“Would you deny the Consul such astounding visions? Me neither. In fact, I think I’ll have a mescal myself …”

Sam Jordisan – the Guardian

Published in 1947, Under the Volcano is Malcolm Lowry’s famous book about Geoffrey Firmin, an alcoholic British consul, living in Mexico, trying to resurrect a relationship with his ex wife. The action takes place over the period of one day, the Mexican Day of the Dead.

Drink is a big thing in this book. Alcohol provides the extreme experience that people often look for in reading a novel, enjoying drama and danger without the risk. For some, all the visions, hallucinations, delusions of grandeur, might even make heavy drinking an attractive real-world option. In The Guardian, I found a reviewer who was inspired to reach for an explosive glass of mescal. Writing for The Guardian must have felt pedestrian compared to the galactic visions provided by Mexican alcoholic beverages.

My reading of Under the Volcano, did not leave me wanting to reach for mescal. Apart from graphic descriptions of the physical horribleness of alcoholism, there was the confirmation that any supposed exciting elements of alcohol, potentially bringing colour to the humdrum lives of Guardian journalists, are an illusion. My favourite scene in the book involved an ‘over the garden fence’ conversation between Firmin and his neighbour, Quincey, a dull, American retiree. Quincey is a conventional, judgemental fellow whose imagination does not stray beyond the watering of plants in his beautifully kept garden. Firmin, too bohemian, drunk and out-there to worry about anything as suburban as watering and pruning, has a derelict garden. The irony is, Firmin, searching for a bottle hidden in his weeds, is not really breaking free from conventional limits through drinking. For all his visions of flying amongst the stars, alcohol has him in a ruthless death grip. And there’s a further irony in the name of his narrow-minded neighbour. Quincey’s name echoes that of the author of 1821’s Confessions of an Opium Eater, Thomas De Quincey, founder of the ‘addiction literature’ genre. There is a suggestion that Firmin and his symbolically named neighbour are actually living similar lives. Both inhabit their own Garden of Eden, and both in their own way have brambles invading their pleasure grounds.

I have to say I didn’t really enjoy Under the Volcano. The action is supposed to happen over a single day, but that’s not how it felt. There were so many walks and visits to people’s houses or bars, trips to fiestas, and days out on buses, that it didn’t seem feasible to pack all this into a day. And between great descriptive passages, and sections like the Quincey conversation, there were long stretches, particularly in the second half, which I found confusing, and I have to admit, boring. Finally, the life of constant drinking did not resonate with me. I had one or two evenings at university involving quite a lot of drink, but they only taught me I didn’t like it. There’s no point pretending I’m some kind of William Burroughs. Drinking always left me feeling terrible, and provided no ethereal visions. Maybe I was a total lightweight, and if I’d tried harder, and drunk the equivalent of Crime and Punishment, the rewards would have come. But I very much doubt it. The alcohol would have killed me before I got anywhere near that point.

In no sense am I envious of Firmin’s experience. I appreciated the descriptive writing, and the contradictions involving freedom applying to drinkers and non-drinkers alike, but it was a relief to reach the end.

The Assistant is Bernard Malamud’s 1957 novel about an ageing Jewish shopkeeper who runs a struggling grocery business in New York, and the young man who becomes his assistant.

Although shopkeeper Morris Bober is an immigrant, with all the suggestion of rootlessness that his situation involves, he has spent decades in the same shop going through the same routine. He is honest and steady by nature, but his business has suffered in not changing or adapting. By contrast, Frank Alpine, a second generation Italian American, lost his parents early, and before becoming an assistant to Bober, has never remained anywhere for longer than six months, suffering a loss of educational and advancement opportunities in the process.

This conflict between the benefits and problems of moving and staying, drives the story. The opposite sides of the issue become so tangled, that it is difficult to tell them apart. For example, Bober is an immigrant, but his experience of having to flee Russia, combined with a cautious personality, has moulded a profound stick-in-the-mud. He creates an unchanging world in his shop, into which Frank Alpine becomes the immigrant, even though Frank was born in America. This isn’t a case of them and us, when the immigrant is very much settled in outlook, and the person born in the country, because of his individual circumstances, is in the position of a migrant. And both Morris and Frank are vulnerable, Morris because his caution threatens his business, and Frank because his rootless wandering leaves him isolated. This confusion also applies to cultural identity, which is important to Bober and even more so to his wife, but which seems to dissolve into nothing if the characters discuss it too closely.

