RECENT READS

THE INNOCENT [By Harlan Coben]. Never read anything by Harlan Coben. This was another novel left behind at our French holiday apartment. Just looking at the reviews on Amazon, it generally has five-star approval although someone says it isn’t a literary masterpiece and elsewhere they say it’s ‘a good airport novel’. Certainly, most blokes in the airport in Nice if they were reading anything, were reading either Harlan Coban or Lee Child [NOT Skandi]. I packed it in at page 48. Dialogue, dialogue, dialogue. Tell, tell and tell again. Not for me.

RAYLAN [By Elmore Leonard]. More crime fiction. I always thought I hated this genre and have never read any of his so-called greats like Get Shorty and Hombre or indeed any of his terrific early western stuff. The blurb on the cover describes him as the Crime Writer’s crime writer. He is the guy famous/notorious for his tips on writing plainly: he said; she said; Raylan said; said Art; he said. I find it mannered and dated I’m afraid.

It’s about a gang of desperadoes who steal the kidneys from living people, usually in a motel room and  then sell them back to them [before they die]. Kidney transplants are something very close to my own knowledge base right now and the idea is completely preposterous, as far as I am concerned. His style is banter and gallows humour, like this from p.129:

‘Raylan, I hear you’re on the company’s side this time.’

‘Till tomorrow,’ Raylan said.

Another coal lover in his sport shirt and M-T company hat said to Raylan, ‘I’ll meet you after, you want. Teach you respect for the company.’

‘You don’t see me right away,’ Raylan said, ‘practice falling down till I get here.’

About half-way through the story takes a right turn in a completely different direction when the boss of M-T mining shoots a miner and then way down the line on page 200 a whole slew of new characters arrive and we get some stuff about poker players. After that he abandons the he said, she said and we go to:

‘I saw that part.’

‘Harry’ll put the checks in my account.’’

‘Were you nervous?’

‘A little. But I knew I’d win.’

‘How’d you know?’

It is linear; this happens then that happens then something else happens. He doesn’t do ‘clever’ with events out of place, which is something by and large that I don’t like. He has a slight structural problem keeping it all in the present tense which effectively means he has to have Raylan in virtually every scene, even when he has nothing to do directly with the action at that time. But it isn’t a big issue. The dialogue seems authentic . . .  Ameri-kan low-life but I am so detached these days from anything American that it is completely meaningless to me whether it is authentic or not.

Overall, I quite liked it.

THE HONOURABLE SCHOOLBOY [By John Le Carre]. Another holiday book from France, which I was reluctant to even pick up because I was so disappointed by The Night Manager and because it followed on from Tinker Taylor, one of my all-time top ten novels and I didn’t want it either spoiled or to be just left feeling disappointed again.

686 pages – Gawd.

It has terrific reviews on Amazon; five star, five star, five star although I can’t find for example reviews from The Times or The Guardian from the time. I am sure they liked it.

As I have written before, I loved Tinker Taylor, I have read it twice in fact and watched the Alec Guinness television adaption at least once. But after the disappointment of the Night Manager, I was wary of picking up yet another John LeCarre. However around about page 250 I actually thought the thought, ‘this is the best book I have ever read’. It is so beautifully crafted, it takes your breath away. 

Line after amazing line. I loved this, among many:

‘She would be funny, he decided. If Lizzie were here she would definitely see a funny side and laugh at it. Somewhere among all her imitations, he reckoned, there was a lost original, and he definitely intended to find it.’

Haven’t we all at some point in our lives thought those thoughts about someone we fancy? It’s what makes the world go round.

But that turns out to be the last great line and we are in to LeCarre the dirty old man: Korean whores; Bangkok whores; Eurasian whores, whatever they might be and of course because it is largely set in Hong Kong, Chinese whores. Never-ending racial stereotyping. Never-ending misogyny. And every character is explored in minute detail, Lizzies mother, Ko’s son, Captain Urquhart, there is a supporting cast of hundreds. Maybe that is what readers wanted back in the day [1977] God, its not what this reader wants today. So, so dated and the whole thing drags almost to a standstill, when the Americans stick their oar in.

I finished it, but If ever a novel needed a strong editor this is it.    

ST ENOCH

St Enoch is the patron saint of Glasgow. According to Genesis, the first book of the bible, he was Noah’s [of Ark fame] grandfather.

I am reading an old [1971] book at the moment called The Private Sector by Joseph Hone. It’s a spy story; it’s good, there is a review below but it has this line:

. . . the ritual in everything, the extreme concepts of honour and pleasure. Honour among men; the tough sink-or-swim male society with its inexplicable, cruel rules . . . like school.

