Swiss wine and cheese reviews part 2: The Riddle of the Sands and A Single Man

First, I would like to share some good news with you. The furniture has gone. It has ALL GONE. There are NO MATTRESSES IN THE HALLWAY ANY MORE and there is NOT A WARDROBE IN THE BATHROOM EITHER. I am euphoric but also slightly suspicious, in case this is all too good to be true and I wake up tomorrow and discover that it has returned, bringing friends.

I seem to recall that I only reviewed half of the books I read on holiday. This is because the furniture made me too angry to think. But now it has gone, and I have room in my brain to get angry about books again.

Actually, neither of these books made me particularly angry. One did make me sad (you'll see why), and one just confused me, but both of them turned out to be not at all well-chosen holiday reads. Oops.

First up, The Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers.

If this book was a person, and I met it on a singles website (go with me on this), we would immediately flag up high uncompatability and any date we were forced to go on would be a disaster. If it was a dog, it would be a short-haired chihuahua and I would be looking for one of those dogs that look like an enormous toilet brush. What I am saying is, this book was not the book for me.

If you want to find out whether or not you will enjoy The Riddle of the Sands more than I did, you need to ask yourself one important question. Do you like boats?

For me, boats are like horses: I find them pleasant from a distance, but quite puzzling close up. They have lots of bits to them, like jibs and booms and all manner of little clippy things (?) that need constant attention, and I am daunted by this. This is not to say that I am incapable of getting on board with aquatically-themed novels. I read the whole Swallows and Amazons series in my youth (although I did mentally look away during the more naval parts), and I think boats are excellent places to put a plot. But there are books featuring the sea and there are books where THE WHOLE STORY is people belaying the fore-top-poop-sail and then letting it out again. (Or is belaying letting it out? Answers below please). And the second is the case in The Riddle of the Sands.

Unfortunately, my duffer of a brain does not allow me to focus properly on seafaring terms, meaning that I was only able to take in approximately one-third of the words in The Riddle of the Sands. To me, a typical paragraph looked something like this:

"??? the ??? ???!" said Davies. I quickly ???? ???? and jumped into the ?????. "Quick!" cried the normally taciturn Davies, turning a violent shade of puce. "We only have three hours until the ??? fills up the ??? and we are left in the ????" "But what of the villainous Germans?" I asked. "Surely their ??? must ???? on the ???? at ????." "Nonsense," said Davies. "Remember the ??? ???? ????? ???? at eight ????. Also, canals."

The narrator, Carruthers, is a twerp - he begins the story by complaining about how BORED he is of London because all his friends are away and both(!) of his clubs are being cleaned - but even though the real hero is sweet, silent Davies, he is still too nautical to make me feel like I had discovered a kindred spirit. Our intrepid heroes (?) have to foil some sort of plot to do with Germans and canals, which they are either in, or not in, or in the wrong ones, or something. Anyway, the important point is that they are VILLAINOUS, like all Germans in British novels at the beginning of the twentieth century.

If you want a good tonal comparison for The Riddle of the Sands, think The 39 Steps but with boats. It's got the same jolly-ho British gentlemen, casual racism, open-air chases and random but very dangerous danger. I think I would have found The Riddle of the Sands gently amusing in its own unintentionally offensive way had I not been so befuddled by all the boat words. If you do like boats, I think you'll find it charming but dated, but because I don't I have to give it

2.5 stars.

My last holiday book was A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood. So far, I have had 100% success with Isherwood. Even though I'm not sure Isherwood's someone I'd like to hang out in a pub with, I love his prose style, and both of the books I've previously read by him were pretty dark but unfailingly funny. In this novel, though, he has magnificently lost his sense of humour.

It's clear that Isherwood was going through a very, very bad time when he wrote A Single Man. Every page of it washes you with utter black despair of the kind I haven't experienced since the last time I read The Bell Jar (which I keep doing because I love it, even though I know that afterwards I will have to crawl into bed and stare at the ceiling for a while thinking about doom). Like The Bell Jar, it feels intensely personal in a way that makes you want to phone the Samaritans on the author's behalf.

Set in sixties America, it follows one day in the life of George, whose life-partner Jim has suddenly died. Because George is a man and Jim was one also, he can't acknowledge his grief, he can't properly mourn and he has no physical or legal claim on the person he loved. (Sounds familiar? Of course it does. And the worst thing is that it's not just ancient history. In the kind of life-mirroring-art that you wish would never happen, George's exact story played out again last year. That last link, by the way, is to a youtube video made by the surviving partner, and you should probably be in a strong mental state before you click play.)

