Lost Dogs - prologue

(At the rate I'm going I'll have a book's worth of unfinished crap by the end of this year.)

When he saw the flames outside, heard the screams that seemed to be so close and yet so far away at the same time, he opened his front door in case the dogs wanted to leave. He wasn't entirely sure of his decision, but felt it was fair to give them fair opportunity to leave should they so desire. They pattered up to the front, ears pricked, and let out a snort or two, the beginning of a bark then seemed to think better of it and looked up at him, ears now pinned back. He thought at first that they might have been happier in the wild, but it now seemed obvious that they were as comfortable in these four walls as him. He ruffled the fur behind their ears and closed the door, walking through the silent house, his home for what seemed at this moment like forever. Every wall, cornice, picture rail and skirting as familiar to him as his own hairs, warts and wrinkles. He ran his fingers along a wooden panel, feeling the peaks where paint drops had dried decades before, then ran them into crevices where pram handles had scuffed or bicycles had chipped, now many years since. The house was dim, lit only by the glow of the growing fires outside but even in pitch darkness he could navigate his hallway and rooms with ease. The furniture never changed position - except when he felt the need to clean. He made his way to the kitchen and the dogs bobbed behind him devotedly. He reached into the dog's sack and felt for the scoop, whereby he filled both their bowls with enough dry food for a week or so, just in case something happened and he didn't get another chance. The dogs sniffed the heap of kibble on the floor, hesistated, and crunched a few pieces between then before catching up to their master at the back door. He stood looking out into his garden, the darkness of the great unknown rendered uncertain by the fire scattered across the land. He stopped his observations momentarily to ascertain whether his running commentary was natural or whether a mere calming mechanism, like repeating a song over and over in one's head in troublesome times. He felt awfully rational and composed considering the state of things outside his front door, but on reflection he didn't suppose there was a particular way of behaving when the world was ending.

Bookclub III - The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ

What you have here is a book which by all rights should be an instant classic. An eloquent and passionate critique of organised religion wrote in the form of a gospel, Philip Pullman has managed to write a book that is a damning critique of the Christian church, while simultaneously writing with much love and reverence of the source material. If the Hitchens and the Dawkins of the world feel a little overly antagonistic to your, Pullman's Good Man Jesus and Scoundrel Christ may be more up your alley.

There is a rather large clue to The Good Man Jesus... on the back cover, which in huge letters reads THIS IS A STORY, Pullman, despite writing a book in the style of one of the four gospels, makes it quite plain from the start that it is not a heretical dig, but a work of fiction. I read the book in two afternoons - while appearing quite sizeable, the layout of the text is more akin to poetry than prose, and the font size is rather large. Normally I would be unhappy about shelling 15 quid for such a short novel, but the final product is very well made, from two font colours, to the ribbon bookmark. In retelling the story of Christ, Pullman takes the man Jesus Christ and makes him into twin brothers. Jesus: a rebellious figure who sees great injustice in the world and sees a chance to bring justice to the meek, and Christ: a quiet, contemplative figure who wants to save the whole of humanity through very different means. A shadowy figure follows Christ, instructing him to document the actions of Jesus, to tell his story in a way that would give the people truth to life, existence, and God. Ironically, Christ retells Jesus' tale in a way that is not entirely truthful, in essence adding legend and miracle to the actions of a good natured, but very normal man. This book begins as the story of Jesus Christ, but ends as an insight into the creation of the Christian church.

In interviews, Pullman has talked about his Christian upbringing, and of his open admiration for the stories within the bible. The Good Man Jesus and Scoundrel Christ is not only an indictment of organised religion, but is to all intents and purposes another authentic attempt at the retelling of the Bible story. It is worth noting that 12 gospels exist, some would say more, taking into account the recently found Gospel According to Judas Iscariot. It's quite clear why some of these gospels were ommitted, such as The Gospel According to Thomas, which talks of an infant Jesus transforming his schoolmates into goats and other such nonsense. The gospels themselves were originally compiled in the 2nd century, and were authored by anonymous writers, only given titles in hindsight. To what extent are these gospels truthful? Were the miracles performed as described, or was poetic retelling of historical moments later taken for physical fact? The Good Man Jesus and Scoundrel Christ doesn't necessarily have the answers you're looking for, but then maybe the New Testament doesn't have the answers either.

Here is an excerpt from close to the end of the book, where Jesus converses with God in the garden at Gethsemane, shortly before being arrested by the Romans. The conversation develops page after page, and is really quite a passionate monologue/conversation, which I think most agnostics and atheists (perhaps even religious) will find common ground.

'Have I been deluding myself as well as everyone else? What have I been doing, telling them that its going to come, that there are people alive now who will see the coming of God's Kingdom? I can see us waiting, and waiting, and waiting... Was my brother right when he talked of this great organisation, this church of his that was going to serve as the vehicle for the Kingdom on earth? No, he was wrong, he was wrong. My whole heart and mind and body revolted against that. They still do.

