My Booky Wooks 2009 (Part 2)

Asterios Polyp by David Mazzuccheli
Mazzucchelli returns, at last, and he's working on a different plane from 99% of the cartoonists in the comics medium. His book is a character study but it is full of digressions and tangents, and Mazzuccheli is good enough to be able to address two themes simultaneously. While his narrative may be concerned with fate or one of its titular protagonists opinions on life or art, his art is generally interrogating one aspect of the medium or another in his use of colour (his main characters are colour-coded), in the design of his characters, in the flow of his panel-to-panel storytelling. This is a cartoonist who obviously thinks as much about his chosen medium as, say, Scott McCloud does. His story follows Asterios Polyp, an Architect without any buildings to his credit, and flashes back and forth between his present - working in a garage in a small town following a fire that has destroyed his life and possessions, and finding himself once again, to some extent - and his past , in which he met a girl, fell in love and ultimately lost that girl. Asterios is not exactly a sympathetic character, but he is always interesting, and his slow thaw in his newfound smalltown life, while being the corniest, most predictable element of the entire book, is also tremendously effective and satisfying. Mazzuccheli draws him as an unchanging razor-edge design squiggle, almost an abstraction, throughout the book, in what may be a comment on the stubborn, immobile nature of his personality. It works as an epic of sorts, a detailed, artful character study, and a brilliant, frequently inspired piece of high comic art.

An Expensive Education by Nick McDonnell
Forget his youth and the suggestions of nepotism his well-connected family have made unavoidable, across the three novels published since he was 17 - which was only in 2002 - Nick McDonnell has proved himself a writer of great style, vision and ability. His third book is his best yet and shows the exciting maturation of his talent. It traces parallel stories with many links between the two - somewhere in Africa, a satellite-guided missile has just wiped out a village of potential anti-government rebels, leaving a young CIA operative the only witness. Back in America, a Professor working at an Ivy League University finds her work - on the rebel leader - and its sources questioned. McDonnell draws the connections between these two worlds with the lightest touch in scenes depicting the CIA agent and his growing paranoia and awareness of the mysterious forces behind his orders. These scenes are reminiscent of Graham Greene and John LeCarre in their great sense of place and moral confusion. In one brilliantly depicted interlude, the agent is dispatched to a luxury, tiny resort on a tropical island for some R&R and debriefing. This is where he figures out what he has seen and what it means and we can see that his growth of a conscience may come to mean his death. The College scenes - a mix of student romance and academic politicking - read like they are based in a solid reality, like McDonnell has based them on his own experiences, and they positively hum with the complex set of social and hierarchical systems universities run upon. I can't wait for whatever he does next, and for the chance to watch a fascinating career unfold.

Legend of a Suicide by David Vann
Not quite a short story collection but not quite a novel, either, Vann's book turns upon the event which changed his life - his father's suicide when he was a boy. And so he revisits this event, and the events leading up to it, and its consequences, over and over, in a set of tales about family and boyhood, divorce and adult unhappiness, and what forms character. The central piece follows a boy and his father as they go to live on a remote Island in a Cabin together for a year. The father has a slow, agonising breakdown and the boy witnesses it all before one horrible event turns the narrative upside down. In the final story an adult narrator returns to the town where he grew up, searching for memories and explanations of his father's actions.
Vann has a lovely, effortlessly elegant prose style - evident to anybody who has ever read any of his magazine feature work - in which no sentence is too long and each word seems to possess just the right weight in the grander scheme. His characters are well-observed, flawed and painfully aware of it, and his portrayal of Alaska - perhaps the third character in this book - is evocative and exciting, a true wild frontier with it's own tough side which wears down the father and his efforts to make a living in the great outdoors.

Parker: The Hunter by Darwyn Cooke
I read this in about 20 minutes, flying through it, then when it was finished I went back and appreciated Cooke's command of the comics medium, his storytelling skill, the sheer beauty of some of his panels, by reading it again, slowly this time, drinking it in. A faithful adaptation of one of Richard Stark's great pulp anti-hero's adventures, Cooke works in a lovely monochrome noir style, and his art is messier and more fluid than it has been on his big DC projects in the past. His script plays perfectly with that art, forming a near flawless reading experience for this type of material - stylish, exciting, witty and self-aware. The majority of the opening chapter is utterly wordless, placing much weight on Cooke's purely visual storytelling. His craft and flow carries that like it was nothing. Stark's books have the nastiness of the best pulp, as does his protagonist, and Cooke captures that quality both in his characterisation and his violent, slashy art. It made me want to read some of the original novels. More than that, it made me want to see Cooke adapt them.

Black Postcards by Dean Wareham
Wareham was the singer and chief songwriter in the influential, semi-legendary and awesome band Galaxie 500, and when he left, he went on to form the just-slightly less awesome but massively underrated Luna. These days he spends his time playing Lee Hazlewood to wife Britta Phillips' Nancy in Dean & Britta, and writing this fascinating, often hilarious memoir of the reality of life in a second tier alternative band in the 1990s. Alongside the vivid descriptions of gigs in seedy clubs in cities you've never heard of and the accounts of writing and recording various songs and the bleak little vignettes of isolation and boredom in sundry anonymous hotel rooms all over the world, Wareham pulls no punches in articulating his own flaws: his infidelities on the road, his pettiness and irritation with bandmates, the affair with Phillips that led to his divorce. But he is always likeable. Witty, self-deprecating and appealingly honest, his voice here makes the book an easy read and encouraged me to listen to nothing but his music for the few days it took to read the book.

The Way Home by George Pelecanos
If any book will ever finally send Pelecanos over into mainstream success, than this is it. He's been angling for that for a few years - ever since Drama City (2005), his first novel since Shoedog (1994) that wasn't part of a series. The Night Gardener (2006) and The Turnaround (2008) are both standalone stories without the Western, music and movie references of his earlier, more violent work. I loved those early books, back when Pelecanos felt like my writer, when nobody liked him and his books weren't reviewed in the broadsheets. But he deserves to be read by a huge audience, because he writes novels with indelible characters and great stories, full of atmosphere and exciting incident, and with funny, authentic-sounding dialogue, and thematic consistency and a righteous social anger. If his colleagues on the writing staff of The Wire; Richard Price and Denis Lehane, write bestsellers and have their books turned into big Hollywood movies, then Pelecanos should too. The Way Home is perhaps his most accessible novel yet, but he has not compromised on the quality of his writing. Washington D.C. is as strong a presence in this book as it has been in all his work, and his characters are just as angry and complex. The story follows a young juvenile delinquent through early incarceration and a subsequent attempt to go straight, which is tested by his discovery of a large bag of cash in a house he is working on. His relationship with his father is precisely dissected, as is the American juvenile detention system, and Pelecanos astutely probes at the forces driving young men toward crime. Also last year Pelecanos wrote the introduction to the NYRB reissue of Don Carpenter's brilliant and hitherto neglected (though not by me) Hard Rain Falling (1966), and I can see the influence of that novel in Pelecanos' book. The cool, dispassionate account of a young man's trials in prison echo Carpenter's lack of judgement, as does the understanding the author extends to his character's shaky efforts to remain clean on the outside. Pelecanos' clean, plain prose is not too far from Carpenter's style, either. The Way Home probably isn't Pelecanos' greatest novel - I would recommend Right As Rain (2001) or King Suckerman (1997) as better starting-points - but its still a great read, something Pelecanos unfailingly provides.

