Having adored Baz Luhrmann’s new film of The Great Gatsby (which I blogged about here), I just couldn’t wait to re-read the book. It must have been a couple of decades since I last read it, and this time, for my third re-read, I was able to use my Folio Fitzgerald set rather than a paperback, which always heightens the experience.

I must say it immediately struck me how faithful the film had been to the book.  The actual dialogue in the book formed the majority of the spoken words in the film, and so many of the little details in the book – from the man with owlish glasses in Gatsby’s library, to Klipspringer playing for them to dance, Myrtle’s puppy, and not forgetting the giant billboard on the road into the city – are all present in the film too.  Where the two differ is in how the film sets up Nick’s narration with the framing device of him being in a sanitorium recounting the events of that summer.  You may argue that faithfulness to a text is not necessarily a good thing for a film, but each adaptation needs to be taken on its own merits. Personally, I think the critics were wrong in their lukewarm reception to this film.  But back to the book …

Nick’s outsider/insider status is set up from the off, when he visits his cousin Daisy and her husband Tom Buchanan at their mansion bought with old money, shortly after arriving on Long Island…

‘I forgot to ask you something, and it’s important. We heard you were engaged to a girl out West.’
‘That’s right,’ corroborated Tom kindly. ‘We heard that you were engaged.’
‘It’s a libel, I’m too poor.’
‘But we heard it,’ insisted Daisy, surprising me by opening up again in a flower-like way. ‘We heard it from three people, so it must be true.’
Of course I knew what they were referring to, but I wasn’t even vaguely engaged. The fact that gossip had published the banns was one of the reasons I had come East. … I had no intention of being rumored into marriage.
Their interest rather touched me and made them less remotely rich – nevertheless, I was confused and a little disgusted as I drove away. It seemed to me that the thing for Daisy to do was to rush out of the house, child in arms – but apparently there were no such intentions in her head. As for Tom, the fact that he ‘had some woman in New York’ was really less surprising than that he had been depressed by a book. Something was making him nibble at the edge of stale ideas as if his sturdy physical egotism no longer nourished his peremptory heart.

This dinner party tells us nearly all we need to know about Daisy and Tom.  She’s selfish and shallow, he’s a boorish philanderer.  There’s few true secrets between them; Tom’s mistress is acknowledged, although not accepted.

Whereas the rumours abound about Nick’s neighbour Gatsby, across the bay in less upscale West Egg, abound – unconfirmed.  When Nick goes to a party at his house, the host is elusive, and Nick sits in the garden chatting…

… I turned to my new acquaintance. ‘This is an unusual party for me. I haven’t even seen the host. I live over there – ‘ I waved my hand at the invisible hedge in the distance, ‘and this man Gatsby sent over his chauffeur with an invitation.’
For a moment he looked at me as if he failed to understand.
‘I’m Gatsby,’ he said suddenly.
‘What!’ I exclaimed. ‘Oh, I beg your pardon.’
‘I thought you knew, old sport. I’m afraid I’m not a very good host.’
He smiled understandingly – much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced – or seemed to face – the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey…

I’m an incurable romantic when reading novels of this period.  Even if Gatsby was a shady businessman, I wanted him to find love, to consummate his great American Dream – I was willing to suspend my prior knowledge of what happened (again) just in case it had changed. I’d previously been rather lukewarm towards the narrator Nick, but this time having seen what are almost throwaway comments made solid in the film, I appreciated him more.

Re-reading The Great Gatsby after seeing the new film, did give me a whole new appreciation of the book, and I revelled in Fitzgerald’s descriptions. Fitzgerald is one of those few authors whose novels I’ve read more than once before, and will doubtless revisit again.  The Great Gatsby will join Tender is the Night in my Desert Island Books trunk.

I shall leave you today with a photo from my New England holiday a few years ago, when we visited several of the mansions at Newport, Rhode Island.  Rosecliff, with it’s beautiful ballroom, was used as the location for the 1974 movie of TGG starring Robert Redford and Mia Farrow.

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I bought my copy. To explore further on Amazon UK, please click below:
The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald, Orion paperback.
The Great Gatsby [DVD] [1974] starring Robert Redford and Mia Farrow.

