Iain [M] Banks

Today one of my colleagues at work told me that Iain Banks has terminal cancer and only has a matter of months to live. I was incredulous and deeply saddened by the news. A writer of rare ability, Banks has had two careers side by side. As Iain M. Banks he has been one of the greatest science fiction writers of the last twenty-five years or so. His Culture novels revealed Banks to be one of the most imaginative and playful writers in the genre.

As Iain Banks he has published literature, with a string of quality releases beginning with the left of centre classic The Wasp Factory in 1984. This was my first introduction to the brilliance of his writing and I still talk to people about that book today. However I’m more familiar with the Iain M Banks side of the story, with Use of Weapons (1990), Against a Dark Background (1993) and Look to Windward (2000) standing out as favorites.

Banks will be greatly missed, but he’s leaving behind an impressive body of work and for that he should feel satisfied. Thanks Iain, I’ve loved your books and I wish you a good end to this part of your story.

You can read Iain’s post about his illness and leave a message if you wish on his website here.

Infinite Jest – David Foster Wallace (1996)

The ABC’s First Tuesday Book Club was televised, funnily enough, last Tuesday, and they ended by revealing that they would read and talk about Infinite Jest in next month’s show. I inwardly groaned because so far this book has defeated me. I bought it a few years back and initially I enjoyed both the style and the premise, but then I became bogged down and finally halted completely. I’m languishing on page 420, half way through 30 April / 1 May Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (this will make sense if you try and read it).

The late David Foster Wallace was an adherent of the so-called hysterical realism style, which basically involves over the top prose that is all encompassing in its attention to detail regarding plot, characters and the minutia of the everyday and the not so everyday. Basically you are up for pages and pages of detail spent on one issue or subject, during which any number of tangents is not nearly enough. Well, this is my interpretation anyway.

The premise is suitably intriguing, complex and amazing. Infinite Jest is party focused on teenage tennis players at a sport-focused American college and partly on the patients at a drug rehab centre. It also involves a video that is so entertaining that the people watching it will starve to death and defecate where they sit rather than stop watching. Oh and it also seems to be set either in the near future or in an alternative present, I can’t quite work out which.

So the question is - should I attempt to finish this book that is sometimes tedious and sometimes brilliant? Has anyone else had the same problem? Or is Infinite Jest a work of genius and I’m simply not up to its challenges? I know from briefly researching the book online that it undoubtedly has its admirers and that it is perhaps the ultimate cult book of our times. This is all very well, but I still can’t get enthused about finishing it. Perhaps I should just get on with it; after all, I kind of want to know what’s on that videotape.

The Name of the Rose – Umberto Eco (1980)

Umberto Eco is a true Italian renaissance man, a semiotician, novelist, children’s author, critic, philosopher and author of non-fiction and essays. He also collects books and apparently has some 50,000 in his collection, including 1200 rare editions. Now that’s what I call a passionate bibliophile! The Name of Rose is definitely his most well known book, having sold some 26 million copies since its publication in 1980. Eco is an academic who has caught the imagination of the reading public the world over.

With The Name of the Rose Eco has created a highly credible medieval world in which fiction and fact are interwoven. This can be heavy going and there are on occasions long sections that deal with papal politics, heretical sects and monkish philosophy, all of which tests the reader’s resolve. Despite this the novel also has political and philosophical themes that have strong relevance today. You could even argue that the book has an uncanny prescient quality thirty-three years on, with its examination of the nature of truth, freedom, intolerance and the sometimes-uneasy relationship between church and state.

The central protagonists are William of Baskerville, a monk who values rationality rather than faith, and his novice assistant Adso of Melk, who also acts as the narrator. William and Adso appear to be playful allusions to Holmes and Watson, that other famous sleuthing pair. William and Adso are finely drawn protagonists who are both humane and complex. But as a murder mystery the book was unfortunately lost for me, due to viewing the movie version many years ago. This, at least, allowed me to enjoy how Eco manipulates the reader, spinning a web of diversions and blind alleys to obscure the truth, which is in any case very well hidden in more ways than one. As a murder mystery the novel is certainly compelling, however your average murder mystery fan will find it hard going.

The Name of the Rose is five hundred pages of dense narrative that will challenge even the most determined fan of literature. I did struggle despite having studied medieval history, but ultimately I enjoyed the novel. Eco is certainly a fine writer. The complex plot and the characterizations are his great strengths, although the pacing is sluggish on occasions, suffering from the burden of medieval detail. The descriptions of the monastery and the labyrinthine library are detailed and genuinely atmospheric. One of the best passages involves Adso becoming lost in reverie as he describes the carvings on the doors of the church, leading me to the conclusion that medieval art attempted to do what cinema does so readily in the modern age – to take people elsewhere and nourish the imagination.

