Matt Tuckey is a writer from Oldham, England. He covers celebrities, night life, Manchester, fitness, creative writing, social media, psychology and events. Some of this may, in some way, help others. Or maybe it'll just entertain you for a while.
Well,
the inevitable has happened and we've seen a spike in COVID-19 cases.
That means a return to lockdown until... who knows. We thought a
month last time; it turned out to be 4. This time, specific areas-
including my hometown of Oldham- have received orders to stay at home, not the whole country. Plus, the gym appears to still be
open.
Between
March and July, I read a splurge of books. I still have this pile to
read, which has been in existence in one shape or another for nearly
a decade now:
It's
time to focus on reading again, but with a twist- I've put two
seemingly unconnected challenges together before, with attempts to do
the splits whilst reading. This somewhat unusual combination of
targets I conjoined in a vain attempt to regain the flexibility I had
in my 20s. (I've just turned 38.) Most recently (2018) I did this
with the aid of Robb, an ointment good for warming muscles.
For
some years now I've had a bottle of Thai oil, an ointment mostly used
in Thailand to increase circulation and prevent bruising. I've been meaning to use that
for practising the splits. So- let's see what happens while I try
this during Oldham's lockdown. A quick measurement between the ankles
shows 1m 42, a long way off my 1m 65 record. We don't know when this
local lockdown will be lifted, but I'm not expecting it to be any
time soon.
Back
in March, the PM put the UK into a disastrously late lockdown.
Anyway, this isn't a political post- it's a literary one. I planned
to read as much as I could before lockdown was lifted.
Today, the gyms have reopened, long after bars and barbershops (the
latter of which I'm in most need of visiting, still). So what did I
manage to read?
Cockney
ex-SAS hero Nick Stone, a sarcastic-but-loveable tough guy, receives
a rather nasty diagnosis from his doctor. Still reeling from the
shock of this, he's asked to rescue a businessman's daughter from
Dutch kidnappers. Stone finds himself in the underbelly of
Amsterdam's dodgy human-trafficking market. Think Patriot Games meets
Taken.
A
fun, action-packed albeit routine yarn with some unsurprising twists.
A convincing, three-dimensional protagonist carries the story,
though.
My
copy was signed by the author at the book launch.
I had completely forgotten all of this!
Perfidia
What
is there to say about James Ellroy's examination of Japanese wartime
interment that hasn't already been said? This semi-fictitious story
tells of a horrific murder of a Japanese family, one in which the
bodies were placed to look like harakiri, a ritualistic
suicide-by-sword. Clues at the scene show these weren't genuine
suicides: a struggle before the deaths, and laundry done the day they
decided to seemingly take their own lives hint more is at hand.
Enter
Hideo Ashida, an archetypal, mild-mannered police chemist and the
only Japanese on the LAPD payroll. The case gets harder for him-
intricately and emotionally- when, a day later, Japanese pilots bomb
Pearl Harbour.
It's
a heavy, complex, slangy book that'll have you looking up archaic
colloquialisms and factual American public figures from the 1940s,
but you'll always go back to the text to see where the twisty noir
narrative takes you next. Some of the offshoots revisit and intersect
with plotlines from previous books, as characters and investigations
overlap. Remember Pierce Patchett's plastic surgery scam from LA
Confidential? Cutting hookers to look like movie stars? Patchett
makes an appearance. As does Ed Exley and his land baron dad, dead by
the time LA Confidential begins and intricately involved in
Patchett's dealings. It's surprising that the father and son never
discussed this.
A
big revelation in Perfidia- spoiler alert- is that Dudley Smith,
master criminal and in this book ranking Sergeant- is the
illegitimate father of Betty Short, the ill-fated party girl and
victim in the Black Dahlia case. This case was the subject of another
Ellroy novel. In The Black Dahlia, though, Sgt Smith is never
mentioned. How could he not be even referenced in the case of his own
daughter's murder?
This
just seemed like an unnecessary layer of complication to an already
complex book. It didn't really do anything to enrich the novel as a
whole. It felt kind of like George Lucas slamming in revelations to
the script of Star Wars Episode I. Hey, look, Anakin, soon to be
Darth Vader, created C3PO! Why wasn't this mentioned in the original
movies? Because Lucas makes it up as he goes along. What does this do
to compound the original story? Fuck all.
I
digress. Perfidia is a brilliant book. I got my copy signed by the author in
2014.
Freedom
Jonathan
Franzen followed up his acclaimed 2001 novel The Corrections- a book
I made it 100 pages into before realising nothing was going to
happen- with 2010's Freedom, another story about a middle-American
family with their middle-American problems. Like its predecessor, it
was reviewed into oblivion by the literary press.
My
take? It's a solidly-written account of a family not doing a great
deal. Aside from an affair, a bit of wheeling-and-dealing in metals,
and a few corporate conference calls, nothing really happens until
family father figure Walter accidentally swallows his own wedding
ring. The resulting aftermath puts paid to a romantic interlude with
his new girlfriend. I'll let you paint the picture. That, and a
meltdown at a business event, are the only moments that rise above
soap-opera-level mundanity. That said, soaps are the most popular
programmes on TV, so real life- or the replication of it- must be
highly marketable. Just not to me.
Not
the autobiography of Pete Burns, nor of RoboCop's Peter Weller, but a
war thriller from the late Tom Clancy. Jack Ryan Jr, son of the
original Jack Ryan (Patriot Games, Sum of All Fears, Clear and
Present Danger etc) steps into his father's shoes as an analyst for a
secret department set up by his dad to root out and covertly kill
terrorists. Their Most-Wanted: The Emir, a bin-Laden-type mastermind.
