thomas Pynchon. As Elvis Presley is the godfather of all pop music; Pynchon is the founding father of contemporary literature. He has helped shape the arena, he has shaved the walls, tiled the roof of prose since the 1960s. And yet, he is such a ball to read and work with - The Crying of Lot 49 is the perfect introduction to the man’s work. It is a delight to read, with characters that we think we all know from cinema, from literature, from pop music, distorted and skewered on a satirical poker. Jacobean theatre, The Beatles, underground counter-culture, television, all is subject to Pynchon’s magical pastiche. The mode of style alters as required - we have those deliciously fat American sentences, clause after clause of sparkle, and we have the hard-boiled, we have Proust, we have Chandler. All this within the covers of a book that is, in total, 127 pages long. Read it, read it, read...

The book I read in 2014 that has lingered most with me, has been Will Self’s 2012 tour de force - Umbrella. By the late 2000s, who even saw Self as a viable, serious novelist and writer anymore? Sure his journalism was always a delight, his television appearances humorous and a welcome change from the ever revolving cast of slobbering talking heads. But who ever thought he could have written something as consistently daring and impressive as Umbrella?
Superficially, thematically, this is a fairly regular Self affair - Ballardian psycho-sexual metaphors, psychoanalysis and techno-culture. Once one turns a page, one realises that formally, Self is far away from his regular Guardian-reading, satirical mode. The entire book is written in the stream-of-consciousness, a narrative style so liquid and difficult to define. Self does not always control the difficulties of the form, but he maintains the narrative adeptly and intelligently.

Really, the book stayed with me so due to almost one metaphorical conceit alone. The reader is aware that one of the main characters and voices in the novel has been presumed dead for decades, one of the many lost on the fields that hosted conflict during the First World War. Yet there is a prolonged sequence where this character - instead of remaining a collapsed corpse amongst the mud - is brought, bloodied and broken, to an underworld, mere feet from the cratered dirt of Flanders and Ypres. Here he is revived by a community of fallen soldiers, all miraculously returned to life also. These soldiers are no longer arms-bearing fighters, but genderless, partially clothed nurses, who sleep warmly with eachother, holding and embracing as death reigns above. They traipse beneath the war, ever expanding this underground not-quite-heaven and rising up to reclaim those fallen men, taking them back to a life of boyhood and simple humanity, away from the brutalised war machine that destroys and bends the human body.
I found this extended conceit so beautiful; for that, Umbrella won me.

Novels AMC Should Adapt Part 2: Samuel Beckett's Murphy

Samuel Beckett is perhaps most well-known to the general public as the author of a play about nothing.

'But nothing happens... in the end, no one turns up... nothing happens.'
 
We can argue over the merit of his theatrical work until the sun turns blue, but what is undoubted is his importance to 20th century literature.
Beckett's writing was a game changer, and according to the opinions of many, we're still struggling with how to respond to his output (Joshua Ferris believes that the novel as a form began with Cervantes' Don Quixote and ended with Beckett's 'Trilogy').
 
What is often overlooked is Samuel Beckett as a prose writer - Samuel Beckett the novelist.
And what gets buried even further from the greater public consciousness, is his earlier work, where his unique brand of comedy sprouted originally.

His scattershot, dry, Irish humour is seen on stages worldwide most nights, but we're lacking in screen adaptations. His work is intimidating - if novelists struggle in his shadow, how could one dare attempt to translate his prose to celluloid and digital...

Well I think we can go back to the beginning almost, and with his earlier fiction, create something with the character-comedy of Peep Show or Black Books, and the existential wonderings (with the occasional slapstick) of The Sopranos.

Samuel Beckett's 1938 novel - Murphy

Murphy was Beckett's second published work of fiction (following his hilarious collection of short stories, More Pricks Than Kicks) and first picked up novel. Unlike his later work, and his general shift towards a more minimalistic aesthetic, Murphy is audacious and expansive.

And at the centre of Murphy is, rather appropriately, Murphy - serial shirker and procrastinator, a 'hero' in the mould of Oblomov and Russian literature’s 'superfluous man'.
 
Murphy does not work, indeed, he has no desire to and considers employment as analogous to death: 'In the mercantile gehenna [...] to which your words invite me-' 

If, like most, you have no idea what is meant by 'mercantile gehenna' - Gehenna, in the Hebrew Bible, was a site where apostate Israelites and worshippers of pagan gods would sacrifice their children by fire.

Clearly, Murphy has a low opinion of the nine-to-five routine.

He would rather spend his days locked up in his London flat, strapped naked to a rocking-chair, rolling forwards and backwards in masturbatory fashion, hoping that he can somehow totally escape inwards, within himself, into the blissful ‘will-lessness’ of his own mind, away from REAL LIFE.

Murphy is in essence, the classic 'comedy-of-the-lowlife', and this is central to the novel's enduring appeal. It is quite possibly the closest piece of fiction there is to the bumbling nothingness of Withnail and I. 

The comedy is suitably hectic in parts, such as the Dublin sections - latterly in London - where Neary, his drunkard man-servant Cooper, Wylie and Murphy's spurned lover Miss Counihan, argue amongst eachother and plot the downfall of Murphy (if only they could find the bastard...).
 
But Beckett crafts a subtle warmth, core to the text, in the figure of Celia - an Irish prostitute-immigrant who wants to settle down with the feckless Murphy, and leave behind her less than desirable profession.
That she ultimately can't, due to Murphy's solipsistic battle with the question of whether there is any real greater meaning to anything, to living, delivers the tragedy in this farcical comedy.

