“Marcel Proust:  À la recherche du temps perdu or as it is often translated into English: In Search of Lost Time or Remembrance of Things Past. I prefer the former translated title as it fits into my life-long interest in ‘retrocausality’, an interest that seems to radiate backwards: making me feel as if I have been  interested in ‘retrocausality’ all my life!

It is a massive novel in seven volumes:  written between 1909 and 1922 (I think) although I’m not into literary history so much as literary criticism from an objective consideration of the text compared to what lies behind the text (Cf: Nemonymity and ‘The Intentional Fallacy’).  Indeed, the novel lends itself to that ‘purist’ preoccupation of mine, despite it being called ‘semi-autographical’ by some, mainly because the Narrator is known as ‘Marcel’.

The novel concerns the nature of separate ‘selves’ within the one self throughout a lifetime. This seems a Horror trope to me. It also concerns unrequited love, a very bitter poignant theme that seems to me to impinge on the Horror genre. It also possesses many social and historical concerns that make those ‘Horror’  matters seem even more real – i.e. giving fiction a kick into truth. Believability makes Horror literally hurt.

In addition, I greatly enjoy the beautiful language style. I read the ‘Combray’ part of the novel in French when I was studying French in 1967.  However, since then, I have read the whole novel in English, twice, one in the seventies, one more recently. Each reading was a rite of passage that affected me in fundamentally different ways – showing me it is a novel for each walk of age… including the walk of Death itself? Indeed, is Death another self? Hence the choice for this context.

PS: The wonderful sentences are often tentacularly long. I once had a genuine dream that I have recounted before. There was a house fire in the dream and one of the inhabitants (me) escaped rather later than the others, i.e. barely reaching safety by the skin of my teeth. When asked about my lateness of escape, I said I had been in the middle of reading a sentence by Proust.

Here are two of my favourite passages from the novel:

I learned that a death had occurred that day which distressed me greatly — that of Bergotte. It was known that he had been ill for a long time past. Not, of course, with the illness from which he had suffered originally and which was natural. Nature scarcely seems capable of giving us any but quite short illnesses. But medicine has developed the art of prolonging them. Remedies, the respite that they procure, the relapses that a temporary cessation of them provokes, produce a simulacrum of illness to which the patient grows so accustomed that he ends by stabilising it, stylising it, just as children have regular fits of coughing long after they have been cured of the whooping cough. Then the remedies begin to have less effect, the doses are increased, they cease to do any good, but they have begun to do harm thanks to this lasting indisposition. Nature would not have offered them so long a tenure. It is a great wonder that medicine can almost rival nature in forcing a man to remain in bed, to continue taking some drug on pain of death. From then on, the artificially grafted illness has taken root, has become a secondary but a genuine illness, with this difference only, that natural illnesses are cured, but never those which medicine creates, for it does not know the secret of their cure.

For years past Bergotte had ceased to go out of doors. In any case he had never cared for society, or had cared for it for a day only, to despise it as he despised everything else, and in the same fashion, which was his own, namely to despise a thing not because it was beyond his reach but as soon as he had attained it. He lived so simply that nobody suspected how rich he was, and anyone who had known would still have been mistaken, having thought him a miser whereas no one was ever more generous. He was generous above all towards women — girls, one ought rather to say — who were ashamed to receive so much in return for so little. He excused himself in his own eyes because he knew that he could never produce such good work as in an atmosphere of amorous feelings. Love is too strong a word, but pleasure that is at all rooted in the flesh is helpful to literary work because it cancels all other pleasures, for instance the pleasures of society, those which are the same for everyone. And even if this love leads to disillusionment, it does at least stir, even by so doing, the surface of the soul which otherwise would be in danger of becoming stagnant. Desire is therefore not without its value to the writer in detaching him first of all from his fellow men and from conforming to their standards, and afterwards in restoring some degree of movement to a spiritual machine which, after a certain age, tends to come to a standstill. We do not achieve happiness but we gain some insights into the reasons which prevent us from being happy and which would have remained invisible to us but for these sudden revelations of disappointment. Dreams, we know, are not realisable; we might not form any, perhaps, were it not for desire, and it is useful to us to form them in order to see them fail and to learn from their failure. And so Bergotte said to himself: “I spend more than a multimillionaire on girls, but the pleasures or disappointments that they give me make me write a book which brings me in money.” Economically, this argument was absurd, but no doubt he found some charm in thus transmuting gold into caresses and caresses into gold. We saw, at the time of my grandmother’s death, how a weary old age loves repose. Now in society there is nothing but conversation. Vapid though it is, it has the capacity to eliminate women, who become nothing more than questions and answers. Removed from society, women become once more what is so reposeful to a weary old man, an object of contemplation. In any case, now there was no longer any question of all this. I have said that Bergotte never went out of doors, and when he got out of bed for an hour in his room, he would be smothered in shawls, rugs, all the things with which a person covers himself before exposing himself to intense cold or going on a railway journey. He would apologise for them to the few friends whom he allowed to penetrate to his sanctuary; pointing to his tartan plaids, his travelling-rugs, he would say merrily: “After all, my dear fellow, life, as Anaxagoras has said, is a journey.” Thus he went on growing steadily colder, a tiny planet offering a prophetic image of the greater, when gradually heat will withdraw from the earth, then life itself. Then the resurrection will have come to an end, for, however far forward into future generations the works of men may shine, there must none the less be men. If certain species hold out longer against the invading cold, when there are no longer any men, and if we suppose Bergotte’s fame to have lasted until then, suddenly it will be extinguished for all time. It will not be the last animals that will read him, for it is scarcely probable that, like the Apostles at Pentecost, they will be able to understand the speech of the various races of mankind without having learned it.

In the months that preceded his death, Bergotte suffered from insomnia, and what was worse, whenever he did fall asleep, from nightmares which, if he awoke, made him reluctant to go to sleep again. He had long been a lover of dreams, even bad dreams, because thanks to them, thanks to the contradiction they present to the reality which we have before us in our waking state, they give us, at the moment of waking if not before, the profound sensation of having slept. But Bergotte’s nightmares were not like that. When he spoke of nightmares, he used in the past to mean unpleasant things that happened in his brain. Latterly, it was as though from somewhere outside himself that he would see a hand armed with a damp cloth which, rubbed over his face by an evil woman, kept trying to wake him; or an intolerable itching in his thighs; or the rage — because Bergotte had murmured in his sleep that he was driving badly — of a raving lunatic of a cabman who flung himself upon the writer, biting and gnawing his fingers. Finally, as soon as it had grown sufficiently dark in his sleep, nature would arrange a sort of undress rehearsal of the apoplectic stroke that was to carry him off. Bergotte would arrive in a carriage beneath the porch of Swann’s new house, and would try to get out. A shattering attack of dizziness would pin him to his seat; the concierge would try to help him out; he would remain seated, unable to lift himself up or straighten his legs. He would cling to the stone pillar in front of him, but could not find sufficient support to enable him to stand.

