Pocket Notebook (Mike Thomas)

It is impossible to review this book without drawing attention to its debts. Starting with the cover we observe the replication of the face and eye from the 1970s Penguin paperback version of A Clockwork Orange (designed by David Pelham). The switching of bowler hat for a bobby's helmet in part remindng the reader of Dim and Billyboy becoming 'millicents' in the final section of Burgess's novel and delivering a beating to Alex.

The cover also uses the distinctive Gill Sans Ultra font, which echoes Kubrick's film version of Burgess's book (and its well-know promotional film poster). Inside the book,

loaning of the word 'droog' and mention of the 'Ludovico technique' further punctuate the author's desire to establish a Burgessian connection. I found the writing style, however, more akin to Irvine Welsh than Anthony Burgess. And the one book that wouldn't leave my mind the whole time that I was reading Thomas's work was Filth. The transgressive nature of the narrator's mind and also the point at which he (Jacob Smith) questions if there is something growing inside of him seem an obvious moment of intertextuality linking the book to the tapeworm that wriggles its way through Welsh's aforementioned novel.

The difference between Welsh and Thomas is that Welsh pushes it so much further, taking the reader to the limits of a twisted mind. Thomas in contrast bravely writes from the inside, brazenly borrowing a vocabulary and a grammar from Welsh (and to a lesser extent Will Self and Martin Amis) in order to do this. It takes guts to write from the inner mind of a prejudiced and bigoted police officer, when the author is himself a police officer. He does it though and whole-heartedly pulls it off.

The book is well written, well executed, and carries the reader from beginning to end with total absorption. Despite its debts, it shows an important level of self-awareness in relation to them. The protagonist's foot fetish, for example, is used to demonstrate the author's knowledge that he is writing a milder book than we would expect of Welsh but that he has pushed the boundaries considering his own employment. A biographical detail that I repeat since it cannot be ignored.

A review in The Independent cited the 'snooker game' as evidence of Mike Thomas writing from a policeman's perspective. For me this wasn't so, I felt when reading Pocket Notebook that Thomas had the unique ability to write from an outside perspective while being on the inside. I mean by this that he plays on all the media portrayals of what the police think of the public, and thereby creates the bad cop but somehow does not fall prey to the stereotype despite recreating it.

I read Thomas in the same way that I read the writer who appears to have so heavily influenced him (i.e. Welsh) - compulsively and for enjoyment. Often not knowing how to decode the work, and therefore deciding not too, but enjoying it all the same. Hence this type of writing becomes a rare treat for me, something that I can find no flaw in but at the same time lack a vocabulary with which to account for it. Leaving me with something that is wholly pleasurable.

Experience and History: Elie Wiesel’s The Night Trilogy and Martin Amis’s House of Meetings

Elie Wiesel, The Night Trilogy ([Night, 1958], [Dawn, 1961], [Day, 1962]; New York: Hill and Wang, 2008)

Martin Amis, House of Meetings (2006; London: Vintage, 2007)


I recently read Elie Wiesel's The Night Trilogy. Each book in the trilogy took me an hour and three quarters to read. Roughly the time it takes the train from Canterbury to arrive in Charing Cross. (And I happened to be on this train when I read the first two books.) For those who have not read the three books Night, Dawn and Day - the latter of which was formerly called The Accident - the first of the books (newly translated by Wiesel's wife, Marion) is a memoir based on Wiesel's time in Nazi concentration camps, the second is the story of a young and recently conscripted terrorist in post-war Palestine having to take the life of an English soldier, and the final book is about a Jewish man who having survived the concentration camps and seen his family members die, is 'willingly' knocked down by a taxi in New York.

The reason Wiesel’s books are of interest to me is two-fold. The first of which is that they are not written in an overtly literary style, and yet I would argue they are literary. Second, the power of the books does not lie in the record of the events alone, or the fact that Wiesel lived through the Nazi concentration camps and lost his family to them. It lies in his ability to render psychological and philosophical states through a record of history, and also imagined scenarios. This is a talent. Especially when the content is so personal.