Okay, it’s out of context but I had never thought before in my life about maleness being sink-or-swim. But it very often is. My old accountant, Andrew was very fond of saying, ‘if you aren’t going forward, you are going back; you can’t stand still’. What a pressure, eh?

Unfortunately there is a lot of truth in it and some men do give up and do something else: play golf, watch football, join the camera club. Something they can compete indirectly in or where failure isn’t the end of the world, as it might be if you take one risk too many and the business fails or you haven’t the stamina to make it to the next peak. Or whatever manly pursuit you are undertaking that day. Or of course, if you can’t find the courage to ask the new girl in HR out on a date and flash Jimmy who has no such hang-ups takes her out and next thing is they are disappearing every lunchtime in his car. Straight to the ladies when she gets back to tidy herself up. Jimmy nonchalant at his screen. And you loved her. She was different; you had stuff in common. It could have been something.

Being an aggressive male isn’t always a hallowed place to be however.

Back in the late eighties when business was booming ding dong and we were firing on all cylinders, we were offered the order for the new St Enochs shopping centre in the centre of Glasgow. Uniquely, never before or since, we could name our price; even at cost it was a £200000.00 job for us . . . all we had to do was supply the stuff on time. There wasn’t a lot of time.

The sole UK Agent for the stuff wouldn’t supply us.

The contractor had fallen out with this sole UK Agent, a very aggressive alpha male who shall remain anonymous because he is dead now but I’ll call him err . . . Bill and who was forcing him to buy his product and dictate the terms. I knew the contractor pretty well [another alpha male I suppose] from previous projects and he said that if I could find a way of supplying him which allowed him to put two fingers up to the Bill, he would pay whatever we asked.  So, one alpha male against another alpha male and quiet, never-raises-his-voice industrious little me in the middle. Benefitting.

I imported the stuff from Riyadh. Paid extra for airfreight.

All hell was let loose. I had Bill on the phone literally five times a day, threatening me with everything he could think of, including violence, ‘I’ll bankrupt yer’ being the least of it. He had the [Danish] manufacturer phone his man in Saudi to threaten to take the Saudi agency away from them if they supplied me. But in those days, Saudi was probably the single biggest construction market in the world so I never thought he would get very far with that. We got the goods; they came in at Gatwick about thirty wooden cases and supplied our clients without any repercussions, and we got paid promptly.

Aggressive male? Moi?

I had the sole agency for this product in the eighties, for everywhere in the UK except London, but including Scotland and bit by bit they took it away from me. I spent months, years trudging around Edinburgh architects doing the groundwork opening doors, making introductions then finally when I had broken through, they give it to Bill. Why? Cos he asked. Cos he said he could do better than me. Did they consult me? No. Did they compensate me? No. They just arbitrarily handed it over to someone else. Someone suitably macho. So when the opportunity came, completely unexpectedly to nick the biggest job they had ever got, I’m afraid I didn’t hesitate. The sink or swim male society. And it’s cruel rules. They don’t always work against you.

JESSICA CHASTAIN

We have seen a slew of Jessica Chastain films recently, either in the cinema or on DVD. We watched Zero Dark Thirty both in the cinema and again on TV which I reviewed last summer on here then we saw Interstellar and A Most Violent Year. Both were disappointing so I didn’t put up any reviews.

I couldn’t find anything positive to say about A Most Violent Year. Talky, talky exposition about a New Jersey businessman and his wife [Chastain] who is being blagged by his business competitors written by someone who has never ever been in business. There are a couple of completely unnecessary violent scenes that have almost nothing to do with the plot; a blood-spattered suicide for no reason that I could detect and a car chase along a railway line that must have taken a month to shoot and orchestrate and contributes nothing to the film. Maybe it was a good book. Or a good treatment. Or a good idea on the back of an envelope. Didn’t make a good film.

Interstellar cost $185m and made around $200 million at the box. It was directed by Christopher Nolan an English guy best known for the Batman Dark Knight films none of which I have ever seen, I am afraid.

I quite liked the idea of it, Earth is dying and the Americans attempt to save mankind by finding another planet to inhabit but again, talky, talky dialogue that has far too much plot to carry. And too much plot: it detours all over the place; it’s a good hour too long. Such a shame; it’s an excellent idea with some realistic CGI scenes, a pretty fair cast [Chastain] and enough budget to really drill down to the subject matter and examine the physical implications as well as the philosophical implications. But Nolan aims too low: he aims at the 15-year old Batman audience with silly fight scenes and unlikely emergencies and explosions to maintain their attention.

It’s Hollywood, again.