And just a few of the many older books I read last year:

We Don't Live Here Anymore: the Novellas by Andre Dubus
I'd read some Dubus before, in the form of his Selected Stories, which I'd dipped into but no more. But I had seen John Curran's terrific We Don't Live Here Anymore (2004), (which narrowly missed out on my Best of the Decade list), adapted by Larry Gross from a couple of Dubus' works (Adultery and We Don't Live Here Aymore). This book was utterly revelatory. Not that Dubus could write - I knew that from the stories I've read, where his prose had that very America ease and elegance. But that his vision was so acute, his ability to nail his characters to the page so faultless. Each of these novellas studies relationships between men and women in absolutely pitiless, unblinking detail. Dubus captures the way people think, the way they lie to themselves and others, and brilliantly; the way they talk. In the title novella, two couples dance around one another, two of them engaged in an affair that will ultimately damage all of them. In another, a young man disguises his obsessive stalking of his ex-wife even from himself, eventually forcing her into desperate action. Dubus charts it all so precisely - love scenes, arguments, internal monolgues...These stories are, variously, moving, painful, and funny. Dubus was a great writer, and he is absolutely ripe for a proper rediscovery of his talent and achievement.

Escape from Five Shadows by Elmore Leonard
I love Leonard's Westerns far more than I do his crime writing. Back when he wrote Westerns, he hadn't yet fallen quite so much in love with dialogue and those books are full of sparse descriptive passages that evoke his classical settings concisely but artfully. One thing that has never changed is his way with characters. He writes great villains - human, complex, with believable motivations and reasons, yet completely and utterly unsympathetic people who a reader wants desperately to see fail. His heroes are of a type - tough, honest, fearless and resourceful men. In other words, his westerns are formulaic in so many respects. And yet, Leonard somehow transcends his formula. His storytelling is great, his plotting like clockwork, and so books like this - to be honest, second rate as Leonard Westerns go - are still gripping, compulsive reading. The plot involves a man sent to a famously hard, impossible-to-escape Desert Prison and his attempts to, you guessed it, escape. And Leonard's account of his attempt is cool and laconic, with a cracking impact to each action scene and a seamlessly integrated love story.
If you want a really top-class Leonard Western, read Hombre or Valdez Is Coming. But I've read those books and I'm running out of other Westerns by Leonard, so I'm trying to ration myself to one a year. Its hard. If only he'd agree to write a few more...

Butchers Crossing by John Williams
My biggest discovery this year came courtesy of the incredible NYRB press. I'd never even heard of John WIlliams before I saw one of his books in a lovely NYRB cover in a bookshop. Reading the back, I discovered he was an American writer with some bold claims made for him. That book was called Stoner, and I bought it. Its a 1965 account of the uneventful life of an English Professor at a Midwestern University - his marriage, rivalries and disappointments. It is masterfully written, almost perfect in the cold poetry of Williams sentences, full of melancholy, and finally of a quite profound sense of the sum of a normal, unexciting, slightly drab life. That book inevitably led me to Butchers Crossing (1960), which is a Western. It follows a young Harvard Student near the turn of the last Century but one as he gives up his studies and travels to the Frontier in order to experience it before it disappears. He funds an expedition to hunt buffalo and he and his comrades spend a Winter in the mountains. When they return to the town of the title, they find that their world has changed utterly. Something of a boys own adventure, Williams' book is also a subtle deconstruction of the myth of the West and the Westerner, has almost an almost ecological agenda, and is a beautiful account of the natural world. I love literary Westerns, and this is one of the best I've ever read. I should thank the NYRB, I suppose, and hope that they get around to publishing Williams' last novel, the National Book Award-winning Augustus (1973), soon.

My Booky Wooks 2009 (Part 1)

Like I wrote in my introduction to the equivalent post last year, I read a wide range of material. Mostly I read older books, but I do read newly published books too, if they interest me enough. In 2009, quite a few did. So, here are some relatively contemporary novels I read this past year, and why you should read them too. Or not, as the case may be:

2666 by Roberto Bolano
Full disclosure: I haven't finished Bolano's final novel. Its a mammoth book, and one to luxuriate in, and I'm reading it just the same way I read The Savage Detectives - in stages. Since the novel is split into 5 distinct parts, I have been reading them as separate books, with breaks and other reading in between. I only have the final book left to go, where Bolano apparently ties it all up, but I'm already awed by his achievement. This book contains multitudes, the writing is inspired, and Book 4, in particular, called "The Part about the Crimes" is one of the most sustained high-wire literary acts I've ever read. Here Bolano unblinkingly details the emergence of a serial killer (or killers) in his fictional Mexican border town of Santa Teresa (inspired by real events in Ciudad Juarez) and describes the discovery and remains of dozens of his mainly uneducated women victims. It is grim, monumentally powerful stuff, and hard to describe - you just have to read it. But its not an easy book - so surreal and personal and dark that it is often tedious and difficult, you have to commit to it to appreciate its greatness, to juggle its many aspects, its hints and suggestions in your mind. Bolano wrote it with the knowledge of his own imminent death in mind, and that much is obvious in the text. But its never a depressing read, really. Horrific in places yes, but Bolano is too interested and curious about life and its energy for that not to communicate itself through his writing, and his book is instead electric.

Jeff in Venice, Death In Varanasi by Geoff Dyer
Dyer seems incapable of writing a conventionally fictional novel. Each of his books mixes essay with autobiography with travelogue with fiction, and this is no different. Split into two sections, the book firstly follows an Arts journalist to a blazingly hot Venice for the Biennale, where he meets a young American woman and they enjoy a brief but intense affair. The second part follows another man - he may be the same character, but it is never made clear - to Varanasi in India where he hangs around for weeks, not doing very much at all. So: the first book chronicles a man's hedonism and pursuit of his desires, while the second reveals a sort of slow death of the self, as all his wants and desires fall away in the heat an inertia of a place where people go to die. As ever with Dyer, the writing is brilliant - witty, transportive and with an understanding of tone denied to all but a few novelists. He is a great observer, casually mining interactions for comedy and awkwardness while also maintaining the ability to suggest a certain profundity in his work. In other words, while he can make you laugh with a riff about the fecal matter in the air being responsible for his stomach problems in Varanasi, he does it while ruminating on the ties - cultural, personal, social - that bind our senses of self to us and what it might take to loosen them.


As The Great World Turns by Colum McCann
What is it with Irishmen writing great New York novels? Last year we had Joseph O'Neil's Netherland, and this year Colum McCann has a go, setting his story of interlinking lives in New York on the day of Phillipe Petit's wire-walk between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre during the 1970s. That act forms a poetic link - a barely glimpsed backdrop which surfaces at a few crucial junctures of the novel, which is otherwise concerned with the lives of an Irish Missionary Priest in the projects, of an aging and imprisoned hooker, of an artist involved in a car accident, of a Mother mourning a son lost to Vietnam, and of a photographer obsessed with the City's graffiti, among others. The only other McCann I have read is his debut, and while it was beautifully written, the sense persisted that it was teh work of an author yet to fully find his own voice. That sense is long gone, it seems. McCann's writing is rapturous, beautifully stylish and compelling, and the book just flows across the pages on its river of voices. The way it all ties in with Petit's walk - and by extension, with the future fate of the Twin Towers - is marvellously, subtly conveyed in a warm and moving final chapter set in the present day. A lovely book, deserving of all its praise and awards.

