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The Long Song – Andrea Levy
Andrea Levy’s previous novels have covered the lives of immigrants from the West Indies to the UK and their British-born children both in contemporary times and in the early to mid 20th Century. Her decision to write a novel set at the time of slavery in Jamaica was therefore a brave one as it would involve meticulous reading of the lives of the plantation owners and ‘their’ slaves and would require allowances to be made for the fact that the vast majority of this literature in the UK would have been written by the white oppressors, thereby not offering a balanced view of the dreadful conditions forced on the black workers.
There’s also a secondary problem with any novel centred around times of horrific injustice based on ethnicity which is that the story, however well written, will inevitably be so harrowing as to put some readers off.
Levy gets around this by making The Long Song a first-person account by a daughter of a slave, taken in to lead a relatively more easy life as a white female plantation owner’s personal maid. The girl, July, is therefore privy to a relatively privileged existence – by this I mean unpaid servitude in the home rather than toiling long hours in the sugar fields – for some of her life.
July is the daughter of a slave called Kitty who has been inpregnated when raped by the white overseer of a plantation named Amity. When July is a child of around eight, the master of the plantation, John Howarth, drives by in his carriage with his pudgy sister Caroline Mortimer. Caroline has been in Jamaica a short time only and is lonely and stressed. Her maid from England has died of an illness picked up on the ship on the way over, and when she sees July she decides she wants her as her plaything and lady’s maid. With no consideration for Kitty, July is torn from her screaming mother and adopted into the household where Caroline gives her the monicker Marguerite because of course it’s better for the girl to have a nice conventional European name than a strange foreign-sounding one. July and the fellow house-slaves mischievously misbehave, filching lace and buttons from Caroline’s dresses or food and drink from the stores, spreading a bed sheet instead of a linen tablecloth on the dining table for a formal dinner party, hiding from their demanding mistress, and generally trying to make life as bearable as they can – an option not open to the plantation slaves sweating with heavy labour all day long.
Within a few years unrest and resentment foments among the slaves. There has been word in 1831 when July is sixteen that the new Queen of England does not approve of slavery and that the King will free them. Militants rise up on the plantations and there are rebellions leading to bloodshed. John Howarth subsequently dies, as does his overseer, and Caroline becomes mistress of the plantation. She hires a series of overseers who don’t last long because their high-handed manner alienates the already discontented slaves. Finally one arrives called Robert Goodwin who starts the day after slavery is finally abolished in 1838. The son of a clergyman, he believes in humane treatment of the black workers – at least to begin with. But negotiations don’t go his way and he loses his patience.
Meanwhile, July has grown up. She has a romance with a black activist who dies, and gives her son from that short-lived encounter up for adoption. Then she falls in love and has a daughter. But the rumblings of rebellion from the now free but still abused black workers bring tumultuous events that change her life.
Levy has managed a real feat with July’s voice which is idiosyncratic and entertaining, bringing many moments of humour and levity to what could have been a bleakly disturbing subject. She talks in a Carribean patois which lilts with rhythm and vitality. Caroline is a ‘fatty batty’, and many words are repeated for emphasis: ‘big-big’, ‘long-long’, ‘hot-hot’, ‘itch-itching’, ‘licky-licky’, ‘nasty-nasty’, ‘ugly-ugly’, ‘bug-a-bug’, and so on. This could easily have sounded contrived and overdone in some hands but Levy makes July’s voice sing – the story really is a long song – and so the story sounds natural and real. As in all Levy’s previous novels, the lightness of touch is delightful. Here is an early segment:
‘Caroline was blessed of a long, pointed nose that, while giving her silhouette a fine distinction from across a dim-lit room, was nevertheless unable to feel what was happening at its tip. Consequently there was often something stuck upon the end of it, of which she was totally unaware; the yellow stain of pollen from the hibiscus she was admiring; a white daub of cream from some milk she was drinking; even a drop of snot from a nasal chill could, like a rain drop caught upon the tip of a leaf, remain dangling and swaying for quite some time. And it was this insensible nose that, her brother began to fear, would be dipping into everything upon this plantation named Amity before too long.’
Yet the sparkle of July’s voice doesn’t veil the barbaric treatment of the plantation slaves. When July is plucked from Kitty on Caroline’s whim there is no consideration of Kitty’s maternal feelings; in fact she is sized up as if she’s a horse, dehumanised and objectified. Levy lets us know how exploited the workers were, both as slaves and as supposed free workers, when punitive rents were demanded for the fields they tended to force them to work on the plantation fields instead of growing crops to sell at market and gaining some independence. None of the white characters emerges with any humanity intact; even the white Baptist minister who adopts July’s son Thomas disowns him when Thomas relinquishes his faith, and Robert Goodwin’s compassion for the blacks is short-lived. This is depressing but probably accurate; in those days the only kindness extended from whites to non-whites was sanctimonious do-gooding conditional on adopting the whiteys’ faith. And even when Levy is outlining hideous working conditions, July’s accessible voice prevents the story from becoming heavily depressing, while the personalisation of experience to individual characters makes it all the more powerful . Here is Kitty, July’s mother, carrying dung from cattle to cane fields on her head:
‘…the solid odour did choke her at the throat, after mighty coughing and a few strong inhalations, all the air about Kitty, be it sweet or bitter, came to smell like shit, so the offence was lost. But for her poor tongue there was no such accommodation. When, unwittingly, a piece would fall into her open mouth…it would burn so fierce upon her tongue that she feared a hole was being bored right through it. For it was sharp as rancid lemon and did make her retch. Everything she nyam, be it food at the cane piece, or her porridge after her day’s work was done, came to taste not like a repast butlike…well, the putrid splatterings that fall from the backside of a mule.’
But Levy’s book is more complex than that – she also shows the black-on-black unkindness perpetrated by those slaves and servants in positions of relative power to their more menial peers, and of course the black hangman who kills his kin. Also a constant presence is the established and rarely questioned pecking order generated by skin shade whereby it was accepted that those with white blood and paler skin were superior to those with a darker hue, despite them all being under the yoke of the whites.
The main drawback of the first-person narration is that July can’t give the reader an overview of events to which she did not bear witness or of which she didn’t receive first-hand accounts. Sam Sharpe, the rebel leader in 1832, is mentioned, but an in-depth account of the rebellions, the path to freedom, the continuing exploitation of the workers following freedom and their gradual resolvement is beyond the scope of the story. This is a very personal account and as such it lacks the wide camera angle of history, but Levy’s bibliography lists literature where this may be found.
My reservations about the novel are minor. The most important one is that there is a period of some forty years or so which remains blank after July is cast out from the plantation owner’s house and before she is found again by her son Thomas. This was a time of real privation and it’s unclear why Levy misses out these years. Perhaps she thought it would bring July’s sassy, cheerful and attitude-soaked voice down. But it’s a loss.
In Levy’s previous novels she has used the image of black characters sucking their teeth several times, so having it crop up twelve times here grated a little: racial stereotyping of this sort from a white author would be unacceptable, so it makes me uneasy from a black one too. There are also one or two possible anachronisms – Alexander Graham Bell didn’t patent the telephone until the late 1870s, so it seems doubtful that it would have been in widespread use by the time July wrote her story. July’s assertion early in the story that sugar turns the teeth black might also not have been widespread knowledge in the 1820s – 30s.
