Perfume: The Story of a Murderer - Patrick Suskind

This blog was originally going to be about that small sub-set of books that I found offensive, but re-reading parts of this particular novel reminded me just how objectionable I found it, and how puzzled I was that I seemed to be the only person who has a problem with it.

Google any combination of the words "Perfume" "Suskind" and "misogyny" or "feminism" and you won't find anything. And yet I am genuinely puzzled that feminists did not feel outraged by this novel. So what is my problem?

Let's start with the Wikipedia entry for it, which says  

"Perfume: The Story of a Murderer is a 1985 literary historical cross-genre novel (originally published in German as Das Parfum) by German writer Patrick Süskind. The novel explores the sense of smell and its relationship with the emotional meaning that scents may carry. Above all it is a story of identity, communication and the morality of the human spirit."

So a story of a murderer - the clue is in the title - isn't about a lunatic murdering virgins and abusing their bodies to distill scent from them, but is about nice, fluffy things like identity, communication, and the human spirit. Is it really?

Imagine an advertisement for a film. It promises to feature the casual murder of 20 virgins - and the emphasis of their sexual status is Suskind's, not mine - followed by an orgy and scenes of cannibalism. The bodies of the murder victims are abused by the murderer in some fetishistic way to distill "perfume". What kind of film would you expect - an exploitative torture porn video nasty, or something literary and sophisticated.

I appreciate the case for the defence will be that I shouldn't take this too literally - despite Suskind's determined focus on making each scene as real as possible by his focus on the senses throughout the novel - and that this is magical realism, where the brutal slaughter of young women is a metaphor for.... - what exactly? This case is laid out, for example, in the dozens of laudatory reviews on Amazon, for example this one:
"I came to this book expecting to find a crime novel, or a thriller, about a serial killer. Instead I found a beautifully written and deeply researched novel about a young Frenchman with an unusual sense of smell and a unique gift for the art of the perfumier. In fact, the murders of young girls, so emphasised in the film, take second place to the marvellous descriptions of how perfume is made, and the way in which Grenouille gradually infiltrates the profession, becoming a master perfumier due to his prodigious gifts"

The murders of girls takes second place to the descriptions of how perfume is made? Really? I don't give a stuff about the technical detail as to how perfume is made, but I am pretty sure it doesn't involve murdering virgins. grenouille may have been a skilled perfumier, and I am sure Hitler could whip up a nice cheese omelette, but talk about missing the point.

To be as clear as possible, it is not the literary treatment of murder that I find objectionable - that would preclude me from appreciating large sections of world literature, including Shakespeare (Titus Andronicus, anyone?). Murder can be used to shock, to amuse, or to make any other number of points. It can even be handled in a way that is hard to stomach (for example, American Psycho). But the idea that women's bodies contain within them an essence that can be found as long as you kill enough of them, and that this is some way legitimises their killing, I found nauseating.

I am aware I have not made the case for the prosecution compellingly here - it is hard to define the offensive, even when it is staring you in the face. Equally I accept no-one else seems to have a problem with this novel and its treatment of women. But I found it nasty, brutal, and disturbing. If that was Suskind's intention, fine, but why is everyone else pretending this is a high minded dissertation on identity and the like?

PS. I started this blog entry using voice recognition - and this is what came out!! How sad he had a terrible chocolate!

"I found the misogyny in Patrick siskins perfume quite disturbing this is a lot of about a person who is has a terrible chocolate and grows up to become massive history skin is creating perfume and this instance decides bizarre me to create perfect from the dead bodies this is presented as being workable months of something or invite be quite sympathetic wants".

Frankenstein (2) - Mary Shelley

In this post I would like to explore the possibility that the monster was the creation of Dr Frankenstein's ego or unconscious, and that the crimes in the novel were committed by the good doctor himself. Furthermore I would like to suggest that the source of this psychosis is his fear of his own sexuality. This answers the question most often posed about this novel - who is the real monster, Frankenstein or his creation, with the answer "They are one and the same". It also explains why the doctor and his creation are so often confused in popular culture, with the name Frankenstein being used for both of them.