Wiesel's books demonstrate that a high level of success can be achieved without entering into what is traditionally regarded as literary (in English and European literature at least) - i.e. dense, multi-layered and ambiguous narratives. But this is not to deride the dense, multi-layered and ambiguous. And what I would like to begin to demonstrate here is the way in which the two writing styles comfortably co-exist, through a comparison of the work of Wiesel and Amis. In order to do this, however, some points must be made first of all.

Martin Amis's House of Meetings is most definitely a text along the lines of ‘dense, multi-layered and ambiguous’ and is very good indeed. But the Amis book is about post-war Russian gulags (slave camps) not Nazi concentration camps. And it is therefore by no means possible to write that the two texts are about the same thing (this would be reductive). Even the observation that Wiesel’s and Amis’s texts contain imprisonment, torture, execution and subjugation in their themes is inadequate given the specifics of their histories.

I therefore wish to apologize in advance for any areas in this posting that might be thought to ride roughshod over important facts through the comparison performed here. For, while I am writing about writing, I realize this is no excuse for not showing due respect and sensitivity.

To begin then, my argument is that Wiesel and Amis - despite writing about histories that would seem ostensibly to give them the opportunity to adopt similar approaches to the challenge of describing them - start from the very beginning in two different positions.

If there is a distance existing between Wiesel and the Nazi concentration camps, it is one imposed by the flaws of memory over time, and by the need to narrate (and story) in a meaningful way the things he has been exposed to. Wiesel’s challenge then is to convert experience into text. He tries all the time to find language that will convey as clearly as possible his experiences (and in fact describes this process in his foreword to Night). Amis, meanwhile, is faced with a different challenge, which is to translate history (passed down through [mostly written] accounts) and to write a text that then conveys experience.

Amis's book begins as a letter written to a young lady incongruously named Venus. The narration is consciously about the past, and about the act of narration. The letter/novel is impossibly long (and here echoes Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness; no doubt consciously since the narrator uses Conrad’s name several times).

As a soldier in the Second World War, the confessor/narrator of Amis’s novel raped multiple women across Germany and also killed. We don’t know exactly why Amis's narrator risks disgusting his reader’s ‘Western’ eyes with brutal truths, because we imagine it may lead to the female recipient of the ‘letter’ aborting her reading and never understanding the story in full. But it is reflective of all the things in Amis’s world that have dark corners and things that cannot at first be explained or known.

When reading House of Meetings we do not always know clearly where we are, and the poetic nature of the language can make this even less clear. But isn't this after all the condition of life? And don't wars (and post-war situations) and all that goes on during them hold much that is inexplicable (and often inexplicable in the extreme)? I would argue an emphatic yes. The thing that I would like to note here, however, is the way in which Amis’s book differs from the aforementioned texts by Wiesel.

In House of Meetings the history appears larger than the individual. This is in no small part due to the background history provided to the reader along the way, which is entangled with the rich writing style. The protagonist raped because the rest of the army raped, for example. While the whole story of the slave camp is set 'descriptively' in its context of post-war Russia, which makes the human aspects, for example the love entanglements of its central characters, more trivial than they would otherwise be if we weren't supplied with the outside detail. Whereas, in Wiesel’s The Night Trilogy, and I am not talking about simply the memoir here but also the two novels, the psychological state of the individual actually appears bigger than the history surrounding it.

Wiesel writes in Night about how stories of the wider happenings during the Holocaust are disbelieved by the members of his hometown, and a woman is beaten for scaremongering about there being fires when the Jews are being transported on the train to Auschwitz-Birkenau. History is not allowed to touch the individual in Wiesel’s writing until he is a part of it. In Dawn, for example, the reader is far less exposed to the politics and history of the post-war situation in Palestine than with the narrator’s coming to terms with his responsibility for killing an English soldier in return for the life of one of his group’s leaders, David ben Moshe. The reader thinks, therefore, about the situation in Palestine through the individual character's psychological state.

