When similes go bad

There should be a law about similes. Or at least the over use of them in novels.

A couple of days ago, I gave up reading March Violets by Philip Kerr, as I was on the verge of throwing it at something.

Described variously as “brilliantly innovative” (Salman Rushdie in the Independent on Sunday) and as having “echoes of Raymond Chandler but [being] better on his vivid and well-researched detail than the master” (Evening Standard), it’s the first of what constitutes the Berlin Noir trilogy, with further installments published later.

Set in 1936 in the German capital, it features private detective Bernie Gunther, a former policeman.

It’s a great idea, but what the Standard describes as “well-researched detail” is, in fact, laid on with a trowel – not least when it comes to the aforementioned similes.

Here’s an early example:

“From her coat pocket she produced a small lace handerchief which seemed as improbable in her large, peasant hands as an antimacassar in those of Max Schmelling, the boxer ...”

Now, if you have to explain a simile to the reader, perhaps you shouldn’t bother in the first place.

It was with some relief that, a few pages later, Kerr didn’t feel the need to similarly explain who Horst Wessel was.

The comparisons with Chandler do Kerr no favours either.

If that “well-researched detail” is better, then it’s worth noting that Chandler was not writing anything that claimed to be a work of historical fiction, so such a comparison is unfair.

And while Kerr clearly is a clever writer, the cynicism of his protagonist comes across as forced and too clever by half.

In Chandler’s deft hands, Philip Marlowe’s world-weary persona never seems over the top, and is subtly leavened by, for instance, his observation of the nature of the novels’ California setting – passing mentions of the colour and scent of jacaranda, for example.

In other words, there are sensibilities beneath Marlowe’s hard-boiled exterior.

If you’re going to do ‘clever’ and make historical and cultural references, there are other authors doing it far better.

Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula novels are riddled with references, historical and cultural, but he doesn’t feel a need to signpost them. You either spot them or you don’t – and part of the pleasure in reading the books is in seeing what you do spot.

And the same can be said of Alan Moore’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (not the film).

One of the things that this illustrates is just how subjective book reviewing is.

A review in the Guardian for Mortal Mischief, the first of Frank Tallis’s Liebermann Papers series, finds it to contain “too much history”.

As someone who’s about half way through that book right now, it seems that there’s enough to give and sense of authenticity and atmosphere, but nothing that leaves you feeling that the author is being overly clever or that gets in the way of the story itself.

Choosing to set his novels in fin-de-siècle Vienna, it allows him to explore some of the massive changes that were occurring at the time – not least in making his central protagonist, Max Liebermann, a young doctor who is acquainted with one Sigmund Freud, and who uses the new science of psychology in his contributions to criminal investigations.

Oh – and since it’s set in the Austrian capital, there’s cake. And lots of it.

One of Kerr’s other problems is that of writing a novel set not just in a different time, with historic events at its heart, but also in a different place.

I can think of a host of 1930s novels about Berlin to recommend instead of this if you want to get the atmosphere – Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin, for instance, or Fabian (now republished in a restored, uncensored version, as Going to the Dogs: The Story of a Moralist) from Emil and the Detectives author Erich Kästner.

And there’s always Christopher Isherwood, who was actually there at the time – and yes, almost inevitably, Kerr uses a metaphor about “Kit Kat” girls.

Of course, the different attitudes toward the historic backgrounds of both books could simply be a reflection of the fact that one of those periods continues to obsess British readers and the other does not.

Run a search for ‘Nazis’ in books on Amazon, and it produces 16,330 results – not all of which will entirely fit the bill, but it gives you an idea.

Run a similar search for fin-de-siècle Vienna, and you get 1,279 results – and that too includes things like tourist guides to the city in the very much here and now.

It is, of course, entirely possible to pen a novel set against historic events in a country and culture that’s different from your own – Martin Cruz Smith is evidence of that.

If he set himself an almost impossible standard with Gorky Park, the first Arkady Renko thriller, the second and thirds one, Polar Star and Red Square respectively, are still a very good outing and in the latter particularly, historic events present a backdrop to the story.

The thing is with Smith, he’s good enough to weave fiction and fact together seamlessly and without ever seeming to be over-egging the pudding.

You don’t sit there, turning pages and thing: ‘My god, how clever is this writer?’ Instead, you simply wonder how it’s all going to turn out – and you keep turning the pages.

It might be that the stereotype of the melancholic Russian, steeped in vodka, is just that – a stereotype – but stereotypes also exist for a reason.