To deal with the most obvious objection first - how could the monster be Victor's alter ego when there are numerous references in the novel to other people seeing the monster? It is important to remember that almost all this evidence is in fact presented through the doctor's conversations with the explorer, Walton, he meets at the beginning of the novel. We are invited to accept Victor as a reliable narrator, but objectively there is little reason to accept what he tells us without question. First and foremost his story is utterly fantastic - if you met someone raving about having created a monster you wouldn't just say, "oh yes, that's interesting". You would naturally want to know more, and to challenge what you are told. The absence of that challenge, just the plan recitation of the tale, presented unquestioningly, lulls the reader into accepting Frankenstein's story. As well as its fantastic nature, consider also the context - he is alone in an Arctic waste, chasing after a distantly glimpsed figure that may or may not have been himself. His story tells of a monster that kills his family and friends. Could not the monster be that part of his personality that he considers monstrous? Was, in fact, Dr Victor Frankenstein the first recorded case of manic schizophrenia or multiple personality disorder, the forerunner of another famous self-creator of monsters, Dr Jekyll?

This reading explains a lot, for example the lack of detail over how the monster is created - if this was a delusion then the subconscious could easily skip over the process to focus on the outcome. The disgust Victor feels in the process of creation can be explained by his disgust with procreation, simply put, sex, and cannot believe what he has done. In his psychological crisis he creates the monster to separate the innocent part of himself from the monstrous.

The murders of family and friends is further circumstantial evidence, although Victor can't be tied closely to any of the murders. There is enough evidence to at least cast suspicion, to the extent that he is even arrested for the killing of his best friend Clerval, and later held during his breakdown after the murder of his wife. The murder of his bride, on the first night of their honeymoon, represents the apotheosis of his sexual horror - rather than consummate his marriage he kills his wife and then faints. His conversations with the monster represent the inner monologue of the two parts of his personality. Virtually no-one else sees the monster in the whole of the novel, albeit admittedly with some exceptions. You would expect a beast lumbering across central Europe to be the cause of some comment - but the monster is never seen or spotted other than at a distance, and then only as reported by Frankenstein.

The exceptions to this are the family he haunts - but this could easily be Frankenstein himself, or just another delusion about his dreams of acceptance into a happy family. The other important exception is the occasion when explorer sees the monster just after doctor's death at the very end of the novel. This is harder to explain away, but hardly conclusive - the explorer is not necessarily the reliable narrator we are led to believe.

The source of Victor's psychosis emerges from a closer reading of the section of the novel dealing with the murder of his wife, Elizabeth. Chapter 22 opens with their engagement and wedding. Having been promised that he will return on his wedding night, VF is tortured by fear of the monster, and wants to shun the company of others - "I felt attracted to even the most repulsive among them, as to creatures of an angelic nature and celestial mechanism. But I felt I had no right to share their intercourse." Who is most commonly characterised by VF as angelic? Elizabeth of course. And who feels unworthy to share "intercourse" with his fellow man? VF feels guilty and worthless because of his "unhallowed acts" - a suggestion that he is unable to face sex with his bride on their wedding night because of previous repulsive and criminal acts. This is the language used to describe homosexuality in the 19th century.

Unable to accept his sexuality VF at first avoids contact with Elizabeth, running away from her to the extent of travelling the world. Apart from her, the part of his personality that wants a conventional relationship comes to the fore, and he agrees to marry her. Before their wedding he writes to her telling her he has a "terrible secret" which will "chill your frame with horror". VF knows that the monster will unavoidably be with him on his wedding night, because he and the monster are one and the same, and the monstrous, hidden aspect of his personality is his sexuality. There is no hint whatsoever in the way he speaks of Elizabeth of any sexual feelings, only tenderness.
Chapter 23 brings us closer to the wedding night, and the confrontation with the "monster". VF sends Elizabeth to bed, knowing this is the scene of the coming confrontation. He resolves not to join her until "I had obtained some knowledge as to the situation of my enemy" - here the enemy being his recalcitrant sexuality.