Finally, to conclude this brief reflection: while I believe that language's failure to explain often says as much as its ability to explain, reading work by Wiesel and Amis so close together was a reaffirmation for me that there is no single way of writing which is 'right'. The author's choices are contextual, difficult and ultimately a compromise between history (experienced or researched) and text. As a consequence, the style of writing that has come to be thought of as having greater literary weight and density in the tradition of English literature is not always necessarily the most appropriate mode for recording experience/lived history, as is demonstrated by the success of The Night Trilogy.

This blog post was originally featured on http://wordnerdarmy.blogspot.com

Clockwork Music

Anthony Levings, 'Incongruous Voices: Musical Philosophies in Mozart and the Wolf Gang', in Marc Jeannin (ed.) Anthony Burgess: Music in Literature and Literature in Music (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009)

"Levings analyzes [Mozart and the Wolf Gang] as a post-modernist search for ultimate meaning about music and about society’s celebration of great artists, debates in which Burgess continually refuses to tip his own hand." (John Cassini, 'Introduction', p. 3)

PDF preview pages (incl. contents and introduction)

A copy of the book can be ordered direct from the publisher here: http://www.c-s-p.org/Flyers/Anthony-Burgess--Music-in-Literature-and-Literature-in-Music1-4438-1116-5.htm

My First Zombie Book

Zombies: A Record of the Year of Infection (London: Simon & Schuster, 2009). ISBN 978-1-84737-762-3, £14.99 (pbk)

Zombies: A Record of the Year of Infection is set in the near future (early 2012), which means that it won’t be long before it is set in the near past. This, along with the fact that it makes no attempt to disguise its contents, means that it must be approached with our disbelief securely suspended. Suspended by the ropes of heavy-duty dramatic irony. Ropes supplied by the fact that the written narrative contains few if any surprises for the reader, and also by the almost interminably long time it takes for pennies to drop in the mind of Dr Robert Twombly (diarist/narrator).

As such, Chris Lane and Don Roff’s book is an escapist piece of writing that celebrates all the zombie goodness that surrounds us in popular culture at the moment. One does not feel excluded or intimidated by this book. It is not exclusively for ‘comic book geeks’ or ‘zombie geeks’, and I suspect that people who are deeply into the zombie (sub-)genre may well be turned off by such an accessible work. This is a mainstream book, a coffee-table book, a book for the toilet-side, an ideal Christmas present, the sort of book you’ll pick up waiting in line at the bookstore, and reads, at times, like a beginner’s guide to zombies.

The text separated from the images contains nothing that hasn’t been successfully satirized in ‘Shaun of the Dead’. When the text is paired, however, with the gruesomely detailed illustrations, ample motivation is provided to keep reading. Since the illustrations provide the gems of this work, and because of this the writing must be congratulated for not absorbing us wholly. If it did, it would be to the detriment of the illustrations and the effect of the book as a whole.

To conclude, if you find yourself in possession of this book, I would recommend the following: a beamed country cottage on a blustery day with an inglenook fireplace, where you can stretch out on a sofa with a glass of red wine in front of a log fire while someone else cooks a roast lunch and you turn the thick glossy pages. In this way you can enjoy the book for what it is: an inessential luxury with an inconsequential storyline; possible to appreciate for its sheer loveliness, and as a reminder that there are still books that are so inseparably intertwined with the medium of print.

The Point of Counterpoint in Fiction

Alan Shockley, Music in the Words: Musical Form and Counterpoint in the Twentieth-Century Novel. Farnham: Ashgate, 2009. ISBN 97809-7546-6199-3 (hbk), £55.


It would be an understatement to write that Alan Shockley’s book, Music in the Words: Musical Form and Counterpoint in the Twentieth-Century Novel, is an ambitious work. Napoleon Symphony alone is one of the most challenging books for even the most adept of readers but to examine it alongside Ulysses and Finnegans Wake verges on the masochistic.