The Other by David Guterson
Guterson takes a quantum step forward with this novel. His most famous book, Snow Falling On Cedars, is a literary thriller, original, atmospheric, haunting and never less than gripping, and he followed it with East of the Mountains, a more meditative and difficult novel about faith and mortality and then Our Lady of the Forest, an even darker book, concerned with the effects of a series of divine apparitions upon a small community. The Other tells the tale of two young men, friends from their mid-teens, and the separate paths they take into adulthood. The narrator, Neil, falls in love, marries and becomes a teacher in Seattle, content and contemplative. His friend John William, the heir to a fortune, drops out of society and ventures into the wilderness of the Pacific Northwest in order to live as a hermit, with only Neil aware of his secret. The story is told in long tangents, Neil's life and daily existence mixed with episodes of his experiences with John William and his investigations into John William's past. He seeks to understand what drives his friend but is always loyal to him, even when baffled and frustrated by his behaviour. As such, Guterson's book is a fine portrait of intense male friendship, its beats and tensions, its strengths and flaws. It is also a superbly textured novel of life in one corner of North America, presenting a vivid view of Seattle and its mountainous environs through Neil's appreciation of it. Neil's voice is a lovely one - gentle, wise and reflective, and it is the novels greatest virtue. The eventual 'explanation' for John William's self-destructive life is perhaps it's weakest point, but Guterson never belabors this point, and you can choose to ignore it and focus on the more ambiguous notes of that characterisation if you wish. Either way, its a great novel, Guterson's finest yet, and highly recommended.

Nobody Move by Denis Johnson
I love when an established literary novelist kicks back and indulges himself with some genre-play. Here, Johnson, one of America's finest living writers, who won the National Book Award for his last novel, the Vietnam Epic Tree of Smoke (which waits for me on a shelf) writes a cool, clean piece of pure pulp, and he does it beautifully. Serialised in Playboy, and written in four parts to a monthly deadline, this tale of a loser on the run in Southern California, the femme fatale he meets, a large sum of money driving it all, and the assorted bad men after them maintains a sensational pace from start to finish. Its also full of witty dialogue, interesting characters, great writing - Johnson's control of atmsphere and setting is just as precise as ever - and a couple of impressive action scenes. Johnson is capable of so much more, but this might be the most fun I've ever had reading a book by him, and fun is never to be sniffed at.

Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower
A collection of fabulous short stories which are written as all great short stories must be - with an exactitude and feel which leaves no room for error. Towers' stories all have a beginning, middle and end, and he deals less in stylish "slice of life" stories than many of his peers. Instead he tells the story of a Viking raid in modern idiom, and makes it moving and funny and horrifying and even very relevant. He drags us through the hilarious, excrutiating trip made by a man, his daughter and his ex-Wife's new Boyfriend together in a car riven by tension and unspoken animus. He lets us into the life of a man unmoored by his father's death and doing some work for an uncle he barely knows while becoming obsessed with his strange new neighbours and their tropical fish. Tower has a particular gift for the undercurrents between people - dislike, attraction, silent grudges, any sort of agenda. But he can also paint a scene with a few lovely sentences and he draws his characters with a telling concision. In short, this is a great collection, and if you don't usually read short stories, I would recommend this book anyway. And anything else Tower might write in the future.

American Adulterer by Jed Mercurio
Mercurio created Bodies for the BBC based upon his debut novel, and the series recently placed in the Guardian's list of the 50 Best TV Drama Ever. But Mercurio has greatly developed as a novelist since then. Ascent, his 2007 character study of the life of a Russian cosmonaut, was a poetic, meditative, brilliantly-modulated novel with a big James Salter influence. American Adulterer is a study of the presidency of John F Kennedy told from a personal perspective. The politics are secondary as Mercurio focuses on JFK's relationship with his wife and children and with the many women he slept with during those years. Some attempt is made to explain the President's compulsive behaviour - he gets headaches when he abstains, as he is reported to have told Harold MacMillan, and he is obsessed with how people see him and is conspicuously comfortable with women in a way his alpha male competitiveness won't allow him to be with men - and this is probably the novel's weakest element. But the way Mercurio balances Kennedy's stress about Cuba and Marilyn Monroe and his relationship with Jackie with his many health problems and the weight of his past is always impressive, and his prose, while not quite as cut-glass perfect as in Ascent, is still stylish and clear.


Beatles by Lars Saabye Christensen
This is the biggest -selling Norwegian novel of all time. And if that's not recommendation enough...
First published in Norway in 1984, it is only Christensen's recent raised status as an Internationally successful novelist that gave rise to a UK release for this novel in 2009. It follows four young middle-class Norwegian boys through the 60s and early 70s as they leave School and begin real lives against the turbulence of the cultural changes and political strife of that era. All the way through as they change and grow apart and fall in love and become politically aware and endure mental illness and family problems, their experiences are soundtracked by the music of the band around which the first bonded; the Beatles.
If it sounds generic and over-familiar, well it is, somewhat. But Christensen is such a wise, observant writer, his characters so warm and likeable, his storytelling so effortless, that it is never less than utterly engrossing. It feels universal - I grew up in Dublin in the 80s and 90s and yet I recognised so many of the experiences and people encountered by the characters, and they were so well-rendered, so understood by the author, that I could not help but feel moved. The specific cultural, social and political references just make it feel more authentic, more of a slice of the writer's life. Despite its bagginess and its rambling pace - for life is a baggy, rambling beast, I suspect Christensen believes, life does not do well-ordered narratives - it gripped me like a good thriller and I cared for these people and believed in them more than I do most fictional characters, which is obviously where that powerful emotional charge comes from. That and the sense of melancholy that early on settles over the novel like an Oslo fog, consisting of the sadness of lost youth, decayed friendships and dreams that never quite came true. There is apparently a sequel, as yet untranslated. Yes please.

Into the Western

Some creative talent was just made to make Westerns. Walter Hill, say. Tommy Lee Jones. Viggo Mortenson. But they all know it, you can see it in their choice of material. Others aren't quite there yet. Tom Jane. He desperately needs to play a decent cowpoke with a fast draw and a bloody past in a modest modern Western. I feel its his destiny. Michael Madsen. He did it in Blueberry, but nobody saw that, and got close in Kill Bill to playing the shit-eating bad guy he looks and talks like, but not quite close enough for my liking. Javier Bardem, surely born to play a Mexican bandido? He would imbue such a stock figure with depth and humanity. Salma Hayek. As a whore in some border town.

And then theres Marco Beltrami. Hes a soundtrack Composer, responsible for a dozen forgettable Scores for action and genre movies. Remember the Hellboy score? No, me neither. Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines? Nope, but I'm presuming it ripped off the original theme Bigtime. Live Free or Die Hard? Did that one sound like Michael Kamen's original? I, Robot? Sorry, I'm drawing a complete and utter blank.

But put Beltrami on a Western, and its a different story. Put Beltrami on a Western, and he'll net himself an Oscar nomination.
Maybe its the Morricone factor. Just as some composers seem to feel the need to go all Bernard Hermann whenever they write a score for anything remotely Hitchcockian, many young composers embrace their inner Morricone as soon as men in hats ride by on horses on screen. Out come the surf guitars, the unorthodox choral passages, the eccentric rhythms.
On his score for 3:10 to Yuma, Beltrami is guilty of all this. But he does it all so well. And he writes some great melodies to twist the stylistics around, which is always key. The main theme, a swooningly romantic passage, is lovely and sounds classically Western but also inescapably modern.