There’s also a small continuity hiccup where Molly, a one-eyed house servant July didn’t get on with asked her for the lace off the mistress’s dress and the lace is gone a few minutes later, even though July had been within eyeshot of it during that time.
These are almost insignificant flaws in a book bursting with warmth and vitality, brought to life by a very credible voice. The Long Song is a novel that combines historical veracity with humanity, and as such is a great achievement.
Blue Heaven – C.J.Box
C.J. Box is one of the doyens of crime-writing in the US, and has won a heap of prizes including the Anthony, Prix Calibre, Macavity, Gumshoe and Barry Awards. His books invariably reside in the New York Times Bestsellers List for months on end, cementing his reputation as a popular as well as a critically acclaimed writer.
His previous work as a ranchhand and fishing guide inject his descriptions of farm-life with an authenticity that’s impossible to fake. This is a guy who’s lived and breathed life in rural America, and you sense that he’d be as comfortable in a saddle or by a river as he is writing novels. This comes through in his work – there’s an effortlessness to his depictions of life and people in smalltown farming communities that pervades the pages of his work, almost as if you could smell the fresh air and pine trees and hear the sounds of the forest.
Blue Heaven, the first of his eleven novels that’s not part of a series, was published in 2008 in The States and has already been optioned for film which is not surprising - I had an overwhelming sense when reading it was that it was wonderfully cinematic. It will make a knuckle-chewing film, full of suspense and intrigue. The novel has been re-published in paperback in the UK this month (July 2010) by Corvus.
Twisted cops feature in many US dramas and they loom large in Blue Heaven. The action is set in Kootenai Bay and the surrounding community in Northern Idaho. This is heavily forested land which is fast being developed by hungry real-estate sharks – the area has earned the monicker Blue Heaven among LA cops because it’s a dream place for retirement. We learn early on that many previous LAPD officers have settled here, some of whom keep very much to themselves.
The action is centred around twelve year-old Annie Taylor, a spirited child of a single mother, Monica, and Annie’s brother, ten year-old William, who’s softer and more pliable. Monica, a thirtyish good-looking blonde with a poor taste in men, has started an affair with a charming UPS driver, Tom. Against her better judgement, Monica lets Tom stay the night. When Annie sees Tom the next morning, she’s furious – both Annie and William’s fathers ended up in prison, and William’s, a drug dealer, died in a prison riot , and Annie has been assured that no other man will saunter casually into their lives. Tom, a shallow chancer, says he’ll take William fishing that afternoon but promptly forgets. Annie, incensed, decides to take William fishing herself, so they thumb a ride with the gossipy local postwoman Fiona, and make their way through the forest to the river.
But then they see something that fills them with horror. They watch from afar as three strangers drill bullets into a fourth in a clearing near the river. To make matters worse, the killers see them, and give chase, determined to kill these young witnesses to their crime. So Annie and her brother go on the run. They can’t go to the authorities for reasons that become obvious. And the hunt for the missing children that is launched by the community is thwarted and twisted by the killers, who are in positions of power and manage to take over the search.
The story is further complicated by the arrival of Eduardo Villatoro, a retired police detective from Arcadia, California who is trying to solve a crime that has bothered him for eight years.
Meanwhile, local rancher Jess Rawlins is in deep financial trouble. His wife has left him, taking most of his liquid assets, and he’s being pressurised to sell up to meet his debts.
Box is a talented writer. His prose is clear and concise, lucid and spare, and his dialogue snappy and realistic. He knows how to build up trepidation and fear, and readers will be glued to the book with their fingernails gripping their chairs. His characters are fully developed and complex, something that is not always the case in the thriller genre. In particular, the venal Fiona Pritzle is a delight with her high-pitched baby voice, caked-on-with-a-trowel make-up, shameless prying and rumour-mongering, vanity, unselective man-hunting and her attention-seeking behaviour; the kind of character you love to loathe. Jess Rawlins is also a three-dimensional figure, a quiet, loyal man’s man, honourable and proud, incapable of small-talk yet able to move mountains for those he loves.
The histories of the characters are backed up by real-life contemporary events which make the action even more credible. The retired LAPD cops refer to the Rodney King affair and ensuing riots which happened on their terrain. The motivation behind their actions is also explained. In this way Box skilfully avoids creating cartoon ‘baddies’. We can see how the omniously calm Singer became hurt and disillusioned as a ‘good’ cop and became twisted and aloof; the taciturn killer. We learn from the malevolent and violent Gonzalez’s family history why he is so determined to reap the benefits of the hard work of his parents and grandparents. And the conflicted Newkirk’s descent into crime is also clarified, the alternative path that can turn a good family man being elucidated with chilling ease.
The whole drama is packed into a long weekend and the chapters are headed only with the date and the time, which adds to the suspense – time crawls by and the reader feels as if they’re watching the slo-mo film of a a professional execution. It’s only a matter of time before someone gets killed.
Blue Heaven is a thrilling crime novel that manages to be impeccably written as well as artfully plotted. It’s a rare combination in a genre that’s often filled with cliche-ridden, pulpy prose, two-dimensional characters and plots that lack intelligence or credibility. Box is a master of his genre and I’m looking forward to the film.
Frank Tallis – Deadly Communion
If you didn’t already know that Frank Tallis was a psychologist, you would guess it from his series of novels set in Vienna at the end of the nineteeth century. Although the five novels featuring the tubby, torte and strudel-gobbling Inspector Oskar Rheinhardt are thrillers, a strong element of psychology is added by Rheinhardt’s friend Dr Max Liebermann, a psychoanalyst.
Of course 1890s Vienna was the time of Sigmund Freud, so most of the theories that surface in Deadly Communion are classically Freudian ideas. At the start of the story, Liebermann is analysing a patient who is convinced that he’s seen his own doppelganger and that it’s a harbinger of doom. Across town, Rheinhardt and his younger assistant Haussman are drawn into the first of a series of grisly murders of women who seem to have been killed after – or during – sexual congress – hence the title of the novel.
Vienna at this time was full of beauty and culture which encompassed both ends of the scale from the grandiose to the earthy, the affluent to the poor. Gustav Klimt created stunningly rich paintings glimmering with gold and romance for those in high society while a few years later, the more tortured and less accepted Egon Schiele preferred to portray young women in more raw, gritty poses, dishevelled and partially dressed. Tallis alludes to the propensity of Schiele for pubescent girls in stages of undress by involving in his novel an artist with such tastes whose work is confiscated. He also includes the world of couture in the form of a successful fashion designer, and thus blends history with fiction in his evocation of the clothes of the time and the move by some to try and free women from the tyranny of the corset.
Because of the nature of the crimes there is a fair bit of graphic description in Deadly Communion. I did wince during autopsies when the colourful Professor Mathias employed unconventional methods to detect sex had taken place. Or perhaps those methods were really used in those days; advances in medicine and ethics may be illustrated by the fact that when I was a medical student in 1987 it was routine for groups of medical students to do unconsented internal examinations on anaesthetised women in gynae lists - a practice that filled me with revulsion and was soon banished.