Thankfully the reader is eased into Shockley's act of what I am tempted to call critical self-flagellation by an introduction that is at once bold and illuminating.

I do not envy Shockley the task of writing such a broad ranging narrative that draws together music and fiction across civilizations ancient and modern, however. For, I know that it is an impossibility to satisfy the diverse opinions of all readers in such an account. I do envy, though, the skill with which he uses it to explain with clear-sightedness the musical forms of the sonata, symphony and fugue.

At the same time as explaining not only the theory of musical forms, Shockley explains the practice: in particular the way in which Beethoven mutated musical forms. He also draws parallels between the employment of musical forms and the novel from Pamela, Clarissa and Jane Austen forwards. But, most importantly, the introduction prepares the reader for failure ahead, warning of the fugue – which is far less narrative in nature than the sonata or symphony - and is so it seems itself a kind of ‘siren’ attracting writers only to leave them shipwrecked.

The first work to be appraised at length is Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (Chapter 2), and here Shockley explores what it means to write 'contrapuntally', and the difficulties of presenting simultaneity within the linearity of a text (pp. 20-1ff.). He argues that 'sustaining distinct plots in separate locations', as with Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities, 'is just that and no more, it is a stock device of the novelist, and not an example of Polyphonic musical composition.' (p. 23)

The chapter goes on to draw from a short story by Dorothy L. Sayers, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, concrete/visual poetry, Anthony Burgess, Barthes, Balzac, and so on, as Shockley places in front of the reader his visions and variations of textual simultaneity. While also making enlightening points about authorial footnotes and marginal glosses, before explaining: 'Having just shown how counterpoint might crop up in a literary text, I have really only demonstrated attempts at non-imitative polyphony. A musical fugue is not a narrative. Though fugues and contrapuntal writing in general are often likened to conversations, canonic writing, or strict fugal technique, does not make for a tidy model for conversation.' (p. 28)

A close textual reading follows of the 'Ant Fugue' in Hofstadter's book (pp. 28ff.), and in this Shockley describes in detail the relationship between the text and Bach’s fugue, which plays in the background. This is a precursor to Shockley's reading of Burgess' 'K. 550 (1788)’ section of Mozart and the Wolf Gang (or On Mozart, as it was titled in the USA; pp. 33ff.), and his conclusion that Burgess's work, like Hofstadter’s, still ultimately 'fails' in its representation of music in text, but 'The basic language of "K. 550" is much more musical than Hofstadter's. Sentence structure breaks down, words shatter into fragments of words or morph into new amalgams. The reader senses an imitation of an allegro tempo ... ' (p. 44).

In his consideration of the ‘Sirens’ episode of Ulysses (Chapter 3), an old friend to those who have studied modern fiction, Shockley presents a close textual reading of the chapter’s centre piece, as well as a careful consideration of the work’s earlier critics. The outcome of which is that he rejects Margaret Rogers’s reading for its lack of rigorousness (p. 60), while Werner Wolf's fugal reading he finds unsatisfactory for its inability to convince completely (p. 61). He makes no bones about his opinion: 'Simply put, the main section of "Sirens" is not a fugue' (p. 66). There is no single overarching musical form that can be applied to ‘Sirens’, argues Shockley, instead it cannibalizes many forms and elements of music.

Conclusions on the ‘Sirens’ section of Ulysses lead into the longest chapter in the book, which is devoted to Burgess's Napoleon Symphony. Shockley explains Napoleon Symphony in a precise way, and carries the reader through a close and careful reading of the book, which as he rightly asserts has been largely ignored or derided by critics.

‘Napoleon Symphony works much more like poetry or music than like biography or a novel’ (p. 101), writes Shockley and he concludes: 'perhaps in his failed novel Napoleon Symphony, Burgess has ceased to be a novelist, and returned to his preferred profession - become again a composer.' (p. 116).