And here too, Smith gives his Renko books a great sense of empathy and atmosphere.

Still, as all this just goes to show, literature – even for professional reviewers; and that’s a role I’ve played – is more subjective than objective, particularly where fiction’s concerned.

It’s also always useful to be reminded of what quality is by seeing what it isn’t. And if Berlin Noir did nothing else, the obvious comparison with Chandler made me realise, yet again, what an absolute poet that man was.

Shaking up British literary complacency

A row is taking shape in British literary circles after academic Gabriel Josipovici declared that some of the countries’ leading authors were not literary giants.

Josipovici condemns the likes of Julian Barnes, Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan and Martin Amis largely on the grounds, it seems, that while they write well, he thinks they all display a “petty-bourgeois uptightness” and are “prep-school boys showing off”.

According to the Guardian, he apparently “singled out The Comfort of Strangers, McEwan's story of obsession, as easy to read but lacking ‘a sense of destiny, of other worlds suggested but lying beyond words’, unlike that experienced through Proust or Henry James. McEwan's novel is read ‘to pass the time’, he said.

“Such novels had a ‘lack of vision and limited horizons’.

“‘One finishes them and feels, 'So what?' – so very different from the gut-wrenching experience of reading Herman Melville's Bartleby or William Golding’s The Inheritors,” said Josipovici.

Now, I’m aware that a similar question has been raised about literature in the US, but don’t remotely know enough to comment on the situation over The Pond.

In this case, I’ve read at least some work by all the authors that Josipovici is quoted as mentioning. What I’ve read of McEwan’s work I’ve enjoyed – Amsterdam is very darkly funny. I’ve not been stunned by Barnes’s fiction, although I like his non-fiction (Pedant in the Kitchen is very funny). I enjoyed Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses; I didn’t like Amis’s Money.

I’d add into the same mix Blake Morrison, whose latest book, The Lost Weekend, I reviewed a couple of months ago.

When I start to really think about it, Josipovici is right. All of the above write very well. You can enjoy them. But they don’t leave you with any great sense of underlying questions afterward.

I mentioned Amsterdam as a book I enjoyed – but I can’t remember anything about it that left me thinking afterward – compare that to Golding's Lord of the Flies, which I hated at school and then was stunned when I re-read it as an adult a few years ago.

The article also mentions the current plethora of historical novels as though this were necessarily a negative thing in terms of thought-provoking literature.

Now I’m currently reading Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall (last year’s Booker winner), a big book about Thomas Cromwell and his role in the English Reformation.

With 101 pages of the 650 to go (I’m absolutely racing through it, given my usual reading speed), I’d have to say that not only is it a very entertaining read, Mantel has penned a deeply informative novel – and one that does make you consider questions around its story.

One could say the same of Thomas Mann’s family saga, Buddenbrooks, which was the title listed on his Nobel citation in 1929.

So if we take Nobel (and Booker) status as indicative of literature, then historical novels certainly count.

But if we’re looking for more than a good read, well written – a ‘novel of ideas’, in other words – then there is no shortage of literary greats (and entertaining to – see Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum).

Personally, Mann is a giant in that area: after reading Buddenbrooks, my introduction to his work, I read a collection of the sort stories, culminating in Death in Venice. The book took me three months to read, because I didn’t want to miss anything and there was so very much to see. And when I read that final novella, my jaw was left on the ground.

I’ve read Death in Venice a number of times since – and on each occasion, I see something different. Reading it initially left me stunned – I don’t think that I had ever quite realised just what a book could contain.

And that, I think, is what Josipovici is bemoaning a lack of.

But if not quite on that scale, there is actually plenty of thoughtful stuff around in genre fiction – if you set aside the snobbery about genre fiction in general.

As an example: recently, in a sci-fi mood, I read Alastair Reynolds’s Revelation Space and Iain M Banks’s Use of Weapons in succession.

Both are well written, rollicking space operas. What differentiates them is that, where that’s pretty much where Reynolds’s book ends, Banks leaves you with a few things to consider: the nature of crime, punishment, forgiveness, repentance and restitution – and that’s without mentioning the constant question that all his Culture novels raise, of foreign policy; of the ethics of interfering in other countries’ affairs.

And as I mentioned last week, setting aside all the hype, Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo offers more than just the thrills that its ‘thriller’ tag might lead potential readers to expect.

What is interesting, though, is why such a situation has occurred? Are there no new ideas – or even reworking and rethinking of old ones for our current times? Given the complexities of these times, you have to wonder why not.