The third person narration of events in Deadly Communion is interspersed with first person accounts by the killer himself filling the reader in on his childhood and mental state. By the time the killer is caught, we already know why he did what he did, so the section where Liebermann asks the imprisoned killer to write down his life story (and, implausibly, the killer complies), is superfluous.
In the novel, Liebermann helps Rheinhardt capture the killer by predicting his psychological mindset and circumstances. Tallis employs Freud himself to expound on his theories in fictional scenes where he has conversations with others, with the dialogues based on Freud’s work. While the theories themselves are explained with diligence and accuracy ( unsurprisngly considering Tallis’s profession), the neat way Liebermann makes assumptions about both his patient, the serial killer, and another killer in town, are unconvincingly pat; real life isn’t like the textbooks. There is also some heavy Freudian symbolism: Liebermann’s patient dreams a Jack and the Beanstalk dream; the bean stalk is immediately identified by Liebermann as being a symbol for an erect penis, and the ogre in the castle at the top is the patient’s father, and these insights guide Liebermann to solving the mystery of the patient’s case. The ease with which the psychoanalyst jumps correctly to other conclusions, such as the way he infers that the victims are killed during sex and not after, is also a bit of a hard lump to swallow.
And yet, despite its tendency to make Freudian theory solve the matter too slickly, Deadly Communion is a well written novel, both as a thriller and as a historical evocation of Vienna at that time. Tallis brings fin de siecle 19 C Vienna to life with accomplished descriptions of the city – the architecture, the people, the cafes, the food. He is also obviously a classical music buff because Mahler, Beethoven and Bach’s compositions, performed live, are evoked in soaring, sensitive prose. And Tallis has steeped himself in the era – references are made to prominent figures of the time in many spheres – Rokitansky in pathology, Landsteiner in haematology, Loos in architecture, the Secession artists and their influences on design and fashion. One character even looks like Schubert.
His style of writing is unembellished and lucid, and incorporates a dry drollerie which makes the pages turn quickly, such as when a spurned Haussman closes a door ‘with just enough surplus force to declare his wounded pride.’
My only criticisms of this cerebral historical murder mystery is the aforementioned glibness with which Freudian theory solves all the puzzles. In all other respects Tallis’s novel is thoughtful and intelligent.
Scarlett Thomas – Our Tragic Universe
Novels where discussions take precedent over action can seem laboured. If philosophising and ideas are shoe-horned in, they may seem out of place and the conversations may not ring true. And the conversations need to be truly stimulating and interesting as well as sounding natural – in Jane Smiley’s Ten Days in the Hills, Smiley’s usual talents as a story-teller were drowned by the incessant tedious babble of ghastly characters exchanging predictable and pedestrian views. Which brings us to characterisation – no novel can succeed on the basis of the ideas it expounds alone – the people need to be believable and the reader needs to care about what happens to them, otherwise they could go off and read a non-fiction book that covers similar ground instead.
So the question in my mind was, would Scarlett Thomas succeed where so many others had failed? I hadn’t read any of her previous work but I had heard that The End of Mr Y was brimming with ideas about philosophy and had divided readers. Most seemed to like it very much, but for some, the format was irksome.
My fears were unfounded. As soon as I started reading Our Tragic Universe, I was hooked. I had expected a book packed with ideas to be lofty, pretentious even, but it is nothing of the sort. The characters are very plausible, ordinary people who happen to have interestingly complicated personal lives, and everything progresses in a natural way. In fact, when ideas are mooted, they are done so in a completely unthreatening way; they are just the opinions of one character or another, and nothing is forced down the reader’s throat. And the liberal amounts of mordant humour and whip-sharp insights make it a novel that is enjoyable on several different levels.
Meg Carpenter is a thirty eight year-old writer living in Dartmouth with her boyfriend Christopher. Meg has been trying to write a serious novel for around ten years as a result of being offered a contract after winning a short story competition in 1997. But it is now 2008 and Meg has spent the past eleven years writing pulpy genre fiction because it brings in easy money and is formulaic and doesn’t require much creative effort. Meg has a knotty past, like most people. Her parents are divorced and she has not spoken to her father for over ten years. Several years ago she had been living in Brighton and had just accepted a marriage proposal from her previous boyfriend, actor Andrew (Drew) Grey, when she met Christopher, fell for him, and ran away with him to Dartmouth. Just to complicate matters further, Christopher is the brother of Drew’s brother’s wife.
This intriguingly gossipy web is tangled further by the fact that things haven’t been going well with Christopher for years and Meg has developed a crush on Rowan, a man twenty or so years older than her. Rowan was previously a university lecturer but has retired from that and taken up a post as director of the local maritime centre. He lives with his partner Lise.
Meg’s personal life is a breeze compared with that of her best friend, Libby, who runs the local deli with her husband Bob. Libby left her previous boyfriend for Bob but is now having an affair with Mark, a casual worker who is saving up to start his own boat design business. She is torn between comfy, staid (and wealthy) Bob and passionate, exciting Mark.
If all this sounds like it’s panning out to be a trite girlie story about cottonwool romance, think again. Although not very much happens in terms of action, the novel is constantly thought-provoking, with intelligent conversations frequently cropping up between characters. You may not always agree with what is said, but it’s never dull. Meg is also good friends with Vi and Frank. Frank used to teach Meg at university. Vi is his wife, an anthropologist who is investigating the tradition of story-telling in other cultures. Some of the conversations therefore focus on the definition of a story and compare the traditional structure of western stories with the ‘storyless stories’ seen in some other cultures. This is all intriguing stuff, and is fitted naturally into the conversations.
Less easy to take are the unfounded theories expounded by a (fictional) writer called Kelsey Newman who, in the story, has written a book about his theory of the universe. This is a load of unscientific twaddle that takes advantage of gullible readers’ fear of death to put forward a totally flawed idea that people live forever because the universe will, at the end of time, have so much energy that it ‘will be able to compute anything’, and thus will simulate another universe where everyone lives forever. To give Thomas her due, Meg and her friends don’t buy into this crazy theory, but the fact that someone as intelligent as Meg would actually dedicate much time to considering something based on nonsense seems implausible. Thomas engineers a way by which Meg accidently reads the book because she thinks the books editor of her local paper, for whom she writes, has sent it to her to review. But even if Meg did read the book by mistake, the central tenet of Newman’s theory is so devoid of reason and unfounded in fact that it seems bizarre that Meg and her friends would devote any time to seriously discussing it.