[The following is] probably the most beautiful passage I have ever read:

The circumstances of his death were as follows. A fairly mild attack of uraemia had led to his being ordered to rest. But, an art critic having written somewhere that in Vermeer’s ‘View of Delft’ (lent by the Gallery at The Hague for an exhibition of Dutch painting), a picture which he adored and imagined that he knew by heart, a little patch of yellow wall (which he could not remember) was so well painted that it was, if one looked at it by itself, like some priceless specimen of Chinese art, of a beauty that was sufficient in itself, Bergotte ate a few potatoes, left the house, and went to the exhibition. At the first few steps he had to climb, he was overcome by an attack of dizziness. He walked past several pictures and was struck by the aridity and pointlessness of such an artificial kind of art, which was greatly inferior to the sunshine of a windswept Venetian palazzo, or of an ordinary house by the sea. At last he came to the Vermeer which he remembered as more striking, more different from anything else he knew, but in which, thanks to the critic’s article, he noticed for the first time some small figures in blue, that the sand was pink, and, finally, the precious substance of the tiny patch of yellow wall. His dizziness increased; he fixed his gaze, like a child upon a yellow butterfly that it wants to catch, on the precious little patch of wall. “That’s how I ought to have written,” he said. “My last books are too dry, I ought to have gone over them with a few layers of colour, made my language precious in itself, like this little patch of yellow wall.” Meanwhile he was not unconscious of the gravity of his condition. In a celestial pair of scales there appeared to him, weighing down one of the pans, his own life, while the other contained the little patch of wall so beautifully painted in yellow. He felt that he had rashly sacrificed the former for the latter. “All the same,” he said to himself, “I shouldn’t like to be the headline news of this exhibition for the evening papers.”

He repeated to himself: “Little patch of yellow wall, with a sloping roof, little patch of yellow wall.” Meanwhile he sank down on to a circular settee; whereupon he suddenly ceased to think that his life was in jeopardy and, reverting to his natural optimism, told himself: “It’s nothing, merely a touch of indigestion from those potatoes, which were undercooked.” A fresh attack struck him down; he rolled from the settee to the floor, as visitors and attendants came hurrying to his assistance. He was dead. Dead for ever? Who can say? Certainly, experiments in spiritualism offer us no more proof than the dogmas of religion that the soul survives death. All that we can say is that everything is arranged in this life as though we entered it carrying a burden of obligations contracted in a former life; there is no reason inherent in the conditions of life on this earth that can make us consider ourselves obliged to do good, to be kind and thoughtful, even to be polite, nor for an atheist artist to consider himself obliged to begin over again a score of times a piece of work the admiration aroused by which will matter little to his worm-eaten body, like the patch of yellow wall painted with so much skill and refinement by an artist destined to be for ever unknown and barely identified under the name Vermeer. All these obligations, which have no sanction in our present life, seem to belong to a different world, a world based on kindness, scrupulousness, self-sacrifice, a world entirely different from this one and which we leave in order to be born on this earth, before perhaps returning there to live once again beneath sway of those unknown laws which we obeyed because we bore their precepts in our hearts, not knowing whose hand had traced them there – those laws to which every profound work of the intellect brings us nearer and which are invisible only – if then! – to fools. So that the idea that Bergotte was not dead for ever is by no means improbable.

They buried him, but all through that night of mourning, in the lighted shop-windows, his books, arranged three by three, kept vigil like angels with outspread wings and seemed, for him who was no more, the symbol of his resurrection.”

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About DF Lewis:

DF Lewis has had approximately one thousand five hundred short fictions published in print from 1986 to 2000, some in hard-to-find outlets plus others in professional book anthologies.

Weirdmonger (Prime 2003) collected some of his stories. A definitive collection, The Last Balcony, is due from Ex Occidente Press. A novella, Weirdtongue, is published this month by The InkerMen Press. And he is currently seeking a home for his novel, Nemonymous Night.

He published Nemonymous from 2001 to 2010, and he received the British Fantasy Society Karl Edward Wagner Award in 1998.

• Visit DF Lewis’ website
• Visit The InkerMen Press
• Visit Ex Occidente

“The book I would like to be buried with is… Ray Bradbury’s The October Country, in any hardback edition that has the original Mugnaini illustrations. For three reasons. Firstly, it sums up for me better than any other book what the supernatural horror genre is about and why it matters. Secondly, it’s the ideal companion for a journey through the land of the dead, as if effectively maps out the territory and lets you know where the best roadside inns are. Thirdly, the ins and outs of how it evolved from Dark Carnival is all that the dead ever talk about. I know, I’ve heard them. But I wouldn’t want to be buried with Dark Carnival because there was no complete mass-market edition, and I wouldn’t want to deprive any living fan of the chance of finding that copy. Hell hath, quite literally, no fury like a thwarted Bradbury fan.”

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About Joel Lane:

Joel is twice winner of a British Fantasy Award, and the Eric Gregory award for his poetry. He is the author of two novels:  From Blue to Black (2000)and The Blue Mask (2003). He has also written munerous short stories, predominantly appearing in TTA Press’ Crimewave and Black Static titles, some of them reprinted in his collections Earth Wire and Other Stories (1994), The Lost District (2006), and most recently, The Terrible Changes (2010). His novella, The Witnesses Are Gone, was published by PS Publishing in 2009. He has published two poetry collections: The Edge of the Screen (1999), and Trouble in the Heartland (2005), with the third, The Autumn Myth, forthcoming in December. He is also an editor, having worked on numerous anthologies including the (in my humble opinion) legendary Beneath the Ground (2002), Birmingham Noir (with Steve Bishop in 2002), and the latest Gray Friar Press anthology, Never Again (co-edited with Alysson Bird) which is launched at Fantasycon 2010.

• Find out more about Never Again

“I have considered this question quite a lot and deemed it probable I would try to come up with a “clever” answer not strictly in keeping with the spirit of the exercise. For instance I thought about insisting on cremation rather than burial and that my funeral pyre should be fuelled with books I don’t like, works by Jane Austen, Henry James and Ian Fleming, among others.

But that is too glib an answer, so my second idea was to insist on a mausoleum rather than a simple grave, a monumental tomb that would contain enough room to house the 44 volumes (deluxe price $3000) of the Vance Integral Edition – every work of fiction ever published by Jack Vance. My corpse could then recline among them like a bloated and stinking bookmark, leaking the occasional stream of purple fluid like a ribbon.

But no, it is better in the final analysis to treat such a topic with the seriousness it deserves. I thought I had fixed definitely on The Complete Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino as my canopic book of choice, a blessed volume published as a Penguin Classic hardback in 2009. Calvino is probably my favourite author of all and the “cosmicomic” genre that he invented (a particular blend of fantasy, science fiction, absurdist humour and serious philosophy) is one of the greatest contributions to imaginative literature in any century.