I think the quality of The Assistant shows in the way you can read a book published in 1957, and then find yourself thinking of immigration in the twenty first century. There’s an ongoing debate in the book about whether Frank’s arrival reinvigorates the shop, compared to other factors, like the changing level of local grocery competition. The ins and outs of this reminded me of an article I read recently by an LSE economist, assessing whether immigration offers economic benefits. With some provisos, the article suggested that yes, immigration does bring economic benefits, just as Frank’s role in the survival of Bober’s grocery shop seems undeniable in the end. This puts the Bobers in the position of trying to get over their innate distrust of a stranger, who becomes important to their livelihood. In the UK, there has been debate about ‘secure borders’ for years. Some of the most hardline Conservative politicians in the UK, with an extreme fixation on borders, themselves have an immigrant background. Their efforts at promoting national isolation and border control are highly controversial, not least in the sense that such measures – according to say, the LSE, the UK Office of Budget Responsibility, the Centre of Inclusive Trade Policy at the University of Sussex, Small Business Britain, and surveys conducted by the British Chamber of Commerce – hurt the economic prospects of the UK grocery shop.

I enjoyed The Assistant. It provides a view into a highly specific community and a reflection on general human dilemmas, which certainly remain relevant. There is quite a lot of skipping about between points of view, but this doesn’t generally make the straight forward writing difficult to read. In fact moving about between different heads is a good way to see how contrasting outlooks, can end up finding unlikely common ground.

Published in 1986, The Sportswriter by Richard Ford tells the story of Frank Bascombe, who enjoys some early success as a novelist, only to give it all up for sportswriting at a major New York magazine.

Well regarded, appearing in Time’s 100 best novels 1926 – 2010, The Sportswriter made me think about what we look for in a novel. Often readers will seek out a central character they can identify with. Reading can then be a process of ‘cheering on’ the hero through various challenges. This, of course, is reminiscent of sports fans getting behind an athlete.

But what happens when this sporting analogy is applied to real life? Frank Bascombe travels to Detroit to interview a former American football player who is now confined to a wheelchair following injury. The plan is to write a ‘former sports star meets new challenges’ story, where our damaged warrior tackles his situation with the same bravery he demonstrated playing against the Dallas Cowboys. Frank, however, is in for a shock. Herb Wallager does not fit this neat, heroic scheme. Herb is living a squalid, aimless existence. On the sports field he was respected and successful. In his rundown house, living with a long-suffering wife, who is trying to look after him, he is a broken man. Frank makes a hasty exit and abandons any idea of writing Herb’s story.

In terms of one particular skill, kicking a football say, a person might have heroic gifts. But beyond that narrow world of ball-kicking, things are more complicated. People are rarely all-round heroes. Just as Frank can’t apply his preconceived, uplifting story to Herb Wallager, Frank himself, the central character of The Sportswriter, is no hero. He’s not a villain but he is definitely not someone to shower in ticker tape. Following the death of his son, he sleeps with lots of women, gets divorced, and continues to move from one love affair to another, usually with women who are much younger than him. He is not above using his writer ‘celebrity’ status to help seduce an attractive intern at the magazine. Frank was a bit dodgy in 1986, even more so now.

But do we really want our literary heroes to be like sports stars, when sport is a discipline separate from the rest of life? It’s true that stories have always been built around a hero. Joseph Campbell’s description of the ubiquitous hero’s journey in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, is the mythic blue print for the entire output of Hollywood, and the hero’s journey has no doubt long served as a tool to show people how they might deal with life’s challenges. But the character in a story has to deal with the whole of life, not just with the highly specific ball-kicking bit of it. Is trying to see yourself, and others, in terms of this kind of narrow heroism really healthy? One of Frank’s acquaintances from the local divorced mens’ group shoots himself. Frank thinks that things would have gone better for this man if he had given himself a break from unrealistic expectations.

So, the book is about trying to do better, accepting yourself and others as they are, and the tension that exists between these two things. If anything, the book is more relevant now than in 1986, as social expectation around behaviour has become stricter since then.

I understand unhappy reviewers who feel Frank is a hard man to get behind. But ironically, that’s where you could say the real interest of this book lies, and why it has a place on lists of best novels.

Samuel Butler wrote The Way of All Flesh in the 1870s and 1880s, but it was not published until after his death in 1903.