From Wikipedia:
'The
book was notable for its antagonist the Emir and his terrorist
organization Umayyad Revolutionary Council, which were based on
real-life terrorist Osama bin Laden and his group al
Qaeda. It also inspired the idea that special forces units
hunting for a terrorist like bin Laden are more likely to find him
living in comfort, rather than in a cave in Pakistan or Afghanistan.
This was proven true when bin
Laden was captured and killed by the U.S.
Navy SEALs in his compound in Abbottabad,
Pakistan on May 2011, five months after the novel was published.'
An
entertaining romp, Dead or Alive is hindered by its Uber-American,
gung-ho attitudes and disjointed storylines. There's a sergeant being
accused of a war crime- of killing enemy fighters in their sleep. But
so what? You think drone strikes never hit enemies who were sleeping?
They were bad guys. Why should I care? The fact that this plot line
is abandoned until the closing scenes makes it more unnecessary. The
few why-would-that-happen moments scattered through the
larger-than-usual, 700-large-page novel stick out like nails from a
nail bomb in what is otherwise an intricately constructed, fast-paced
yarn. A lot of characters from previous novels re-emerge, sometimes
with new identities- among others, bodyguard Clark was Navy Seal
Kelly in Without Remorse (itself an interesting precursor to the
Michael Caine movie Harry Brown).
Like
all Clancy books, it's heavy and technically-detailed, but it's a war
novel, so what do you expect? It's still a pacey, gripping thriller.
Bravo
Two Zero
I
returned to Andy McNab, to his most popular book. Bravo Two Zero is
McNab's autobiographical account of his SAS unit, working behind
enemy lines in The Gulf War to cut communications routes in Iraq. It
isn't long before they're spotted and caught. Their cover story of
being a search-and-rescue team doesn't hold up, due to a big wad of
explosives in one of their backpacks.
Bravo
starts out slow. It took me two attempts to get into it. Once the
mission is underway it picks up, but their inability to hide from
civilians, police and military leave you wondering how they managed
to get positions on the SAS in the first place. That said, it's an
interesting, exciting story of British SAS in action, of Iraqi
prisons and, well, grim torture scenes. Fair play to McNab for
sticking with the military after those experiences.
I
also got this book signed at the Zero Hour launch.
The
Dice Man
The
Dice Man is a 1973 novel by George Cockroft, writing as Luke
Rhinehart, which is also the name of the protagonist and narrator.
You'll have to forgive my memory- I cannot find any info on who sent
me this book. I remember seeing a picture and description somewhere
online, or maybe in an email, thinking that it was a non-fiction
account of a real-life psychological experiment. I knew it took place
in the States, at a hospital in which doctors and patients made
decisions regarding the roll of dice. I was expecting skydiving
geriatrics and scientific reports on free will and creative arts
sessions. The Dice Man was somewhat different.
(Update-
I had been talking in an online Andy's Man Club session and an attendee friend told
me about it- he saw my Instagram story asking, on the off chance,
whether any of my followers might know, and he reminded me that he'd
sent it. Social Media for the win!)
Largely
fiction, the book tells of Rhinehart devising a simple game in which
he will make certain decisions based on a dice-roll. ('If it lands on
a [insertnumber]
I'll [insert action].')
The story quickly descends into darkness when his first roll
'tells' him to rape his colleague's wife, only to find she welcomes
his advances. He quickly becomes enthralled by the 'opportunities' he
perceives the dice to give him, and steadily initiates patients,
colleagues, friends and family into the dice-life. From therein, he
finds freedom and chaos in equal measures, with each roll of the dice
pushing the narrative into darker and darker (and more hilarious)
territory.
As
Rhinehart offers the dice further obscene outcomes, and more
opportunity to destroy his life, the dice's will is done and
Rhinehart's initial character becomes so eroded that he soon cannot
identify as, or with, himself any more. Cue intense introspection and
frequent first-to-third-person narration shifts.
This
intense, genuinely funny tale investigates themes of nihilism (25
years before Chuck Palahniuk did with Fight Club) and psychosis in
the narrator (20 years before Bret Easton Ellis gave us American
Psycho).
Reading
the book, I was reminded of No Country for Old Men, the 2005 novel by
Cormac McCarthy, in which antagonist hitman / bounty hunter Anton
Chiguhre decides whether to kill or release people based on the toss
of a coin. (His character was certainly somewhat eroded.) The Dice
Man is more weighty and generous than an afternoon McCarthy read,
though, and requires a little Googling if you're not classically
educated (unless you're happy to shrug at obscure literary references
and Calvin Coolidge quotes). Regardless, Rhinehart's ascent to almost
celestial-level fame as the founder of dice behaviour is a
page-turner of a trip.
How the hell had an Easton-Ellis /
DeLillo fan like myself never heard of Rhinehart / Cockroft until
last month?
To
be fair, lockdown hasn't been that bad. I've enjoyed all the reading,
the working out via Instagram Live, the movies, the routine. I'm
ready to shake off the hermit-like existence now, and, among other
things, get a haircut.
Some autographs
from book signings. Andy McNab writes 'have you stole
this' when he sees his book belonged to Ashton Market Hall in a
former life, James Ellroy calls me 'Matt the Rat.'
Jonathan Franzen wants a simple life, with 'best
wishes.' pic.twitter.com/CQe5lxi3xw