Ostensibly a medieval murder mystery, the novel also examines the meta relationship between narratives, how they feed into each other and also how they blend with the ‘real life’ narratives of the humans who read them, in this case scared apocalyptic fourteenth century monks. About half way through the novel, after William and Adso have already ventured through the library labyrinth (a highlight of the novel), they ruminate on the nature of books, how “Often books speak of other books.” In The Name of the Rose Eco does indeed speak of other books, with many references to ancient books, real, lost and perhaps even fabricated by Eco himself. Books and the stories they tell are the key to understanding this complex murder mystery. Keep that in mind when reading and you’ll have a chance of solving the mystery yourself.

Blending medieval history with a murder mystery has certainly worked for Eco in terms of capturing readers’ imaginations, but I wonder just how many people have actually finished the book? I know of at least two people who have had up to four attempts at completing it. If you are interested, but can’t face up to the long medieval interludes, perhaps try the movie, or even the board game. But that would be cheating, wouldn’t it?

The Transit of Venus – Shirley Hazzard (1980)

Rating: Sublime

Shirley Hazzard is one of those writers who can skirt the borders of literary pretension and get away with it due to her beautiful writing style and her subtle skill with narrative form. Hazzard also has a splendid way of making an obtuse plot inviting, making The Transit of Venus a master class of highly literate writing that even those who feel most comfortable with so called genre novels can easily read and enjoy. Hazzard is an Australian ex-pat who left the country in 1947 at the age of sixteen and as far as I can ascertain has never returned. She began the life of a writer in the early 1960’s when she submitted a short story that she’d written for her own enjoyment to The New Yorker and it was published. Since then there has been short story collections, non-fiction and four novels. Although Hazzard is not prolific, there was a gap of twenty-three years between The Transit of Venus and The Great Fire (2003); she makes up for it with her sheer class.

The Transit of Venus is, on the surface, a story about two orphaned Australian sisters, Caroline and Grace Bell, who end up living in 1950’s England. The narrative takes place over four decades and follows their lives and, most significantly, their relationships. Love, with all its triumphs and tragedies, is central to the novel. Caroline has many suitors but it is her unrequited relationship with the long-suffering Astronomer Edmund Tice that gives the novel romantic tension. Using the actual transit of Venus as an analogy for the vagaries of romance, Hazzard milks it for all it’s worth. She suggests that like trying to observe the transit of Venus, you need to be in the right place at the right time to succeed romantically.

Thematically The Transit of Venus tackles not just the nature of love, but also gender politics, class, wartime morality and personal duplicity. One of the strengths of the novel is Hazzard’s skill in bringing the time period of the 1950’s to the 1980’s alive. The narrative is a superb blend of the personal and the historical, each complimenting the other. There’s a great sequence in which she describes a multitude of women across 1950’s London waking up and preparing them-selves for a day’s work. These women represent the vanguard of working women who weren’t going to waste the gender gains of WWII.

Hazzard’s pose is dazzling, sophisticated and beautiful, allowing a special kind of engagement between the reader and the narrative to develop. At times I felt enraptured by her writing and as the novel unfolded the strength and subtlety of the plot became readily apparent. Hazzard also drops a few strong hints about how the novel ends early on and if you pay attention you will understand the ending, otherwise you may be in for a re-read.

Hazzard’s characters have a certain cold complexity, particularly Caroline, who manoeuvres through her relationships with a subtle cold detachment. Caroline’s sister, Grace, mostly serves to underline the gender trap of domesticity, although she does take the lead in a section filled with frustrated romantic yearnings. Her husband, Christian Thrale, represents middle-class public servant small-mindedness, something Hazzard herself was familiar with having worked for the United Nations.

I first read this novel way back in 1994 for a university unit on Australian literature and it really opened my eyes to the possibilities of highly literate fiction. My prior reading habits mainly included cult novels and science fiction. Hazzard, with one novel, inspired me to move outside my comfort zone and for that I’m grateful. Recently I read an interview with Hazzard in the Guardian from 2006 and I realised that my conversion was no coincidence. She has this to say about literature:

"The idea that somebody has expressed something, in a supreme way, that it can be expressed; this is, I think, an enormous feature of literature. I feel that people are more unhappy, in an unrealised way, for not having these things in their lives: not being able to express something, or to profit from somebody else having expressed it. It can be anything but it's always, if it's supreme, an exaltation."

