Mid-life reading: "The Guts" by Roddy Doyle

Exactly as I was supposed to, I picked this book up in Waterstones in Nottingham on a quick impulse, thinking: "I'll give that one a go". The cover gives you'll the clues: Roddy Doyle, the author; not one, but two references to The Commitments, and its protagonist Jimmy Rabbitte; as well as the life-affirming and triumphant citation from the Irish Post.

Why didn't they just put something like: this book is for 50 year-old men who twenty plus years ago loved Roddy Doyle's Barrytown novels but who are bit older now and need a dose of humorous reassurance  about that fact, not to mention about actually pretty nasty things that are starting to impinge on their lives, like bowel cancer?

Well, enter your (still, just) 50 year-old guy, who, in a considerably pre-blog era, devoured the three joyous Barrytown Trilogy novels - The Commitments, The Snapper, The Van - as well as the successive Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha and The Woman Who Walked Into Doors, which, although undoubtedly less joyous, remain among the most powerful and memorable works of fiction I have ever read. I stuck with Doyle for one more, A Star Called Henry, but than drifted away, as I think many of Doyle's readers did. Perhaps it was he who drifted away.

But who more than me, and my like, to snaffle a copy of The Guts, with its promise of a nostalgic return to Barrytown and curiosity about how our fictional contemporaries are ageing?

So, now, having completed the book, do I feel like a victim of a marketer's ploy and the need of an author to cash in on past glories? 

In a word, no. 

The Guts perhaps does not have the crazed energy of the The Commitments but it does have the humour, the sense of place and the terrible language of its predecessor combined with, yes, a degree of subtlety and grounded wisdom which would not have been right for the younger Jimmy Rabbitte. 

Unflinching reading: "Levels of Life" by Julian Barnes

This is an odd book. It is in three parts. The first, The Sin of Height, is essentially an historical essay, relating the story of early ballooning in France, and in particular the exploits of Nadar, the first man to take aerial photographs. The second, On the Level, is a quasi-fictional account of a love affair between English balloonist and general Victorian man-of-action, Captain Fred Burnaby, and the renowned French actress, Sarah Bernhardt. It ends disappointingly (for him), when Sarah shies away from the marriage he was preparing to propose, but not before they have been ballooning together, relishing their love and their ability to soar over the people below.

These two sections, which are engaging to read, but strangely light, do prepare the ground for the third part of the book, The Loss of Depth, through parallels and metaphors of love, transcendence and loss, but, more than anything, they feel like a way for Barnes to pace himself, to work up to the searing, intimate, astoundingly honest account of his own grief at the loss of his wife. 

Julian Barnes' wife, with whom he spent thirty years of his life, was Pat Kavanagh, a literary agent. She died in 2008, just thirty-seven days after being diagnosed with a brain tumour. Barnes nursed her through her last days. The Loss of Depth is not however about the illness and death - in fact Barnes respects his wife's privacy and tells us little about her - but about his experience following her death. Every love story is a potential grief story, he writes early in the book, and his description of his grief at her loss is a testament to the depth of love he felt for her.

Disaster!

Not a book review, but a news flash. Grim tidings, a disaster indeed, or at least a significant blow to the quality of life. The Foyles bookshop in St. Pancras station has CLOSED. (To be replaced by a John Lewis.) 

Late lamented

Where will I buy my serendipitous books now? Here's the roll of honour:

The Traveller's Guide to Medieval England
The Rivers of London
London Under
How to Thrive in the Digital Age
Underground Overground
Expo 58
The Ocean at the End of the Lane
The Circle
Sputnik Sweetheart
Tatiana
Savage Continent
Broken Homes
1984
The Tudors

All bought in Foyles, St. Pancras... The last nine all bought on the same day this year, in what turns out to be my last purchase there (and the point at which it had become so regular, and thus, I suppose, not serendipitous, that I stopped mentioning the fact in the posts). Obviously it wasn't enough to persuade them to keep the shop open.

Shame. Another small setback for civilisation.

Abnormal, psychotic, chaotic reading: "Stuart: A Life Backwards" by Alexander Masters

An extraordinary book, put in my hands by my most literary friend, with the admonition: "see what you think of that". Well, what do I think of that?

But first, what is it? A biography, and the story of writing a biography. Alexander Masters is a PhD student, who - quite how we are not sure - has agreed with one Stuart Shorter, multi-convicted, long-term homeless drug-abuser, prone to outbursts of psychotic violence and surpassing flights of insight and eloquence, to write his life story.

The first attempt goes badly. Or in Stuart's words, it's bollocks boring. He has other ideas:

He wants jokes, yarns, humour. He doesn't admire "academic quotes" and background research. "Nah, Alexander, you gotta start again. You gotta do better than this." 

He's after a bestseller, "like what Tom Clancy writes. 

"But you are not an assassin trying to frazzle the president with anthrax bombs," I point out. You are an ex-homeless, ex-junkie psychopath, I do not add. 

Stuart phrases it another way, then: "Something what people will read."

Somehow they come to the conclusion that Masters will write Stuart's life in reverse, starting with his apparently quite stable present, working back through the homelessness, the drugs, the prison terms, the violence, the abuse, back to before things went wrong. As we go back in Stuart's life, we go forward in the story of its writing, Alexander and Stuart camped out together in front of the Home Office with half of London's homeless, no-hopers and weirdoes to protest against the wrongful conviction of two managers of a homeless shelter; Stuart "losing it" and trashing Alexander's flat; Stuart showing Alexander where the dossers shoot up; Stuart explaining the brutal and bizarre bye-laws of prison, and so on. We trace the writing of the biography as the reverse biography reveals itself and we dig into Stuart's past.

Itinerant reading: "A Short Ride in the Jungle" by Antonia Bolingbroke-Kent

Three, perhaps two and a half, degrees of separation lie between Antonia ("Ants") Bolingbroke-Kent and me.  Her book, which was lent to me by a friend, contained a dedication addressed to him by the author. "Do you know her?" I asked later, after I had read the book. "Not really", he replied, "I've never met her; she's sort of a friend of a friend, but I was in touch with her during her trip on Facebook, exchanging a few thoughts about Vietnam and so on." 

So two and a half degrees is about right.

Antonia Bolingbroke-Kent is, in her own words, a "writer, TV producer, traveller and lover of the curious and quirky". As a TV producer, we discover, she has worked on many BBC travel documentaries which have taken her professionally to - or at least in the direction of - places in which she has subsequently undertaken personal journeys. Such is the case of the subject of this book, a solo exploration of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, previously visited while working on a Top Gear special featuring the nation's favourite three uber-blokes larking around on scooters in Vietnam. You don't have to read too closely between the lines to discern that such programmes are very far from what they seem, with our laddish heroes accompanied by hordes of mechanics to fix the machines they bust and insisting on five-star hotel accommodation to help them recover from their exertions of an evening. No such cosseting for Ants (I shall call her "Ants"; everyone does, it seems, and besides getting us past the aristocratic resonances of the name, Ants is also considerably shorter to type than Antonia Bolingbroke-Kent), for whom the journey was explicitly an exploration of place, history and self. 

The idea was indeed, also self confessedly, rather mad. I had been under the impression, admittedly without having really considered the matter, that the Ho Chi Minh Trail was, well, a trail, i.e. a single route linking two places. But no, the Trail is a vast network of often near-impassable trails, threading through the mountains and jungles of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. With two seconds thought, this is rather obvious. To commit the entire military supply line to North Vietnamese forces to a single route would have been suicidal. Even the network of small hidden trails running through three countries was intensively, mind-bogglingly so, bombed by the USAF.