Murphy's end (accidental self-immolation, yeah...) is as blackly grotesque as one would expect from Beckett, there is no heroic denouement for our protagonist.
 
But the final scene, where Celia takes her aged grandfather (who is also her pimp, it’s never black-and-white with Sam Beckett) kite flying at Round Pond in Kensington Gardens, would be a marvel of modern television - tragic, poignant and wonderful.

The relative brevity of the novel (just shy of 160 pages), would allow for it to be developed into a cracking three-part mini-series, in the manner of Hugo Blick's dramas on the BBC (such as his excellent, The Shadow Line).       
And with Irish actors being killed off quicker in Game of Thrones than ants in a garden, there would be no trouble in finding a suitable cast to gallivant around central Dublin and west London. Just imagine if they could coax Jack Gleeson from his bizarre retirement to take on Murphy...

Basically, it'd be a great BBC Two thing at 11pm on a few Sundays in a row; in association with Canal Plus or HBO or some other foreign risk taker. I'm sure it would be heralded loudly, but watched by few - as the best shows always happen to be.

Introduction and Novels AMC Should Adapt Part 1: William Gaddis' JR

Introduction to the concept

If you've read any broadsheet paper over the last, oh, I'd say three-to-ten years, you will be aware of a particular cultural obsession - the rise of the television series box set.

From HBO's pioneering crime serials Oz, The Wire and The Sopranos through the late 1990s and early 2000s, to the spread of such mature, experimental programming throughout the schedules of effectively every broadcaster in the US (AMC's Mad Men and Breaking Bad; Cinemax's The Knick; Showtime's Dexter, etc.) - if one is looking for an engaging 50 + hours of television, one does not have to look far.

It has been noted that the prolonged dramatic development (and the associated emotional attachment one, almost unconsciously, gives) inherent to the art form, is akin only to the novel.
One works when one reads - as such, pushing through a thick novel, shoving your way through Dante or Beckett takes dozens of hours.
When you read, you re-read, you imagine and you criticise and you argue.
We do the same with our beloved television shows.

As I've been at pains to posit - they're vaguely similar, alright...

With the rise of the 'serious' TV show, we have reached an age where those great beasts of literature can possibly - finally - be tackled with success.
No more must we settle with abridged cinematic adaptations, we will hopefully see those great works attacked, as Fassbinder did with his 14-part take on Berlin Alexanderplatz (an early masterpiece of the 'box set' genre).

What I intend to do here, is suggest works of literature on a regular basis that could be adapted for the box - I want to put forward novels that have been labelled as, unfilmable.
After all, due to the formal constraints of cinema, texts of a certain length (and depth) just can't be translated into that medium - remember the Watchmen film? Yeah, neither do I...


William Gaddis's 1975 novel - JR

It is difficult to know where one starts with JR. This is a 726 page novel told almost entirely in dialogue, with brief elliptical interludes in the present-continuous. It sounds pretty tough doesn't it?
 
Well, it is. But this should be no reason for one to avoid the book - it's hilarious, it's sexy and - most importantly with regards to our focus - it has plot. The novel is all voice and plot, and the emphasis on these functions makes the book one that is very amenable to the modern television drama series.

So, plot... JR is, centrally, about an eleven year-old boy (the eponymous JR Vansant) who manages to create a corporate empire built on penny stocks via the telephone at his high school. Along the way, the reader will encounter Jack Gibbs (a free-spirited, somewhat nihilistic physics teacher), Edward Bast (failed composer and consistent failure to all of the women in his life) and Mrs Joubert (not just a beautiful school teacher, but the daughter of a recently retired powerful stockbroker), as well as dozens of others. An entire cast-list can be found here.

Why would JR work as a Breaking Bad styled 50-minute-an-episode television show?

Well, we're back to William Gaddis' crucial aesthetic play - the prevalance of dialogue (at least 90% of the text), and those hallucinatory, floaty elliptical interludes.

Portraying dozens of different voices without those signposts writers are so fond of (- 'so and so said'), meant that Gaddis had to really stress the colloquialisms and verbal ticks that come with everyday speech.
Eventually, once the reader has hit a pace and is in the thrall of Gaddis' prose, we know who is talking without needing to be told.
Gaddis' characterisation and his dialogue almost render the need for a screenplay void - just read from the novel, read the dialogue as it was written.
And the verbose interludes in the present-continuous, those serve within the novel as transition shots, as the camera floating from one telephone line and room into another, or as its rise above the trees of the Bast garden into the car of his cousin, Stella Angel.
In a sense, there has yet to be another novel so formally close to the screenplay (yet of course, JR is so much more).

With a massive cast of characters who continually bump into each other’s lives, plot threads which wrap around the central conceit (a satirical attack on free-market capitalism - how timely, eh...) and dialogue that is ready, JR would be perfect.
We would have the wit of The West Wing, and the bite of Breaking Bad; we would have a chance to move Mad Men into the 1970s and indulge in the period detail that is a trademark of these shows. 

If the modern box set could make millions fall in love with subjects as traditionally unpopular (to the majority) as shadow monsters popping out of vaginas, and the graphic ripping apart of limbs and innards, surely we can find a space for a satirical, scathing and hilarious take on free-market economics as exploited by an eleven year-old boy.

(Just so long as Edward Bast is played by Vincent Kartheiser).