• The River of No Return by Bee Ridgway. Billed as ‘a story of love and time travel’ I couldn’t resist accepting a review copy of this book published next week.
• Shakespeare’s Restless World: An Unexpected History in Twenty Objects by Neil McGregor. Drawing you into Shakespeare’s world, McGregor analyses how these objects influenced his life and times. Based on the Radio 4 series which I enjoyed so had to buy. A beautifully produced book.
• Constance by Patrick McGrath. Another beautifully produced book that I couldn’t resist buying. I’m loving these new designs from Bloomsbury Circus – squarer than standard paperbacks, and with French flaps. It’ll be my first McGrath read, and I’m looking forward to it.
• Beautiful Fools by R Clifton Spargo. Given that I adored Baz Luhrmann’s Great Gatsby last week, browsing in my favourite bookshop yesterday, this book shouted out to me. It’s a novel based on the lives of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.

• The Cleaner of Chartresby Salley Vickers. New out in paperback – Yippee!
• Emilie and the Hollow Worldby Martha Wells. This YA book also shouted from the shelves to me – a bit steampunk, a bit like Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth or Edgar Rice Burrough’s Pellucidar books – this novel from the new Strange Chemistry imprint from Angry Robot books sounds great fun.
• A Heart so Whiteby Javier Marias, trans Margaret Jull Costa. This was a charity shop find – I love Penguin Modern Classics and having spotted this one in great condition bought it without even looking at the blurb.

Have you read any of these?
Have you got any good new books recently?

This is the story of Gabriel Delacruz, orphan, international furniture remover and father to four sons. Four boys – born in four different countries to four different mothers; one German, one English, one French and one Spanish, and all christened the local equivalent of the name Christopher. They are not aware of each other’s existence, and none of them have seen their father for a couple of decades.

The ‘Four Christophers’ finally meet when the youngest, Cristòfol is contacted by the police when his father goes missing. He finds a piece of paper with the details of his brothers on.  The Christophers meet to learn each others stories, and also to research their father – they don’t believe he’s dead.

In fact, disappeared isn’t the correct verb, and if we’ve decided to find him, it’s to make sense of the word.  Give it a body. Only somebody who’s previously appeared can disappear and that’s not the case with our father. We haven’t seen him for more than thirty years and the sum of our memories presents us with only a blurry image of him. It’s not as if he was a timid man, or naturally reserved, but he always seemed to have an escape route. He wasn’t edgy, anxious or mistrustful either. Sigrun says she fell in love with both his presence and his absence. Mireille recalls that as soon as he arrived it was as if he was leaving again. The brevity of his visits helped, of course. …
This vanishing act can even be seen in the letters he used to send us. He wrote them from all over Europe, wherever he was moving furniture, telling us stories about the trip. Sometimes they were postcards, scribbled by the roadside. … In the letters he wrote us he sometimes enclosed photos of himself, alone or posing with his trucker friends. The words accompanying these images revealed real tenderness and longing, which made our mothers cry if they were feeling fragile, but they never went beyond two sides of a single sheet of paper. Just when it seemed he was getting into his stride, the writing would abruptly end. See you soon, kisses, and so on and so forth, his name, and that was that. As if he was afraid to give all of himself.

The brothers take their turns to tell their stories. How their mothers met Gabriel, their births, and those rare visits throughout their childhood.  Although they are very different, they all get on well, making up for lost time.  Their mothers were all independent women and despite the lack of a permanent father figure in their lives, they have made the most of things. They start meeting regularly to talk, and search out Gabriel’s friends and acquaintances to help fill in the gaps.

Alongside Gabriel’s unfolding story was that of his fellow orphan and colleague Bundo. Together since their days in the ophanage, their undying friendship was the most touching part of this story. Whereas Gabriel had a woman in each port so to speak, there was only ever one girl for Bundo but he had to share her, for Carolina was a prostitute in a roadhouse outside Lyon.

One of the naughty but interesting things that Gabriel and Bundo did together along with fellow removers was to always remove one random box from the contents of each move. They’d share out the contents, and Gabriel catalogued them – over 200 boxes in total over their career. One of those boxes had contained a ventriloquist’s dummy, which Gabriel passed on to his German son, Christof, who called it Christofini. The dummy kept butting into Christof’s part of the narrative, which did give a slightly surreal edge to things.

