Conspicuous Consumption

  M. John Harrison has just won the Booker Prize for his most recent novel, The End of Everything . Thus I'm several years late and a dollar short in publishing this review of his 1989 novel Climbers . Harrison is best known for his science fiction, so the first thing to note about Climbers  is that it is not science fiction. (It seems pretty clear, from the reviews I've read, that The End of Everything isn't either.)   It is a climbing novel, and won the Boardman-Tasker prize for mountain literature, but for many reasons it would be a mistake to slot it into any of the categories that might suggest. In place of pristine landscapes, or outdoorsy nature writing we get disused quarries and the industrial detritus of Northern England; in place of wholesome young mountain athletes we get working class and sub-working class climbers surviving in England during the dark days of late Thatcherism, and in place of the sort of upward and onward success for which ascending a r...

  As unlikely it sounds, even as anti-clerical and irreligious as I am, I have enjoyed Phil Rickman's series of novels about a Church of England exorcist (the Church still has them, but now calls them "Deliverance Ministers"), and the mysteries she encounters which, if I recall correctly, usually seem to have solutions that are in large part material, but don't rule out the supernatural. One of the ongoing threads in the novel is the tension between the exorcist, Merrily Watkins, and the increasingly secularizing Church which no longer has much time for woo-woo explanations of evil. That, for the space of the novels, my sympathies were with Merrily is surely the result of Rickman's skill in creating characters who convince us. And as is the case with all successful series, it is the recurring characters that keep us coming back. We look forward to updates about the lives of her crusty old mentor, about Merrily's lover, Lol, a folkie singer-songwriter who is al...

 I've read this poem three times in the last four days. Reading, rereading, and rereading again seems the appropriate way to experience this book, which draws for its structure on the Aztec sun calendar and the cyclical notion of time it embodies. I guess it qualifies as a long poem, though as it's only about 25 pages long, in each of the languages in which it is presented, one has to ask: Compared to what? I came across one scholar who likens it to "The Waste Land," and I can't help but suspect that it is that the poems are of similar length (Paz's offering is 150 lines longer) and the fact that their concerns are wide ranging, that drive that observation (Paz's poem is the more wide ranging).  The styles in which the poems are written, for example, have little in common. Paz writes in regular hendecasyllabic  eight-line stanzas; Eliot does not. The form Paz has chosen, and which Weinberger, wisely, does not slavishly follow in the English translation, gi...

   The first section of Herman Hesse's Steppenwolf  is is all about the Steppenwolf, aka Harry Haller, and offers, in these opening pages, a simple notion of identity: Our identity is composed of, or at least Haller believes that his identity is composed of, two battling parts: the Dionysian and the Apollonian. I'm using Nietzsche's terms, because much of this book seems to be a rehash of some of that philosopher's thought. Later this theory of a bifurcated identity is altered to say that we each have not two sides, but many. This is the book's great reveal, but the combination of a self-obsessed character and facile philosophy and psychology in the opening pages almost made me put it down before I got there. It gets better when we get a glimpse outside Harry's head: A new character, Hermine, appears. She seems to understand Harry for what he is, and calls him out on at least some of his nonsense while also teaching him the popular dances of the day. This is nee...

   Patrick Wright has chosen to focus his massive account of the last ten years of Uwe Johnson's life, spent in Sheerness , on the place. The detail we absorb from Wright about this neglected and depressed locale—I seem to remember it being referred to as "the back end of the Thames"—is staggering. It seems trite to say that the places we spend our days make us who we are, but how many biographers take that seriously? Most seem content to tell us what their subjects do while more or less ignoring where they were. Wright, adopting the opposite approach, focuses most of his 750 or so pages on the bleak, depressed place Johnson made his home. In those pages we do get the facts of Johnson's life, but much more we get the facts of Sheerness, Sheppy, and the bleak place that was England in the 1970s.  The book's great strength is its discursiveness. From Sheppy and Johnson, Wright journeys widely., and as much as we enjoy reading about our subject, especially in the sub...

 The race continues. Can I keep going long enough to finish Michael Connelly's ongoing series of Harry Bosch novels or will I die before Bosch? The good news is, after The Crossing , the 18th in the series, I still enjoy the books enough that I want to give it my best shot (though it wouldn't make me sad if Bosch's story continues even after mine has ended).  Bosch is now officially retired again—he's already retired once, but then come back under a special program allowing retired detectives to return to duty. He is, however, suing the LAPD for forcing him out: He still doesn't like retirement. Mickey Haller, a defense attorney who, it was revealed several novels back, is actually Bosch's brother, something of which neither of them had been aware, contacts him and asks him to work for him as an investigator.  Haller has his own Connelly series, so this book is a crossover. I have a vague memory of reading one Haller book, and not being eager to go back for more...

 It is tempting to read  Stoner,  the story of a man in an unhappy marriage, thwarted in his career, and not quite able to be the teacher or scholar he wants to be, as relentlessly bleak. And yet, in the course of the protagonist William Stoner's life, he manages to experience the aesthetic bliss that one can find in the best art, to experience love (also passionate sex), albeit outside his marriage, and also to experience paternal love in the early years of his relationship with his daughter. The view of life Williams presents us with is in no way idealized; it is a realistic account of the good accompanied by the bad, a combination with which most us will be familiar. Stoner is, for most of the book, a university professor. There is nothing in the account of his life and career that is surprising or exciting. It is, in short, mundane. Reading Williams's account of it, though, we find ourselves affected by something that lies just beneath the surface. As in, for example,...