So the plan was to go to Ashdown Forest over the April bank holiday weekend, and record a video of me reading scenes from my novel Secret Street set there. It was freezing cold, blowing a force eight gale, but we did our best. Thank you to Sharon, producer, director, camera operator, location catering manager and motivational coach 🎥

Ubik by Philip K.Dick is a science fiction story, published in 1969, now considered a classic. It appears on Time Magazine’s list of best novels since 1923.

The book imagines a version of 1993 where people with telepathic powers use their skills to gain access to valuable information. They are like psychological computer hackers. Individuals with ability to block these hackers form themselves into what you might call antivirus companies, known as prudence organisations. For a fee they will block the telepaths. There is a constant tension between these two sides, which reaches a crisis point when the anti telepaths are lured to a base on the moon, where, apparently, their leader Glen Runciter is assassinated. Then, under pressure from competing mind-bending powers, time seems to slip backwards as the anti telepaths fight for survival. Our threatened group is helped by a mysterious substance called Ubik, which appears in all sorts of guises, ranging from hair products to medicines – a kind of all-inclusive useful stuff, whose name derives from the word ubiquitous, meaning everywhere.

Alright. Let’s take a moment. A tricky, complicated story. What to make of it? There’s a kind of amorphous quality that invites theories, which many readers have duly provided.

For me, I suppose I made sense of it in the virus/antivirus comparison. Antivirus companies wouldn’t be necessary if people didn’t make viruses. And most of the time you have no idea if a virus is threatening your system, requiring the protection you are paying for. There is an element of unreality about the whole situation, cooked up between two opposing sides, who after much expensive trouble, end up back where they started when there was no virus. Everyone expends a lot of energy to get precisely nowhere. And the medicine to make it all better is ambivalent to say the least, coming in many forms, with warnings of side effects if not used as directed. After all, the one thing that an antivirus company needs to keep it going is a good supply of viruses to protect against. You might imagine an antivirus company, short of things to do, cooking up its own threats, the medicine becoming the poison. Ubik, the book and the substance, is a bit like that.

‘Could the prudence organizations be, in fact, rackets? Claiming a need for their services when sometimes no need actually exists?’

This is not the most straight-forward of reads, jumping around in viewpoint and setting, with a kind of spare writing style that leaves much of the work of imagining scenes to the reader. But there are interesting ideas that save a potentially chaotic project. You have this fascinating struggle, deriving from ancient dualities of good and evil, presented in a modern story about data theft. For me, Ubik was a book that seemed better in retrospect, thinking abut it afterwards. It kind of took me on a bizarre and confusing journey only to bring me back to where I started. This could have felt like a waste of time and effort to get nowhere in particular. Instead it was more like a crazy trip before the relief of home-coming.

Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, published in 1966, is about conspiracy. While the internet has become a Petri dish for conspiracy, people have long been attracted to the apparent presence of hidden controlling influences in life, whether they actually exist or not.

The setting for The Crying of Lot 49 conspiracy is, of all things, the postal service. A woman named Oedipa Maas, while acting as executor for Pierce Inverarity, her hugely rich former boyfriend, seems to stumble on the existence of the Tristero, an unofficial postal service with roots going back to the Holy Roman Empire. At first the idea of a postal system conspiracy seems merely quirky, as we explore the niche arcana of stamp collecting and postmarks. But then you begin to realise that because the postal service was for centuries the means by which society communicated on a wide scale, control of the mail becomes a way of controlling society. If that sounds far-fetched, remember that even in the age of electronic communication, there have been controversies about politicisation of the U.S. Postal Service, and the effect this might have on postal voting.

So, we follow Oedipa on her tortuous, confusing and sometimes very funny path towards revealing the existence or otherwise of the Tristero. What the outcome of this investigation might be is a tricky thing to reveal, even if I wanted to provide a spoiler.

Personally, I think you can find a clue to the enigmatic truth of this book in the twists of its language. Characteristically, a sentence will seem to be going in one direction, before going off somewhere else. As a general illustration, look at the word ‘God’ which consistently appears as an exclamation doing double duty as a proper noun. Some examples:

‘Now here was Oedipa, faced with a metaphor of God knew how many parts.’