Elizabeth is strangled and VF falls senseless to the ground. When the hotel owner and others come into the room a little later, there is no sign of the monster. There is some confused business here in which he appears to awake from his faint in another room, surrounded by the people of the inn, because he then goes back alone to the bedroom where Elizabeth's body lies, where he then spots the monster goading him. Again no-one else sees the monster, and after a fruitless search "most of my companions believing it (the monster) to have been a form conjured up by my fancy". If they genuinely believed this then they can have drawn only one conclusion about the cause of Elizabeth's death, the identity of her murderer. His guilty behaviour continues as he flees the village without telling anyone, and returns to Geneva. He descends into madness and is kept locked in a cell and his again suspected of being the criminal.

In moments of lucidity VF recognises he is responsible for the killings. He tells his father "I murdered her. William, Justine and Henry - they all died by my hands". Indeed.

Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabokov

"Pale Fire" is a complex, multi-layered post modernist novel - but for goodness sake don't let that put you off! At the heart of this novel is an extraordinary romp - and that's not a word you expect to see used to describe a modern novel.

The structure of the novel is worth spending a minute or two outlining. It opens with a 999 line poem, which is followed by what appears to be at first a detailed critical analysis of the poem. The critic uses appropriate technical language and phrases, and the reader is not alerted to there being anything out of the ordinary in this set up. This appearance slowly begins to unravel. The first hint that all is not as it seems occurs when the critic is disturbed by some noise outside, and this intrusion appears in his notes. The situation quickly spirals from here, as we come to understand that the writer - Charles Kinbote, academic and friend of the now deceased poet John Shade, is in fact delusional. He is the ultimate unreliable narrator, and nothing he tells us can be taken at face value. Sometimes slips in his facade reveal a different perspective, but any "revealed truth" has to be treated with equal care. This is not a world in which the true state of affairs is within our grasp; we are just shown different levels of illusion.

Kinbote's footnotes to the poem steadily lead the reader to understand that he took a teaching job in the United States and cultivated an acquaintance with Shade, imposing his company despite the resistance of Shade's wife. over time he tells Shade the fantastic story of King Charles the Beloved of Zembla and his escape into exile. We are invited (by Kinbote) to infer that he is telling his own story, and that he wants Shade to turn this narrative into his poem; a suggestion Shade stubbornly resists.

The real delight of the novel is this Zemblan fantasy. It is outrageously kitsch, almost unquotable in that every sentence is at once ridiculous, over-written, camp, and hilarious. The king's escape from imprisonment, his disguises and near misses, is all related breathlessly, kept superbly in tone. A parallel narrative relating the journey of Shade's accidental assassin across Europe to the US is of a piece of this comic operetta style, closer to some of the tone of cheap gangster or spy stories.

In constructing this inner narrative we are invited to see the world outside it as real - similar to the way McEwan uses the alternative ending of "Atonement" to bring into focus the "real" ending. In this "real" world Kinbote is a disturbed academic, Gradus the assassin an escaped lunatic or criminal trying to kill the judge from whom Kinbote rents his house, and Shade is who we are told he is, the one constant through all the layered narratives. But there are many warning signs that tell us that however flawed and ridiculous Kinbote's stories may be, the world from which he relates them is equally artificial. There is no safe ground to which the reader can anchor themselves, no fixed point of reliable perspective. The "real" world is equally flawed and ridiculous, albeit in a different, less comic, way.

On one level, the simplest reading of this novel is a satire on academia, and in particular the hangers on that surround famous writers, noting down their every comment for future inclusion in memoirs, chronicling the mundane details of the famous one's life, and attempting to gain their place in the margins of the picture frame of posterity. No doubt this was in part Nabokov's point, reflecting on some of the response to the publication of "Lolita", but on its own this is a fairly mundane reading. But this is a fairly limited reading.

An alternative approach is to see the novel as a mystery story, in which we are invited to unpick the accidental revelation of the real events of the novel from Kinbote's confused perspective. This is a seductive reading, as the reader is always led carefully into "guessing" what really happened a few pages before Kinbote confirms it. A good example of this is his identity - we work out that he believes he is Charles the Beloved well before the mask slips and he refers to Charles as "I" rather than "He". But this guessing game is, once the reader realises that Kinbote is telling his own story, far too easy. Guessing games are sometimes fun, but they aren't great literature.

Which leaves the complex, multi-layered narrative which is open to multiple, all equally valid readings. Which in turn makes this a classic modernist novel.