The important thing for books crammed with theory, philosophy and other facts is that they don’t become dry or pompous and self important. This could never happen with Thomas because, despite the very real factual stuff thrown in – comparisons of two of the greats of Russian literature, Chekhov and Tolstoy for example, she has a refreshingly unstuffy outlook and the novel is scattered with funny incidents and insights. Sometimes the delight is in throwaway comments like ’Our few kitchen cupboards were always full of things that couldn’t be thrown away but couldn’t be eaten either’, or ‘the pieces of pasta bobbed about in the pan like little tubes of brown cardboard, the empties from a doll’s house toilet, perhaps, although not even doll’s house people would put little tubes of cardboard in a pan and cook them.’ At others, it’s warmly humorous observations about human or canine habits or characteristics (‘As the house filled with the concentrated smell of rancid dog…’), or a quirky view of what could in other hands be mundane. What could be a boring meal by the telly is expressed as ‘We ate in front of the TV with me still looking at my crossword and Christopher occasionally looking at my crossword too as if it was my lover and he’d become resigned to discovering us together…’ Thomas’s - and thus Meg’s – eye for detail is acute and her descriptions are therefore never ordinary. Here is Meg musing on the atmosphere at Frank and Vi’s holiday home in Scotland:
‘In the evenings the dogs laid by the fire and Sebastian [their talking bird] hopped around in his huge cage on top of the piano just as he would at home, interspersing phrases he’d been taught from Shakespeare or picked up from the cricket with words and phrases he’d taught himself, like ‘Banana!’ and, regardless of whom he was addressing: ‘You’re a very hairy man, Frank.’ Frank was indeed very hairy. He was in his early fifties and had a scruffy beard, bushy hair, ragged fingernails and sharp green eyes, like some creature living in the mountains. Vi resembled one of those mountains: tall, jagged and permanent, with the possibility of a dangerous fall if you took the wrong path.’
It is apt that many of the conversations between Meg, Vi and Frank are about storyless stories because, although the definition of ‘storyless’ is different, some may argue that a novel without many events is itself storyless. This is an intentional paradox. With Thomas the joy is all in the incidentals around the story – the characters, the conversations, the emotions, the opinions. They *are* the story. Anyone who needs wild action for stimulation is missing out on the pleasures to be derived from human interaction. This is not to say there aren’t momentous events – the kind that occur in people’s lives. Thomas sparkles on the foibles of human behaviour (‘I had decided I would apologise…if he apologised first…’) and the neurotic extremes people go to on a whim (Libby pushes her car into the sea as part of an elaborate lie to explain her absence from home when she’s been at her boyfriend Mark’s.)
Our Tragic Universe works both as a wickedly funny novel about lost oddball figures finding their way in life and, in a wholly unheavy way, as a deeper treatise on literary theory and philosophy: what constitutes a novel, whether all kinds of story are as valid, whether there is a place for trashy genre fiction, whether someone writing about their life is meaningful, what the definition of a paradox is. Inevitably, not all of the topics dissected in the conversations will appeal to all readers, but I didn’t find any unbearable apart from the Kelsey Newman gibberish and Christopher’s brother Josh’s extension of it, a long-winded section which I skipped. Apart from those, though, the only thing that mildly irked me about this novel was the unfeasible number of coincidences – Rowan’s girlfriend turns out to be related to Bob, Kelsey Newman comes to speak in nearby Totnes, a ship in a bottle Meg finds is identical to one she saw as a child and ends up belonging in Rowan’s museum, Rowan is friends with Frank and Vi, Meg’s childhood friend Rosa, an actress, ends up playing Anna in Anna Karenina – coincidentally Meg’s favourite book – and the actor chosen to play opposite her is Drew, Meg’s ex. This tying up of ends which weren’t noticeably loose in the first place is simply unrequired in a novel of this calibre. It’s a shame for such a brilliant read to be marred by this kind of formulaic and unnatural neatness.
In the end, much is left unresolved, as is the case in life. Several strange events occur for which there is no obvious explanation, but the reader is, thankfully, always given the chance to go for the rational option rather than anything supernatural.
For the most part, the feeling I had when reading this book was the one I experienced when reading Darkmans, by Nicola Barker. That novel was similarly populated with colourful misfits in dysfunctional relationships and had the same intelligence coupled with outrageous, irreverent humour as this one. Subsequently, I read the rest of Barker’s oeuvre and decided Darkmans was my favourite and that Barker seemed to bleed the quirky vein repeatedly until the vein had collapsed, dry, and the concept died of overuse . I have high hopes of Thomas’s other work based on the enjoyment I gained from this novel, and hope that her other novels are sufficiently different to keep my attention. I have a feeling they will be.
Roger Billcliffe Gallery, Summer Exhibition
Roger Billcliffe’s gallery is always a treat to visit. As well as the large, light and airy gallery space downstairs the nineteenth century building in Glasgow’s Blytheswood Street also boasts several upper floors, accessed by a labyrinthine staircase. The walls are lined with more delectable art and there is more gallery space upstairs.
The summer exhibition is usually full of lively scenes and shades and this year’s doesn’t disappoint. One of the most striking paintings on view is Tulips on Blue, a large oil painting by James Fullarton. Fullarton’s big, wide strokes of oil and the vivid primary colours – red and yellow flowers, green and yellow stalks - create a fresh, lively painting that would bring summer into any room. Fullarton’s two smaller works here also exhibit discrete brush strokes, the tranquil street scene of Towards Cranworth Street having many areas made up of an array of individual dabs of paint, like pointillism but using small strokes instead of dots. Both the latter and Fullarton’s Study for In The Garden are like breaths of a Scottish summer captured on canvas, the glory of sunlight glinting through leaves on trees made permanent.
David Morrison’s oil on canvas The Waverley is one of the paintings here that draws the eye and won’t let go. Morrison’s idiosyncratic colour choices make the painting stand out: the sky is a glorious orange, the sea is yellow, and a powerful ship is bearing down towards the viewer. Morrison is excellent at capturing ships and boats, he conveys them the way they are, as working vessels transporting good and people, but also imbues them with an unusual grace and elegance. There is something about his work that mesmerises. I felt as if I was watching the ship’s surging approach through a pair of binoculars, savouring the spectacular colours of the sunrise or sunset, hope and anticipation in my heart. I’ve already bought a Morrison for my boyfriend and a smaller one for myself – I had to fight the urge to buy The Waverley on the spot.
Jackie Philip is also a master of colour. Her two paintings here feature her trademark beautiful bright flowers against a bold background. Dusk shows pink flowers in a vase with a mauve background, and French Truffles and Flowers pictures more pink flowers. She shares with the likes Michael Clark a talent for being able to express something as simple and everyday as flowers in a breathtaking way through her combination of an understated impressionistic style with throbbing, vibrant colours.
There are many paintings here that transfix the brief weeks of sunshine and optimism that constitute a Scottish summer. James Harrigan’s Picnic at Balmaha depicts a stunning coastline with families picnicing on the beach next to the creamy froth and blue waves of the sea, the mountains stretching beyond. Harrigan’s Jazz Band also conjures up summer; those evenings wandering the pavements looking for somewhere to sit outside and eat when one is surprised by a jazz band playing in the open air, joyful and ebullient.
David Martin’s paintings are always lovely and the ones here are no exception: Sunset Seil Island, Dark Cloud Rising and Landscape Fife are idyllic rural scenes where nature is the big star, whether she is casting a vast rain-filled cloud across an expanse of land or transforming the sky with a sunset - a dot of orange sun next to a streak of yellow.
And summer isn’t all heat-hazed days. Gary Harper shows the daytime scene of a coast with wild purple flowers growing just off the sand in Summer on the Island. Then he paints a seascape at dusk in Sunset Over Harbour , the boats dark as the sun disappears.