'Because I can see just what would happen if that kind of thing came about. The devil would rub his hands with glee. As soon as men who believe they're doing God's will get hold of power, whether it's in a household or a village or in Jerusalem or in Rome itself, the devil enters into them. It isn't long before they start drawing up lists of punishments for all kinds of innocent activities, sentencing people to be flogged or stoned in the name of God for wearing this or eating that or believing the other. And the priviledged ones will build great palaces and temples to strut around in, and levy taxes on the poor to pay for their luxuries; and they'll start keeping the very scriptures secret, saying there are some truths too holy to be revealed to the ordinary people, so that only the priests' interpretation will be allowed, and they'll torture and kill anyone who wants to make the word of God clear and plain to all; and with every day that passes they'll become more and more fearful, because the more power they have the less they'll trust anyone, so they'll have spies and betrayals and denunciations and secret tribunals, and put the poor harmless heretics they flush out to horrible public deaths, to terrify the rest into obedience... (This goes on for quite a while)

'Lord, if I thought you were listening, I'd pray for this above all: that any church set up in your name should remain poor, and powerlessw, and modest. That it should wield no authority except that of love. That it should never cast anyone out. That it should own no property and make no laws. That it should not condemn, but only forgive. That it should be not like a palace with marble walls and polished floors, and guards standing at the door, but like a tree with its roots deep in the soil, that shelters every kind of bird and beast and gives blossom in the spring and shade in the hot sun and fruit in the season, and in time gives up its good sound wood for the carpenter; but that sheds many thousands of seeds so that new trees can grow in its place.'

Doghead Book Club II - Night Train

Here's what happened. A woman fell out of a clear blue sky.

Night Train is going to prove difficult reading for some. Not difficult through verbiage or structure, but difficult on a metaphysical level. Night Train is, to all intents and purposes, a crime novel. The main character Mike Hoolihan, is a homicide detective in an unnamed American city (my gut was telling me Boston when I was reading it, not that it's especially important). Hoolihan is an ex alcoholic, large framed, and female, and is investigating the suspicious suicide of the police chief's daugher. So far, so straight forward.

The intriguing thing about this short work is the direction it takes. Before even getting to the halfway point it turns from a whodunnit into a whydunnit, leaving the characters, and the reader for that matter, to face up to some difficult truths about the world. I wouldn't describe night train as revelatory, as a good deal of Martin Amis' work can be, but for a short piece of writing it gets to the point eloquently enough.

I anticipate a lot of the animosity that attracts itself to Night Train comes from a deliberately unsatisfying conclusion. Those who expect a run-of-the-mill detective yarn will be disappointed on a number of fronts. Firstly, it seems Night Train is a playful response by Amis to critics that often label him chauvanist (I've never seen it to be honest), and while I wouldn't go far as to call Night Train a work of feminism, I would say that Amis portrays the women in this book famously, and writes with warmth and sensitivity, factors not usually associated with either Amis or crime novels. Secondly, while the language, setting and foundation of the book is very much in the style of the pulp crime novel, the development thereafter will likely confound and frustrate anyone who wants a bad guy caught and punished. The evils of Night Train are existential and totally out of grasp, and the only way this book could have ended really is badly.

It's not a good starting point for someone who wants to read Amis. I would recommend Money before all else, followed by something like Time's Arrow or Yellow Dog, but at 150 pages you could quite easily read this in an afternoon and take something valuable away from it.

Here's an extract from Night Train, with a train of thought I would have loved to have seen explored in more detail above and beyond the 150 pages:

Homicide can't change - and I don't mean the department. It can evolve.
It can't change. There's nowhere for homicide to go.
But what if suicide could change?
Murder can evolve in the direction of new disparity - new dis murders
Upward disparity:
Sometime in the fifties a man made a homicidal breakthrough. He planted
and detonated a bomb on a commercial airliner: to kill his wife.
A man could bring down - perhaps has brought down - a 747: to kill his wife.
The terrorist razes a city with a suitcase H-Bomb: to kill his wife.
The president entrains central thermonuclear war: to kill his wife.
Downward disparity:
Every cop in America is familiar with the super-savagery of Christmas Day domestics. On Christmas Day, everyone's home at the same time. And it's a disaster... We call them 'star or fairy?' murders: people get to arguing about what goes on top of the tree. Here's another regular: fatal stabbings over how you carve the bird.
A murder about a diaper.
Imagine: a murder about a safety-pin.
A murder about a molecule of rancid milk.
But people have already murdered for less than that. Downward disparity has already been plumbed - been sonar-ed and scoured. People have already murdered for nothing. They take the trouble to cross the street to murder them for nothing.
Then there's the copycat, where the guy's copying the TV or some other guy, or copying some other guy who's copying the TV. I believe that copycat is as old as Homer, older, older than the first story daubed in shit on the wall of the cave. It precedes the fireside yarn. It precedes fire.
You get copycat with suicide too. Fuck yes. They call it the Werther Effect. Named after some melancholy novel, later suppressed after it burned a train of youth suicides through eighteenth-century Europe. I see the same thing here on the street: some asshole of a bass guitarist chokes on his own ralph (or fries on his own amplifier) - and suddenly suicide is all over town.
There's a recurring anxiety, with every generation, that a shoah of suicides has come, to blow the young away. It seems like everybody's doing it. And then it settles down again. Copycat is more precipitant than cause. It just gives shape to something that was going to happen anyway.
Suicide hasn't changed. But what if it did change? Homicide has dispensed with the why. You have gratuitous homicide. But you don't-