To me this perfectly sums up just why fiction is just as important, if not more so, than non-fiction when it comes to guiding us through this weird universe we find ourselves in. Read The Transit of Venus and you’ll find out just why.

No Certainty Attached: Steve Kilbey and the Church – Robert Dean Lurie (2009)

Rating: Excellent

No Certainty Attached is written by long time fan musician and writer Robert Dean Lurie, who in 1990 at the tender age of 16 saw The Church live on a tour of the U.S. Thirteen years later Lurie contacted Kilbey to ask if he’d be involved with this biography and to Lurie’s surprise he said yes. Fittingly the biography begins with some words from Steve Kilbey himself:

Lurie attempts to come to some kinda understanding of my paradox. That is, I can be so nice, or I can be not so nice and hardly anything in the middle. And it’s funny that Lurie puts the boot in at the end and he reckons that the fambly manne (sic) thing is an act, and my everyman pose is faux, and really I’m the same old prick, and Rob, you’ve hit the nail on the head, actually…

As a long time fan of both The Church and Kilbey’s solo music, the question of whether Steve Kilbey is the same old prick is something I do not particularly care about (as interesting as that is). For me the music is the main consideration and I consider The Church to be one of greatest Australian bands of any era. What the above quote reveals is that No Certainty Attached is not one of those sycophantic and superficial biographies. The fact that Kilbey’s ego is not pandered to and that Lurie himself is part of the story makes No Certainty Attached one of the most enjoyable music biographies I’ve read for a long time.

It’s easy to warm to Lurie, his writing style is unpretentiously affable and over the course of the book his relationship with Kilbey and The Church progresses to the level of friendship. Lurie’s life is very much tied up with Kilbey in terms of being a source of inspiration and ongoing fascination. Lurie recounts his first meeting with Kilbey in 1998 as a support for a solo gig, a meeting that provided him both disillusionment and a certain level of fulfilment. The book contains several interludes in which Lurie ponders the ambiguous boundaries between fandom and his burgeoning relationship with Kilbey. Bravely Lurie recounts how during one of their interviews for the book Kilbey openly tests him for evidence of sycophancy; a test that Lurie fails, much to Kilbey’s displeasure. But Lurie later admits that it taught him a valuable lesson.

Although Lurie’s presence in the book is welcome, it’s Kilbey’s story and the history of the band that makes the book an essential read for Kilbey/Church fans. There’s the usual childhood background, with Kilbey emigrating with his parents from the UK in 1957, eventually settling in Canberra. Steve Kilbey the child was a Doctor Who fan and as Lurie notes was, for better or worse, a smaller version of his adult self. Kilbey became a reluctant teenager, recalling that he was disappointed when he realised that his childhood had ended. Lurie notes that as a teenager Kilbey dated a girl that he was attracted to because she looked like Roger Waters circa the 1971 Meddle album. Hilariously he couldn’t understand why this didn’t go down well. Recollections like these give the biography a welcome level of charm and warmth.

Steve Kilbey's girlfriend in high school

The tale of how The Church came together as a band is a fascinating one. Lurie does a fine job recounting the history of The Church, but one of the best things about the book was that I found out about Kilbey’s many obscure side projects that ran parallel with both the Church and his solo career. It’s possible I could be spending a lot of money online searching out these records. Kilbey’s career is like a labyrinth with many rooms containing obscure treasures.

No Certainty Attached also contains a few revelations; including that incredulously the first lineup of the band included a guy who bullied Kilbey in high school – Nick Ward. Lurie’s interviews with Ward reveal that twenty or so years later he probably would still be bullying Kilbey had he stayed in the band. What is it about drummers? I was also amazed to learn that Kilbey endured a ten-year heroin addiction, which began post Gold Afternoon Fix (1990) - naughty Steve, but I’m glad he survived to tell the tale.

Lurie’s serpentine tale of strife, inspiration, failure and musical brilliance ends in 2006, where again he meets with Kilbey on tour. The meeting is friendly and you can detect that fambly man vibe between them. At the end of the book Kilbey has the final word in a hilarious stream of consciousness via his blog in which he refers to Lurie as having been “…some seriously uptight fanboy” and how he divested himself of that and wrote “a good book”. Kilbey is correct and Lurie should update it soon as The Church released one of their best albums in 2009 (Untitled #23) and are still touring to this day. I advise Church fans to read this book, but no doubt many have already. Also check out Kilbey's interesting blog...