But ultimately I have chosen a different book, a slim volume published in 1950, a set of linked stories featuring a dwarf surrealist boxer who fights against ghosts, witches, clocks, zombies, gorgons, mechanical brains and sundry impossibilities in his efforts to remain the miniature champion of the Surrealist Sportsman’s Club. The Exploits of Engelbrecht was the product of the febrile mind of Maurice Richardson, that punchy, funny, hard-drinking journalist and satirist, and it remains, to my best knowledge, the only Gothic spoof on sport ever written.

It is truly a magnificently odd book and I still find its peculiar whimsy menacing: the Old Id, the mythical chairman of the Surrealist Sportsman’s Club, comes over as a cross between Aleister Crowley, Alfred Hitchcock and Père Ubu; the endless drug taking of the other members evokes irresponsibility and darkness as only the strangest pre-hippy trippers – who masticate mescaline while wearing tweed and sitting amongst mahogany furniture – can do; the mischief makers Chippy de Zoete and Tommy Prenderghast are lighthearted jokers in the most devious and catastrophic sense. And among this dubious company Engelbrecht the dwarf stands out like a sore thumb swollen a thousand-fold because of a manticore sting: he never holds a grudge, is up for anything, contains all the sangfroid of a flock of dandies compressed to extreme pressure under his modest frame. He’s ready to explode with nonchalance – a pleasing paradox. Engelbrecht is a battler, a noble and generous soul. His Britain is seedy, crumbling, sinister, saturated with the feedback and echoes of a dying or never-really-existed courtesy and respect, enmeshed in ritual webs as intricate and pointless as those of Gormenghast; but the castle is a clubhouse and the conspiracies are amusements, mere pastimes that warp time, space and sanity.

The original limited edition hardback was illustrated by James Boswell – a man who should be even more famous than the other James Boswell (the biographer). I once came across a Boswell exhibition by accident while killing time in London. Boswell’s satirical work is second to none, his grotesques as moving as those of Mervyn Peake, his elaborations no less intricate than Heath Robinson’s. A New Zealander by birth, he spent most of his life in England, eventually becoming the art editor of Lilliput magazine, perhaps the finest ever Fleet Street publication.

The Exploits of Engelbrecht remains, for me, the ultimate work of British comic surrealism. I liked it so much I wrote a sequel, Engelbrecht Again!, which seems fated to become even more obscure than Richardson’s original. Quite an achievement!”

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About Rhys Hughes:

Rhys Hughes is Wales’s best kept literary secret. Championed by the likes of Michael Moorcock his unique fantastical fictions have already achieved the level of cult-status. Influenced by Borges, Calvino and Stanislaw Lem, Hughes’s fiction is both intellectual and hilarious with plenty of jokes, puns and satirical side-swipes to keep the reader constantly amused. His most recent book is the novel Twisthorn Bellow. And his next two collections, The Impossible Inferno and Tallest Stories, are both due out in 2010.

• Visit Rhys’ blog

“There are two choices here, essentially because this article serves as a kind of recommendation (and primarily, I suppose, for those reading in English) and my chosen author, Nagai Kafū, is Japanese. Therefore, I’ll have to select one translated volume, and one volume in the original.

On the website Goodreads, I notice that my influences are listed simply as, ‘Nagai Kafū’. His name standing alone like that makes it seem as if he is actually my greatest influence as a writer, and at first I wondered if this might be misleading. I suppose it is, to an extent, but perhaps not such a great extent as I first thought. It does seem curious, though, that Kafū has come to assume such great significance for me.

I was writing from a very young age, and was more interested in simply immersing myself in my own fantasy world than assimilating literary influences. The first influences of which I was conscious, however, were Tolkien and H.P. Lovecraft. I wrote a number of truly terrible Lovecraftian stories in my teens, but was eventually saved from this tendency just because of the need to express myself – which cannot be done in the Lovecraftian manner for me – and also through my discovery of Japanese literature. The imagination, I saw, did not have to be overtly supernatural in order to explore its own boundaries. In a way, my emphasis had shifted. Where before I was most intoxicated by fantasy, now I was most intoxicated by beauty. It probably does not need saying that there is considerable overlap between these two things.

My first love in Japanese literature is Mishima Yukio, and his swansong, The Decay of the Angel, is perhaps the strongest influence on my writing after H.P. Lovecraft. Mishima served as the doorway, and Ian Buruma was my immediate guide when I stepped through. In Buruma’s book, A Japanese Mirror, I learned of a strange and intriguing writer called Nagai Kafū, who wrote about the esoteric world of the old Japanese demi-monde. Mishima’s form of beauty is in some ways in the major key. His titles – The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, Sun and Steel, A Forest in Full Bloom, Beautiful Star, Forbidden Colours – speak of the extravagant, the brilliant, the zenith of things, the flash of a blade, the glitter of gold (with a hint behind this dazzle of the sinister and demonic). His is an extroverted introspective literature. Kafū is almost the opposite of this, but is perhaps too odd and too asymmetrical in his ethos to be quite the opposite of anything. His titles – Flowers in the Shade, Dwarf Bamboo, Quiet Rain, Coming Down with a Cold, A Tale No One Asked For – speak of the creeping grey of shadows in layers of quietude, of world-weary sophistication, of the hour past the zenith, of the rustle of autumn leaves and the sober but rich colours of an Edo komon-style kimono. It is beauty in the minor key, and a literature of introverted extrospection. Where Mishima’s titles blazon their symbolism like a banner flapping in the sun, Kafū’s titles hide their symbolism as in the folds of sombre fabric, like threadbare embroidery in the bed robes of an old and ailing man, quaintly elaborate with wonderfully decrepit allusions. In truth, Kafū is closer to what many hold to be traditional Japanese aesthetics. In the fourteenth century, the monk Kenko wrote, “Are we to admire the moon only when it is full, the flowers only when in full-bloom?” The question suggests he was reacting against the orthodoxy of the time, but his aesthetic of the falling petals and the waning moon has itself come to be something of an orthodoxy in Japan.

Conservative in his nostalgia, and in his love of the traditions of his country, still, it would be wrong to think of Kafū as orthodox. When other Japanese were still wearing kimono in their daily life, Kafū – taller than the average Japanese – cut an eccentric figure in a dark Western suit, carrying a briefcase. (He spent four years in America and almost a year in France at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.) Some of his works (including his collection Tales of France) were banned for many years on grounds of indecency. And during the Second World War, when other writers were lending their words to the propaganda of the war machine, Kafū kept what is seen retrospectively as the respectable silence of integrity.