Doghead book club I - If I die in a combat zone

Given that chaps have been, and are, dedicating their time to cataloging all manner of records, trainers, tattoos, art prints, etc for the blogosphere, I thought I'd make a contribution with something that I hold a little closer to my own heart: bookywooks. Knowing me this will be updated once every 7 years, so don't hold your breath.

The first book I would like to share is If I Die in a Combat Zone by Tim O'Brien, purely because it's the last book I read. I last read If I die... about 5 years ago, when I was studying peace and conflict resolution at university. Reflecting back, I was rather disheartened with the course, and with my life in general, and think that my way of thinking tainted the reading experience. I disregarded it entirely back then as liberal toss, and remember getting into a little bit of a heated argument with Dave'o (no relation) over it. Long story shortened, I gave it another chance the other night and read the whole thing in about 6 hours.

If I Die in a Combat Zone is an autobiographical account of Tim O'Brien's tour of Vietnam. Before even going he was fairly liberal minded, and even did his best to get out of active service. What's refreshing about O'Brien's account is his emotional honesty (I say 'honesty' while appreciating that no work of writing can ever be truly honest, but here is not the place to dissect such an idea). This passage quite succinctly sums up O'Brien's account:

Men are killed, dead human beings are very heavy and awkward to carry, things smell different in Vietnam, soldiers are afraid and often brave, drill sergeants are boors, some men think the war is proper and just and others don't and most don't care. Is that the stuff for a morality lesson, even for a theme? Can the foot soldier teach anything important about war, merely for having been there? I think not. He can tell war stories.

And war stories are what you get. Poetically told, with at times stunning insight, but war stories are what this book contain, ranging from his frustrations in training, his self-sabotaging of going AWOL, through to his violent, bloody, and almost entirely useless tour of 'Nam. You can tell O'Brien is both left leaning, and against the war he's fighting in, but so is almost everyone fighting there, on all sides. It always seems to be a recurring theme in almost all Vietnam books I've read. Noone ever really seemed to know what they were there for. If I were recommending a book on Vietnam, I would suggest Dispatches by Michael Herr over any other, but this book taps into much the same moods and sentiments, and is certainly a useful companion piece with a different perspective.

Here's an excerpt in lieu of an MP3 or youtube clip. The following passage really stood out. It could well be a standalone piece in its own right, and in an abstract sense sums up a great deal of human struggle:

10: The Man at the Well

He was just an old man, an old Vietnamese farmer. His hair was white, and he was somewhere over seventy years, stooped and hunches from work in the paddies, his spine bent into a permanent, calcified arc. He was blind. His eyes were huge and empty, glistening like aluminium under the sun, cauterized and burnt out. But the old man got around.

In March we came to his well. He stood and smiled while we used the water. He laughed when we laughed. To be ingratiating he said 'Good water for good GIs.' Whenever there was an occasion, he repeated the phrase.
Some children came to the well, and one of them, a little girl with black hair and hoops of steel through her ears, took the old fellow's hand, helping him about. The kids giggles at our naked bodies. A boy took a soldier's rifle from out the mud and wiped it and stacked it against the tree, and the old man smiled.

Alpha Company decided to spend the day in the old man's village. We lounged inside his hut, and when re-supply brought down cold beer and food, we ate and wasted away the day. The kids administered back rubs, chopping and stretching and pushing our blood. They eyed out our C rations, and the old man helped when he could.

When the wind stopped and the flies became bothersome, we went to the well again. We showered and the old fellow helped, dipping into the well and yanking up buckets of water and sloshing it over our heads and backs and bellies. The kids watched him wash us. The day was as hot and peaceful as a day can be.

The blind old farmer was showering one of the men. A blustery and stupid soldier, blond hair and big belly, picked up a carton of milk and from fifteen feet away hurled it, for no reason, aiming at the old man and striking him flush in the face. The carton burst, milk spraying on the old man's temples and into his cataracts. He hunched forward, rocking precariously and searching for balance. He dropped his bucket, and his hands went to his eyes then dropped loosely to his thighs. His blind
gaze fixed straight ahead, at the stupid soldier's feet. His tongue moved a little, trying to get at the cut and tasting the blood and milk. No one moved to help. The kids were quiet. The old man's eyes did a funny trick, almost rolling out of his head, out of sight. He was motionless, and finally he smiled. He picked up the bucket and with the ruins of goodness spread over him, perfect gore, he dunked into the well and came up with water, and he showered a soldier. The kids watched.