The book is famous for satirising Victorian morality and family life. Words like ‘scathing’ and even ‘blow up’ (V.S. Pritchett) appear in reviews. There’s a feeling that this bomb of a book was so destructive to Victorian sensibilities that it could not be published at the time of writing, having to wait for a slight loosening that came with the early twentieth century.

The book is certainly interesting for charting the effect of scientific advance – the publication of Darwin’s research – on a specific, rigidly religious family in England, and their wider society. But the quality of the book doesn’t really lie in simple demolition.

The interesting thing for me was how many echoes of the old world we find in the emerging new one. Literal interpretations of the Bible do come in for demolition. But while taking a metaphor at face value might be ridiculous, the general drift of the thing might not be so ludicrous. For example if someone tends to be positive rather than negative in their outlook, that state of mind can tend to make things go better for them. Some people would call that ‘having faith’. Separating the dogmas of Christian faith from just faith in general is the kind of thing The Way of All Flesh goes in for.

I sometimes find an assumption that the job of a writer is to act as a kind of investigative reporter with a wide ranging brief to expose social hypocrisy and delusion and make people see where they are going wrong. This is a tough task, it seems to me, when people will only want to see where they are going wrong when they are good and ready, which is usually a long time after they went wrong. Otherwise they won’t be interested and no one will buy the brave writer’s book. The thing about The Way of All Flesh is that it does show people their wrongs, but does so in a humane way, where right and wrong, new and old, can be shades of each other. In that sense The Way of All Flesh is both a modern book and a good book.

Milkman by Anna Burns, winner of the 2018 Man Booker Prize, tells the story of an eighteen year old girl living in an unnamed Northern Irish city during the 1970s. The fact that author Anna Burns is from Belfast, gives us a pointer to how we should picture this fictional city. The narrator, sometimes referred to as Middle Sister, lives in the equivalent of East Belfast, a ‘renouncer’ area, run by paramilitaries fighting British rule. With trouble all around, Middle Sister tries to muddle along, attending a French evening class, going running in the park, reading nineteenth century novels while out walking, and pursuing a not-quite-committed relationship with her motor mechanic boyfriend. Then a man known as Milkman, high in the local paramilitary hierarchy, embarks on programme of intimidation designed to coerce Middle Sister into a relationship with him.

Milkman is often funny, told in a charmingly off-kilter, conversational style. But don’t expect something like Derry Girls. The narrator lives in a very hard place, trying and failing to remain neutral and middling in a situation where neutrality is impossible. She becomes the talk of the neighbourhood as rumour spreads about her ‘relationship’ with Milkman. In many ways this is a study in the contradictions of extremism. Does Middle Sister suggest the middle, as in the most important centre of things? Or is she middling in the sense of being ordinary and unremarkable and nowhere near the centre of things? The story presents her as both. The middle is a boring place that people go to extremes to avoid. It is also the best place. A character called the ‘real milkman’, who delivers actual milk, is a much better man than Milkman, the paramilitary leader.

Apart from this consideration of extremism, which of course remains very relevant, the 1970s society portrayed in Milkman also resonates in the way its truths rest on rumour, propaganda, fear, disinformation, and people believing what they want to believe. An ordinary girl living in a judgemental, divided society with fluctuating rules, suddenly finds herself the focus of something that feels very like a social media pile on.

As chance would have it, I started writing this review on the evening of Good Friday 2023, the 25th anniversary of 1998’s Good Friday agreement which brought peace to the warring factions of Northern Ireland. Milkman, describing a world long before the peace negotiated in 1998, still feels relevant. That is quite an achievement.

From what I have been reading in the news recently, my reviews might soon be written by AI. Erewhon, by Samuel Butler published anonymously in 1872, contains one of the earliest explorations in literature of artificial intelligence. I thought it was time to take a look.

The opening chapters introduce us to Higgs, the book’s narrator, who works at a sheep station in an unnamed British colony. Butler based this section on his own experiences in New Zealand, where he fled to escape his overbearing, religious family. Just like Butler, Higgs goes on an expedition to explore uncharted areas.

After a perilous journey across a mountain range, Higgs finds himself in the country of Erewhon, which is an odd, distorted, mirror image of his own society. Erewhon criminalises physical illness while moral lapses receive compassion and medical assistance. There is an odd banking system where people deposit money in an effort to build up a kind of spiritual capital. A literal-minded religion teaches antipathy to machines. All of these topics cause Higgs to question conventional ways of thinking.