This is because Beltrami puts his own stamp on these familiar elements. He modernises where he can - there are synthesisers and samples alongside the electric guitar and orchestra and mandolin. The score sounds like a score for a Western, but could also belong to a modern action film in its propulsive sense of forward momentum, in its constant tension.
Here is the closing theme, the best showcase of that melody:



And this, the very Morricone Bible Study:



3:10 to Yuma is as Classical a Western as Hollywood can make these days, devoted only to telling its story without much in the way of subtext or genre revision in mind, and so the strained romanticism of Beltrami's score is a good fit. His other prominent work on a Western, for Tommy Lee Jones' fantastic The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada is a lot stranger and more experimental, which suits the material. At heart it contains an unmistakeably Western theme, picked out on guitar, but Beltrami surrounds it with strange synth noise, echoes and a jerking percussion which make it thoroughly modern. There are also haunting quivers of what sound like Native American instruments underneath the main melody, which is lovely in itself:



Beltrami seems to be splitting his career cleverly at the moment, working on big genre movies (like the upcoming sci-fi actioner Repo Men and Knowing) and also on projects for quality directors, such as Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker and Bertrand Tavernier's In the Electric Mist. However, there are no Westerns on his slate at the moment, which is a damn shame.

Novelist George Pelecanos loves Westerns. He refers to them in his books - one of his recurring heroes, PI Derek Strange, is a Western nut and even listens to Soundtrack cds at his desk ( I bet he loves Beltrami) - and writes reviews and articles about them on his website and in online and print media. He wrote a great piece for Sight & Sound a few years back in which he discussed Elmore Leonard adaptations, including a couple of Westerns (he praised the unjustly underloved Valdez Is Coming) and I've read his paeans to Classic Western Novels like Oakley Hall's Warlock and Charles Portis' True Grit. He even contributed this List of 10 Best Westerns to Read for Amazon and this one of his favourite Western movies to the Rumpus. So he knows the genre.

His own books are basically Urban Westerns, in a sense. He tells tales of Men in conflict, of law and order, full of moral quandaries and loyalty and violence and blood, of honour and revenge, and always with an extraordinarily vivid sense of place. He has written several period books - altough only The Big Blowdown is set in a period far removed from his own experience - and recently worked as a writer on HBO's The Pacific, set during WW2. But he needs to write a Western. His crime writing has become somewhat repetitive in its setting, characterisation and concerns, and a change of focus would freshen up his approach, I think. A screenplay would be good, but I really want to see Pelecanos try his hand at an Elmore Leonard-style Western novel; taut, spare and gripping the way Leonard used to do it. Pelecanos is more than capable.

A few years ago I would have said I fervently wanted Quentin Tarantino to direct a Western. Now, post-Kill Bill; not so much. But I would love to see Michael Mann on a western. Or Terence Malick. Carlos Regaydas. Scorsese or Soderbergh. Peter Weir. Many more...

niyas tsuj

- This spot was reserved for a teaser for HBO's "The Pacific" that was on YouTube for about two days in late May. It originated in Australian tv, and brief though it was, it suggested something of the scale of this show. Except HBO got rid of all signs of the trailer sharpish, perhaps unwilling to begin any marketing for a programme which will not air until 2010. Produced by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks, it is the companion piece to "Band of Brothers", only focusing on the intertwined stories of three US Servicemen in the Pacific theatre of the Second World War. Its the most expensive television production ever attempted, its got some quality talent behind the camera and writing the scripts and the cast is composed mainly of unknowns and barely-knowns. It looks great, and if its anywhere near as good as "Band of Brothers", then we're in for a treat.

- Glen David Gold's second novel, "Sunnyside" is finally released this week, eight years after his fine debut, "Carter Beats the Devil" made its bow. Writers can be terrible this way, stretching out a novel, endlessly tweaking, trimming and thinning, stopping and starting. This one is about Charlie Chaplin, WW1 and America, and it sounds intriguing. A couple of other writers I love have books out over the next few months. Again, they're extremely long-awaited:

James Ellroy's "Bloods A Rover", the final part of his USA trilogy, which is out in September. Long long awaited by Ellroy disciples...


David Mazzuchelli's even longer-awaited "Asterios Polyp", which has gotten unsurprisingly rave reviews and is out in July.


- Simon Kuper is, for my money, the best football writer working today. He once edited the short-lived periodical of literary writing about the Beautiful Game; "Perfect Pitch" and his book "Football Against the Enemy" is something of a masterpiece, and hugely influential. In this month's issue of "Four Four Two" he contributes a dazzling portrayal of Johann Cruyff which for anybody too young to appreciate the man's genius, is an absolute must. The article mentions several legendary goals and tricks, and almost all of them are included in this short clip:



- Gustav Hasford was a former combat reporter in Vietnam who became quite a celebrated Nam novelist upon this return. His novel "The Short Timers" formed the basis for "Full Metal Jacket", and great stuff it is too. However it, like all his books, is bafflingly, currently out of print. But available to read in its entirety here at his official website, as are all of his books and seemingly everything he ever wrote. He was an interesting character - at a dlunch meeting with Stanley Kubrick and fellow Nam scribe, Michael Herr (who went on to write the screenplay of "Full Metal Jacket") Kubrick leaned over to Herr and whispered "I can't work with this man"...

- A beautiful and limited Yojimbo print by Paul Pope, available to buy (if you're lucky to find there are any left) right here:



- It is an irresistible idea; bringing an Asian Warrior to the old West. The obvious examples - "Red Sun", "Shanghai Knights", and even "Kung Fu" all fudge it somewhat in the execution, however. Either not really Western enough, or half-hearted in their martial arts shapes. Recently the cross-pollination seems to be going the other way and so we end up with "The Good, the Bad and the Weird" and "Sukiyaki Western Django". This, "The Warriors Way" is a directorial debut, and it looks a little bit insane, if in a good way:


- Lee Weeks is a much underrated artist, perhaps too old-fashioned for current tastes, and under-utilized as a result. I love his stuff, though, and its suggestions of Toth and Wally Wood and Gil Kane. He gives good cover, too, as this "Tarzan vs Predator" shot proves:



- I'm currently reading Dean Wareham's fantastic memoir, "Black Postcards", which has made me go back and listen to more of my Galaxie 500 and Luna stuff, which I've always liked. And this eerie, beautiful, poetic, magical song stands out:



Top? Where? Who?
Oh, her...

Joanne Whalley. (Kilmer?)

J-J-J-J-Just s-s- s-s-

- Darwyn Cooke, one of my favourite cartoonists, tries his hand at hard-boiled crime comics with "The Hunter", an adaptation of one of Richard Stark's Parker novels. Which looks beautiful, and knowing the estimable, scarily talented Cooke (if you haven't read "New Frontier" you need to go to Amazon right now and buy it) will be a great read too:



- Last year I was dreading Sam Mendes' adaptation of "Revolutionary Road", because the director was wrong, the casting was wronger, and the mere fact of the movie was wrongest. This year I find I'm looking forward, sorta, to John Hillcoat's adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's "The Road". Interesting director, great screenwriter (Joe Penhall) and good casting of Viggo Mortensen in the lead. But when I read and loved the book I wasn't father to a little boy. Now I am, and I imagine that the film may be unbearably moving, if it captures even a tenth of the book's power. Anyway, the long-awaited trailer, featuring an excrutiating first 20 seconds or so of exposition reportedly entirely absent from the finished cut:



- Chris Ware, genius that he is, has contributed this amazing little single-page story about web culture and virtual friendship to Wired, which is almost worth buying the magazine for:



- Hernanes, next next-big-thing from Brazil, is currently playmaker for Sao Paolo, the country's most successful club in recent years. No doubt he'll be in Europe soon at a Big Italian, Spanish or Portuguese club. Its safe to say he's quite useful:



- The novelist Rick Moody is of that generation of US writers (alongside the likes of Jonathan Lethem and Michael Chabon, say) whose work is absolutely suffused in pop culture. Its an explicit presence in all of his writing, from the use of the Fantastic Four as a metaphor in "The Ice Storm", to the film references in "The Diviners". But music seems to have a particular centrality in Moody's worldview, as indicated by the references to the Jersey scene of the early 80s in "Garden State" and a particular story in his collection, "Demonology". "Wilkie Fahnstock: The Boxed Set" is a short story in the form of a set of liner notes to a 10-volume mix-tape chronicling the title character's life. The tracklisting is in a column on one side of the page, the liner notes in another. Moody has good, interesting, varied taste in music, which goes along way to redeeming the clever-clever aspects of the conceit. "The Feelies", one of the great lost bands of the 80s, feature prominently in "Garden State", and "Wilkie Fahnstock" is almost the perfect hipster playlist in its careful eclecticism.
Recently he's started to write a music blog for The Rumpus , which is a good read if you're interested in that kind of thing (Jazz, Springsteen, Syd Shaw, Frank Zappa) or in Moody's writing in general. Last year he also contributed a fascinating, rewarding playlist to the New York Times , which is, pleasingly, surprisingly heavy on folk music, not an interest I would have ever suspected Moody of having...all of which is basically just an excuse allowing me to post this. The Feelies greatest song, and one of my favourite songs of all time, "The Boy with the Perpetual Nervousness":



- Robert E. Howard created a slew of characters, but the 3 most important are the most visible in modern popular culture. Conan The Cimmerian, of course, is arguably the most popular and recognisable character in all fantasy literature, Tolkein excluded. Kull the Conqueror was the hero of a Kevin Sorbo film a few years ago. But the influence of Solomon Kane is more subtle. A 17th Century English Puritan gunman who travels widely across Africa and Europe, fighting and converting heathens, his character is more difficult and less instantly appealing. His influence is obvious visually across the fantasy and SF genres, however. Both Vampire Hunter D. and Van Helsing (and even V, in V for Vendetta, to some extent) are dead ringers for Kane. Kane himself seems to have been developed as a period version of the Shadow, in hatwear and cape, at least. But a new film, starring James Purefoy in the title role, should bring Kane himself into the cultural spotlight to some extent. Illustrator Gary Gianni has done some terrific Kane work in the past, perhaps establishing a definitive look for the character, which even that film appears to echo.



- I've talked here before about my affection for "Red Dead Revolver". Well, the sequel is incoming. Only this time its a free-roaming game, GTA in the West by all accounts. "Gun", only good, I'm hoping. Also hopeful that this has better acting, characters and plotting than GTA, and less tedium. Oh yeah, and more choice spaghetti soundtrack cuts. Whatever, the trailer looks great:



- Speaking of spaghetti Western soundtracks, the Cannes programme includes a listing of the Soundtrack for Tarantino's "Inglorious Basterds". The best thing about each of his last three films has been the soundtrack, and this one sounds just as good, stuffed to the gills as it is with Morricone, Tiomkin, both Charles and Elmer Bernstein, Gianni Ferrio and Lalo Schifrin, with just a little bit of Billy Preston and Bowie/Moroder thrown in. I am there. ITunes, I mean...

- YouTube is a treasure trove of boxing footage. When I was a kid, boxing was awesome. Giants still fought in the heavyweight division. Ali had only just retired. Larry Holmes was in his pomp. A young pitbull named Tyson was carving his name in the division in short, brutal fights. But even better was the Middleweight division, where the "Four Kings" co-existed to create the richest division since the Heavyweight era of Ali, Frasier, Foreman and Norton in the 1970s. Those four fighters were Roberto Duran, "Sugar" Ray Leonard, Thomas "Hitman" Hearns and "Marvelous" Marvin Hagler. They fought each other in different combinations over the course of a decade, creating a series of classic encounters. The most classic was "the War" between Undisputed World Champion Hagler and in-form Hearns at Caesars Palace on April 15, 1985. The first round may be the most exciting I've ever seen, and I vividly remember watching it in a Saturday morning ITV replay with my Dad. I doubt any fight I've seen since has really lived up to it, in its relentlessly gripping pace, its clash of style and personality and the sense that it was two true Greats, and equals at that, determined to beat the crap out of one another. Consider that the early stunning right Hearns catches Hagler with broke Hearns' hand. Consider that Hagler had only seconds before the fight would be stopped due to his bleeding eye. Consider that this fight is like something from a video game. When you've finished watching this, follow the links to watch Part 2. You know its right:



Top?
Valerie Perrine.
Miss Tesmacher to you, bud.

Saying Just

- I'm on a real short story kick at at the moment and the best young short story writer I've recently come across is named Wells Tower (which, yes, is his real name). His collection, "Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned" is fantastic, full of finely honed, beautifully written stories which are remarkably well-observed and funny, truthful and occasionally disturbing. Yet they are generally heavier on plot than the microscopic observation which dominates the form of the modern short story. Things happen in Tower's stories. There are unexpected twists and turns. Never more so than in the title story of the collection, a story of a Viking Raid on a coastal town and its consequences, narrated in a modern American idiom by a decidedly reluctant pillager. The first line gives a little of the flavour: "Just as we were all getting back into the mainland domestic groove, somebody started in with dragons and crop blights from across the North Sea." It is a great story, unlike anything else I've ever read. And you can find it in its entirety right here.



- The pictures of Megan Fox dressed as the hottest Old West Whore since Claudia Cardinale on the set of "Jonah Hex" set me to pondering on the character of Jonah himself and Western comics in general. I like Western Comics. From the classic Fleischer Hex stories (particularly those with Garcia-Lopez art) to Mobius on "Blueberry", to "Lucky Luke" and Azzarello's "Loveless", Westerns make for good comics. All this in turn led me to check out "High Moon", a Western-Horror on DC's web-comic imprint, "Zuda". I don't read many web-comics and this is an interesting read on that basis alone, for what it suggests are the strengths and drawbacks of the medium itself. The story and art are ok, but the premise is pretty good and its worth a glance. The image above, on the other hand, is a classic Nick Cardy "Bat Lash" cover that I just had to include because its so lovely...

- "Batman: Dead End", the impressively slick and assured 2003 short fan film featuring Batman, the Joker and Alien and Predator, was primarily intended as a showreel for the directorial skill of Director Sandy Collora. Well, it worked, as "Hunter Prey", Collora's debut feature, is nearing release. A determinedly 70s-retro feel to the photography and design instantly marks it out as something different to most mainstream SF. Basically, it looks somewhat like a Star Wars fan film. But a really good one, with lots of violence:



- As I've written before, there are only a handful of Playmakers in the classic mode surviving in modern football. Riquelme, Diego, Gourcuff, to name a few, as well as the Brazilian Ederson, who is being played out of position at Lyon to accommodate the waning talents of Juninho. In previous seasons however, he was phenomenal for Nice, scoring regular belters like this one:



- Next Season, Arsenal will wear a Green ("Hunter Green", to be precise) away kit in Europe. Supposedly in homage to the (reputedly unlucky) away kit worn in 1982-83 and rapidly abandoned (in a similar vein, Man United's new kit is a tribute to thier 1909 kit, White-V from the shoulders and all). Not too many clubs play in green, is the thing. Countries (Ireland, Ivory Coast, Mexico for instance) do, since its a staple of many flags and even key to certain National identities and myths. But disregarding those that wear green stripes (like Celtic, Betis and Sporting Lisbon), how many Big clubs play in Green? None in England, unless you count Plymouth Argyle as a Big club. Saint Etienne in France, Werder Bremen in Germany, Palmeiras, Panathanaikos...In a world inescapaby dominated by red and blue, green is an unfashionable colour for a football shirt, it seems. A friend suggested to me that this was down to the folk superstition associating green with bad luck, which makes some sense, I suppose. What also makes sense is that Nike would ignore any such superstition in its lust for money through increased sales of as many new kits as it can churn out.