There are no rules about how or when to enjoy a novel, and the escapist fantasy of the King of Zembla, which wouldn't feel out of place in a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, is still for me the funniest, most enjoyable part of this novel.

Savage Continent - Keith Lowe

This survey of post war Europe is a natural sequel in terms of my reading to Ian Kershaw's "The End", reviewed here last month. "The End" described and explained the utter destruction of much of central Europe at the end of the Second World War - this books follows on by describing some of the consequences of that destruction.

I knew very little about this period before reading this book. If pushed I would have mentioned the Marshall Plan, and guessed that the process of moving from the anarchy and chaos of war to civilised society would take time and a lot of pain. Britain, which had never been invaded or occupied (the Channel islands excepted), and which had ended on the winning side, struggled to recover, and was not clear of the shadow of war until the 1950's (arguably a whole generation was damaged by the conflict) - how much worse must it have been for those countries utterly wrecked by occupation, saturation bombing, and the deliberate destruction of industry by retreating forces? Add in the bitterness of ethnic tension and a thirst for revenge against collabarators and others, and it is hardly surprising that "Europe in the aftermath of World War 2" was the "savage continent" Lowe describes.

The human instinct for neatness means we readily accept the story that the war ended in 1945, but for many of the people of Europe their problems had only just begun. For many others the war raged on without respite. Lowe chronicles these stories clearly and navigates the complex moral issues adrioitly. His analysis is bravely unblinking - he does not turn away from analysing atrocities irrespective of who commits them. Suffering is not ignored, even if he does not fall into the trap of drawing moral equivalences between the crimes of an invading regime, and the revenge attacks of the newly liberated. He engages with some of the most difficult and passionate controversies of the 20th Century - for example, do the crime committed against the German people of Eastern Europe by the Soviets and others in any mitigate the impact of the Holocaust - and presents the arguments and evidence and makes judgments the reader is compelled to trust.  

The importance of knowing how the Europe of today emerged from the ashes of World War 2 is key to understanding so much about European history - the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia (the one country that didn't undergo massive ethnic cleansing in the post war period); the Cold War; the formation of the Warsaw Pact, and the modern European Community amongst many others. I simply didn't know before I read this book about the subversion of democracy in (ironically) post-War Greece, aided by the British, nor how the Communists took control in many Eastern European countries in a manner reminiscent of the Nazi take over in Germany - get a foot in the democratic door, then gradually use what levers of power you do control to get more, until the opposition is finished. That is what makes this such an important book. Knowing World War 2 didn't have a neat tidy ending is one thing; understanding how the continent was torn apart before it could be slowly reassembled is quite another. This isn't an easy read, both in terms of content and length, but it is well worth the investment.

The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald - 1925

What is this? - not "this" the Great Gatsby, but this, the words I am writing? It is not a review - you can't really review a book published 90 years ago, not one which has attracted the wealth and weight of critical comment that much loved novels such as this have? At the same time a plot summary would be redundant, and random impressions need some kind of structure to make them worth reading. I think the best I am going to get to is "some interesting things I noticed about the novel that may not have been written about elsewhere, but probably have".

I mention above that this novel is much loved - adored would be closer. On a first reading it is hard to see why - the central character is a deeply flawed former criminal, and is involved in the death of a young woman. But he sacrifices himself for the woman he loves without flinching, knowing that his life without her love is worthless. It is in that sacrifice that he finds redemption from his previous life of crime.

The Jazz Age setting is obviously seductive, conspicuous consumption meeting post Great-War hedonism and the early days of prohibition in a perfect storm of parties, frivolousness, and excess. The narrator, Nick Carraway is a tabla rasa who observes the events of the novel without meaningful judgment or any significant involvement - he seems as hollow as many of those he observes. He suggests that he has scorn for the nouveau riche and borderline criminal people orbiting around Gatsby, but is happy to join them, and condones Tom's unfaithfulness to Daisy by his silence.

The novel is rich, almost burdened, with symbolism. The glasses that loom over the petrol station, a key scene for the very visual settings Fitzgerald uses, are explicitly compared to Nick's neutral gaze. I am aware as well that the name Carraway suggests the very small (if pungent) seed of the same name - he is as unsubstantial and of little significance. As a narrator he is reasonably reliable, and does not hide or obscure events, but equally his personal role is not really important - he is only there to observe.