It's not that we've always lacked such writers – Golding was mentioned above: there are plenty more, from Virginia Woolf to Iris Murdoch.

Perhaps it’s simply another aspect of the attitude toward intellectualism and intellectual pursuits in the UK? But then again, we have almost nothing that could be described as philosophy in this country – or nothing that anyone outside some hallowed ivory halls has heard of, leaving us with populists such as AC Grayling and Roger Scruton. So maybe it's not really a surprise. Perhaps, after all, we're doing really rather well to have nicely-written books that entertain?

A thriller that offers more than thrills

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

Investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist is co-publisher of Swedish magazine Millennium which has a built a reputation for holding dodgy businessmen (and women) to account for their actions.

But when he receives information that leads him to print a story about industrialist Hans-Erik Wennerström, Blomkvist finds himself in court on libel charges, and with the realisation dawning that he cannot back up his claims.

Sentenced to three months in prison and having resigned from Millennium, he is awaiting the date for his incarceration when he's invited to visit Henrik Vanger, the elderly former CEO of Vanger Enterprises. Vanger asks him to take on a job in a freelance capacity – writing a book about the extended Vanger family. But that is a cover for trying to work out what happened to his niece, Harriet, who disappeared without trace in 1966 and who Vanger believes was murdered by a family member.

Vanger has already employed Lisbeth Salander – 25 and a ward of state after a deeply troubled childhood – to find out everything that there is to know about Blomkvist. The asocial Salander, we discover, is a genius with computers, but she has problems of her own with her new state-appointed guardian.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is one of the most hyped novels in recent years: as such, I'd avoided it. But a number of personal recommendations concluded last Wednesday night when I was at a book launch in a book shop – and on the way to pay for some books, I picked one up. In effect, 500-plus pages disappeared over two days.

A thriller and a detective novel: dark and violent, cynical and yet written in a very unrushed and careful style, the first of Stieg Larsson's trilogy is a super read.

And that's not simply because it's entertaining as a piece of genre fiction – which it certainly is. But what Larsson also created here was a series of very interesting and quirky characters, and a very morally complex piece of fiction. Add into that such things as as recurring debate about nature v nurture, and you have a very satisfying piece of fiction indeed.

The tragedy is that Larsson himself died shortly after delivering the three manuscripts to his publisher. What a shame he never lived to realise what a success the books would become – and well worth that success they really are.

Of course, there are huge amounts of snobbery around about genre fiction, but this is more intellectually challenging than some 'proper' literature.

Lost

A few months ago, in another little corner of cyberspace, a poster suggested that we have a writing competition. They posted a number of poems, and invited anyone who was interested to write a short story inspired by one of the poems.

Well, I read the poems, and the following one got my brain ticking:

Lost by (no author given)

Hollow footsteps, cloaked by night
Of sadness known through tortured sight;
The willow weeps for solitude
As Owl moans a gloomy interlude.
- Reflection in the glossy lake
"If I should die before I wake..."
A tear shatters the silent face
That seeks solace in this deserted place.
Wind whispers through the willow's leaves,
And Owl, perched high, silently grieves.
The glow from city lights afar
Swallow whole a falling star.
A wish upon the trembling lips
For peace. A raven gently sips
The water near his honored guest,
But soon flies to his hidden nest.
Weary beneath the flowing cloak,
The traveller rests against an oak
And fights the lure of heavenly sleep
-"I pray the Lord my soul to keep..."

Forever lost, each journey taken
Plagues the mind; the nights awaken
Troubled visions, thoughts of yesterdays,
That seem like beacons - lives away.
Random comforts cannot ease this soul,
For knowledge takes its weary toll
'Pon one who suffers with each breath,
Who slept once in peace, then awoke in death.



The following story was the result. And it occurred to me that it wouldn't be a bad idea (or perhaps it is!) to give it a home here. It was an intriguing experience writing it, because it's light years from anything that I'd written before or since. See what you think.



Lost

Evening dips its toes into the incoming dark, feeling the cool pull of unstoppable night. One world dies as another comes to life. Street lights flicker awake. The breeze is negligible but cooling after the heat of day.

Beneath the bruised sky a woman hides in the shadows and scuttles with care between patches of covering gloom as the dusk descends and people stride purposefully past to pick up their lives elsewhere.