- One of the great voices of 90s Indie, singing one of the best songs of 90s Indie:



Topside?
Jacqueline Bisset, officially the most beautiful woman in the world back then. Seriously.

Just....sayin?

- I've complained before on this blog about the unavailability of various films on DVD. But I understand it doesn't make much financial sense for DVD producers to create costly discs of niche films that then fail to sell. Warner Brothers seem to have come up with a solution to this problem, with their new "Warners Classic Archive" operation. They have an enormous library of back catalogue titles unavailable at present, and they've just opened up a small portion of it. If you want one of these films on disc, you order it from the website. They print one off specifically for you. The selection is quite mixed, but there are a couple of intriguing possibilities: Francis Ford Coppola's "The Rain People" and Paul Simon's "One Trick Pony" both jump out at me. But whats more exciting are the possibilities it raises...



- If "Burn After Reading" was exactly the opposite of what I wanted the Coens to do after the success of "No Country for Old Men", and the forthcoming "A Serious Man" is exactly the opposite of what I would have liked them to do for a follow-up to the follow-up, they've finally made me happy with the announcement of what their next project will be. Charles Portis' "True Grit" is a great Western novel which was turned into a middling (but Oscar-winning) John Wayne vehicle by Henry Hathaway in 1969. The novel follows a young girl as she hunts the murderer of her father through Indian territory with the aid of a legendary US Marshall and Texas Ranger pursuing the killer for a different crime. The true glory of the novel - in common with Portis' other work - is the strength of the distinctive voice, for the girl narrates the novel in a sort of off-kilter frontier poetry. But the characters are pretty memorable too, none more so than Rooster Cogburn, the Marshall portrayed by Wayne in 1969, and a role crying out for Tommy Lee Jones in the Coens' version. What is really exciting is that the book seems a perfect fit with the Brother's sensibility: dark, violent, witty and yet slyly funny. Plus, every director should make at least One Western in their career.

- Some exciting announcements at DC of late. Kyle Baker on a very Joe Kubert-looking Hawkman, for one:




- Recent news that a fourteen year old product of the Real Madrid youth academy by the name of Enzo Zidane (whose many Youtube clips feature a pirouette very much like his Dad's) is to make his debut for the Spain under 15s made me think of this clip of Paolo Maldini's eight year old son executing a stunningly perfect sliding tackle on Clarence Seedorf at a Milan party (unsurprisingly, he's already on Milan's books):



- Mondo Tees do t-shirts and posters and stuff. Many are beautiful, some are funny, most are cool. This poster for "Point Blank" is just awesome:



- Back in the grunge era, I always preferred Pearl Jam to Nirvana, which wasn't the fashionable choice. Pearl Jam were too earnest, too rawk, too corporate (though they later proved that to be decidedly not the case). Now it makes sense to me, since Pearl Jam came far more from a Classic Rock tradition, whereas Nirvana had their roots in Punk, and I always had more of a leaning towards Classic Rock than Punk. Anyway, for a few years in my mid to late teens, they were easily my favourite band. A gateway act, too, leading me away from metal and towards wider, fresher territory. The shiny new super-duper reissue version of "Ten", originally released in 1991(!!) makes me feel very very old. But it also reminds me of what a great band they were and how much I loved them back then, and why. I have the first three records on my ITunes, and one of their songs crashing into a shuffle always makes me smile. Especially "State of Love & Trust", off the brilliant "Singles" soundtrack. I first encountered the song on their appearance on MTV Unplugged, and it took me a while to get my head around the electric version on "Singles", but I finally did. It rocks. The unplugged version, however, edges it somewhat in my opinion. Pearl Jam didn't approach Unplugged the way most bands did. Nirvana, say, showed up and played a polite, quiet little show. Dave Grohl used brushes on his kit. They foregrounded Cobain's melodic, pop songwriting ability at the expense of the fuzz and white noise of their records. It worked, it made for a great show and a nice album. Pearl Jam, however, just treated it like any other gig. They rocked, in other words. Acoustic guitars are battered, nary a brush comes near the drums, it all gets quite loud. Theres a DVD of the appearance on the new "Ten", which may be reason enough for me to get it. But then again, I know it off by heart. I must have watched this performance at least a hundred times as a 16 year old:



That? Up there?
Tuesday Weld.

Just Sayin Yet Again

- Armando Ianucci's "The Thick of It" is quality satirical comedy, with a great performance from Peter Capaldi at its dark, bitter little heart, and the forthcoming movie version adds James Gandolfini and Tom Hollander and looks funny enough to go on my short list of comedies not to miss in 2009 (alongside "Black Dynamite", "The Hangover", "Bruno" and "Transformers 2"):



- Tony Gilroy wrote and directed "Michael Clayton" a couple of years ago, and his new film, "Duplicity" opens this week. So The New Yorker give him a long, respectful profile which is full of fascinating tidbits about his role in the creation of the Bourne series (pretty fundamental, it seems) and his views on the work of Paul Greengrass (not so big a fan) together with the usual guff about his approach to writing. Good stuff.

- Juan Pablo Aimar with the most beautiful piece of control...followed by a botched finish:



- Christopher Sorrentino's "Trance" is one of my favourite novels of the last decade, and he's contributed to Granta's "Fathers" issue with this lovely little piece which encompasses a lifetime and a world in one thrilling paragraph. When is that next book due?

- DC Nation features a coy little preview of the new Grant Morrison/Frank Quitely collaboration. But nobody seems quite sure whether its in-continuity or some sort of AllStar project. Whatever, it features the best creative theam in mainstream comics of the last decade or so working on these two characters:



- "Theme de Camille" by Georges Delerue from Godard's "Le Mepris" (also used by Scorsese in "Casino"). Absolutely beautiful. But cut to a load of perfume adverts, to weirdly comic effect. Listen, don't watch, is my advice:



Up top?
Gong Li.
You knew that.

My booky wooks

I've never done a Books of the Year. Mainly because I don't read all that many newly-released books in a Calendar year, I think. I tend to read far more widely, lots of "classics", a bit of non-fiction, some genre stuff, then by the end of a year what I read and when all blurs into one long reading experience without beginning or end. I also tend to avoid writing at length about books, an English Lit degree and the hours of deconstruction and essay composition that entailed being at least partly to blame.

But this year I read a bit less, for various reasons. Still more or less a book every ten days or so, but thats well down on how much I used to read. And it means I remember what I read when more clearly. Including some fine novels published in the last year.
So, in no particular order:

The Brief Wondrous life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
An intimate epic chronicling the life of an obese second generation Dominican immigrant in New York and the Dominican Republic, this masterpiece more than met the expectations of anyone hoping for great things after Diaz's extraordinary collection of stories, "Drown". Narrated by a friend whose cultural touchstones all emanate from geek culture (there are continual references to superhero comics, sci-fi movies and the Lord of the RIngs), Diaz demonstrates the richness of his talent in every facet of this book. The voice is vivid and original and utterly convincing, the narrative unexpectedly gripping and finally moving, the tone and sense of place perfectly judged and evoked. But it is the books scope and ambition, the way it includes a history of the Dominican Republic in the Twentieth Century and a torrid family saga while never losing its focus on Oscar and his search for love, that is most impressive.