I particularly loved reading about Gabriel and Bundo and their exploits through the years, lovable rogues both, always up for a chance to make a bit on the side or a game of cards. The sons’ stories weren’t as exciting in comparison, and as I read on, I did hope that they’d make progress on finding Gabriel, for at 473 pages, this is rather a long book. I won’t let on what finally happens, for this was a charming story told with humour, and you may want to find it out for yourself.  Despite its length, Punti has created some memorable characters in this debut novel and I enjoyed the travels and travails of Gabriel, his friends and extended family a great deal. (8.5/10)

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I received a copy from the publisher – thank you. To explore further on Amazon UK, please click below:
Lost Luggage by Jordi Punti, pub 25th April by Short Books, Trade paperback, 473 pages.

The moment that Tobey Maguire as Nick Carraway finally met Gatsby, when Leonardo Dicaprio turned around and smiled that smile, my heart did a little leap, and it confirmed for me that he was perfect for the role, and that this film was going to be totally worth it for me.

The story is framed by a narration by Carraway as his rehab doctor encourages him to write it all down after the end to that summer. Maguire plays the insider-outsider with either constant wide-eyes and goofy smile, or zonked out – still with those wide eyes but staring. Carey Mulligan as Daisy is all doe eyes, shallow and fun-loving, yet trembling and weak, showing us another side to this actress who wowed as the confident young lead of An Education.  Australian actor Joel Edgerton, who looks like a slightly ravaged Guy Pearce here, is suitably boorish as Daisy’s husband Tom Buchanan.

Co-starring with the principal actors is Luhrmann’s artistic vision. No-one does parties on film like Luhrmann, and the raves at Gatsby’s mansion are jaw-droppingly amazing, and here the mainly contemporary soundtrack with inclusions from Jay Z and Beyoncé works really well.

There are no musical set pieces as in Moulin Rouge though.  Here the music comes in little strains throughout, intertwining pop songs with jazz, blues, and notably Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue.

There was a pervading air of melancholy throughout and even when people were ostensibly happy, it was that kind of brittle happiness – except for the flashback of when Gatsby first met Daisy.  I can’t think of anyone else other than DiCaprio that could have played the title role – it’s his film.

Baz Luhrmann’s Gatsby is not subtle – at all!  
It won’t be for everyone – the critics didn’t really like it …
But I did!  

Most importantly, it made me want to re-read the novel – pronto. So, I’m just going to riffle my bookcase …

It’s 1923. Evangeline English is accompanying her sister Lizzie as part of a Christian mission to Kashgar, in Western China on the ancient Silk Road route. Eva in turn is accompanied by her trusty bicycle. She keeps a diary about their expedition which she plans to publish on her return as a guide for lady cyclists.

The mission is led by the forceful Hatamen cigarette smoking Millicent, who with her suffragette-influenced mission style of is determined to bring some Moslem women under her umbrella, whatever the cost; and photographer Lizzie is under her spell. Things don’t start off well for them. Approaching the city, they find a woman in agony in childbirth by the side of the road. Millicent delivers the baby, but the mother dies, leading to the trio being put under house arrest for ‘murdering’ the unknown woman.  The baby girl is left with them, and it falls to Eva to look after it.

Time shifts to the present day, and we are now in South London with Frieda, an independent young woman, who one day has two surprises. She has an unexpected inheritance from an old lady to whom she is listed as next of kin by the Council. She also opens her front door to find a young Yemeni man sleeping on her doorstep. Tayeb is an illegal immigrant, and has had to make himself scarce from the flat he shares as the authorities are looking for him.  Frieda and Tayeb strike up a sort of friendship, and he agrees to help her sort out the flat of her unknown benefactor.

These two very different narratives twist around each other, gradually revealing Eva and Frieda’s stories, and edging slowly towards each other.  There are connections, but they’re not immediately obvious which keeps the reader guessing.

Often in dual narratives one story tends to dominate – this isn’t the case here.  Although initially Eva’s tale, told through her diaries, is totally absorbing due to its exotic location and the pioneering spirit of the women on their mission, the mysteries in Frieda’s life are equally compelling.  Both provide adventure tinged with tragedy, be it in the desert heat or the claustrophobic isolation of South London, and I enjoyed both.  A skilfully plotted and accomplished debut that made for an absorbing read.  (8/10)

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I received a review copy from Amazon Vine. To explore further, please click below:
A Lady Cyclist’s Guide to Kashgar by Suzanne Joinson, Bloomsbury paperback, 384 pages.