A Time to Read - a Time to Write

January has passed by in a heat haze of demand and grind, so much so that I’ve barely had any time to write either fiction or reviews. If time were a book the January chapter would have to be speed read because reality is just so demanding. As Damon Albarn once noted - modern life is rubbish.

Luckily enough moments to read still present themselves on the train and at work-time lunch. Recently I’ve read No Certainty Attached - a fine Steve Kilbey biography; Shirley Hazzard’s highly literate The Transit of Venus and I’m one hundred pages from finishing Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, which is like being caught in a medieval mudslide. My thoughts about these books will emerge eventually.

Meanwhile I’m having nearly a week off work to go south of Perth to rest and relax by the beach. I’m taking with me Haruki Murakami’s last book - 1Q84. I’m finally in the mood to read his book after having bought the hardback edition over a year ago. It’s going to be great to reconnect with Murakami. About five years ago I had become quite jaded with the books I was reading. Fortunately I stumbled across his novel Dance Dance Dance at my library and it totally reinvigorated my reading experience.

So Murakami, I’ll be immersed in your weird world again and at night I’ll dream of being trapped in a library labyrinth whilst library patrons pursue me asking unanswerable reference questions, their mouths leaking words that pool on the floor until I’m swimming in them. Well, hopefully I will not have that dream again; instead I’d like to dream about books and wine… 

How to Live Safely in A Science Fictional Universe – Charles Yu (2010)

Rating: Unrated

I’m a total sucker for time travel stories, with their wild narrative possibilities that allow for glimpses of the future, or to meddle with the past, producing paradoxes that can bend your mind. Charles Yu’s tale about a time machine repairman, a meta-man called Charles Yu, promised just the kind of time brain-bending thrill I needed. But a curious thing happened – I didn’t connect with the book at all and found the plot to be pedestrian compared to other great time travel related novels, such as Dan Simmons’ Hyperion (1990) and Greg Bear’s Eon (1991).

How to Live Safely in A Science Fictional Universe’s protagonist is a bit of a loser who has escaped his problems by hiding out in his time machine with a pet dog who doesn’t really exist and a computer with a female persona called Tammy. Unfortunately most of the narrative is centered around Yu’s family, most notably his father who toils for years to create the world’s first time machine by working on the theory that human psychology is the key to time travel. Yu goes on to get himself in a spot of bother with a time paradox and has to work out a way around it. What could be intriguing stuff is unfortunately let down by the subdued loser tone and Yu’s endless ruminations about his relationship with his parents. Charles Yu, the protagonist, not the author, is not an engaging character and the novel also suffers from sluggish forward momentum.

I could go on to further criticise the book’s shortcomings, but instead I’ll talk about how being dissatisfied with this novel made me think about the nature of writing and criticism. This is Charles Yu’s debut novel and as someone who is trying to write fiction I know that it’s no mean feat to sit down and put in the hours to actually write a decent story. Yu undoubtedly put a great deal of hard work into this novel and Corvus also believed that it was good enough to be published. But then someone like me reads it and finds it wanting. Every reader is a critic, whether they write about it or not, but how can we be sure of our critical acumen? With any work of art there exists an objective criteria that can act as a critical roadmap for judging its worth. In the case of literature it is not enough to merely state that the book did not engage or that you simply didn’t like it, you need to be sure objectively as to why the book falls short; that your criticisms are not wholly given over to the subjective whims of your tastes. This is why a book like Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) is considered the greatest novel ever written despite the fact most people do not actually enjoy reading it (I’ve met a few who have, but not many).

I am actually comfortable with my conclusion that How to Live Safely in A Science Fictional Universe is flawed due to objective reasons rather than subjective distaste. But there is still a nagging doubt, enough to stop me from giving it a rating. Looking around on the net I found that reader’s reactions ranged from one star reviews right up to five star reviews with raves about the novel’s originality. Did I miss the point of the novel entirely? Was the narrative so clever that all I could notice was some trivial shortcomings that are perhaps commonplace in an author’s debut novel? Did I miss key clues that could have led to an understanding of a complex hidden subplot? This has also made me rethink the plot and wonder if the book is a clever analogy for an individual’s journey through life and therefore space/time? A journey filled with regrets and what ifs that define our psychological landscape.

Perhaps, Charles Yu, I should read your novel again. Perhaps this is the very point of the novel, after all the eponymous protagonist is stuck in a time loop, reading a book that came from the future, a book that Yu is actually writing as he is reading it. A book called How to Live Safely in A Science Fictional Universe. Confused? So am I. Read the book yourself and let me know what you think.