Netherland by Joseph O'Neill
This was the favourite for the Booker until it failed to even make the longlist. Too good for the Booker, then. A rambling narrative concerning a Dutchman (spiritually and emotionally) lost in Manhattan after separating from his wife and young son and his encounters with a Trinidadian full of plans to make Cricket a global sport, the beauty of this novel is all contained in O'Neill's achingly lovely writing. His prose is luminous, poetic, and yet effortless in that inimitably American way best displayed by the work of Updike, Roth or Bellow, say. From a writer born in Ireland, raised in Holland and living in the US, the warmth and panoramic vision of a World still off balance in the years after 9/11 is impressively, even soulfully conveyed. O'Neill's voice is assured, measure, confident, precise. The kind of book I wanted to go on reading, not because I wanted to know how the story ended - its not that kind of book - but because the prose gave me so much pleasure.

Lush Life by Richard Price
Always the most literary of the "holy trinity" of Big Crime Novelists who work on "The Wire" (the other two being George Pelecanos and Denis Lehane), it finally struck me who Richard Price's writing reminded me of whilst reading this novel, his eighth.
He's like Jay McInerney with vastly different subject matter. And less pretension. This dense, telling novel is a police procedural, a portrayal of a couple of different strata of New York society and a political commentary on the state of modern America, focusing particularly on its racial politics and class tensions. Three drunken young men are robbed at gunpoint one night. Only one of them challenges the gun pointed at him and dies. Price then plunges us into the lives of the police investigating this murder, of the teenaged killer, and of the ageing hipster who survived and witnessed the violence. It never feels like a straight crime novel, with Price always just as interested in the milieu his characters move in as he is in their movements toward a resolution. New York is the main protagonist - its tenement walk-ups, its boho bars, its bodegas - and he paints it as vividly and completely as anyone ever has.
Price's dialogue is unparalleled - funny, realistic, brilliantly captured, with a rhythm all its own.

The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano
Bolano is probably the hottest author in the literary media right about now. Full page adverts for his (latest and final) novel 2666 in all the broadsheets, a three page article in the Guardian book supplement, mentions on every book-blog of note. Why? Well, he is dead, for one thing. The media loves a posthumous success. His life - arrested in Pinochet's Chile, a "literary Terrorist" in Mexico, a junkie/poet/odd job man in Catalonia before he gained any literary success at all - reads like a tall tale, romantic and fascinating. And then there is his writing. His sudden appearance in the English-language scene was startling, because he arrived fully formed, with a unique and brilliant style and his own themes and obsessions already well developed and fixed in place. I read his short story collection "Last Evenings on Earth" in hardback a few years ago and was stunned by it and its portrayals of poets and lost men in Mexico and Spain, obsessions and disintegrating relationships, all told in his sonorous, deceptively readable voice, and sought out his other early, short novels. "The Savage Detectives", originally published in Spain a few years ago, is another thing entirely, an epic novel with distinct sections, imposingly dense but breathtakingly brilliant. It begins as the diary of a young poet in Mexico City in the 1970s, then becomes a history of two of his friends - told by a host of narrators they have encountered as they travelled across the globe over the years - before rewinding to focus on their experiences of searching for a reclusive poet in Mexico in the 70s. I have not finished it. I read 100 page sections, its density exhausts me, and I put it down for a few weeks before returning to it. But what a pleasurable way to read a book, knowing its there, waiting for me all of the time, and that Bolano will never let me down. And I still have 2666 to read...

The Delivery Man by Joe McGinniss Jr.
A debut novel. Concerning a group of friends in their 20s in Las Vegas becoming involved in prostitution and smalltime crime. Written with a feel for mood and emotional chill which is stunning. The hero, the delivery man of the title, is a young Teacher with dreams of being an artist, slowly poisoning his own life through his old friendships and his inability to shake them off and move on. The sense of inertia and powerlessness are terrifying. The portrait of the MySpace generation is alienating and yet feels true. The prose - flat and precise, punchy and somehow blank - develops its own poetry, until it is almost hypnotic, the ending ghastly yet compulsive.



Everything by Grant Morrison
That "everything" would include "Final Crisis", "AllStar Superman" and "Batman", drawn by many hands, most notably Frank Quitely and J.G. Jones. All of them Superhero Comics set in the DC Universe, which has revealed itself to be the perfect toybox for Morrison to play around with. Lets start with "Batman", easily the worst of the three titles. Here Morrison's grand plan took an age to unfold, complicated by crossovers and general continuity issues. And continuity was his subject, really - his Batman was a man who had lived through all of the Batman's comic history - the rather primitive early years, the silliness of the 60s, the darkness of the 70s and 90s, all of it, every battle, every beating, every horrific sight and encounter with the supernatural or evil or ultradimensional - and it was beginning to take a psychological toll. Somewhat sabotaged by awful art, Morrison's Batman stories betray his usual problems. He tries to do too much, his plotting feels a little haphazard, his ideas are sometimes placed on top of the narrative rather than expressed through it, but it still had its moments of absolute, shining brilliance. Not least its ending, when Batman's plan was revealed. Batman also featured crucially in "Final Crisis", which still has one issue to go. Morrison has refined his technique over the years, when it comes to these massive crossovers. Now he makes them seem almost effortless, the way he juggles dozens of characters and plotlines, the bigger picture never slipping out of focus, the satisfying genre moments always delivered. Has anyone ever written Darkseid as well as he does, or made the Anti-Life equation seem so evil and horrific? I doubt it. And still he manages to smuggle in his interests, his ideas, hard science and physics, philosophy, all bubbling under the surface of his narrative about vigilantes and gods punching one another.
"AllStar Superman" may just be the best thing hes ever done, in a way. Pure and simple and beautiful, yet complex and demanding. It works as a sublime Superman story, yet also critiques Superman stories. Superman stories are not about Superman in combat, for as many who loathe - or just fail to see the appeal of - the character point out, there is no tension in that. Superman, as a character of near-limitless means and ability, opens up the universe to a writer. He can go anywhere, do more or less anything. Yet he is human in his heart, a midwestern farmboy raised by the Kents. A good Superman story should therefore be about wonder, about awe, cities in bottles, other worlds and dimensions and concepts that strain our imaginations. Morrison wrote such a story and Frank Quitely drew it absolutely beautifully. It is, finally, magnificently moving, and made me love Superman more than any story about the character has done since Alan Moore wrote him. Morrison is the finest writer working in mainstream comics.

Sway by Zachary Lazar
This cool, black novel traces periods in the lives of Keith Richards, Brian Jones, Mick Jagger and Kenneth Anger, connecting them thematically, bringing in Charles Manson and addressing the legacy of the 1960s and its dark heart. The writing is so good, so convincing, that we forget who the protagonists are meant to be, and it doesn't matter. What matters is this story, the evil in it, the energy and vigour.

Inventing the Pyramid by Jonathan Wilson
I read a lot of books about football. This was the best one I read this year, a history of tactics by one of the Guardian's better football hacks, who was responsible for a great study of Eastern European football a few years back. Here he traces the games development from a no-passing, all-dribbling frenzy, through the W-M and catenaccio eras, up until todays high pressure possession game, by analysing specific teams and key games. And to anyone with any interest, it is riveting - well-researched, convincingly argued, often witty and nicely written.

Sharp Teeth by Toby Barlow
A novel about werewolves in modern Los Angeles, who operate in little profit and blood-hungry clans. Told in verse. It works, beautifully. Because Barlow, who contributes to N+1, can really write. His work here is terse, lyrical, lovely, scary and stomach-turning when it needs to be. His characters are established and made convincing and real in short little stanzas. The pared-down feel makes it all more haunting and precisely envisioned. The plotting is simple, direct and effective. Against the odds, its a page-turner, but never a potboiler.