To the company of writers, Kafū appeared to prefer the company of dancing girls, geisha and prostitutes, and these were his chief muses. Let me select two brief quotes that may give some idea of Kafū’s world. The first of them comes from Seidensticker’s translation of A Strange Tale from East of the River, and describes a prostitute that the protagonist has become ‘accidentally’ acquainted with:

The figure of O-yuki, her hair always in one of the old styles, and the foulness of the canal, and the humming of the mosquitoes – all of these stirred me deeply, and called up visions of a past now dead some thirty or forty years. I must, if it seems at all possible, state my thanks to her who was the agent of these strange, insubstantial visions. More than the actor in the Namboku play, more than the Shinnai singer, Tsuruga somebody or other, who tells of Rancho and his tragic love, O-yuki was the skilful yet inarticulate artist with power to summon the past.

The second is a quote (trans. Seidensticker) from ‘Unfinished Dream’:

He frequented the pleasure quarters with such enthusiasm that ten years were as a day; for he knew only too well that they were quarters of darkness and unrighteousness. … Indignation at the hypocritical vanity of proper wives and the fraud of the just and open society was the force that sent him speeding in the other direction, toward what was from the start taken for dark and unrighteous. There was more happiness in finding the remains of a beautifully woven pattern among castaway rags than in finding spatters and stains on a wall proclaimed immaculate.

Recently, I moved from Wales to Devon. I was forced to leave many of my belongings behind, and, more recently again, I returned to Wales to retrieve some of these, and store others of them in the attic of the cottage where they remained. Among the books I retrieved was a jacketed hardback edition of Kafū the Scribbler (The Life and Writings of Nagai Kafū, 1879-1959), a volume that contains something between biography and critical appreciation, by Edward Seidensticker, and translations of a handful of Kafū’s stories (including some excerpted fragments), also by Seidensticker. It is a book that has travelled with me all over the world, to Japan, America and back. It is not in poor condition. I received the book as a Christmas present when I was still quite young (in my early twenties, I would say), and at that age I was so leisurely in my habits that I would coat any new book I acquired with a kind of transparent laminate plastic; I did not want the books to become stained or dog-eared. The jacket of this book has just such a coating. The pages have a soft, matt quality, and a sense of thickness to the fingers. They give off a natural, woody aroma. The print is large and friendly. Inside front and back covers are maps of Tokyo as Kafū supposedly knew it, after the earthquake of 1923, and marked with place names of particular significance in Kafū’s oeuvre. The publisher is Stanford University Press. The jacket cover is a black and white photograph of Kafū with round, black Harold Lloyd glasses, a rather wry – or ‘dyspeptic’, to use a Kafū-esque word – expression on his face, as he holds a cigarette aloft in his right hand. There was no way I could leave this book in Wales, however many times I have read it before.

Back in Devon, I leafed through the volume again, and read the opening of the first of the translated stories, ‘The River Sumida’, which is about the length of a novelette. Even in translation, Kafū’s prose is intoxicating. The tale begins:

Shōfūan Ragetsu, teacher of poetry, had missed his midsummer visit to his sister, who gave samisen lessons across the river at Imado. Every day he told himself he must go. He could not bring himself to venture out into the heat of the day, however, and so he would wait for evening.

How leisurely and how elegant is the flow of Kafū’s writing. How simple and opaque it is, and yet, in the perfection of its selected detail, how endlessly evocative. Whenever I revisit Kafū, I wonder why I have ever been away. It is one of the most prominent peculiarities of my taste in literature that I like writing that stands up to being quoted in excerpt form. Kafū is not quotable because he is epigrammatic, but because he is lyrical. Especially reading his work in the original, I feel that I could break it down to a sentence at a time and still quote it with savour. More than that – a word at a time. Clearly that’s a ridiculous statement, but such are my feelings about Kafū. I should also emphasise that Kafū’s writing is significantly greater in the original. One thing that does not translate is Kafū’s absolutely masterly sense of rhythm, with long, elaborate sentences held in perfect balance over many clauses.

In his Preface, Seidensticker writes:

It might be argued that the rather fragmentary and in-between form I have chosen is more appropriate for introducing a lyric poet than a novelist. I would reply only that Kafū is a very discursive sort of novelist. Excerpt treatment does not damage the dramatic unity of his works, for there is little dramatic unity in the first place.

Seidensticker views Kafū as a deeply flawed writer, largely because of the lack of dramatic unity he describes, and yet he does not stop to admire the fact that Kafū’s work stands up to be excerpted in such a way when the work of so few other writers does. I feel as though I can dip into Kafū’s work anywhere, as if it is, in a sense, all one great work, though Kafū does vary his style considerably. In other words, all Kafū’s pieces are, in a sense, additions, enriching endnotes to a vision that has no particular beginning or end. Kafū, like Lovecraft, like Peake, is one of those writers who gives us new glasses with which to view the world. What he allows us to see is indefinable, but distinct. I begin to see Kafū everywhere, and especially in the works of writers I admire (though not all writers – not, for instance, Mishima). Mark Samuels, Arthur Machen, Denton Welch, Justin Isis – to my knowledge, these people have not been influenced by Kafū, but I see Kafū in them in ways that are sometimes hard to describe.

There’s a kind of mystery to Kafū’s writing, which consists partly in the fact that he does not present mystery. On questions of metaphysics (in which I have great interest), he is almost entirely silent (though it would be impossible, I believe, to remove all hints of the metaphysical from literature). Yet he cannot have been a shallow man. I say this because, if he were, he would have been unable to write works of such profound consoling power. It is as if, where others (a very few) perhaps found the Fountain of Youth, Kafū, who continued to age, found something else, just as rare, that made his aging unimportant – the Fountain of Understated Beauty. Those who drink from the fountain are able to see anything in life from an aesthetic point of view, to gain a sense of beauty through distance. The Fountain of Understated Beauty frees you from the body. Kafū, freed thus, recreated the places he loved and haunted and loved to haunt, through his prose. To immerse oneself in that prose is therefore to be similarly freed. As with metaphysics, also with psychology, Kafū is unusually (for a modern novelist) lacking in interest. The layers of depth in Kafū’s work are not layers of human psychology (at least not as understood by a psychiatrist); they are layers simply of the aesthetic – of atmosphere. In this sense, he is the perfect writer, though an unusual one, since he approaches more nearly to the idea of writing for writing’s sake than anyone else I can immediately think of. It’s not that he has no opinions – these he expresses quite freely when he feels like it – it is simply that, whatever point he might be making is somehow contained within a greater aestheticism that is beyond all pontification. Other writers may affirm or deny there is a meaning to existence, and I am far from being immune to such questions. When I read Kafū, it does not matter whether or not there is a point. The struggles of other writers to make this or that point seem faintly ridiculous. Indeed, nothing matters, because I have once more sipped from the waters of the Fountain of Understated Beauty. If this sounds nihilistic, the experience of it, though tinged strongly with resignation, is for me far from nihilistic. It is no more nihilistic, in fact, than friendship, or that notion that Kafū in so many ways embodies – art for art’s sake.