Feel depressed yet? It gets worse. If that whole scenario wasn't awful enough on its own, A Single Man is set in Los Angeles, the most grim city in the universe, where the roads are neverending circles of hell, the sky is a permanent weird shade of yellow and everyone is starving hungry and hates each other. Everything is horrible, George hates everyone and his life is just A LITANY OF DESPAIR. And that is how this book goes.

I felt uncomfortable and upset while I was reading it, and disliked George intensely, which I'm sure is exactly what what Isherwood wanted to happen. The idea he's trying to get across- and it's an extremely powerful one - is that if you're subjected to hate all your life, you will become a hateful person. If you simply feel soggily sorry for George, you've missed the point. He's not a tragic martyr, he's a painfully angry, sad man, and that's the fault of all the people who have made sure that he can't be open about the life that he's lived. Isn't that a jolly holiday thought?

A Single Man was incredibly powerful, but also incredibly embittered. Rage and sorrow just shoot out of it in waves. I think it'll stay with me, and I know I agree with what it's got to say, but I didn't actually enjoy the experience of reading it.

I just wish it wasn't still so completely relevant.

3.5 stars.

Two super fast reviews - The Long Goodbye and Mr Norris Changes Trains

My god, look at the time. It's almost 2012. Last time I glanced up from frantically doing all the things it was only half way through December. I made Christmas dinner, I herded children, I wrote essays, I bought presents, I gave presents, I made things and cleaned things and fed people and went places and did things and I also read some books! I think. I can't even remember, really. So these two reviews will be short and to the point, and then I will go lie down in a darkened room and rest for ever.

First up: Mr Norris Changes Trains, which is confusingly called The Last of Mr Norris when in America. Presumably this is because trains are boring to Americans and/or publishers want you to spend more money, but in this case it's amusingly apt - it's a book all about wigs and international intrigue and it goes by several different aliases.

It's often published with, and almost the flipside to, Goodbye to Berlin (which I read and reviewed a few months ago). While Goodbye to Berlin sort of papers over all the terrible things that are happening politically, Mr Norris looks straight at them - which, oddly, has the effect of making its effect far less lingeringly stomach-churning than Goodbye to Berlin's.

For what is essentially a spy novel about the doomed Communist movement in Berlin, Mr Norris Changes Trains is - strange word, but the one I keep coming back to - unexpectedly charming. It's also the most gentle and funny look at homosexuality and extreme sexual fetishism that I've ever come across. The point I think it's trying to make (and, as far as I'm concerned, making very well) is that wanting to have sex with lithe German boys or asking a prostitute to whip you while you wear a dog collar and lick her boots is really far less offensive to humanity than going out and punching a Jewish man to death.

Mr Norris Changes Trains is a  wry, witty and distinctly not-your-average look at Berlin's underworld during Hitler's rise to power in the 1930s through the eyes of someone who bears a striking resemblance to Christopher Isherwood (I get the feeling this may be a common theme throughout Isherwood's novels). It's exceedingly polite, exceedingly funny and an exceedingly good read.

3.5 stars.

After Mr Norris Changes Trains (possibly it gave me a taste for underhand activity) I read The Long Goodbye, a distinctly more grim look at a life of crime.

Even people who haven't read a Chandler novel will know, vaguely, what one contains. It will be full of grim, similar men loping about with guns in their pockets and menace on their faces, while the cicadas chirp and the dust settles on the side of the road as a symbolic sign of civilisation's decay. Bodies will pile up in hotels and motels and parlours, impeccably dressed and generally clutching the remains of their last drink (if anyone in a Raymond Chandler novel is sober, it's either an oversight or a passing phase). But what is surprising about Chandler is that under all that slang and punching ("Hand over your gat, shamus, or the dame gets a sock in the kisser" and so on, interminably) he's an extremely accomplished and fairly beautiful writer. I think he writes pulp better than most Booker prize winners write at all.

Of course, there's a nastier side to all that tough talk and hard hitting. The book is catastrophically racist, sexist and homophobic. The women are living dolls who say no and mean yes and then dance about in front of Philip Marlowe with all their assets showing (most of the time he heroically resists temptation but slaps them about a bit to relieve his feelings), the gay men are evil like Disney villains and so weak they can barely stand on their pointy-shoed feet and the Mexicans laugh shrilly, twirl their knives and need constant verbal and physical abuse to keep them in their rightful place. I've written about the problems with reading this sort of fiction before - how do you, as a sensible, thoughtful human being, justify enjoying a book that refers to Mexicans (among many, many other even more horrific slurs) as 'cockroaches' and opines that their employers ought to beat them more in order to - if I understood this odd logical leap correctly - keep them sweet? My conclusion then, as now, is that you can't let your anger run away with you. It's vile, but it's just as much part of Chandler's cultural moment as the highballs and gats and outrageous suits. I like Chandler's writing - I really like his writing - but all the same, I think what he writes about is often fairly odious.

