Saturday, 25 July 2020

I Read a LOT of Books During Lockdown

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?



Zero Hour

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.

I got the book signed at the launch in 2010.

Dead or Alive

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 [insert number] 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?

During lockdown, publishers also sent me books to review. The Fix Yourself Handbook and Why Buddha Never Had Alzheimer's both found their way to me.

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.

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