I came across this book of my late mother’s this afternoon and thought I’d share it with you. This copy is rather dilapidated, having been liberated (withdrawn and sold) from Cannon Street Library many years ago. She used to go there during her lunchtimes, and brought countless books home that they were clearing out.

Its author, Schonberg was music critic for the New York Times, and he won a Pullitzer Prize in 1971 for his criticism. This book was published in 1967. It follows the development the role of the conductor from mere time-keeper to interpreter, from before Bach and Handel up to Leonard Bernstein and his contemporaries.

Wagner conducting (1863)

The first half essentially follows the composer as conductor of their own music mostly, and the musical world is full of rivalries – the straight-forward Berlioz described Wagner’s conducting thus: ‘Such a style is like dancing on a slack wire, sempre tempo rubato,’ and Wagner said of Berlioz who was conducting a Mozart symphony: ‘I… was amazed to find a conductor who was so energetic in the performance of his own compositions sink into the commonest rut of the vulgar time beater.’

In the chapter on Richard Strauss, a renowned cynic, we find out his tempi got faster and faster as he got older and more bored. Apparently at Bayreuth, he conducted the first act of Parsifal in 1h 35mins – Toscanini took 2h 2mins. Strauss wrote a flippant article that tickled me giving guidance for young conductors – I reproduce it for your amusement below:

‘Ten Golden Rules for the album of a Young Conductor’

1. Remember you are making music not to amuse yourself, but to delight your audience.
2. You should not perspire when conducting: only the audience should get warm.
3. Conduct Salome and Elektra as if they were by Mendelssohn: Fairy music.
4. Never look encouragingly at the brass, except with a brief glance to give an important cue.
5. But never let the horns and woodwinds out of your sight. If you can hear them at all they are still too strong.
6. If you think that the brass is not blowing hard enough, tone it down another shade or two.
7. It is not enought that you yourself should heard every word the soloist sings. You should know it by heart anyway. The audience must be able to follow without effort. If they do not understand the words they will go to sleep.
8. Always accompany a singer in such a way that he can sing without effort.
9. When you think you have reached the limits of prestissimo, double the pace.*
10. If you follow these rules carefully you will, with your fine gifts and your great accomplishments, always be the darling of your listeners.

* Today (1948) I should like to amend this as follows: Go twice as slowly (addressed to conductors of Mozart).

As Schonberg says, although tongue in cheek, there is an underlying truth behind most of the above.  Having played violin in many youth orchestras and into my twenties, I always found that the brass section attracted the most exuberantly confident (and good-looking) players!

The chapter on Furtwängler in the 1920s and 1930s was elucidating too. Schonberg writes …

Furtwängler’s beat was a phenomenon unduplicated before or since: a horror, a nightmare, to musicians. On the podium he lost himself. He would gesticulate, shout, sing, make faces, spit, stamp. Or he would close his eyes and make vague motions. … In the Berlin Philharmonic there was a standard joke: Q: How do you know when to come in on the opening bars of the Beethoven Ninth?  A: We walk twice around our chairs, count ten and then start playing. … Musicians had to watch his face rather than his baton. Furtwängler was fully conscious of the difficulties his beat gave musicians. It did not bother him. “Standardised technique creates in turn standardised art,” he would say.

We carry on through Beecham, Stokowski, Szell, Karajan and many others to Bernstein. Schonberg finishes his book by proposing some future candidates for conducting greatness, including Seiji Ozawa, Lorin Maazel (whom my mother adored – he conducted the Philharmonia Chorus in which she sang many times), and Zubin Mehta.

Sir Colin Davis (1927-2013)

The last to be mentioned is the recently departed Colin Davis, of whom Schonberg says, his ‘conducting is marked by taste, strength and an eclectic approach characteristic of English magicians.’

I couldn’t agree more – Davis for me always achieved such a lovely string sound in particular, (well, I was a fiddle player), and always came across as such a nice man.

I really enjoyed this book, getting really into the personalities of all these great conductors.

P.S. For another interesting quotation on conducting an orchestra see my review of Frank Zappa’s memoir here.

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I inherited my copy. To explore further on Amazon UK, please click below:
The Great Conductors by Harold C Schonberg – used copies available.

I couldn’t wait! Just back from the first screening (bar last night’s midnight one) at my local cinema of Star Trek: Into Darkness, the second outing for the young classic Trek crew.