In this case, The Long Goodbye is about the strange and meandering case of Terry Lennox, who does something terrible (or maybe he doesn't) and Roger Wade, who is a mean drunk (or maybe he isn't). There's the inevitable cast of evil babes, wicked billionaires and hard-nosed policemen, and of course Philip Marlowe, who makes smartass world-weary comments and untangles the many threads in the case. It's weird, it's atmospheric and it's often distasteful, but for all its unpleasant flaws I still can't help liking it a lot.

3 stars.

(And, for those that are following my 1001 Books progress, I'm up to 18.88% on the list. Auspicious. Bring on the New Year.)

Two-Birds-With-One-Book-Review: Goodbye to Berlin

With the glorious sense of timing that only a Department of English can provide, I have finally been given my MA optional modules a whole week before term begins. I assume this is meant to provide us with a sense of excitingly Bohemian edge-of-our-seat living, as we frantically try to hold three books in our right hand while we scribble down notes with our left.

But amidst this hipster madness it does rather pleasingly turn out that many of the books I've been told to read for my 'Literary Biography and Autobiographication' (bonus points if you know what that last word means precisely, because I don't) course also appear in my nemesis the 1001 Books list, and most excitingly of all one of them is the very book I've been dying to have an excuse to buy since I watched Christopher And His Kind last spring.

This BBC drama, for a random one-off production about an author that most people my age have never heard of, was watched by an unusual number of my friends. This was, of course, because of its superior script and heartfelt political message, which is a polite way of saying that everyone wanted to see Doctor Who having gay sex in Nazi Germany. What I - and I think everyone - took from Christopher And His Kind was an hour and a half of staring at Matt Smith's alarmingly snow-white and icicle-like torso as it lounged in various locations with a variety of men (and sometimes women, platonically).

Goodbye to Berlin turns out to be, oddly enough, the inspiration for the film Cabaret. This is strange to me, because I've never seen Cabaret, but from what I know about it the resemblance seems tenuous. Sally Bowles does appear in it, but there's really not much singing and dancing in Goodbye to Berlin at all. When the characters do go to bars, they tend to sit around gloomily in an atmosphere of creeping unease and encroaching ruin. It's very proto-hipster, although with a political message, which redeems it somewhat.

The other thing that redeems it is Christopher Isherwood himself. Goodbye to Berlin is a very artistic-licence version of his own time in Berlin, during Hitler's rise to power in the early 1930s, and luckily he makes a great narrator. He's wry and observant and writes in a snappy, deadpan style that I like a lot. He's the sane guy in the middle of a world that's fascinating and recognisibly similar to our own but also completely, terrifyingly crazy. In Isherwood's Berlin, Nazis aren't cackling maniacs, they're plumbers, or bar men, or professional yodellers, and when Isherwood walks down the street he's just as likely to see two SA men casually turn around and beat some random guy's eye out of his head as he is to come across someone selling scarves. It's easy to explain away Hitler as the result of about 80% of Germans going raving mad in 1933, but the mad thing about Goodbye to Berlin is that these people aren't crazy. They're normal. And they still think that Hitler is a good idea. Are you unsettled yet? You will be after you read this book.

If you did watch Christopher And His Kind, you'll find Goodbye to Berlin very familiar. Its writers pretty much boiled down and tidied up the stories of Goodbye to Berlin (it's made up of six vaguely-linked chapters, each one to do with some part of Christopher's stay in Berlin), and then, because they were making a big-budget TV drama, made the result heave with added sexiness. The sex in Goodbye to Berlin itself turns out to be more referred to than written about, which is hardly surprising - since it was originally published in 1939, Christopher Isherwood could hardly include sentences that finished with, "... and then I had sex with a man I picked up in a bar!" I assume the BBC writers got most of their source material for that from Isherwood's memoir (also called Christopher And His Kind, and written much later, after most of the interested parties were convieniently no more). I may have to read it one day.

But anyway, Goodbye to Berlin was great, and disturbing, and a real relief after all that critical reading I've been wading through. I am now all in favour of bringing Christopher Isherwood back into literary favour from the Wasteland of Largely Forgotten Writers where he is currently hanging out. Because he's a good writer, and also because knowing about Christopher Isherwood can sometimes be very handy to a person.

4 stars. And the progress meter is at 17.98%