Although it is not spelt out in big letters, the reader presumes that Shockley finds Napoleon Symphony more authentic in its application of musical form than the ‘Sirens’ section of Ulysses. The reason for not spelling it out might well be that Shockley finds himself suddenly on dangerous ground with these opinions despite his earlier confidence about the correct way in which to approach Joyce's writing. This would be understandable given Joyce’s dominance in literary studies throughout the majority of the twentieth century.

The reader is returned to Joyce in the guise of Finnegans Wake, eager to grasp more wholly Shockley’s argument, and to understand where all the textual analysis is leading. Unsurprisingly, Shockley is not unaware of the challenge he faces. He writes: ‘To tackle even a small part of this work, [Joyce’s] colossal “legpull,” is a mammoth task’ (p. 117).

The moderately brief Wake chapter centres on the way in which Joyce overloads the text, gives it density, and virtually commissions critical works on his novel (p. 130). Shockley compares the Wake to a ‘polyphonic piece from the baroque period’, where one ‘must hop on at the beginning of the ride, and hang on for dear life’ (p. 131), an image of the sort that burns itself onto the mind’s eye.

In conclusion he writes: ‘Perhaps the Wake doesn’t read like a piece of Beethoven or Mozart or Bach, or any extant musical work; but it asks its readers to listen to its counterpoint, to join the dance at any point, and then to hold on breathlessly.’ (p. 136).

The theme of listening to novels like music is carried forward through the examination of David Markson's This is Not a Novel in Chapter 6, 'a beautiful, funny, sad little work’. ‘Reading it as music,’ writes Shockley, ‘teases out some of the myriad themes that fill this brief work, and gives the reader entrance into the book's melodies, its rhythms, and its multiple voices.' (p. 156).

Introduced later is the musical term ‘rondo’ (p. 170), and at this point I wondered whether continual returns to Burgess and Joyce in this book were intended by Shockley, himself a composer, to be musical, and to reflect patterns such as the rondo, the fugue, or the symphony. Which might explain the rough arrangement of the chapters following an, at times, inexact ‘hierarchization of success in the musicalization of the novel’.

It is Agapē Agape that draws Shockley’s ‘symphony’ to an end with what might be termed the ultimate musical novel, for the following reasons:
  Quoting other novels, misquoting, and repeatedly using the same material from other novels … is very unnovelistic. Novels may refer to like themes from other novels, may share characters, may even include epigrams or other small quotations from other works, but they are not usually (built of) this material. Conversely, musical compositions are often composed in this way ... (p. 172).

The discussion of William Gaddis’ Agapē Agape is followed by a short conclusion (Chapter 8) that draws together loose ends, and leaves the reader with a tangible notion to take away with them when Shockley writes of music as a challenge to writers, and an attempt to extend the ‘reach’ of their ‘everyday tools’, i.e. words (p. 174).

Of course a book of this kind, which aims to consider ‘musical form and counterpoint in the twentieth-century novel’ in less than 200 pages, is unable to do everything. While mentions are made of Barthes and Bakhtin, for example, there is no detailed analysis of their works on polyphony. There is also no time to look in detail at works, such as Point Counter Point and If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, also mentioned in passing.

Shockley further identifies a ‘cottage industry of musicological readings (conducted almost exclusively by literary critics)’ of Napoleon Symphony (p. 79), but no direct citations are attached to this. This is a shame, for I am familiar with the newspaper readings, and Geoffrey Aggeler’s discussion of Napoleon Symphony, as well as M. L. Holloway’s PhD thesis ‘Music in Words: The Music of Anthony Burgess and the Role of Music in his Literature’ (1997), and further points made by Christine Lee Gengaro in Anthony Burgess and Modernity (2008), but I didn’t uncover these other contemporaneous readings to which Shockley alludes in my own research on the novel.