It is perhaps fitting that Kafū’s first western biographer, Seidensticker, should take such a cranky view of his work, given the eccentric nature of that work, and of Kafū’s life, but even Seidensticker, through his deprecation, has this to say of Kafū:

[He is] the writer of whom I was probably fondest [though] affection and admiration are not the same thing. … Though he was not such a good novelist, he has come to seem better and better at what he was good at. … As I try to keep alive memories of how things were [in Tokyo], Kafū is a dearer companion than ever.

I do not agree with Seidensticker’s assessment that Kafū was a bad novelist. Kafū was a great writer, and whether he was a ‘novelist’ or not, as judged from a hidebound Western point of view, is irrelevant. Nonetheless, reading these words, I forgive Seidensticker, and feel disposed to take his cantankerous biography and really not bad translations to the grave with me.

Since it would be wrong to take only a translation to the grave, when I love the original texts so much more, I would also like to take volume 5 in the Shinchō Japanese literature series – a hardback of selected Kafū in a creamy bamboo-beige box, with an ‘N’ motif on both box and jacket. A wraparound slip that comes with the box sports my favourite photograph of Kafū, in which he is giving a gap-toothed grin. The stories contained inside are, Udekurabe (Geisha in Rivalry), Bokuto Kidan (A Strange Tale from East of the River), Sumidagawa (The River Sumida), Hikage no Hana (Flowers in the Shade) and others. Many of my favourites are missing, but Kafū wrote a great deal (I have his collected works in 29 volumes), and I must face the agony of choice.

What will they bring me in my grave? That, I hope, which they have brought me in life. I quote again, this time from the story ‘Coming Down with a Cold’:

… it brought the supremely soft consolation of knowing that he was at home.”

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About Quentin S. Crisp:

Quentin S. Crisp was born in 1972 in North Devon, England. After a period of five years working with Wolf and Water Arts Company, he attended Durham University where his degree was Japanese Studies. He graduated in 2000.

He has had a number of books published – mainly short fiction – including Morbid Tales (2004), Rule Dementia! (2005), Shrike (2009) and All God’s Angels, Beware! (2009).

His latest book is the novel Remember You’re a One-Ball! from Chomu Press.

• More information and interviews with Quentin at Wikipedia
• Visit Quentin’s website, The Directory of Lost Causes

]]> http://www.mathewfriley.com/2010/08/quentin-s-crisp-the-book-i-would-like-to-be-buried-with/feed/ 0 http://www.mathewfriley.com/2010/08/simon-kurt-unsworth-the-book-i-would-like-to-be-buried-with/ http://www.mathewfriley.com/2010/08/simon-kurt-unsworth-the-book-i-would-like-to-be-buried-with/#comments Mon, 23 Aug 2010 08:00:33 +0000 Mathew F. Riley http://www.mathewfriley.com/?p=1216 One of my favourite short story writers, the very personable Simon Kurt Unsworth, gives us his Book To Be Buried With, in this, the twenty fourth instalment…

“Let’s sort out our terms of reference here. I’m assuming by ‘the book I’d like to be buried with’ that we’re granting me some kind of zombified afterlife in which I can read, and that I’ve been buried with one of those booklights, and maybe some peanuts to keep me going when I get peckish? I’m also assuming that we’re meaning ‘a book I’d like to read again’, which helps – it means I can discard all those books I’ve enjoyed but am unlikely to tackle more than once (Danielewski’s House of Leaves, for example, which I thought was great, but I really can’t be bothered doing all that ‘holding the book upside down and reading great long lists of stuff’ again). In the end, this came right down to the wire in a all-out scrap between three books, all of which I’d have been perfectly happy to read in my coffin at leisure as the Rapture happened around me. The two losers (let’s not call them that, actually: let’s call them the two equally wonderful books that I didn’t pick this time) are The Collected Ghost Stories of MR James and Junji Ito’s three-part graphic novel about a town cursed by spirals, Uzumaki. Both of these are superb, nigh-on faultless, pieces of art which have brought me hours of pleasure, but in the end, I didn’t really have a choice. So, the book I’d like to be buried with is Stephen King’s ‘Salem’s Lot.

I think I was about 12 when I first read ‘Salem’s Lot; I’d read Carrie previous to it, which I’d enjoyed but which hadn’t done too much for me, so my buying it wasn’t because I was a King fan per se. No, I bought it for three reasons: firstly, I was on holiday in Wales, in a rainy caravan park, and just before we’d left home, I’d seen the first part of Tobe Hooper’s adaptation of ‘Salem’s Lot on TV – I was concerned that my parent’s very basic video wouldn’t tape the second part, and I wanted to know what happened, damnit! Second, the cover had a big, bald creepy vampire face on it, which intrigued me. And, thirdly, it had a cover quote by the Manchester Evening News, my local newspaper (“Triple H for horror!” was another quote, if I remember correctly, although not the one from the Evening News, I don’t think). I mean, how could I not buy it from the camp shop? Despite my mum’s misgivings, I used some of my own money and bought the book, and read it over the course of the week’s holiday. As the rain boinged on the caravan roof, I became entirely immersed in Maine, and in the goings-on in a small town, and I was genuinely, absolutely entranced.

For me, in ‘Salem’s Lot, King does so more than tell a vampire story (although he does, and a damn good one at that); he paints a town. I loved (and still do) the way King allows his characters (the town included) to unfurl, opening out before our eyes. It feels, somehow, like we’re not so much being told a story as let into a series of secrets that, almost accidentally, form a narrative. For an imaginative young boy just beginning to expand his reading choices into the world of ‘adult’ fictions, it was almost revelatory, that you could spend time over the small details, could let things happen at their own pace. It seems so obvious now (and I also know King wasn’t the first to do it; after all, ‘Salem’s Lot is, according to him, simply Peyton Place with vampires), but at the time it was a major lesson in how stories could and should work. As an adult, I can analyse why ‘Salem’s Lot is so good, and tell you that it’s because the set-pieces are thrilling, that it’s both creepy and moving, that the characters are complex and believable, that it never tries to make the vampires anything less than alien and vicious, that King’s eye for the details of a small town, and the lives that small town contains, has never been finer, but none of that really matters. No, what matters is this: at the time I first read it, ‘Salem’s Lot felt real.

It’s not a perfect book, by any means (how does Barlow get into the Petrie’s house without being invited? Huh? Huh?), but all of the faults that (for me) came to characterise some of King’s later work are held in check – the plotting never gets flabby, the authorial voice never gets too folksy, the characters are likeable without being contrived and, perhaps most importantly, despite its length, it never contains simply too many unnecessary words or feels too big. Sprawling and grandiose, yes, but always manageable. And in Straker and Barlow, of course, you have one of the greatest villainous double acts created, both urbane and violent, selfish and driven by lusts and yet veneered with charm and able to intellectually rationalise the horrors that they perpetrate. Before them, the human frailties King gives his other characters seem tiny but are never insignificant, which is how it should be: humans are worked upon, twisted and reformed by exposure to something evil, made into something new and less pleasant. Barlow and Straker are Evil, and when our heroes go into battle against them, it makes the stakes (no pun intended) as high as they can be.