Probably the most mundane, but unavoidable, reading of this novel is that it represents a judgment on the Jazz Age and all its excess. Mundane because once you have drawn the conclusion that rich people aren't that nice one doesn't really have anywhere to go with it. Gatsby is usually exempted from this judgment, despite his background and criminal career making him in many ways its exemplar. His time in the war has taught him the cheapness of human life, although perhaps he did not value his own anyway, having lost Daisy to Tom, which is why his sacrifice, when it comes, seems so easily done.

I wanted to mention one irritation, which seems churlish given the overall strength of the novel, but stood out for me anyway. Prior to the motor accident that precipitates Gatsby's demise there is a lot of "business" about who takes what car. This is a plot device to ensure Gatsby is mistakenly blamed for the accident. It appeared clumsily done to me - it was obvious there was some reason for the "take my car" " no take mine" nonsense that didn't really make much sense at the time. I may be being unfair to Fitzgerald, who I am sure wouldn't mind that much anyway! Doubly unfair because the plotting may have been tight and I might have just missed the point, or simply because in the overall context of the novel a writer should be allowed to get away with little bits of business to engineer the end he is looking for.

I think this novel, given its place in the pantheon of world literature, probably deserves another reading, which given its relative brevity isn't asking that much. For now its success is for me, elusive.

Frankenstein - Mary Shelley

With 200 years of critical analysis weighing down on any critic or reviewer, what is one to do with a novel such as Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus? Trying to find new insight or interpretation is almost pointless. Such is the nature of the novel that it opens itself to an almost boundless variety of interpretations, on human relationships, sex and sexuality, or science and the modern world. That burden of scholarship can be oppressive and hamper the ability to say anything sensible or interesting about such a complex novel.

Let's start at the beginning. The story of the novel's genesis is well know, probably much better known than the novel itself. It did not come as a surprise to me, with the experience of reading Dracula last year, that the novel bears little or no relationship to its popular culture incarnation. Crucially, the monster is not an incoherent, stumbling beast, but a highly intelligent and articulate creature, albeit one which is monstrously ugly and extremely, dangerously strong. The sub-title of the novel, the Modern Prometheus, should not be overlooked. Wikipedia says that "Prometheus became a figure who represented human striving, particularly the quest for scientific knowledge, and the risk of overreaching or unintended consequences. In particular, he was regarded as embodying the lone genius whose efforts to improve human existence could also result in tragedy". Quite. Is this then a straightforward anti-science parable - don't meddle with nature because you will create a monster beyond your control? Certainly the anti-GM protagonists would support that reading. But simple readings of this kind, however attractive, are invariably over-simplistic and resisted by classic texts, and this is no exception. I suspect this is a bit of authorial mis-direction. The sub-title invites us to a simplistic don't meddle with the unknown interpretation. Suspicion of science and where it might take us at the beginning of the 19th century was certainly understandable. For me the novel's themes about parenthood and original sin are more interesting.

The narrative structure of the novel is the complex "Russian doll2 approach much loved of 19th century novelists. To be honest this adds little to the story overall - you quickly forget you are reading a letter from the explorer who has met Frankenstein and is passing on his tale to his loved one, in much the same way you forget Wuthering Heights is told as a series of fireside gossipy chats from the ever present domestic servant to the new tenant of the neighbouring house. It is almost as if the truly omniscient narrator had yet to be accepted by authors or readers at this stage of the development of the novel, (which in the early 19th century was not quite so anachronistically named). The author appears to feel compelled to show the reader what happens by using increasingly artificial devices - someone claims to have observed what happened - rather than just tell the story. In this novel this is pushed to ridiculous extremes - so for example the monster lives for almost a year in a hovel adjoining the house occupied by the DeLacey family without their once wondering "I wonder who it is who lives next door?". Dracula uses much the same technique, despite the almost 100 years between the two novels. Is this in homage to the early 19th century spirit of the novel?