And this is where the famous section on machines and artificial intelligence comes in. Higgs finds The Book of the Machines, a set of documents describing a crisis thousands of years previously, when rapid technological evolution led to fears that machines would eventually enslave, or supersede, humanity. Reading The Book of the Machines, Higgs’ conventional assumptions come in for a pummelling. Machines are not considered as living, sentient things, but where does the dividing line exist? Is a leg a machine that life uses to get about? Or is a leg itself life? Plant life is not generally considered sentient, but it would be hard to say plants are not alive. Plants act to protect themselves and communicate with each other. Machines also protect themselves and communicate with each other. They need outside help to reproduce, but so do plants, which employ the services of bees. So are machines similar to plant life? And if we worry about becoming slaves to machines, what is the nature of the relationship that already exists? Even in the nineteenth century people were serving machines in a slavish capacity. A stoker on a ship spent backbreaking days feeding and tending a machine that relies on people for its continued existence. Equally, people rely on the labour of machines. The present population of the world could not be supported without them.

So coming back to where I started, does this book make me feel any better about the prospect of AI writing my reviews? Well, first I have to say that Erewhon is remarkable, coming out of strait-laced Victorian society, throwing over conventional thinking so completely that it remains challenging and thought provoking hundreds of years later. As for what the book has to say about artificial intelligence, you might end up agreeing with the Erewhonians who decide that it is safer to get rid of machines, given how they might develop. However, there is much to suggest this is not sensible The relationship between people and machines is as old as humanity itself. In fact, use of tools, which evolved into machines, might actually be the defining characteristic of humankind. People and machines are mutually dependent. Rather than seeing a threat to humanity from machines, you could say that, for better or worse, humans without machines are not really themselves.

My new book A Contradiction of Sandpipers is now available. I thought it was worth taking a few moments to think about my reasons for spending years writing it. You’d think as author of the thing it would be clear to me what I was trying to say, but writing is one thing – thinking about it afterwards is another.

So, the book is set in Victorian London, but is really about the sort of popular music that burst upon the world in the 1950s, and then went on a wonderful rampage through the 1960s and 1970s, and is still going strong into the twenty first century. That music has always been an important part of my life.

In the past, music with strong rhythm and beat was not the fun thing it is now. For centuries this sort of music was largely functional, whether it was coordinating the effort of oarsmen in galleys, seamen pulling ropes, soldiers on the march, or farm workers toting bales or picking crops.

The Industrial Revolution, in many ways, dragged people further into a working life of relentless rhythm, in factories and mills. Nineteenth century society more than any other, saw the dark side of mundane, repetitive labour. And yet the music that once accompanied backbreaking effort evolved from an aid to hard work, into something to be enjoyed for itself. The movement it tends to encourage, which we call dance, is not a march, or an accompaniment to rope hauling, but an expression of freedom.

I suppose that is what I was after. The book is an attempt to capture the feeling of coming home after a mundane day of putting yet another brick in the wall, and then listening to the sort of music which makes you feel like you could jump right over the wall.

That is the contradiction underlying A Contradiction of Sandpipers.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Contradiction-Sandpipers-Martin-Jones-ebook/dp/B0BZMKTGPD/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=A+Contradiction+of+Sandpipers+by+Martin+Jones&qid=1680849074&s=digital-text&sr=1-1

Libra by Don DeLillo, published in 1988, is an imaginative reconstruction of events surrounding the assassination of President Kennedy in November 1963.

It might seem unlikely, but one of the first things that came to mind whilst reading Libra, was VAR, the Video Assistant Referee, which was supposed to take the controversy and doubt out of refereeing decisions in football. Did it? No. Instead the controversies just concentrated themselves on ever more subtle distinctions. And there isn’t really time for forensic analysis of video footage in the middle of a game of football, which after all is what people have paid to see. A recurring thread in Libra involves a CIA historian sitting in a room with vast amounts of mounting evidence. The assassination of President Kennedy is like a deadly serious and endlessly complex VAR controversy. Time moves on rather than freezing itself on one moment, leaving the historian gathering more and more information, not getting any nearer a conclusion, the conclusion becoming of academic interest only, as the events under study slip into the past.

Libra reads like an arty thriller, and it works well like that. But there is a lot to think about with this book. It is very relevant to contemporary concerns regarding conspiracy in its various forms – from the self-centred idea that certain people claim to see truth hidden to normal people, to that vague feeling of life itself seemingly pushing you in a certain direction through coincidence and unlikely twists of fate – which is where the somewhat ironic reference to astrology in the title comes in.