I’ve reread ‘Salem’s Lot fairly regularly between that first experience and now (most recently listening to it as an unabridged audiobook on my iPod, which was a new and fun way to experience it), and whilst I’ve never quite caught that anything like that initial rush of sheer enjoyment that the first time delivered, each subsequent reading has given me something new and something good. Barlow and Straker, Ben Mears, Susan Norton, Mark Petrie, all may have aged since I first found that paperback in a dreary shop in Wales, but they haven’t dated a bit.”

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About Simon Kurt Unsworth:

Simon Kurt Unsworth was born in 1972 somewhere in the northwest of England, on a day during which no mysterious signs or portents were seen. He spent most of the following years growing, and hasn’t stopped yet, although he’s swapped upwards for outwards these days. He lives in Lancaster (just below the Lake District) with his wife and child, which is a good place to live if you like that sort of thing – it has a river, some pubs and roads of varying quality. He writes when he’s not working, spending time with his family, cooking, walking the dogs, watching suspect movies or lazing about.  His stories have appeared in the Ash Tree Press anthologies At Ease with the Dead, Exotic Gothic 3 and Shades of Darkness, as well as in Lovecraft Unbound, Gaslight Grotesque, The Black Book of Horror 6 and Black Static magazine. His story ‘The Church on the Island’ was nominated for a World Fantasy Award, and was reprinted in Stephen Jones’ The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror #19 and The Mammoth Book of the Very Best of Best New Horror. His first collection, Lost Places, was published by the Ash Tree Press in March 2010.

• Visit Simon’s blog

“‘The Wine Dark Sea by Robert Aickman would have made joint first choice but that problem has been decided for me because it has already been mentioned in this series …the other is Nest of Nightmares by Lisa Tuttle. A friend in California sent it to me last year and I was devastated when I had to send it back. Quite fortuitously, as copies are hard to come by now, I went into the dealers’ room at WHC Brighton this year and found a copy quickly. I asked Lisa to sign it – a wonderful moment for me.

In Nest of Nightmares Lisa Tuttle gives me the mystery I long for and everything isn’t neatly tied up. I don’t always want that. And, there is much more going on than the literal meaning of the words. Her fiction is enigmatic and all the stronger for being so. Her characters are ordinary people facing the strange and I remember the imagery long after the final page has been turned. Women are mad, or are they? They are taken over, as are some of the ones they love — but by whom or what? They feel trapped. One protagonist is belittled (Robert Holdstock mentioned this when he talked of the story, Flying to Byzantium in Horror 100 Best Books, edited by Stephen Jones and Kim Newman) and others are driven by ‘forces’ supernatural or otherwise. They face life and death and we wonder if they live …what will be the outcome? They are never let off easily. The way back can be fraught with danger and some make the choice to stay or can’t get away from the ‘supernatural’ knowing a price will be paid.

And then we come to The Nest at the end of the collection. A real horror story for me, and as with many of Lisa Tuttle’s stories, it can be read on many levels. There is so much pain and yet hope in that story. We are all mortal and just perhaps… whether it is something we shouldn’t wish for… there might just be more about our world that we can’t comprehend.”

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About Allyson Bird:

Allyson’s debut collection, Bull Running for Girls, won The British Fantasy Society award for best collection in 2009. Her second, Wine and Rank Poison from Dark Regions Press, will be launched at Fantasycon this year. Autumn sees the publication of her first novel, Isis Unbound, from the same publisher. She is also co-editing an anti-fascist, anti-racist anthology, with Joel Lane, called Never Again. This is due out from Gray Friar Press in September.

A little on Wine and Rank Poison.

Revenge. Best served cold. Here are ten stories involving most of the deadly sins: greed, lust, envy, wrath, and pride. Strange stories woven in time and place from Ancient Greece to 1929 Odessa, Italy to the modern United States…stories that mix reality, mythology, legend, half-humans, and the inhuman…

Allyson lives near the South Yorkshire moors with her husband and young daughter.

• Visit her website here: www.birdsnest.me.uk

“Although the Fifty Years of Playboy comes to mind because of the continually deviant workings of my fourteen-year-old mind, not only am I not sure that it is really a book, but even if it was, the experience of looking at pictures would eventually grow tiring and pale in comparison to the universe one can be transported to with cannonical writing.

Such is the case with Dandelion Wine. If I was to be buried with any book, it would be with my own first edition signed by Ray – Bigger Elvis – Bradbury. Not only did Ray introduce me to the coming of age (Bildungsroman) style of writing, but this truly magical novel contains everything I should ever want to read; it is a tale of horror, it is science fiction it is fantasy, it is mystery… it is truly an iconic book because it is uncategorical.

All that said, I think that the sole greatest importance that Dandelion Wine offers to the cannon of great writing is that it is a thesis on living. The most captivating idea for me as both a young adult and an adult was the notion that the main character, Douglas Spalding, believed that by owning a pair of brand-new Cream-Sponge Para Litefoot Shoes it could change his life. I’ve never looked at tennis shoes the same way since. Even now in my middling years, I can stare into a shoe store window wondering how much faster I could run, or how much higher I could jump, or how much better my life would be if only I owned those pair of shoes resting magically behind the glass. It’s a simple thing, but there are leagues of depth in the idea that a mere pair of shoes can change how we interact with the world. The shoes are of course a metaphor, and to that end, Dandelion Wine is really about the idea of living, for it was in this special summer that Douglas realized that he was not just existing but alive.

I can still remember when the world changed and I realized that I wasn’t the center of the universe, when I understood that I was but a small part of an unimaginably large whole. It was a terrifying moment, but it was necessary. And like myself, in that acknowledgement of one’s own mortality came the realization that everything could end for Douglas. He could die. And it is in that moment that he discovers the importance of everything and learns to appreciate that which he took for granted. So what better book to take with me in my death, than the book that best tells me how to live? What better book to spend an eternity with than one that can transport me to the eternal summer of my childhood, where I am running through a field of dandelions, the universe in front of me, immortality around me, wearing my own pair of brand-new Cream-Sponge Para Litefoot Shoes, with the glorious knowledge that it will never ever end?”

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About Weston Ochse:

Weston Ochse is known as El Elvis Rojo south of the Mexican-American Border and has been known to appear on doorsteps singing his tales of horror and woe to the occupants who are huddled inside. The residents of the Mexican State of Sonora have begun to paint sigils on their doors to ward him away and have begun a tradition of providing offerings in the town squares of Sonoran Hotdogs, Pollo Asado Burritos and Chili Rellenos in an effort to appease El Elvis Rojo.