Then there are the still life paintings that show ornaments and plants set out on kitchen tables in warm sun-drenched kitchens. Emma Davis has three paintings in a vertical column - Temptation, Coffee Pot and Sunflower, all mixed media, all featuring white flowers in pots or vases. Hazel Nagi has two paintings of interiors: Fishy Teapot showing a table dressed with a vase of red flowers and another with a pot of pink tulips, and The Red Chair displaying an arrangement of various jugs and pots of flowers.
Upstairs, Glen Scoulier’s icily enticing oil on canvas Winter Sun suggests that winter is never far away. But for the moment, it’s time to enjoy the delights of summer.
The summer exhibition is currently on at The Roger Billcliffe Gallery, 134 Blytheswood Street, Glasgow G2 4EL, tel 0141 332 4027
Flash Fiction
So – flash fiction. What is it? I only came across it quite recently. A facebook friend opened an online group for people who like to read and write and kicked it off by asking for flash fiction submissions for a competition. The remit was to write 150 words or less on the title Winning.
Anyone who’s ever written for the press will know how much harder it is to cut than to lengthen pieces. In a recent article, Jeremy Clarkson quoted Clive James as saying that cutting work is throwing your babies away. Clark goes on to describe how he once cut a whole section of a programme – analogous to a whole limb cut cleanly off - rather than trimming bits off the whole programme – equivalent to cutting into the bone and hacking bits away from the whole body.
From my very limited attempts at flash fiction (ie the last 20 minutes only), there’s much less invested as your piece will only start off at a couple of hundred words.
Sorry, have removed my piece because competition entry rules declare it shouldn’t be published anywhere, even on your own website or blog.
Michael Clark – A Very French Affair
Michael Clark is an artist whose work I have long loved. Born in Ayr in 1959, he has won many coveted awards including the 2005 Art Hire Prize at Paisley Art Institute Annual Exhibition, the 2007 Art Hire Prize at the Scottish Drawing Competition, the 2007 and 2008 Wren Gallery Awards for Still Life Painting at the Paisley Art Institute Annual Exhibition, and the 2010 Winsor and Newton Award at the Annual Exhibition of the Royal Scottish Society of Painters in Watercolour. He was also a runner up in the 2003 Kennox (Aspect) Painting Prize and was selected for the 2007 Sunday Times/Singer Friedlander Watercolour Prize. He exhibits all over the UK but primarily in Edinburgh and London. He was elected as a Professional Member of Visual Arts Scotland in 2003, an Artist Member of Paisley Art Institute in 2003, and an Artist Member Glasgow Art Club in 2007.
Around ten years ago, he was painting beautiful and striking oil depictions of flowers where the primary colours leapt out from the canvas and you could almost smell the heady fragrance in the air. His vibrant colours were immediately captivating and his technique was also bold, with broad, confident brush-strokes forming alluring impressionistic images. Details such as flower stems were often omitted to give the vividly bright flowerheads even more impact; it was all about colour and impressions. Having one of these paintings in the home was like permanently having the most exquisite bouquet forever blooming in your room. Unsurprisingly, the commercial potential of these gorgeous images was recognised by others and his work soon became available as printed greetings cards.
Around 2004 – 2005, Michael started traveling abroad to paint, and in 2005 an exhibition of his paintings from Paris and Barcelona was shown in Edinburgh. These paintings were largely a departure from his still lifes although he didn’t abandon these completely, painting occasional bowls of lemons and Seville oranges. However, most of the paintings were of places he’d fallen in love with in these two cities. The Placa Reial in Barcelona was depicted in glowing colours, the yellow buildings contrasting with a clear blue sky and the pink of the ground, with shadows cast in purple. Like the Fauves such as Matisse, Michael doesn’t use colour in a way that is constrained by reality but employs it to bring places alive, his imagination and eye marrying shades that make the images mesmeric.
Among my favourite paintings in that show in 2005 were the stark, sparse depictions of the Tuileries gardens in Paris. There was something haunting about those images, the long, spindly tree trunks stretching, bare and unadorned, into the air, leaf covering having been lost in autumn and winter and not yet regained. The colours of the Tuileries paintings were much less bright than Michael’s other work but the wintery shades added to the atmosphere and mystery of the pictures.
I was very pleased to see more Tuileries paintings in Michael’s current exhibition, A Very French Affair, showing now at the RGI (Royal Glasgow Institute) Kelly Gallery in Glasgow. This show contrasts Michael’s paintings from Paris, which are urban and monochromatic, painted almost in muted colours and exhibiting a striking chiaroscuro - almost like black and white photos - with ones created in the rural south-west of France, where the sun and colours sing from the canvas. It’s amazing how the colour choices capture the feel of these two such different areas of France. Paris is a bustling city where you almost don’t notice the weather. The mood there is of city life but doused with the style and panache of the French sophisticate. One of the Parisian paintings shows a building in St Germain where the sombre, dun colour is enlivened by only a splash of colour from blue shutters.
Several of the Paris paintings show dresses hanging on invisible mannequins in shop windows. Unlike the cheap, garish explosion you see in chain shop windows on any British high street, the ones in Paris are more artisan, more reserved, more chic, and largely in creams or dark colours. My favourite of these window dress paintings is the one showing a line of wedding dresses, Wedding Dresses, St Germain. The dresses are almost dancing in the window; you can almost sense the young French women subsequently wearing these to their big day. They are alive with possibility and promise.
The paintings from the south-west rural areas of France look wildly colourful in comparison. In one, a building flaunts aquamarine shutters and a purple roof while the building itself is shown in hues of pink, yellow and pale green as well as cream. In Restaurant D’Abbaye, the burnished orange building captures perfectly the feeling of brick baking in the heat, and the olive chairs and linen tablecloths bear testament to the departed diners. Hotel near Puymirol boasts a red roof and turquise shutters against a blazing yellow sky, with soothing green trees in the garden. In Le Marie, Montjoi, red window shutters open against a cream building lapped by leaves from an overhanging tree. In Chateau Bastide, delicate pink metal chairs face each other, as if deep in conversation, against the backdrop of a cool grey-green building with blue window shutters and verdant leaves hanging against the walls. It’s either dawn or dusk, since the sun is not bearing down, and you can almost feel the fresh breath of the beginning or end of the day seeping from the air. The aura emitted bythese rural south-west France paintings is of the good, simple life of sunshine and fine food and wine richly enjoyed, and a slower pace of life than in the capital city.
Michael Clark’s paintings transport the viewer to other lands and conjure up memories tinged with joy and nostalgia. If I could, I would snap up at least three of these paintings immediately: the largest Tuileries one, the dancing wedding dresses, and one of the colour-soaked south-west ones.
Some of Michael’s paintings may be seen on his website:
http://michaelclarkartist.co.uk
A Very French Affair is on at the RGI Kelly Gallery, 118 Douglas Street, Glasgow G2 4ET, tel 0141 334 6352, until 26th June.
Jay McInerney – The Last Bachelor
No one captures the superficial concerns of the upper echelons of Manhattan society like Jay McInerney. In his seven novels and two collections of short stories stretching from the acquisitive ’80s across to the more sober present day, he has captured the zeitgeist of the times as experienced by these privileged social butterflies. Cocaine use, parties, clubs, modelisers (men who can choose to date only models), early marriage among those media and banking darlings blessed with looks, success and money – McInerney has made them his trademark.