Anyway I will leave my evidence there. Gathering more won’t make the picture clearer. I have to make a call and not interrupt the run of play – so, yes, a compelling, interesting book, exploring typically modern dilemmas.

To the Lighthouse, published in 1927, is Virginia Woolf’s partly autobiographical novel about the Ramsay family, who stay with various guests at their holiday home on the Isle of Skye one summer in the early twentieth century.

In many ways this book is difficult to classify as a novel. There’s no story as such. The first section describes a day of hanging about the Ramsay’s residence. The holiday group combines highbrow, sometimes extremely annoying men, eight lively Ramsay children, the maternal Mrs Ramsey, a young girl about to marry, and a frustrated woman with artistic ambitions, who has been told by one of the male guests that women can’t paint, or write. A boat trip to a nearby lighthouse is tentatively planned but abandoned because the weather is unsuitable. The second section, following family loss, is a description of the deserted holiday home slowly falling apart. And in the third section, surviving members of the original party make a nostalgic return after ten years, Mr Ramsay and two of his now adolescent children, finally taking a boat trip to the lighthouse. That’s it.

Mrs Ramsay’s youngest boy, James, likes to cut pictures out of catalogues. To keep James occupied for as long as possible, his mother tries to find him pictures of items such as rakes, which require plenty of time-consuming trimming around prongs. The adult men, who are university professors and the like, are grown-up versions of young James, cutting things out from experience to study. In contrast there is an approach more associated with women in the book. For them, experience is best understood in terms of how things work together rather than in isolation. There’s one scene describing a trout in a river. Take the trout out of the river and it won’t be a trout for long. The trout’s essential troutness is best understood as part of the river.

There is some amazing descriptive writing. My favourite part of the book was the second section where the abandoned house is slowly deteriorating. It’s haunting, almost post-apocalyptic. So much goes on that doesn’t involve people at all, great tracts of time and events. People see only a tiny piece, and maybe, in the end, that tiny piece is best considered as part of something bigger.

Once Upon a Tome, published in 2022, is the memoir of rare bookseller, Oliver Darkshire, telling the story of his apprenticeship at Sotheran’s antiquarian bookshop in Sackville Street, London.

This is a charming and funny book, with a quick, unexpected stab of extremely moving right at the end. There are plenty of colourful characters encountered in the surprisingly varied life of a bookseller. If you think it’s just about working in an old shop you’d be wrong. There are adventurous journeys to libraries in crumbling mansions, book conferences in York, storage cellars in Kings Cross, as well as trips to other rare bookshops to return borrowed hat stands.

Once Upon a Tome has a lot to say about all kinds of things, the enigma of value, health and safety in the ancient work place, the ironies of ownership, guords. There’s rare book jargon, and assessment of various species of collector – the omnivorous Smaugs and the focused Draculas. Out of this witty, wry, droll collection of observations, one in particular really said something to me about books. I don’t mean books that cost thousands of pounds, which are way beyond my budget – I mean all books, including the books I borrow from Kent eLibrary, a type of book that has no physical existence at all. This observation involved Oliver’s cautious reveal to his new colleagues that he was gay.

“If a place is aesthetically stuck in the 1800s the people who work there might be too.”

But when Oliver drops a gendered pronoun regarding his partner into conversation, he gets no reaction. There’s nothing, no drama. The only difference is that bookseller James seems to put more authors like Oscar Wilde and Christopher Isherwood in Oliver’s cataloguing, as if making a point about the book world. Wide reading tends to promote tolerance and acceptance, opening a reader to different points of view and experience. A book shop as old at Sotheran’s may be a bit backward looking, suspicious of computers, dusty, prone to mould, but it is a naturally tolerant environment. Of course there have been intolerant books, dark books, books that are now an embarrassment. An antiquarian bookshop could well have examples of those. But Oliver suggests we can learn from any book. A Nazi might burn books, but Sotheran’s would not burn a copy of Mein Kampf. The shop would seek to place it, say, with an institutional buyer interested in the context of such a work. And none of this means that the shop would fail to show the door to any aggressive bigot who goose steps over the threshold. You see the difference? Book burners don’t usually read widely. People who read don’t often burn books.

As someone who loves books, this was one of my favourite observations in a book of excellent book-centric observations.