John Sutherland's book on puzzles in 19th century literature which I wrote about earlier this month has an interesting take on this novel, and in particular the question of how Frankenstein actually creates the monster. The author gives virtually no detail - there are glimpses of how he prepares, but the actual process itself is not described at all. Time and again Shelley uses the word "disgusting" to describe Victor's reaction to his work. This could be a response to the body parts he is presumed to have used, but when he begins to create the monster's partner later in the nvoel he does so in a remote Orkney croft-house with only his scientific equipment to hand, far from any mortuary or graveyard. Sutherland speculates a sexual component to Frankenstein's disgust, which is a seductive interpretation. How does man create life, after all? This would go some way to making sense of the original sin theme of the novel - Frankenstein creates life, then rejects it, and reaps the consequences. All parents will have some sympathy with how he feels.

As a central character it is hard to warn to Frankenstein. He is a complete idiot - for example, despite the monster making it clear to him that he will make him suffer if he does not create him a partner, and that he will see him again on his wedding night, the penny does not drop that there might be a threat to his fiancee. He lives a life of considerable privilege, but wastes his energies and gifts on ultimately fruitless personal obsessions.  The monster is a more interesting character, although again his "no-one loves me so I am going to kill someone....Why does nobody love me?" wears thin fairly quickly.

As I mentioned earlier, there are many ways to read this complex novel. The one that appeals to me the most is that the monster is, like Mr Hyde, a product of his creator's sub-conscious. Both doctors Jekyll and Frankenstein create monsters that run out of control and lead to their ultimate demise. Victor is arrested for the killing of Charval, and it is surprising that no-one suspects him of Elizabeth's murder. Several people fear he is mad, and few other witnesses see the monster clearly. The sexual under-currents of the novel could also explain Victor's terror of his wedding night. I appreciate I haven't explored this idea in any depth, and no doubt there are scholarly articles and books out there which explain the idea far more coherently than I could ever do, but it is an interesting reading of the novel I think.

Christmas Books - Various

Desperate times require desperate measures, and there are few so desperate as Christmas shoppers in the throes of a guilt induced buying frenzy. The Christmas book market caters for this community, and while I have no intention of reviewing my Christmas book consumption this holiday, for the record I have scanned the pages of:

Viz - The Bill-Poster's Bucket - the toilet book par excellence, but not for the squeamish or prudish.

Pointless - 100 Pointless things - definitely the cream of the crop, (is that a dead metaphor by the way, or does it still bring to mind cream, or crops?) - it appears to have genuinely been written by Alexander Armstrong and Richard Osman from the TV show of the same name, and contains several moments of real wit. It recognises its own emphemeral nature in a good humoured way, and is not utterly disposable.

QI - 1,227 facts. Bends the meaning of the word "fact" to breaking point, and gives the impression of being thrown together - very little trouble has gone into this to make it anything other than a long list of the curious, gleaned from research for the programme. With each fact being a sentence or two long at most there is little to make the facts interesting, or even quite interesting. The value of the television programme lies in the patient explanation which comes with each question, rather than the bald fact itself.

Is Heathcliff a Murderer? – Puzzles in 19th Century fiction – John Sutherland

This book is a series of 34 short and not quite so short essays looking at “anomalies, enigmas and mysteries” in 19^th century fiction. The definition of “puzzle” is draw deliberately loosely. Some are genuine questions that would occur to any reader – how does Jane Eyre get Mr Rochester’s mysterious "celestial" message at the end of her novel? Others would not normally occur to an ordinary reader, particularly those in which the main concerns are timing. One does not normally worry too much about or even notice small anomalies in timings and obsessively working through all the time markers in a text to spot so called mistakes feels like a huge waste of time. (Othello is a great example of this - very few if any audience members and readers spot the parallel time schemes running through the play, which of course are anything other than accidental.)

Sutherland draws on his extensive knowledge of the most arcane and obscure of 19^th century novels and the period in which they were written to answer some of his puzzles. Mesmerism, for example, is suggested as the answer to the Jane Eyre puzzle. This was a rich mine for Sutherland - "Can Jane Eyre be happy?", and "Who Betrayed Elizabeth Bennett?" followed this book in due course, as well as a similar look at Shakespeare.