Occasionally his irony has been subtle so that his stories seemed almost to relish the glassy, cocaine-fuelled lifestyle of their protagonists. But more often than not, the lives of these media and financial high-players unravelled, their greed and egocentricity leading to their own downfall in the guise of lovers, spouses and even employers abandoning them.
The short story format holds certain advantages for McInerney. His crisp prose is ideally suited to rapid fleshing of vapid characters, and the variety of humankind on offer in a volume of stories gives his sharp wit many delicious targets. What is lost is the depth that certain of his novels brought to some of his characters – the disillusionment felt by Corrine Calloway at her fickle and greedy husband Russell in Brightness Falls, for example, which precipitated her affair there and her desire for escape with the more morally-conscious Luke in the peri-9/11 follow-up The Good Life.
But this sacrifice of continuity and long-term investment in his characters is compensated for by the fascination exerted by the more impressionistically drawn egos on parade in the short stories. The Last Bachelor, his latest collection of these, was published in 2009 and released in paperback earlier this year. As with his previous collection How It Ended, McInerney’s wicked insight into the foibles of his fellow residents in the wormy Apple makes the stories in this collection something to relish and savour. And some of the important characters from his novels surface again in sketches which add to the picture already drawn of them, with more minor characters flitting around in the shadows.
In Sleeping With Pigs, a young man dissects his broken marriage. He met his ex-wife Blythe when she was the darling of the Manhattan cocktail party circuit and he found it difficult to accept the changes in her once they were married and she showed more enthusiasm for the six months a year they spent in rural Tennessee than the six months lived in the urban bustle of Manhattan. Blythe’s maternal instinct is not assuaged by their one son and she devotes herself to their menagerie of animals which include a pot-bellied pig called Sweetheart. There are some classic comic moments, such as smuggling Sweetheart onto a plane. As is characteristic for McInerney, contemporary references abound - Annie Liebowitz and Jasper Johns to name but two. More substantially, McInerney comes out with those pithy comments that make you realise, time and time again, that he’s not just a subservient witness but a scythe-voiced critic, and, moreover, one whose facade of ennui hides a perceptive insight into relationships. His insight is almost always casual, throwaway; almost delivered with a self deprecating yawn :
’Over time almost anything can come to seem normal in the course of a marriage: food fetishes, sexual kinks, even in-laws.’
Uncharacteristically for McInerney, this story ends on a surging hopeful note, a glint of optimism in his characteristic dark palette.
I Love You Honey returns to more bleak territory – the couple whose marriage seems doomed to a cycle of infidelities and retaliatory avengements. Liam, a Catholic, is married to Lora, whose substitute for religion is Xanax. McInerney’ s writing is at its sharp taloned best:
‘Lora seemed to have finely calibrated her chilliness to a degree or two above the freezing point.’
And his laid-back similes carry similar clout:
‘After Mass he didn’t feel he could return directly to the apartment. It would be like smoking a cigarette after running a marathon.’
Lora chances on the perfect vengeful come-back to Liam’s casual affairs (one of which is with a woman called Sasha – perhaps Luke’s wife from The Good Life?), and her glueing of passive-aggression to this most cruel form of punishment caused a frisson of shuddering horror in this reader.
The Madonna of Turkey Season presents the more rarely seen side of McInerney – that of sensitivity to vulnerable characters. A father and his three sons, Brian, Mike and Aidan, are left devastated by the loss of the mother of the family. The father remains faithful to his ex-wife’s memory:
‘Our father never brought another woman to the table, though many tried to invite themselves, and our young girlfriends remarked on how handsome he was, and what a waste it was. ‘I had my great love, how could I settle for anything less,’ he’d say as he poured himself another Smirnoff and the neighbour widows and divorce’es dashed themselves against the windowpanes like birds.’
McInerney conveys the family dynamics in his concise way:
‘Mike had a fierce stubborn honesty and a big hardwood chip on his shoulder, which was in some measure, a reflection of his belief that Brian had already claimed the upper bunk bed of life before he came along and had a chance to choose for himself.’
Family catastrophe ensues when Brian oversteps the implicitly understood boundary between fact and fiction. Many female writers like Mary Lawson, Sue Miller and Heather Clay eloquently capture the turmoil of emotions inside strong, silent, bereaved men. McInerney’s method is different but as potent, using the spare male language of events rather than the more analytical female one of feelings.
Everything Is Lost is one of two stories here with a similar pattern – a woman passionately in love is made to reconsider her relationship because of her boyfriend’s reactions to seemingly unimportant events. Here, Sabrina starts the tale off smug in her love for her ex writing tutor at NYU, Kyle, and plans a surprise birthday party for him. She is all set for the inconvenience of Kyle’s curiosity and even jealousy at the secretive phone calls she is making and receiving, but, stolid and oblivious, he fails to show any such problematic observation. What Sabrina thought she wanted – a clear path to do what she wants without nosiness from Kyle – starts to irk her. The story successfully showcases the contrariness of human behaviour although the way in which every man Sabrina met makes a move on her is slightly simplistic and cartoonish; too black and white for a master of shades of grey like McInerney.
Invisible Fences moves to the uglier, darker side of the partying lifestyle. Susan is a lawyer and Dean, her husband, is a bookshop manager. Ostensibly a respectable couple, they actually indulge in a voyeuristic sex life where Dean gets aroused by watching Susan have sex with male strangers. As with all the stories the action is firmly rooted in contemporary times by cultural references – here the music of The Killers. McInerney probes the apparent but often illusive complicity of both individuals in a couple into swinging. There is some lovely writing here which adds to the atmosphere – ‘a gibbous harvest moon hangs over the interstate, leaking an orange glow into the surrounding sky.’
The March revisits Corrine Calloway from Brightness Falls and The Good Life. It is 2003 and Corrine has arranged to meet two friends to join in an organised march against the Iraq War. Just as she chanced on Luke post 9/11 in The Good Life, she happens on him again now, and her heart leaps. Corrine and the reader are taken back to the end of their affair and left wondering, as one often does in life, ‘what if…’
Summary Judgement is a juicy little foray into the world of gold-diggers. It’s fun to read and concludes satisfyingly but is a lighter offering in this box of delights, the protagonist Alysha de Sante being too hideous to believe in, though on further contemplation and perusal of the media, such vilely two-dimensional characters do seem to exist.
The Waiter features another grotesque woman, this time an imperious Italian snob, Marella, who denigrates waiters in an anecdote she tells to the male narrator, a young post-grad student, and Cara, the woman with whom he’s in lust. There are some laughs here – most notably in the exchange where Marella refers to ‘a corrector’ and the narrator asks her what a corrector is. (Cara hisses ‘Honestly Seth. She means character.’) Like many of the other vignettes, it’ a snapshot of a moment in time, and here, as in Sleeping with Pigs, the ending is upbeat.
