Hell's Angels - Hunter S. Thompson

Thompson pioneered this type of in-your-face journalism, which would now be called embedding oneself with the enemy, and he obviously wrote about it in exciting prose. Despite the qualifications offered by our hero, however, the Hell's Angels qualities are massively outweighed by their repulsive attitudes towards sexual violence, so I was pleased to leave their company at the end of the book.

All That I Am – Anna Funder

This is a novel based on real men and women who fled Germany in the early 1930s and spent years desperately trying to warn a blithe world about the danger of Hitler. Much of the action takes place in London and I was shocked at how active the Nazi henchmen were outside of Germany in this period. I knew nothing about the characters depicted, whose heroism cannot be doubted and, for me, inspire awe.

On a technical level, though, the book is flawed. Sentence for sentence it is fair, but characterisation gets a bit blurry and the overlapping narrators are insufficiently differentiated. I could also have done without the strand concerning life in contemporary Sydney which adds little.

As a work of literature, All That I Am is pretty good. As an act of remembrance, it is magnificent.

Lucia’s Progress – EF Benson

In which Mapp and Lucia continue their sniping war of one-up-womanship in the setting of bourgeois England between the wars. Cricket matches, local elections and the excavation of Roman ruins all become objects of social prestige in delicious style, if not quite at the level of the similar PG Wodehouse.

The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner – Alan Sillitoe

Sillitoe does for 1950s Nottinghamshire what Joyce had earlier done for his hometown in Dubliners.

Both books create a tableau of working class life through a series of discreet but thematically linked short stories, dominated by a longer tale (in the case the brilliant title story). Both discuss themes of working class anger, sexual politics and the vulnerability of children. And both are minor masterpieces.

Craven House – Patrick Hamilton

This isn’t top-notch from the brilliant Hamilton but it’s still the best book I’ve read for a while. Taking the form of a comedy of manners set in a down at heel guest house, it gains real heft from the depiction of the trials of young love and an underlying sense of the characters’ despair.

H.G. – the history of Mr Wells – Michael Foot

Rather than a straightforward biography, this concentrates on two important strands of Wells’ life; his socialist though and his relationships with women.

On the former, it was a relief to have accusations of racism well and truly quashed. In fact he was a highly progressive socialist, with an unsurprising facility to predict future events with great acuity.

On the latter, he both professed and enacted a form of free love predicated on mutual respect with a series of highly impressive women.

The Soft Machine – William Burroughs

The Soft Machine – William Burroughs
Having read and enjoyed Naked Lunch, Queer and Junkie manymany years ago, I was interested to go back to Burroughs and see if he was as good as I remember. It turns out...not.

This is pretty adolescent stuff, and the shock value of using the words “rectum” and “jissom” ad nauseum wears very thin very quickly. It may be that those other books are simply better, but I am disinclined to spend time going back and finding out.

Here’s a representative sample:

Smile of idiot death spasms – slow vegetable decay filmed his amber flesh – always there when the egg cracks and the white juice spurts from ruptured apines – from his mouth floated coal gas and violets – The boy dropped his rusty black pants – delicate musk of soiled linen – clothes stiff with oil on the red tile floor – naked and sullen his street boy senses darted around the room for scraps of advantage.

Skinny Dip – Carl Hiaasen

Lots of fun as one would expect from Hiaasen, with unlikely characters reeling off quips and racing around Florida having adventures. The serious stuff is less successful, including some well-meaning but horribly clumsy editorialising on environmental issues.