In this sentence, if there were a full stop after ‘God’ it would be a name for a deity. But we then skitter on into the ‘knew how many parts’ bit, causing the word to slide into an exclamation of confusion.

‘That night she sat for hours, too numb even to drink, teaching herself to breathe in a vacuum. For this, oh God, was the void.’

Once again God can be a noun, as in Oedipa appealing to God, while also serving as an exclamation of frustration at the absence of any such thing.

‘Suppose, God, there really was a Tristero then and that she had come on it by accident.’

Same again. The presence suggested by God as a noun disappears into a throw-away exclamation.

Finally have a look at this passage, where we get the God as noun/exclamation trick twice in quick succession.

She looked around, spooked at the sunlight pouring in all the windows, as if she had been trapped at the centre of some intricate crystal, and said “My God.”

“And I feel him, certain days, days of a certain temperature,” said Mr Thoth, “and barometric pressure. Did you know that? I feel him close to me.”

“Your grandfather?”

“No, my God.”

For me, this characteristic use of the word ‘God’, reveals much about the enigmatic nature of hidden controlling influences in The Crying of Lot 49. As soon as shadowy forces become real enough to be named, they disappear again, provoking an exclamation of shock and surprise.

As I was reading my way through all of Pynchon’s twisty sentences, there were times when I did wonder if I was actually enjoying the experience. But by the end I could only feel impressed. The Crying of Lot 49 is very interesting, in a rarified, philosophical way, and also in a more down to earth sense, surprisingly relevant to twenty first century political and social concerns

Greek Lessons is a novel by the Korean author Han Kang, who won the 2024 Nobel Prize for Literature. It’s about a woman who can’t speak, developing a relationship with the tutor of her Ancient Greek class, who is losing his eyesight.

This is a book about the contradictory development of language.

If that sounds abstruse as a topic, then I would agree.

There’s one chapter which opens with two Ancient Greek words which look almost identical on the page. Forgive me if I don’t reproduce them, but my keyboard doesn’t stretch that far. I’ll just quote the comment that follows them:

‘These two verbs mean ‘to suffer’ and ‘to learn’. Do you see how they’re almost identical? What Socrates is doing here is punning on these words to remark on the similarity of the two actions.’

Does learning necessarily involve suffering? Well, to an extent the answer is yes. It does take some effort and discipline to learn anything. There are occasions, however, when you can learn without too much pain, maybe even enjoy the process. This sort of learning is a less visible achievement, and is less likely to win a Nobel Prize. Maybe that’s why P.G. Wodehouse never won a Nobel Prize. Maybe that’s why comedies rarely win Oscars, though it would be hard to argue that the best comedies are not deserving of such an honour, or that comedy does not have lessons for us.

Greek Lessons was very interesting, and I’ve thought about the book a lot after reading it. The way language evolves, from pictograms, becoming sophisticated, moving into bewildering abstraction, leaving behind the experience it was meant to be communicating, and then evolving seemingly backwards in a simpler direction. The book has a rarified quality about it, and more down to earth moments, as language circles around from naivety to complexity and back again. But while I admired all that, overall I have to admit finding the book fairly hard work to read. My personal feeling is that a book like this reveals much about how we view achievement in literature. To be good it has to teach us something, and to teach us something it has to be hard work. Is that how literature should be? I don’t know. But my feeling is that it’s just as much an achievement to create something that seems like fun but is quietly teaching you things anyway. Novels developed as a diversion and an entertainment, and that flaky, showbiz history has to be part of their work, even when people study novels at university. It’s that grey area between goofing off and getting it together that somehow gives the novel as a form its particular fascination. And in a sense that’s the grey area that Greek Lessons explores as it follows language from simple to fancy and back again. Maybe in the case of Greek Lessons the work was a bit too overt. But don’t let a slacker like me put you off. Greek Lessons is an interesting book and worth reading.