Obviously knowledge of the text (rather than a film of the text) is a useful prerequisite for enjoyment of each essay here, and as Sutherland fairly quickly moves from the novels that the average reader would be familiar with to ones that only students of 19^th Century novels could hope to have heard of ("Is he Popenjoy?" anyone?) I found myself reading more to enjoy his scholarship and learn a little about the text and author, than to share the judgment on the particular puzzle in question.

Genuinely original insight into the core texts are of course elusive. These – Bleak House, Emma, Wuthering Heights, Middlemarch - are some of the most studied works in literature. So it is in the margins that Sutherland finds some gems. In Bleak House the crossing sweeper Jo sweeps what exactly? Is it "dust", an excuse for begging with no practical purpose, or is it excreta from the horses and humans of a crowded London? More controversially, what is the role of the slave trade in the prosperity of various families in Jane Austen's novels? I particularly enjoyed the close reading of Frankenstein, soon to appear here, which looks at precisely how the good Dr creates his monster. In the absence of Hollywood's lightning and hunchbacked servants, Sutherland deduces that there is a sexual component to the act of creation, which of course fits nicely with the creation myth reading of the novel.

I think I know why I enjoy this kind of literary sleuthing so much. In my blog entries the ones which I feel happiest about are the ones where I have from close reading and perhaps a bit of creativity come up with a new and different perspective on a novel - the parallel between A Casual Vacancy and A Christmas Carol for instance.

Shattered Hourglass – Day by Day Armageddon – J L Bourne

 Shattered Hourglass is the third in the Day by Day Armageddon series. Zombie novels are very much a niche genre, with carefully prescribed rules. The first novel in this series worked within these conventions, but took a fresh approach. Written in diary format from the perspective of a military man surviving the outbreak one day at a time, it had an immediacy and freshness that captured the horror of the situation. In the sequel the focus broadens, and we are given more information about the unfolding apocalypse. Shattered Hourglass takes the threads of the story from the end of the previous novel and throws them to the wind. The tight focus is lost with multiple storylines, but no central character to follow. Some diary entries are retained, but these are interspersed with traditional narratives.

Granted, the author could not just keep giving us yet another day of zombie apocalypse, so it was inevitable the focus would broaden to look at, for example, the source of the infection, how the military responds, etc. But the tight focus of the first novel is now expanded with any kind of control. Essentially the novel consists of long periods of travel without zombie encounters to provide any threat or interest, interspersed with people running around shooting zombies in the head, with occasional zombie brain smashing using alternative implements for variety. Innovative ways of killing zombies such as luring them into the Panama Canal are flirted with but then spurned for more shooting and slashing. The central, originally anaonymous, character, gets lost in the crowds, and we stop idnetifying with him or caring about him.

So far this is just a descent to the ordinary, but then things get worse. First, the author’s right wing, pro-gun views intrude into the text. Normally I am reluctant to accept the “Character A thinks X, therefore Author A thinks X” argument without further evidence, but here the references are sufficiently heavy handed and inappropriate as to suggest the author is using the zombie apocalypse as an excuse to promote his own views. I have to say the argument that gun control, as well as leaving the good citizens of pro-gun control states exposed to gun-toting lunatics (rather than spawning them) would leave them equally exposed to flesh eating zombies is one of the more innovative and plainly laughable arguments I have come across in a long time.

This book was originally due to be published earlier this year, and the final publication date – 26^th December – is just weird. The published version has a large number of traces of being hurriedly finished. The author runs multiple plot lines – far too many to manage effectively – but the spinning plates come crashing down in a badly mis-managed finale. Plot lines are shut down suddenly with little or no explanation, or in the case of the Hotel 23 outpost not at all. The aircraft carrier is overtaken by zombies without any coherent rationalisation beyond a hint that it has something to do with the children on the carrier exploring (great security there), but all is OK because they manage to crash into an island secured by a previously unmentioned citizen militia. The main plot line is concluded in even more of a hurry, with the deployment of a concrete spraying weapon that would not be out of place in Scooby Doo.

A huge disappointment. There is plenty of scope here for further sequels, but whether this author has the commitment or interest to deliver has got to be in doubt.

Books I read in 2012 but did not blog about.