Omega the Unknown by Jonathan Lethem and Farel Dalrymple
Lethem has addressed his love of superheroes and comic book culture numerous times in his fiction and journalism, but this is the first time he's ever actually written a superhero story. And true to form its really a story about Aspergers Syndrome and its consequences. It is also one of the most indie and interesting things Marvel has ever published, partly because Dalrymple's art is so different from anything else in the genre. But it is strangely thrilling and utterly unique.

The Portable Frank by Jim Woodring
Frank is a Fantagraphics comic by Jim Woodring which concerns...well, its hard to describe. The stories, told in a deceptively simple style reminiscent of Disney comics if they had been printed with woodblocks, are about a protagonist in a fantasy world full of bizarre, surreal creatures. Only he too is a bizarre creature, a dog (or a cat) wearing gloves (and shoes) who walks on two legs. He has a pet (or companion) which is basically a mantle ornament with a face, legs and tail. And a humanoid slave hog. There is no dialogue. There is often unspeakable violence. The plots are comic parables of struggle with hidden depths. You could probably study them for a lifetime, write dissertations, long books about their meaning. They are hilariously funny, and often eerie and scary, disturbing in their content. Deadpan, never hyperbolic, Woodring is surely some sort of genius. This collection of some of the black & white stories was published this year, but there are many other bigger, more expensive collections of the many colour tales. Buy them all. Thank me later.

Pandora in the Congo by Albert Sanchez Pinol
Catalan Pinol writes literary genre fiction. His first novel, "Cold Skin" was a horror story of amphibious humanoids besieging a tiny Island station in the South Atlantic, held off by two men. It is an amazingly creepy, strangely erotic book, full of metaphoric power and meaning, yet succeeding as a straightforward genre exercise too. This, his second, is a pastiche and critique of a certain kind of Victorian fiction. Conan Doyle and H.G. Wells and H. Rider Haggard and Edgar Rice Burroughs. But it is written by a man who obviously loves those writers and the boys own glee of their best work. So it works, like "Cold Skin", on two levels - story of Victorian Explorers in the Congo and their discovery of an Alien world, and interrogation of Victorian attitudes to colonialism, race and fiction itself. It is superb.

City of Thieves by David Benioff
Benioff wrote "The 25th Hour" a few years ago. Its a pretty good first novel - assured in its voice and sense of place, full of sharp, memorable characters, and extremely tightly plotted. He adapted the book for Spike Lee's commendable film version and turned that into a well-paid career as a screenwriter which has never lived up to his novel (or the short story collection "When the Nines Roll Over" which followed it) on films like "Troy", "Stay" and "The Kite Runner". He also married Amanda Peet, the bastard. Well, just to prove he can still write, this year brought "City of Thieves," a novel set during the Siege of Leningrad, and following the desperate quest of two young military prisoners for some eggs to save their own skins. Again, that gift for voice and place was evident, again the characters were well-drawn and real. He is a natural novelist, and his ability seems to me to straddle the line between literary and popular fiction pretty evenly, meaning that he may struggle to find an audience. Which would be a shame. More novels, less screenplays - that would be nice though...

"What art offers is space"

"Existence itself does not feel horrible; it feels like an ecstasy, rather, which we have only to be still to experience."



John Updike died. He was - until a few minutes ago when I read of his passing and my jaw literally dropped - quite possibly my favourite living author. There is a poster for the 1970 adaptation of "Rabbit, run" on the wall beside my computer. There are more of his books on my shelves than there are by any other writer.

He died without having won the Nobel Prize for Literature, something the Nobel Committee should feel great shame about. For he was one of the great writers of the Twentieth Century, both popular and prolific but never less than challenging and often profound. What he accomplished better than any other writer I can think of, put simply, was to capture what it feels like to be alive. The sensory experience of living from moment to moment, with all the flavours and sights and scents and aches and confusions and joys that entails. How it feels to drive with the radio on, the peculiar ecstasy of that, for instance. What sex is really like, in all its messy and complicated intimacy. And he did it poetically, in prose which always read like it was written by a poet, in prose that was often musical and always precise. He also managed to address wider concerns, political and sociological and cultural issues. But his better books hum with beauty, both in the style of the writing, from lovely sentence to lovely sentence, and in his appreciation for what makes life so wonderful and thrilling and sometimes terrible.

He was perhaps the greatest stylist of his generation. This was one of the great criticisms of Updike - that his writing was too beautiful. The Rabbit Tetralogy, in particular, is repeatedly accused of this. Since it chronicles the life of Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, an American Everyman figure, from his 20s until his death in his 60s/70s, and is mostly told from his perspective, some critics feel the writing should reflect how such a man would interpret the world. Meaning without Updike's own marvelous eye and ear. But Updike shows that Rabbit is not stupid, that he has his sensitivities and obvious flaws, and his prose never gets between the reader and the character. Rather it reveals him in greater depth, I think. The criticism basically boils down to an accusation of style but not always substance. Which, in some of his work, is inescapably true. But Updike wrote so much his ouevre was always bound to be a mixed bag. There are a few duds among his more than twenty novels, the odd pedestrian short story. Style does occasionally triumph over substance. But so what? When it is such grand style, when reading it is such an intense and dependable pleasure, who cares?

Thankfully, Updike was insanely prolific. Novels, short stories, criticism - he wrote plenty of each form. I have still got quite a lot of Updike reading ahead of me. If you haven't read him and are wondering where to start, some suggestions:

- Couples (1968) Novel about a circle of adulterous middle class couples in a Boston dormitory town in the 1960s. The first Updike I read, it bowled me over with its concise vision of how people lie to themselves and each other and its frank view of sexual politics. And of course its beauty. It was quite controversial at the time of its release for its sexual explicitness.

- The Early Stories: 1953 - 1975 (2003) The depth and breadth of his control and ambition is best seen in his short stories, often perfectly formed little jewels of wisdom and compressed narrative. This collection is a brilliant primer.

- Too Far to Go/ Your Lover Just Called (1979) The Maples stories focus on a married couple through their life together, children and ultimately, divorce; and combine Updike's brilliance with longer, serial narrative, with the elegance and perfection of his short stories.

- Marry Me (1977) His rawest, most emotional work is the story of adultery and the destruction of a marriage, territory he visited again and again in his work. But never with quite this depth of feeling or despair.

- Self-Consciousness: Memoirs (1989)

- The Rabbit Tetralogy (1960-2001) Made up of five books written over forty years, the Rabbit series (Rabbit, run, Rabbit Redux, Rabbit is Rich, Rabbit at Rest and Rabbit Remembered) is the greatest achievement of postwar American fiction, in my opinion. Funny, moving, filled with brilliant, acute characters, the books are also tightly plotted, densely imagined works about America itself and its changing culture and society. Taken together they also offer a subtle and haunting portrayal of aging and ultimately, mortality. I read Rabbit, Run in my mid-twenties, when I was more or less the same age Rabbit is as the novel begins. The perfect time to read the book, and it had a massive effect upon me.

But really, any Updike is good. even the lesser books contain their pleasures. He was incapable of writing badly. His criticism is also worth a look - he was a warm and wise and voracious reader and his insights are always useful and constructive. If you read and you haven't read any of his work, then you owe it to yourself to change that. To read him was, strangely, to be made feel more alive, such was his appreciation of the joy of living, and that is a rare gift for any writer.
He will be missed.