North of the border he is a fiction author who has won the Bram Stoker Award for First Novel, and has been nominated for a Bram Stoker Award in both Short and Long Fiction, as well as the Pushcart Prize  for short fiction. His most recent novel is Empire of Salt, a tale of zombie love and loss on the shores of the Salton Sea.

In his spare time, he races tarantula wasps, watches Border Patrol Death Race 2000, and bakes in the noonday sun. You can find him at www.westonochse.com.

“There are works of fiction I’ve enjoyed as much as M R James’s ghost stories, but few, I think, that I’ve enjoyed more. Certainly none have played so unexpectedly large a part in my life. I think that I first came across MRJ in a paperback edition of the Collected Stories belonging to my dad, when I was 13 or so. But the book I’d like to be buried with is a first edition of Ghost Stories of an Antiquary [1904]. (I don’t own a copy incidentally – the readers of this will have to club together in time for the funeral. No flowers, please).

Of the eight stories in this, his first collection, I would count six as absolutely first rate, and rank the remaining two alongside the best work of other Edwardian supernaturalists. Five of them, and a later story – A Warning to the Curious – form what I now call the M R James Trilogy, a set of one man shows in which I take on the role of the author telling spook tales in his Cambridge study, circa 1904.

Most people who love M R James – and I’ve only ever met those who love him or have never read him; I have yet to meet a full blooded James hater – most people who love him seem to have got hooked during adolescence. But they’re a pleasure that endure into adulthood and – for the purposes of this, anyway – beyond.

They grow on you. Of the stories I perform, The Mezzotint, The Ash Tree and Lost Hearts have increased in stature in my eyes over the years while Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook, Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to you, my Lad, and A Warning to the Curious have retained their status as firm favourites.

I started doing MRJ shows five years ago, when I worked at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge and got the chance to perform in his old office – the Founder’s Library, a magnificent Victorian book-lined interior with a huge marble fireplace, where he catalogued so many of the medieval manuscripts in Cambridge collections. I think I’ve probably performed Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook over two hundred times since then and I’ve really not got sick of it. The gradual build up of tension, the accumulation of detail, the spectacular, climactic apparition, and that slow, rather melancholy coda – they affect me now as they affected me a quarter of a century ago.

Perhaps, in fact,  after so many repetitions the stories aren’t quite as chilling as they were on first reading. One might think that’s a failure in a ghost story but I don’t. For me the shudders – and they are undoubtedly there – have always been only part of the pleasure that MRJ delivers. There’s a humour in the stories, a playfulness, and that distinct narratorial voice – sometimes diffident, always friendly – that make them perfect holiday reading. Particularly if that holiday is taken alone. In winter. By the sea. And one reaches it by train. I think I’ve always found something strangely comforting about M R James.

They were composed for the holidays in the first place. James wrote all except one of the stories in Ghost Stories of an Antiquary to read aloud to friends at Kings College at Christmas (the last, The Treasure of Abbot Thomas is for me the least satisfying of the collection and was written at the publisher’s request to fill up the volume). So they are party pieces, really, candlelit, donnish entertainments, to be enjoyed with wine and anchovy toast after chapel on Christmas Eve. James’s protagonists are often solitary men, even lonely men, and this often leaves them vulnerable to inexplicable phenomena, but he’s not out to describe or inspire any existential agony. He doesn’t show us a cruel, random universe. His is a world of cathedral precincts and pipesmoke-filled hotel sitting-rooms, into which the monsters and grotesques that lurk in the margins of his beloved medieval manuscripts sometimes intrude. If James has a world view it is, as he admits himself, a very simple one – that there is more in heaven and earth, Horatio…  And that golf is an inexplicable waste of time.

I also love James McBryde’s illustrations in the book. Poor, genial, doomed, talented James McBryde, MRJ’s beloved friend. A reluctant medic, he had in 1904 at last embarked upon a career as an artist. The illustration of Ghost Stories of an Antiquary was his first professional job and he went at it with gusto. A framed print of McBryde’s version of the climax of Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to you my Lad, hangs above the desk where I’m writing this.

A quick recap: Parkins, the Professor of Ontography at Cambridge University, is enjoying a golfing holiday on the Suffolk coast. He finds an ancient whistle by the beach, blows it and inadvertantly summons a… well it’s hard to say what exactly… but something responds to the whistle and attacks him in his room in the middle of the night, something wrapped in bedsheets.

The story makes the being’s “intensely horrible face of crumpled linen” the focal point of the terror. James McBryde pays more attention to the grimace of its victim: in the picture Parkins is skeletal, his mouth a lunatic rictus, his cheeks hollowed out by a scream. The story has him lurching out of the window to escape his attacker; McBryde hems him in against a chest of drawers, his claw-like hands reaching out to fend off a being that he is too terrified to touch. Like the best book illustrations, it not only complements MRJ’s prose, it adds to the enjoyment of it.

The young artist himself sensed that he had created something special. On the 6th May 1904 he wrote to MRJ. “I have finished the Whistle ghost… I covered yards of paper to put in the moon shadows correctly and it is certainly the best thing I have ever drawn…”

It was probably also the last piece he completed. By the 4th of June he was dead, from a botched operation to remove his appendix. It was partly as a tribute to his great friend that James published Ghost Stories… in the first place.

I’ve also grown to love the look and feel of that first edition – the weight of it, the thick pages, the brown, hessian-like binding, the Gothic script on the cover. I’ve seen and handled a few copies over the last few years and still scour charity shops and jumble sales just in case one of those mythical copies turns up, going for 50p because the vendor doesn’t know what he’s selling.

And finally I like the idea of some Dennistoun or Parkins of the future digging up my funerary copy and becoming increasingly uneasy as he reads about what can happen when you pilfer the treasure of the past. So uneasy in fact that, by the time he has reached the end of the book, he decides it might be best to return the modest looking volume to the bony grasp of the skeleton from whose grave he snatched it. Yes, that would be the sensible thing to do.”

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About Robert Lloyd Parry:

Since December 2005 Robert has been performing two one man shows based on the stories of M R James, the greatest writer of supernatural tales in English. His uncanny resemblance to the author has been noted with a shudder by more than one enthusiastic audience member.

• Visit the Nunkie Theatre Company’s website

“Just realizing that this is a completely different question than What book have you reread the most, or even What book is your favorite book, though I kept trying to read it that way. Since you asked, I’ve generated lists and lists, and consulted old lists, and it’s too painful to select just one, but at the same time I keep wanting to allow myself to cheat, just string ten or twenty together here, the same way you wallpaper your room with band posters when you’re fourteen, in hopes somebody’ll walk in, see how obviously cool you must be.

Or, really, I kind of gave up on an answer, was ducking the reminder I’d set to do this. But then, yesterday, I was writing the notes for this story collection I have coming out, and it hit me, or, I discovered it on the page, which is pretty much where I discover everything: It. Stephen King’s It.