How very post-modern of me – a blog about things I didn’t blog about! The intention was always to write about what I read, but in 2012 I made a few exceptions – either I struggled to formulate anything coherent about the books, or er, …

Crime and Punishment. Yes I did really read this through to the bitter end, although it was something of a struggle. Why didn’t I blog about it? Some novels are just so monumental it is hard to find anything original or insightful to say. But that’s not the real reason if I am completely honest. At the heart of this novel is a shocking and brutal double murder shown through the eyes of the murderer. The reader is invited to empathise with the killer – not to condone their actions but to come to some sort of understanding of their behaviour, bizarre and erratic though it is. I didn’t, and I fully recognise that is a failure on my part. But without that understanding the rest of the novel is just so many words. The other relatively minor issue I had with this novel was the translation – it was heavy handed and cumbersome, which may have been true to the original text, I have no way of knowing, but make a tough read even tougher.

Oleanna – David Mamet. I read this very quickly earlier in 2012, so definitely need to revisit it in 2013. It is a highly fractured text – a lot of the speeches are one side of telephone conversations, or fast paced cross-purpose arguments, which on the page are almost unintelligible, but in performance I am sure would make a lot more sense. On my initial superficial reading I got the impression that the play condoned violence towards women, which I can’t believe for one minute is right (although I know the play on first publication was considered controversial) – so I definitely need to reread.

50 Literature Ideas you really need to know – John Sutherland. A text book really, but bite-sized introductions to a wide range of literature concepts such as Post-Modernism, Structuralism, Post-Colonialism, and a lot of other -isms. Text books aren’t really for reading, as any student will tell you, but for referring to in the course of that frenzied last few hours of revision. Sutherland works hard at making this all accessible, but there is only so far you can go with Deconstructionism without reducing it down to an alternative set of labels.

Back Story - David Mitchell

Time was I would run a mile from a celebrity biography, with I think plenty of reason - there are so many clippings jobs with glossy front covers out there , that sorting the wheat from the cliche wasn't usually worth the effort. Autobiographies ought to be better, but the majority are ghost-written with the minimum of effort - a few childhood anecdotes, prompted by photographs of minor parts in school plays and family holidays, progressing quickly to the break through appearance on Comic Relief/Big Brother/Help I'm a Celebrity etc. You can spot the filling and the difficult subjects avoided or glossed over a mile off.

In the spectrum of autobiographies, of which there was a huge surfeit this year, Back Story fits firmly in the middle of the pack. In its favour it is clearly not ghosted - Mitchell's engaging personality shines through - and it is reasonably open and honest. The downside is that his career trajectory, arguably even his life, has been so predictable and routine - for a comedian that is - that you get the feeling you have read this all before, and more entertainingly.

To provide the book with a structure,other than the blindingly obvious chronological approach, which of course is in the end unavoidable, Mitchell takes a walk through north London, using the things he sees along the way to prompt a minor grumble about an aspect of modern life, followed by the appropriate reminiscence. This is a harmless enough conceit, but gets predictable very early on, and soon becomes unintentionly pedestrian (see what I did there?). It is obviously not his fault that his life has had little in the way of trauma or challenge, and he has made the most of the opportunities life has given him, but overall you have to wonder why he wrote this other than to cash in on his moment of celebrity.

If you want to get to know the real David Mitchell - and I am not sure why you would, his work doesn't require it, and his comedy is funny irrespective of what school he went to - this is obviously a good starting place. I got the impression a few things were passed over quickly or omitted - most notably the name of the lover before his engagement to Victoria Coren. The section of the book on his relationship with Victoria is by far the most engaging, where the barriers come down the most and we see someone with a bit more than a dry wit and a comfortable life.

One quibble - Mitchell has a pop at Stewart Lee for a piece he does on Only Fools and Horses. You might have seen it - the scene where Del Boy falls through the bar was voted funniest moment on British TV in one of those made up polls that no-one ever really votes in. Lee used this vote as the basis for an extended and extremely funny rant. Mitchell objects to the points Lee makes in this rant, missing the point with considerable flair - Lee is being funny; it is a performance piece, not a political treatise. The irony is that rants about things that you really shouldn't get upset about eg Tesco's signs or grocers' apostrophes are Mitchell's trademark.