I’m not going to tell you any of the story except that Benedict Cumberbatch, with a spectacularly basso profundo voice, was truly wonderful as Kirk’s adversary. However everything else was in place – here are a few slightly cryptic notes:

• The crew from the previous movie are all present and correct;
• Kirk breaks the prime directive – again;
• Uhura and Spock have sparks flying off them!
• There are plenty of laughs;
• Simon ‘Fat boy’ Pegg gets to do lots of running as Scotty;
• The Enterprise gets shot up of course;
• It’s no tribble at all for Bones;
• Future adventures are (retrospectively) set up, and references abound;
• Spock gets to be an action hero – he melds, he pinches … and he cries.

LOVED IT!!!  Want to see it again.

The American humorist David Sedaris is famed for his self-deprecating wit and his good-natured take on life.  He has written nine books compiling his essays and stories now, plus loads of journalism, plays and more.  I first encountered him on radio – he’s recorded many of his essays for BBC Radio 4, (sadly none are available on listen again at the moment).

We chose Sedaris’ breakthrough volume Me Talk Pretty One Day for our book group this month.  We like to throw an occasional non-fiction book into the mix, and having read James Thurber’s autobiographical stories My life and hard times last summer, and some Garrison Keillor previously also, it was good to compare and contrast their styles.

MTPOD is split into two parts.  The first half ‘One’ comprises tales from Sedaris’ childhood growing up in Raleigh, North Carolina. The second half, ‘Deux’, chronicles episodes from the time he spent living in France with his partner Hugh.

I loved the first story Go Carolina which told of Sedaris’ battle with the school speech therapist who tried to get rid of his lisp – his ‘lazy tongue‘. In an aside he tells about his lazy family …

My sisters Amy and Gretchen were, at the time, undergoing therapy for lazy eyes, while my older sister, Lisa, had been born with a lazy leg that had refused to grow at the same rate as its twin. She’d worn a corrective brace for the first two years of her life, and wherever she roamed she left a trail of scratch marks in the soft pine floor. I liked the idea that part of one’s body might be thought of as lazy – not thoughtless or hostile, just unwilling to extend itself for the betterment of the team.  My father often accused my mother of having a lazy mind, while she in turn accused him of having a lazy finger, unable to dial the phone when he knew damn well he was going to be late.

In Genetic Engineering I had to giggle along with his observations about his father when they were on holiday.

As youngsters, we participated in all the usual seaside activities – which were fun, until my father got involved and systematically chipped away at our pleasure. Miniature golf was ruined with a lengthy dissertation on impact, trajectory, and wind velocity, and our sand castles were critiqued with stifling lectures on the dynamics of the vaulted ceiling. We enjoyed swimming, until the mystery of tides was explained in such a way that the ocean seemed nothing more than an enormous saltwater toilet, flushing itself on a sad and predictable basis.

Most of our group found his essays on childhood and his family were more fun than his time in France, although his exasperation over his attempts to learn the language were fun…

Of all the stumbling blocks inherent in learning this language, the greatest for me is the principle that each noun has a corresponding sex that affects both its articles and its adjectives. Because it is a female and lays eggs, a chicken is masculine. Vagina is masculine as well, while the word masculinity is feminine. Forced by the grammar to take a stand one way of the other, hermaphrodite is male and indecisiveness female.
I spent months searching for some secret code before I realized that common sense has nothing to do with it.

Having a French/German language teacher in our group, the latter chapters about his attempts to learn French sparked off some good conversation about learning languages in general, but not so much about the book. Incidentally, the book’s title was about him mistranslating a phrase into French.

I enjoyed a lot of Sedaris’ writing in this volume, but did find that, as in his radio programmes which just feature a couple of articles, they were more fun in small doses.  Similarly, those of our group who hadn’t heard him on the radio, weren’t so taken, preferring the gently rambling tales of Garrison Keillor, another author who broadcasts his work; we managed to forget about Thurber comparisons.

I would happily read some more small doses of Sedaris, but will definitely listen out for him on the radio. (6.5/10 as a book).

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I bought my copy. To explore further on Amazon, please click below:
Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris, Abacus paperback, 272 pages.

Mad Men still ranks amongst my favourite TV programmes ever. I love everything about it – the clothes, the campaigns, the decor, the lifestyle, the cast, (especially John Slattery as Roger Sterling).

But how true is the series?