Paul Bowles’ The Sheltering Sky is about a wealthy American couple, Port and Kit Moresby, travelling in Africa soon after World War Two. In a snobby sort of way, Port considers himself a traveller rather than a tourist, on a more meaningful journey than someone who relaxes at beach resorts and maybe pops into the occasional museum. He wants to live with the local people, eat their food, speak a few words of the language, contract their picturesque diseases, neglecting vaccination to allow for a really authentic experience. By the end of the book, Kit in particular totally immerses herself in local culture. Suffice to say both Port and Kit’s attempts to escape their own society fail in the nastiest way possible.

I was thinking about this riding to work, a type of journey which would count as neither travel nor tourism, but, whisper it, commuting. In Sheltering Sky terms, if traveller is at the top of the scale, with tourist beneath, then commuter must lurk below day-tripper and Sunday driver at the very bottom of the barrel.

Towards the end of my ride, I passed a branch of Nationwide Building Society. In the window there was an enigmatic poster displaying three words: ‘Going, going, nowhere’, I think referencing the fact that the branch would not be closing any time soon, unlike other establishments on the rapidly changing modern high street.

How ironic that my commute had revealed a poster displaying words summing up The Sheltering Sky for a struggling reviewer.

A commute is not such an inappropriate journey to be taking while considering this book. In a sense the regular, unremarkable trip to work is the most epic of voyages, made in daylight or darkness depending on the season, in rain, sun, sleet or snow, going on for years, repetitive and yet never the same twice. It’s almost like that scene in The Time Machine where the time travelling vehicle does not move, while the world changes around it.

Similar contradiction surrounds Port and Kit’s journey. We discover early on that they go to Africa with the aim of repairing their crumbling marriage. But Port, fearful of the responsibilities that a committed marriage would involve, half-unconsciously sabotages the whole project by bringing along a young male friend, with whom Kit might very well have an affair. From this shaky starting point, the travellers ride on bone-shaking night buses, chaotic trains, and meandering camel convoys over endless dunes. There is even a bike excursion. There are horrible accommodations, illness and madness in unfamiliar and dramatic landscapes. It’s truly a hellish trip.

And yet, all that being said, there is, believe it or not, a strange reassurance to be found. The world of The Sheltering Sky is undoubtedly vast and hazardous, but it is actually hard to get lost there. The journey designed to both save and sabotage a marriage has accelerator and hand-break working against each other, so the car does not move. The whole trip is like this. It goes a long way and doesn’t move at all. So yes, in the physical sense the travellers go places, but in other ways not so much. There is no gone after all the going.

‘The Sahara’s a small place really, when you come right down to it. People don’t just disappear there. It’s not like it is here in the city.’

So, a beautifully written, bleak and sometimes harrowing book, which offers an unexpected reassurance, that you can take the longest journey and be home again in time for tea

I once went to a wedding where the bride and groom’s first dance at the reception was to the Elton John song Sacrifice. Strange choice I thought. ‘Into the boundary of each married man sweet deceit comes calling and negativity lands’. An interesting lyric, however, suggesting that marriage creates a new boundary as a condition of not being alone anymore. Two work colleagues have boundaries that do not exist for a married couple. And a married couple have boundaries that do not exist for two work mates going out for the evening. This sort of irony runs throughout Doris Lessing’s first novel, The Grass is Singing.

Here’s another song for you – Lennon and McCartney’s With a Little Help From My Friends, where someone keeps wanting to fall in love, but actually gets by with help from their friends. In The Grass is Singing, Mary Turner grew up on a farm in South Africa, but moves to the city and spends a contented few years doing office work, and getting along quite happily with her wide friendship group. Then she overhears some gossiping women remarking on the fact that she is unmarried and not as young as she used to be. Mary reacts by rushing into marriage with a farmer she meets at a cinema, moving out of the city to his remote farm.

Mary’s story goes from A Little Help From My Friends to Sacrifice. No more casual lunch meet ups for her. Out on the wide open spaces of the veld, Mary lives behind a new boundary. And as in Sacrifice, sweet deceit comes calling. It all ends in her murder. This is not a spoiler. We know from the beginning that Mary gets murdered and we know who did it. The question is what happened to get there?