These points aside, Chapter 3 should be read by every undergraduate student of literature (course convenors photocopy this for your course packs); Chapters 2 and 4 should be read by every scholar of Burgess (to overlook them when attempting to write anything on Mozart and the Wolf Gang and Napoleon Symphony respectively would be foolish); Chapter 1 (the Introduction) should be read by scholars interested in tracing the historical connections between literature and music; Chapters 5, 6 and 7 should be read by those interested in exploring the limits of making the novel musical.

References

Aggeler, Geoffrey, Anthony Burgess: The Artist as Novelist (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1979)

Holloway, M. L., ‘Music in Words: The Music of Anthony Burgess and the Role of Music in his Literature’, PhD thesis (University of Huddersfield, 1997)

Lee Gengaro, Christine, ‘From Mann to modernity: Anthony Burgess and the intersection of music and literature’, in Alan Roughley, ed., Anthony Burgess and Modernity (Manchester University Press, 2008)

A copy of this review can be read on the International Anthony Burgess Foundation (IABF) Website.

Portrait of a Modern Man

Anthony Levings, 'Futures Past: The End of the World News', in Alan Roughley (ed.) Anthony Burgess and Modernity, intro. David Lodge (Manchester University Press, 2008)

"Anthony Levings’s ‘Futures past: The End of the World News’ ... adds to our sense of why Burgess’s creativity tended to involve generic experimentation, generic hybridity and narrative structures in which time moves both diachronically and synchronically. Levings argues, after acknowledging that the novel’s origins ‘appear various and overly avant-garde and with it ambivalent’ and that its themes ‘do not guide the reader into a meaningful way of reading the novel’, that the disorientation which The End of the World News tends to produce in readers can be mitigated somewhat if its social, political and philosophical concerns are read in light of Reinhart Koselleck’s Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. Koselleck’s work offers us a comprehensive reflection on the nature of modernity by way of its exploration of how ideas and approaches to history and the notion of the historical itself changes from the medieval to the modern era. Centred on the French Revolution, Koselleck’s study shows how this event ‘created a shift in terminology from histories to history, and developed the modern conception of the importance of temporality and chronology’.

"Levings’s analysis highlights how Burgess manipulates genre and narrative as part of a process of semantic and epistemological deconstruction, a process which lays bare the importance of narrative to understanding but also its failure to produce understanding – understanding, that is, which leads to change. A key narrative device employed by Burgess to underline the peculiar status of narrative to understanding is anachronism. As Levings sees it, generic deviations ‘highlight the anachronistic qualities of the structuring narratives: the narratives are at once necessary, but at the same time out of place’. Further, Burgess uses anachronism to ‘sensitize’ the reader to the importance of historical interpretation; the work of sensitisation helps to ‘open’ the reader ‘to the possibility that the point in time can be connected to other points in time’. Thus, Burgess’s experimentation should be seen, not as a ‘trick’ played on the less educated and less creative reader, but as Burgess’s confession of ‘his own fallibility in writing’ and his desire that the reader engage in serious and creative interpretation of history." (Carson Bergstrom, 'Introduction', pp. 13-14)

Author? Publisher? Bookseller? Printer? Social Networking? Blogging? Published? Self-published? Short-run Books? Print-on-Demand Books? eBooks?

I am currently updating for publication a paper presented at the University of Bedfordshire (http://cwparadox.wikidot.com). It is aimed at postgraduate students who have embarked on a Creative Writing PhD and discusses the options open to them when it comes to publishing. This is a call for as many viewpoints (and statistics) from those embedded in the publishing industry as possible. Are you an author whose books sell well? Are you a publisher disillusioned by eBook sales and the costs involved? Are you a bookseller who is watching sales decline in the current economic climate? Have you managed to use social networking to establish yourself in publishing or is it all a mystery to you? Are blogs a time-consuming distraction? Is print advertising still worth the bother? Are you making money through self-publishing? Are you a printer seeing expensive machinery left idle?

Please comment on the site or email me. All comments and opinions welcome.