Penelope on the Pond repeats the pattern of Everything Is Lost in that the female protagonist changes her feelings about her boyfriend in a short space of time and unbeknown to the boyfriend. Here the story is related in the first-person and the narrator is Alison Poole, who was the narrator of McInerney’s third novel, Story of My Life. Alison is having an affair with a married Democrat Senator. She starts to have second thoughts when the Senator – who has already regurgitated things she’s said to him in public broadcasts, passing them off as his own words – does not respond as she would like him to when she tells him about an ardent political blogger suitor.
This recurrence of themes rises again in Putting Daisy Down, when Bryce, who has been striving for membership of a golf club for two years, is publically shown up by his pregnant wife who reveals a letter sent to her by Bryce’s mistress. There are echoes of the scene in The Good Life where Russell Calloway’s ex-mistress Trish presents Russell’s wife Corrine with written evidence of Russell’s lustful e mails. Here, Bryce struggles to resolve the situation with his wife but, as in I Love You Honey, Bryce’s vulnerability is partly his Catholicism. The other point where his wife can attack is Bryce’s cat Daisy, who he adores. There are plenty of well observed scenes in this tale, mainly those centring on the male camaraderie shown by Bryce’s golfing buddies who rally round. This excerpt is from the moments after Bryce’s silently incandescent wife has left after travelling to the golf course to hand Bryce the letter she’s received from his mistress:
‘Without a word she turned and drove away. The men watched silently until the cart finally disappeared behind the rise of the thirteenth tee, and then resumed their play, Bryce’s partners respectfully somber, their fraternal compassion compounded in equal parts of selfish relief and empathetic dread. Their goodwill seemed only to increase as his game fell apart.’
The penultimate story of the twelve is The Debutante’s Return. McInerney has set two of his stories in this collection in the South and he is remarkably adept at switching his acuity from the brusque pace of life in Manhattan to the slower but more suffocating environs and residual simmering racial inequalities of Tennesse. In this story, a dutiful daughter, Faye, returns from NYC to Nashville when her mother suffers a stroke. When she arrives, it seems that the stroke has precipitated other cognitive problems resulting in her mother showing signs and symptoms of dementia. Being back home causes Faye to reassess her perceptions about her childhood. And her problems aren’t limited to her mother’s illness – her swaggering brother has grown up with a sense of entitlement and begins the process of looting his mother’s house. Faye is at a loss for ways of stopping him, but events pan out in a rather pleasing if unexpected way.
Finally, The Last Bachelor is the story that ends the collection. Like the previous tale, it is set in the South, here in Tennessee. A woman approaching middle age, Ginny, sees her ex, A.G. Jackson, flirting with her niece, and the experience brings back memories of her time with him. A.G is getting married that weekend. McInerney paints a wonderfully vivid, almost cinematic tableau of wedding preparations at A.G’s home and creates a very plausible character in the confident, buffoonish A.G, revealing his vulnerabilities by revisiting his past.
As with McInerney’s novels, the reader is often left wondering who the real winners and losers are. Happiness is often a transitory emotion or a dream, and the ease of life usually brings more problems – drugs, alcohol, opportunities for infidelity – than it resolves. This is a colourful cascade of human life, revealed in all its weaknesses. McInerney remains one of our foremost chroniclers of modern domestic life among the privileged in The US.
Mike Thomas – Pocket Notebook
The cover of Mike Thomas’s debut novel , Pocket Notebook, is a reworking of the original cover of Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, only the heavily lashed, wide-open, one-eyed face belongs not to a brawling offender in braces but to a policeman in full uniform. The contrast is intentional: the protagonist of Pocket Notebook is indeed a police officer. However, like his Clockwork Orange parallel, he is also a violent thug.
This would be a risky topic for most writers. Bent coppers receive their share of attention in movies, but in a novel where detail isn’t so easily skimmed over, isn’t it tricky terrain for a writer not versed in police work? It would be, but Mike Thomas is a serving policeman as well as a writer.
And it shows. Pocket Notebook is extremely authentic in its use of police jargon and routine. A small, preconceived idea-hoarding part of me protested before I read the book that a novel written by a policeman might not be very well written because he’d be too busy being a copper to write. However, that’s not the case (and what a feeble prejudice that is in any case, considering the wide variety of professionals who are also stellar writers). His novel is sharp, funny, black and strikingly written.
The story centres around the life of Jacob Smith, a thirty seven year-old tactical firearms officer. Jake starts off the novel in his prime. He is popular, has a best buddy and partner Frank who loves him like a brother, he is tall (a towering 6’5”) and built like a bull, and he has a wife and two children. But Jake is out of control. His fanaticism for body building has led to an addiction to testosterone injections. His liberal use of these illicit drugs has landed him in deep debt. Meanwhile the testosterone has precipitated aggressive behaviour which has crossed the line into violence. Jake now routinely takes his belligerence out on those rounded up for petty offences. And his colleagues are starting to notice.
Coincident with this, the surging male hormones have also caused Jake’s libido to surge out of control. He had an ill-advised fling with a junior female police officer and has also developed the hots for Frank’s teenage daughter Jessica. There is a darkness in Jake’s past regarding his parents that he is pushing into his subconscious but it keeps bobbing out and threatening to overwhelm him.
Pocket Notebook is the story of Jake’s life spiralling out of control. He gradually loses everything he loves – his wife and children, his job in firearms and even his devoted best mate Frank. He becomes an explosive, unpredictable psychotic, as amoral and violent as any of the worst criminals he’s previously detained.
Unlike A Clockwork Orange, there is no ’cure’ for violence here. We just read the account of Jake’s downfall, illustrated by pages from his pocket notebook at work, which metamophosises from a formal list of his work duties to a stream-of-consciousness diary of his anger and frustration.
Thomas’s experience as a police officer is very apparent: the copper slang and vernacular – for example ’Trumpton’s wagon’, ‘hose monkeys’ and ‘water fairies’ for fire engines/firemen and ’blues and twos’ for police sirens - come across as genuine and are casually dropped into Jake’s feverish first-person narrative and not forced. Thomas also reveals shocking unofficial police tactics. For instance ’black dogging’ is a form of police revenge on particularly abusive and violent prisoners taken into the police van: after locking the prisoner in the cage at the back of the van, the police officer driving the van accelerates to a high speed and then suddenly slams the brakes on, allegedly due to an (imaginary) dog in the road, hurling the prisoner about in the cage and giving him/her bruises. There is also the matter-of-fact mention of the need for Jake and his fellow officers on an arrest to ‘get our heads together back at the nick and make sure everyone’s pocket notebook entries tallied.’
Thomas is also honest about the problems in policing such as the understaffing, where young, inexperienced officers are left in charge of large units overnight, although everything is described not as you’d see it reported in an earnest broadsheet but as seen through Jake’s sneering, extremely cynical gaze. In this regard it’s almost like Cardiac Arrest or Bodies (Jed Mercurio’s medical dramas) as applied to the police force – showing the gritty reality in an astonishingly frank and often jarring way.