We get there really through the contradictions of human relationships. Mary can only be accepted into white rural society by subscribing to the notion of white superiority. But Mary can only be accepted into humanity in general by accepting that the notions of her white rural society are vile nonsense. She can choose a sort of deluded friendship with her fellow white farmers, or a universal fellowship, specifically with her native servant. But the more that fellowship calls her, the more isolated she is from her own society, and the more harshly she behaves trying to live by its delusions of superiority. There is always a boundary it seems.

Reading a book is a kind of relationship. In some ways it can be a less real and intense alternative to reality, a pleasant meet-up for lunch. In other ways it can offer something more dramatic than reality. Both options are on offer here.

Generosity: An Enhancement is a story about a troubled former writer, Russell Stone, who, after some moderate early success, has suffered a crisis of confidence. He ends up editing magazine copy, and teaching creative writing on a short-term contract at a college in Chicago. One of his students, an Algerian refugee called Thassafit Amzwar, comes to fascinate him. Her level of happiness and contentment is so marked that it might rise into a category known to psychiatry as hyperthymia. After news of this happy girl gets around, a genetic research team becomes interested in her, believing she might possess a ‘gene for happiness’. Generosity was published in 2009, a quick internet search revealing that this was a year seeing significant advances in the science of genetics. The book reflects a time when understanding of the human genome was increasing to the point where it might soon be possible to choose the characteristics of a baby.

The author Richard Powers hovers behind his book, occasionally making enigmatic appearances to comment on the characters he has created. This might come over as a fancy, postmodern-literature trick if it didn’t fit so well with the issues the book considers. There’s a feeling in Generosity that people might not have to accept for much longer the whims that fate deals out. Richard Powers presents a scenario where people have lived, in effect, as characters in a novel, at the mercy of their author. They have had no choice about the looks, intelligence or inherited diseases they are born with. That time might soon be over. Characters have the potential to become their own authors, controlling their own destinies. But before they get above themselves, those same characters also have to accept that control is contradictory. Think about it this way. Advances in genetics might seem to offer the prospect of humanity deciding their fate, but those advances actually give power over the vast majority to a tiny group of scientists who are the only ones who actually understand the science. Are they up to such a responsibility? Or are they in the situation of a writer like diffident Russell Stone, who finds the writing he is supposed to control taking on an unpredictable life of its own?

This is a book of big ideas from someone who clearly knows lots about literature and science. But for all that, I did not feel Generosity was a vehicle designed to show off its author’s cleverness and knowledge. I mean it is clever, and there is a great deal of wide-ranging knowledge. But there is something else, a feeling that while authors might appear to be up there in author heaven, deciding destinies, they are in fact – if they are any good – also down here with everyone else, from Nobel-winning scientists, to people who have no idea about the science, and have to look it up on Wikipedia, and even then are not much the wiser.

The result is a book that reads like a kind of low-key, brainy thriller, not with good guys and bad guys, but with guys whose good intentions end up making them into ambiguous guys. I would recommend.

The job of a reader in the early days of literature was to admire, study, and learn. The only book on the shelf was the Bible, with an additional offering, after a while, of the rediscovered works of apparently superhuman Greek writers. The idea of having a go yourself was almost unthinkable. It was against the natural order of things. Echoes of this outlook remain in the academic world of modern times. A.S. Byatt was a prominent academic, before she became a writer. In her 1990 novel Possession we meet academics living in the shadow of the writers they study, in this case a pair of fictional Victorian poets, Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte. But as we get to know these writers through their poems and letters, we see that they are no different to the people who study them. Ash and LaMotte read each other’s work which feeds into their own. Writers and readers are not different species, with the blessed former up there, and the many latter down here. It’s a two way street. People seemingly hanging onto the coattails of others are actually helping to fashion their fancy coat, as something they can both wear.

Possession is very enjoyable, full of excellent fake Victorian poetry by fictional poets, and interesting ideas alongside down to earth romance tropes – such as two young people getting thrown together by a snow storm. The book is extremely sophisticated, but also enough of a romance novel with obvious scenarios and highly unlikely plot twists, to exist as a book with a human voice, serving to remind us that people rather than literary gods write and read.