The minutes pass. Unobserved, weary beneath the flowing coat, she rests against a wall and sighs. But exhaustion is mingled with excitement and her heart pounds as she bides her time. The glow from city lights could dwarf a star, yet in her corner she remains unseen. A sparrow in the narrow alleyway gently sips the water near his guest, but soon flies to his hidden nest, leaving her to seek solace in this deserted place.

The minutes pass. She watches as the shops close; as shutters glide down, as doors are locked, as ‘open’ signs are spun to say otherwise: and then – half envious half chivvying them away – as the shop assistants leave for the day, chatting and gossiping amongst themselves and into mobile phones, their laughter spreading out as the emptying streets echo with departing life.

The minutes pass and still she waits to be sure that she is alone. A cat slinks past, brushing against her and, with an insouciant flick of its luxuriant tail, disappears into the gloom in search of mice. She listens to the beat of her heart, the whisper of her breath; feels the pulse near the surface of her skin; feels safe in the dark, in the silence. And finally, certain at last that no one else is in sight, that nobody will see her, she steps out into the deserted street.

Neon reflected in a glossy puddle proclaims all the pleasures that can be bought from the shops around her. She gazes into vast windows, mesmerised by plastic flesh, pristine and faultless, draped in creations of exuberant colour and texture. Vacant eyes stare over her shoulder, ignoring her – as she knows everyone ignores her. How odd that being so large should make her feel so small.

Silk scarves of almost impossible delicacy drape from long, thin fingers, unmoving. Unattainable elegance scorns her gauche clumsiness and yet she stares with longing; with a belief that this could – should – be possible for her too.

Gods, plastic gods; to be worshipped and adored: looked up to as they preside over vast cathedrals of glitz and glamour, of beauty and perfection. Praise them and pass the concealing stick. Beacons, these unthinking dummies – many lives away from hers: a perpetual, impossible challenge to her own body, which she hides forever beneath formless grey that promises never to reveal her secret curves.

And she buries herself deeper, deep in the dark shadows, staying away from people, saving them the sight of her grossness. Only the gods can see her failings when she comes to them.

Fortune has been kind to her – parents who left her wealthy enough that she never has to leave the house for work each day; no mixing with those who are more beautiful that she is; no mixing with anyone, then.

The money grows of its own accord, without effort, while the internet – blessedly impersonal – takes care of basic needs: but they’re animal comforts that never ease her soul.

Unused credit cards sing siren songs from an unopened purse, urging her to give them air; to flash them brazenly at sales assistants and spend, spend, spend. To enjoy life. To experience life.

There’s so much money waiting to be spent that she could buy anything she wanted: but what she wants, money can’t buy.

Threadbare emotions, worn through by lack of care, lay bare a throbbing pain, as prodigious as her fecund bank accounts.

And still she gazes at the mannequins with their alabaster skin and curveless figures, longing to look like them because, when she does – if she could – then everything will be different; everything will be alright.

She turns from the windows that comfort and torture, and trudges through the city, back to her twilight existence on the edge of life.

Hollow footsteps, cloaked by night, sound on the naked wood. In dusky rooms, damp with the disappointment of decades, the mirrors tease her; like fairground gimmicks, they warp her before her own eyes. It’s a sadness known through tortured sight. A tear shatters her silent face.

Interred in the kitchen, she mixes ingredients with unexpected ferocity into every variety of cake imaginable. But she never eats – not even a lick from the wooden spoon – muttering instead an obsessive mantra that reminds her that, if only she can lose enough weight, if only she can cut enough calories, her life can start.

But she cannot stop wanting, cannot stop thinking about food. So she bakes the dark hours away, throwing flour and salt and eggs and cream and spices and milk into bowls and moulds; mixing and stirring and creating; the vast oven a surrogate womb, dispensing the fruits of her lust onto racks to cool as the night moves to day and she tries to beat past the need for food; for comfort.

Under bruised skies once more she scurries outside to a nearby home for the infirm, leaving cakes on the doorstep and running away again before anyone can see her.

Exhausted; gothic pale, she hides from the sun in her lair, heavy curtains blotting out the light. After the night’s work, she slumps into a chair in front of the muted TV, defeated once more, lonely and miserable, stuffing her face with chocolates, lips tinted brown like one of those store mannequins she envies so much.

She sleeps, but barely in peace, then awakes to a living death as the sky darkens once more; as a willow weeps in solitude and a nearby owl moans a gloomy interlude. There’s a wish upon her trembling lips for peace, but knowledge takes its weary toll and each journey taken plagues her mind, while the nights awaken troubled visions and thoughts of yesterdays. With nothing to follow but more of the same.