The unapologetically un PC view of Jake’s allows Thomas to describe the less salubrious encounters a policeman has without the filter of diplomacy. Here he is on the Magistrates’ Court corridors:
‘It’s an animal pen. They wait for you, clumped in groups on stairwells, near the toilets, outside the very court they’re about to appear in. They bring their friends, their families. Despite the draconian ban, the air is thick with smoke. Soggy roll-ups, or if they’re flush it’s Lambert and Butler, the underclass’s pre-rolled cigarette of choice. It’s a blur of hoodies and cheap Asda trainers on cream tiles. These Burberry fools. These walking abortions. The aroma is fags, sweat and stale lager-breath from their pre-court piss-up. You walk past, uniform pressed, eyes fixed on somewhere ahead but not really looking, pretending to ignore them when they tell you what they plan to do to your wife and children. How they hope your father dies of cancer, you fuckin’ truffle-snuffler. That they’re going to rape your mother as soon as they’re finished in this joke shop of a building.’
Jake’s casual violence is shocking yet plausible. He refers to the young officer working with his ex-girlfriend as FNG – Fucking New Guy – and says he previously referred to him as Seal Pup because he wanted to ‘club him to death.’ His urge to have sex with so many women he comes across without consideration of the consequences makes him comparable to Nick Cave’s recent amoral anti-hero Bunny Munro – certainly both men seem to have been screwed up by their fathers, are out of touch with their emotions and are on self-destructive spirals leading to their downfall.
Yet for all the marauding maleness of the action, the pugnacious brawls and Jake’s bursting libido, there are very funny parts to Pocket Notebook. Thomas manages to capture domestic detail sympathetically, both with regard to Jake and his wife Karen and Frank and his wife Mel, who is deeply irritated by Jake. Here is Thomas making Jake’s wife’s huff amusing:
‘I’m in trouble. I sense it immediately. Karen’s stomping around the bedroom in her slippers, refolding already neat clothes.Picking up jeans I wore last night.Kicking my shoes under the bed. Cleaning. Arranging. She does this when she’s angry. After an argument she can sterilise the entire kitchen in an hour.’
And when Jake addresses his ex-girlfriend in front of the FNG, he reports ‘I note with satisfaction his Adam’s apple is pistoning.’
There are also light moments related to Jake’s predilection for women’s feet – podophilia. His reaction when he sees Frank’s wife Mel’s feet is described like so:
‘Mel’s feet are bare but she’s got bunions and freakishly long little toes; I have to clamp my teeth together and swallow as my mouth floods with saliva. How Frank can even be with this woman is beyond me. It’s all I can do not to retch.’
There are also sly witty touches - Jake uses the collective noun ‘a pointlessness’ for a gaggle of police community support officers, for example. In fact, Jake’s sense of humour makes him almost endearing – he describes his female superior as having a face that’s ‘peculiarly flat, like a dog that’s spent too much time chasing parked cars’, and likens his puppyish new partner’s ’constant wittering’ to ‘someone gouging my eardrums with toothpicks’. It’s when his violence and sexual urges escalate that he transforms from a lovable rogue to a frightening figure.
Even when Jake finally flips, there are some blackly comic moments: when he’s suspended, he dons full uniform and patrols the streets:
’…pootling along nicely, feeling pretty mellow now, stopping to exchange pleasantries with some of the old grippers out shopping for condensed milk and cat litter. ‘What’s the time, officer?’ they ask over and over until I’m telling them – nicely, of course, got to stay a pro – to buy a bloody watch.’
And I laughed out loud when Jake entered an internet cafe and arrests a young university student for ‘being Muslim without due care and attention.’ Shades of the Not The Nine O’clock News sketch where Griff Rhys Jones’s Officer Savage is chastised by his superior Rowan Atkinson for arresting someone on the basis of ’possession of curly black hair and thick lips.’
The ending is again similar to The Death of Bunny Munro by Nick Cave ( coincidentally so, since both books were being written at the same time.) The first-person narration leaves a slight problem of ‘how is this story being narrated if what we think happened happened?’ But then, maybe Jake survived and lived to tell the tale. Even if he didn’t, this is a minor hiccup in a wickedly funny yet disturbing book about a policeman having a breakdown. Mike Thomas is a real talent, and his credentials as a working police officer with a sharp eye and a scathing but raucously funny voice make him pretty much unique.
Davie Smith, landscape artist.
One advantage of the dismal weather where I live (Scotland) is the constant rain on the rugged terrain of the more rural areas makes for jaw-droppingly gorgeous landscapes. Perhaps partly because of this there seem to be many tremendously talented painters in Scotland producing amazing work. I’m always disappointed when I go to contemporary art shows in London because quite apart from everything being shockingly expensive (I’ve been known to ask if the correct number of zeros were on a price tag), a lot of the work down south seems to be that of artists who are uninspired and so churn out derivative or weak stuff that’s either been done before (shock tactics and is-this-art? posing a la Marcel Duchamp) or work that shows little artistic talent or else is so up its own arse in terms of conceptual game-playing that you wonder if the artist is hiding behind a pillar clutching his sides as the likes of Saatchi fork out millions.
By contrast the Scottish painters whose work I’ve loved for the past 20 years often paint representative work showing the beauty of their country. When I say representative I only mean the subject is recognisable, I don’t mean that it’s painted in a dull, unimaginative painting-by-numbers way like the landscapes you see used to see hanging on the railings of Hyde Park on a Sunday. Rather, those Scottish artists I love use their own idiosyncratic styles, whether it’s combining the smudge and blur of impressionism with their own distinctive mark or using bold textures and brushstrokes to make their work original.
One of the Scottish artists whose work I’ve loved for over a decade is Davie Smith. Davie paints not only landscapes but seascapes and skyscapes. I own a couple of his watercolours and they still make me hold my breath in awe when I catch a glimpse of them. Great watery washes of sky in swirling blues, pale violets and seductive aquamarines with slivers of clouds chasing across the expanse. Vast stretches of sea, the depth and mystery captured with stunning acuity and talent. Little bothies and cottages nestled amidst breathtaking landscapes. Boats in harbours, morose-looking fish, clucking hens - those scenes that make the remote areas of this brooding country so beautiful. Davie has won several highly prestigious prizes – I first came across his work at the Royal Glasgow Institute annual exhibition in 2001 when he had won the coveted David Cargill Prize . Since then he has won the Winsor and Newton Award at the 2009 RSW (Royal Scottish Watercolourists) annual exhibition and the Adam Award at the 2010 Paisley Art Institute (PAI) annual exhibition. He exhibits regularly at the RSW, RGI, RSA (Royal Scottish Academy) and PAI annual exhibitions.
You wouldn’t think it to meet him though – a more modest and down-to-earth guy is hard to imagine. He spends his weekends climbing and takes his paints with him.
There are many qualities of his work that I love: the expanses of colour, one shade merging into another in his watercolours; the oil textures that stand out from the canvas giving the picture a three dimensional aspect that you feel you could climb into; the way seemingly random specks and brushstrokes of colour coalesce to form an organic whole.
You can see some of Davie’s art on his website:
or
He currently has an exhibition in the small gallery space upstairs at The Mussel Inn at 157 Hope Street, Glasgow, G2 2UQ, website
http://www.mussel-inn.com/gallery
I’ve already been seduced by two of the exhibits there and snapped them up.
(PS If any IT boffins know how to show the paintings on Davie’s website on this blog page, I’d be very grateful.)
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