That story’s still running in my head, is probably the most permanent piece of fiction I’ve ever read. The most influential, anyway, the one I’m just now seeing that I’ve always been trying to rewrite without getting caught. Because, even just looking at it on my shelf, that’s enough for me to see some chrome eyeballs rolling my way, sure, but the real magic of that story’s those kids, their dynamic, how they’re growing up together. With It, you get the horror but you also get the, I don’t know, the distinct sense of what it means to be human, and to keep trying to be human, even when the world’s failing all around you. A completely magical book for me, and I so appreciate the way it splits into all these distinct storylines but then comes back together. I mean, reading it, just remembering it, I know it’d be dangerous to be in that story, and it’s likely stupid to secretly want to be, but, just for the chance of gambling everything on that bike ride at the end, the chance of gambling and winning, it’s got to be worth it, yeah?  My heart’s pounding, even, writing this. Just thinking about that story again, about It.

I’m going to have to read it again now, soon. Need to get back to Derry for about a thousand pages.”

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About Stephen Graham Jones:

Stephen Graham Jones has seven books out so far, two of them horror – Demon Theory and The Long Trial of Nolan Dugatti (the second a Shirley Jackson Award finalist) – and has two more horror novels on the horizon: The Ones That Almost Got Away, a collection of horror stories out with Prime Books in October, and It Came from Del Rio (Trapdoor Books), Book 1 of the Bunnyhead Chronicles.

Jones has been an NEA fellow, a Texas Writers League fellow, has won the Texas Insititute of Letters Fiction Award and the Independent Publishers Multicultural Award, and, in spite of all that Texas stuff, he now teaches in the MFA program at the University of Colorado at Boulder, assigning Jack Ketchum to his students every chance he gets. His next two courses are The Slasher and The Zombie.

• Visit Stephen’s website at http://www.demontheory.net/

“…E Mortius Revoco, a Guide to DIY Practical Resurrections.

Only kidding.

In fact, that’s a hard question, but put a gun to my head (and let’s face it, such an act would bring the grave a tad closer) and I’d have to say Money by Martin Amis. I love it. One of those books you can read from start to end with undiminished pleasure, or simply dip into and revisit certain seminal passages. The prose is wonderful, the jokes as dark and funny as they come, and the whole thing is frequently profound, provocative and stimulating. Amis is my generation’s big UK voice. Nuff said, sir.

Here’s a short extract to illustrate only some of the foregoing eulogising:

In LA, you can’t do anything unless you drive. Now I can’t do anything unless I drink. And the drink-drive combination, it really isn’t possible out there. If you so much as loosen your seatbelt or drop you ashes or pick your nose, then it’s an Alcatraz autopsy with the questions asked later. Any indiscipline, you feel, any variation, and there’s a bullhorn, a set of scope sights, and a coptered pig drawing a bead on your rug.

So what can a poor boy do? You come out of the hotel, the Vraimont. Over boiling Watts the downtown sky line carries a smear of God’s green snot. You walk left, you walk right, you are a bank rat on a busy river. This restaurant serves no drink, this one serves no meat, this one serves no heterosexuals. You can get your chimp shampooed, you can get your dick tattooed, twenty-four hours, but can you get lunch? And should you see a sign on the far side of the street flashing BEEF–BOOZE–NO STRINGS, then you can forget it. The only way to get across the road is to be born there. All the ped-xing signs say DON’T WALK, all of them, all the time. That is the message, the content of Los Angeles: don’t walk. Stay inside. Don’t walk. Drive. Don’t walk. Run! I tried the cabs. No use. The cabbies are all Saturnians who aren’t even sure whether this is a right planet or a left planet. The first thing you have to do, every trip, is teach them how to drive.

What I love here, as in the great majority of Amis’s work, is the brilliance of the ideas, their phrasing, the way he alludes to great literature by way of tawdry modern life (“God’s green snot”). He has made the hideous beautiful – quite an achievement. If great writers hold up a mirror to their times, what is Amis giving us? In Money, it’s the way that the whole of social life has been commodified and subjugated to the rigors of capitalism. John Self is a void, a man who moves from one effortless addiction to the next. When he goes to watch an opera, he interprets the story according to a soap opera or a tabloid headline story. He’s drunk most of the time, but those blank-outs serve another purpose. Amis also offers us a meta-reflective rumination on the nature of novel writing. Characters disappear for great patches of all novels – Self simply blacks out: a nicely judged metaphor what happens when the reader ‘isn’t looking’. But Amis goes further, and later in the book we get a character called Martin Amis who’s deliberately manipulating his central character much in the way that ‘Godlike’ authors do: a smart touch. There are other things going on in this novel which beggar belief. The complexity masquerades as endless vitriolic and painful comedy. It’s probably the funniest thing I’ve ever read. And if Self achieves a little pathos and independence towards the end of the book, what are we to make of this? Is he redeemable? Are our times? Are we?

On the basis of this book in particular, Amis has been described as a misogynist, but nothing – in my view – could be further from the truth. Selina Street manipulates Self, for sure, though it’s he who holds all the money and that’s what she’s after. And of course it’s another female character, Martina Twain, who attempts to reform Self, even though, when left in her flat a while, he spends rather less time reading the copy of Animal Farm she’s lent him than he does seeking out choice bits of photography over which he can masturbate. But come on, that’s all true – it’s so true. And that’s the bottom line for me: Amis tells it the way it is for men in these not-so-long-departed modern times.

Maybe he’s therefore a geezers’ author. I’m not entirely sure. All I do know is that his fictional worlds resonate with me. The headiness of the language is intoxicating. He does what V S Pritchett insisted all writers should do: give voice to all the wonderful thoughts inside even the most base of people. And boy is Self base. But…maybe we all are. Maybe Amis is reminding us of that, and perhaps he uses his divine gift for prose as a way of smuggling these truths through the ever-so-refined filter of ‘good taste’. In short, he challenges what literature is supposed to deal with, the higher aspirations and concerns of humanity. Well, what can I say to support that? Something in the style of the superb Money, maybe: okay, here goes – Bach, Galileo, Shakespeare, Churchill, Keats, Constable, Brunel, to name but a few – they all surely enjoyed a handjob now and again.

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About Gary Fry:

Gary Fry lives in Dracula’s Whitby, literally around the corner from where Bram Stoker was staying when he was thinking about that character. Gary has a PhD in psychology, though his first love is literature. To date he’s had four short story collections and over 60 tales published. His first novel – a frightening haunted house piece called The House of Canted Steps – will be published in 2010 by PS Publishing. He also has a disturbing novella – the colourfully entitled ‘The Invisible Architect of Psychopathy – out from Pendragon Press in 2010: this accompanies a fine piece by Simon Maginn in a book called Feral Companions.

• More news and views on Gary’s new website at: http://www.gary-fry.com/