Behindlings - Nicola Barker
Nicola Barker is an interesting writer. A really great writer, but an interesting one. A messy one. One I really love. There’s a rule that is pretty much standard across the board in writing, best summarised by Strunk & White as “Omit Needless Words”. Barker totally disagrees with this, and it is totally glorious. Consider the following:
“The pigskin was firm to the touch. She tapped at it with her knuckle - the way you’d tap a tambourine - then she plucked at a string with her index finger. She sniggered, guiltily. It produced that deliciously tinny, utterly distinctive banjo sound - that dizzy twang - that stifled yowl of an angry tabby with it’s tail caught in a malfunctioning cat-flap. She liked it.”What a crazy, delightful passage. It’s gorgeous language, so evocative, but so over-the-top. You could scrub out half of it and it would be just as evocative, but nowhere near as good, or distinctive.
I think that is perhaps what makes Barker so interesting. She shouldn’t work. She’s verbose and expansive. She writes stories with no discernible plot and strange, unlikeable characters, and somehow it all works.
Really, really well.
I had an absolute hoot reading this. It’s not necessarily an easy read, and the themes and ideas often sit far deeper in the narrative than is standard in literature, but the search for them is rewarding, and when everything finally comes together in the end, you feel like you’ve read something impressive.
American Gods - Neil Gaiman
Gaiman is a fascinating figure in the world of writing. He’s probably the biggest superstar in the world of writing, a genuine celebrity, but with the talent and the stories to back it all up.
Sandman is a massive achievement not only in the world of comics, of graphic novels, but in the world of writing as a whole.
American Gods is a curious novel. It’s a deeply researched, deeply layered novel that, at it’s centre, deals with a theme familiar to Gaiman, the idea of change vs. death, but it’s dealt with in really interesting and fantastic ways. Even tho he’s dealing with really similar ideas to
Sandman, the treatment is so different, and so it never feels like he’s treading water.
He has a really strong gift for character, especially Shadow and Wednesday, and a real feel for story and structure. He’s also got the ability to create a mythology down pat, and it never feels unoriginal or bastardized, although it’s probably both. He doesn’t necessarily have the strongest gift for prose, although that’s really a minor complaint, and it’s not as if it’s bad, just very plain, functional prose. Which probably isn’t a bad thing.
It’s not a novel that’s gonna break my top 20, nor is it one that I’m likely to ever read again. But it’s definitely strong, and totally worth reading. And I definitely can’t wait to further explore Gaiman’s oeuvre.
Beatrice and Virgil - Yann Martell
Martell is such an fantastic writer. I’ve loved
Life of Pi and
The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccomatios, and when I heard this was coming out I was super excited. With good reason.
It’s the story of a successful writer, Henry, who writes a novel and an essay on the Holocaust, designed to be shipped together, printed as a flip book, where each half is printed opposite ways up, so that the book can be flipped over and the other part read. His editors turn the book down, and Henry leaves the world of writing. He moves to another city, and there he is sent a Gustave Flaubert short story and a scene from a play. He eventually meets the writer of the play, a taxidermist.
It’s a fascinating novel dealing with art and celebrity, but also dealing with the Holocaust in the most incredible of ways, with the persecuted cast as a donkey named Beatrice and a howler monkey named Virgil.
It’s fantastic, daring writing. It’s a relatively brief book, just on 200 pages, and it only took me probably 3 hours to read it. But it’s so worth it. Really highly recommended.