The Subterranean Railway - Christian Wolmar

I've picked up various titbits about the history of the London Underground over the years, but this skilfully put together overview has given me a far better understanding of the story. The random, uncoordinated nature of the early system explains many of the anomalies that exist to this day, and I liked the odd aside such as the Sudanese diplomat who described the atmosphere in the tunnels as "like a crocodile's breath".

Kingdom Come - J.G. Ballard

I've always enjoyed the work of Ballard, but his final novel does rather coast along on the reputation of former glories. It is a typical Ballardian investigation into a contemporary phenomenon (here, the shopping mall) that reveals a kind of social psychosis. The misanthropy has an unpleasant class-inflected tone, much of the dialogue and plotting is preposterous, the central character is ambivalent to the level of incoherence, and the analysis of modern life is undermined by any role for the internet or mobile phones.

I only really started enjoying it once I threw any notion of reality out of the window and instead took it as a kind of dystopian romp, on which level it's not bad. Any novel which is basically an extended shoeing of Bluewater can't be all bad.

And then there's the odd moment of brilliance that recalls his mighty prime. How's this on the architecture along the M25:

“The entire defensive landscape was waiting for a crime to be committed”

Brave New World Revisited - Aldous Huxley

Picked up this essay reflecting on Brave New World after listening to the ever-wondrous In Our Time on the original novel. Between the novel and the essay came Nazism/WW2 and the publication of 1984, both of which throw new light on Huxley's original vision.

Some of the predicitions are wildly off target, largely due to Malthisian gloom over population increases, and on occasion the attitude threatens to become both luddite and misanthropic. Occasional glimpses of brilliance make the read worthwhile. Check out this prediciton about election campaigns, bearing in mind it was published when Eisenhower was president.

In one way or another...the candidate must be glamorous. He must also be an entertainer who never bores his audience. Inured to television and radio, that audience is accustomed to being distracted and does not like to be asked to concentrate or make a prolonged intellectual effort. All speeches by the entertainer-candidate must therefore be short and snappy. the great issues of the day must be dealth with in five minutes at the most - and preferably...in sixty seconds flat. The nature of oratory is such that there has always been a tendency among politicians and clergymen to over-simplify complex issues. From a pulpit or a platform even the most conscientious of speakers finds it very difficult to tell the whole truth. The methods now being used to merchandise the political candidate as though he were a deodorant positively guarantee the electorate against ever hearing the truth about anything.

Bone: The Dragonslayer - Jeff Smith

Bone heads further into conventional fantasy territory, despite the entertaining subplot about the dodgy Bones causing havoc in the town.

You must go on. I can't go on. I'll go on.

The Meaning of Liff – Douglas Adams and John Lloyd

A compilation of things that really should have words to describe them given words that have hitherto been languishing in obscurity as mere place names. I’ve owned this for many years and it always makes me laugh. Last week I casually picked it up off the shelf and spent the next 2 days sniggering and reading out entries to my my long-suffering wife. Taken together with the wonderful Uxbridge English Dictionary, this will cater to all of your made-up word requirements.

Somebody’s lobbed the whole thing online.

Here’s a taster:

ABILENE (adj.)
Descriptive of the pleasing coolness on the reverse side of the pillow.

GLASGOW (n.)
The feeling of infinite sadness engendered when walking through a place filled with happy people fifteen years younger than yourself.

NAD (n.)
Measure defined as the distance between a driver's outstretched fingertips and the ticket machine in an automatic car-park. 1 nad = 18.4 cm.

The Alexandria Quartet (Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea) – Lawrence Durrell

The Alexandria Quartet is a monumental four-novel sequence based around the lives of several diverse characters living in Alexandria in the 1930s and 40s. The first story details an interconnected web of relationships and love affairs. The second and third books retell the same stories in the light of new information, so that although the essential facts remain they become more complicated and motivations shift ambiguously. In the final instalment the narrative extends forward in time and we discover the fates of the characters involved.

The prose requires concentration but is magical. Some set pieces are dazzling, and the setting is conjured up superbly. I’m not sure I could name a book with a stronger sense of place and time.

There are shortcomings. The sexual and racial politics are often uncomfortable to a modern eye. All of the characters have a tendency to speak in lengthy, poetic and highly unlikely slabs but the quality of the writing outweighs its shortcomings in terms of realism.

Really substantial and impressive literature of the first order.

Bound For Glory - Woody Guthrie

Probably the best musical autobiography I’ve read since Julian Cope’s magnificent Head On. It’s essentially a real-life retelling of Grapes of Wrath with added freight trains. He’s a great story-teller, as you will know if you are familiar with his songs, but I could have done with more about his recording career which takes up just one page.

The Private Patient – P.D. James

Lots of people rate Dame Phyllis as a serious writer and I like a good genre yarn, so I thought this could be a winner, but it turns out I was hopelessly awry with my optimism.

The set-up is pure Agatha Christie cheese: an isolated manor house, various suspicious characters with unlikely motives, and a murder by strangulation. Enter our hero to save the day. This stuff can work with a sufficiently ingenious plot, in this case everybody just sort of hangs around until somebody goes a bit loopy and confesses, all in a rather humdrum way. There are also various uninvolving sidetracks into the detectives’ private lives, presumably to keep long-term readers happy but baffling to me.

Then there’s the dialogue, much of which is embarrassingly clumsy exposition that takes the form “As you already know (2 pages of regurgitated research)”.

Here’s a sample from a discussion between 2 professional surgeons about a third:

“We can take his qualifications for granted – FRCS, FRCS (plast), Master of Surgery.”

What? WHAT?! They are telling each other things they already know, they are supposedly say aloud the words ”FRCS” repeatedly and they are somehow enunciating “(plast)” at the end of it. How was she picturing this scene? Where was the editor? How did this stuff reach publication?

The Pianoplayers – Anthony Burgess

A minor work from a major novelist. The depiction of the vaudeville life between the wars is fun and convincing but the end of the book takes us into different and less fertile territory.

Fingersmith - Sarah Waters

This is one of those books that has enjoyed both critical acclaim (a Booker nomination) and popular appeal. I enjoyed Tipping The Velvet, an earlier example of Waters’ sapphic Victorian melodrama, so I came into this expecting an entertaining romp.

At first I was somewhat bemused. The set-up was neat and atmospheric but then everything appears to slow down catastrophically in an over-detailed sequence in a country house. Things began to drag.

And then, and then... round about p.150 Waters superbly executed a narrative switchback that literally took my breath away, and I was off. The reason for the earlier pedantry became clear, and the rest was pretty well pure pleasure.

Clever stuff.