The Seventh Son is a 2023 novel by Sebastian Faulks, a sci-fi story set in the near future, about a human genetic experiment and its aftermath.

As an aspiring writer I often look at the websites of literary agents. A lot of them will say they are interested in promoting under-represented or diverse voices. Reading The Seventh Son I thought those agents might be interested in signing Seth, the book’s central character, who is unique in having some of humanity’s distant past implanted in his DNA. Ironically, however, Seth looks like someone the agenting world would presumably feel is over-represented – male, white, middle class, Oxbridge educated. Seth even takes the name Ken as an alias. I saw the Barbie movie recently. There are lots of different incarnations of Ken but they are all Ken. This book, supposedly about a unique individual, is actually more about how much people share.

I once visited the British Wildlife Centre in Kent. One of its jungly enclosures housed a wildcat. An information board described the wild cat as endangered, before qualifying this with the admission that wild cats are so genetically similar to domestic cats, that it’s hard to say if wild cats are endangered or doing very well in a slightly different guise. Seth, the central character of The Seventh Son reminded me of that wild cat, a lonely individual, maybe one of the last of his kind, who nevertheless is hard to tell apart from millions of other individuals who are doing very nicely, thank you.

As for the science in the book, some of it is made up. However, I did do a bit of reading and found the book might reflect a reasonable scientific position in a general way. Chris Stringer, a leading authority on ancient humanity suggests that former human species might have been absorbed into present Homo sapiens.

“If you add up all the Neanderthal DNA in the world today in everyone you could probably reconstruct 40% of the Neanderthal genome….” (Quoted in IFL Science, Why Are We The Only Surviving Human Species? 31 Dec 2024.)

So even if some of the science is fictional, my feeling is that there is a reasonable basis for Seth, who is unique in his recreated DNA and yet can easily pass as a normal person rather than being some kind of Frankenstein’s monster. A lost wild cat can be there in today’s domestic pet.

The Seventh Son is an interesting book, relevant to our times when the book industry, along with culture in general, is fragmenting into different enclosures. Rather than a book for everyone, there is more of a feeling that everyone must have their own book. The Seventh Son is a bit of a corrective to that, using human difference as a way to show what humanity shares. It reads like a thriller, carrying a reader along. And that reader could be a generic, white middle class man with a university education, or some other one-of-a-kind individual. There is much more of an overlap between those two people than we usually allow.

I have just caught up with 2023’s Barbie, a film where there are lots of different Barbies, all called Barbie, and lots of different Kens, all called Ken.

After having a bit of an existential crisis during a dance routine, Stereotypical Barbie leaves Barbieland with Beach Ken, who jumps uninvited into the back of her pink convertible. They head to real Los Angeles, where Ken discovers the patriarchy. He takes this back to Barbieland, where he sets up his own version, important elements of which are riding horses and dressing up like a rock star. The Barbies respond by turning the Kens against each other. They do this by offending the Kens’ egos during their beach serenading of the Barbies with Matchbox Twenty’s song, Push. Barbies listen for a while before moving to another Ken, causing devastating jealousy.

Following this debacle, there is a touching scene as Beach Ken and Stereotypical Barbie talk, Barbie telling Ken that he needs to find his own identity, beyond that of her boyfriend, or some kind of ridiculous bro. And that’s the thing – the unexpected philosophical twist of this charming film. Ken, in all of his incarnations, is Ken. After the beach serenading scene, when the Kens decide to fight each other, they have to decide which Kens are the enemy, and which are allies, a tricky task when they are all Kens. So maybe Ken would learn something by accepting that there is sameness in his variety. Ken’s jealousy is like one branch of a tree having a problem with another branch. Note the wall being built in the desert between Barbieland and the real world. What does that make you think of in the early 2020s? What does that suggest about creating division between people where none need exist?

So Barbie is about both finding identity and overcoming identity’s false limitations. Barbie can be President Barbie or housewife Barbie, black or white, different shapes and sizes Barbie, but she shares in the essential Barbieness. And Ken can be all sorts of Ken, but he can share in the essential Kenness. In the end Ken and Barbie can be themselves, but be with each other.