I’ve already read one book by a guy who was there – Jerry Della Femina’s memoir (reviewed here), gave one man’s eye view – but his isn’t the only perspective available to help answer that question…

Jane Maas was there and saw it all. She was one of the pioneer ‘Mad Women’ of Madison Avenue. She started as a copywriter in 1964 at Ogilvy and Mather after several years working in TV production on Name That Tune, rising through the ranks to be a creative director and president of another New York agency along the way.

In compiling her memoir, she has spoken to many of her colleagues to build up her picture of working for and with the real Mad Men, giving a fascinating portrait of the advertising industry of the 1960s and beyond, and especially what it was like for women, although she didn’t have to start off as a secretary like Mad Men‘s Peggy Olson.

Jane Maas in her official first day photo at Wells Rich Greene, 1976

A petite redhead, Jane was married to architect Michael Maas in the late fifties, had kids and lived in central New York rather than towns outside like many of her colleagues.

She was also one of the first working Moms – ranking her ‘job first, husband second, and children third’ realising that her job and husband might go away, but that ‘the children would hang in’.  Jane was very lucky to have the services of her Mon-Fri live-in help Mabel though, but always felt guilty about not giving her children enough attention.

In chapter two, Jane gets straight to the subject of sex – apparently there was a lot of it about, although O&M was one of the more discrete agencies.  At other agencies, including Young and Rubicam, (the model for Mad Men), it was seemingly everywhere between employees outside the office…

The term ‘sexual harassment’ hadn’t been invented yet, or certainly wasn’t in our vocabularies. Most women then working in advertising were either secretaries or copywriters,  and 99 percent of us had male bosses.  The boss was in control of your salary, your raise, your career advancement … your life.  If he wanted to go to bed with you, you had to ask yourself what mattered more: your self-respect or your career.
A number of people confided recently that women were sometimes the ones doing the seducing. The best way to get promoted from secretary to copywriter was for your boss to make it happen. And the fastest way to make that happen was to make it with your boss.

Ultimately what I am most fascinated by in Mad Men and books like this are the advertising campaigns themselves. For me, many of the best scenes are the ones where the creative folk are at work, and pitching to clients.

Maas tells us about the good and the bad campaigns, and the good and bad clients.  She tells howit was common for rooms full of men to discuss the ins and outs of feminine hygiene products without asking their women staff of their opinions, except as an afterthought.  She recounts how it was usual for women copywriters to be put on accounts for household products, the men kept all the cars, booze, fags, etc for themselves.

Maas was one of the few that did break through the glass ceiling though.  She was not only one of the first women to wear trousers to work, she went on to be the director of the ad campaign that put New York back on the tourist map, I ♥ New York with its iconic logo designed by Milton Glazer in 1977.

She is also quite clear where she thinks Mad Men (and she is a fan) gets it slightly wrong.  In the hippest times of the 1960s, the agencies were colourful places – not the beige, class and chrome we see on TV.  Most of all though, she stresses that they worked hard, they played hard, and most important of all, they had terrific fun doing this job that they loved so much – Don Draper and his colleagues don’t have enough of the latter.

This book was less rambling and much more entertaining than Della Femina’s, and confirmed most of what I’d always suspected happened in a woman’s lot in those glory days on Madison Avenue.  I’ve always been fascinated by the world of advertising, it’s long been one of my fantasy jobs from way before Mad Men, so I liked it a lot.  If you love the series, you’ll probably enjoy this book too. (7.5/10)

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I bought my copy. To explore further on Amazon, please click below:
Mad Women Bantam paperback, 218 pages.
From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor: Front-line Dispatches from the Advertising War by Jerry Della Femina
Mad Men – Complete Season 1 [DVD]

Distractions! I had hoped to read or re-read more Banks books by now. But better late than never, I have returned to the beginning and re-read The Wasp Factory again, and updated my BanksRead page.

Published in 1984, I read it for the first time in 1985 when the paperback first came out. I read it again back then too, and I still have my original paperback.  The monochrome cover with its squared symbols and numerals, and the embossed title and author name really stood out then, and does now.

Banks has always been brilliant at beginnings,  and the first lines of his first novel are cracking.

I had been making the rounds of the Sacrifice Poles the day we heard my brother had escaped. I already knew something was going to happen; the Factory told me.

Right from the off, you know you’re in for something different with Frank, a rather feral teenager who lives on an island with his abandoned father. Frank is rather fond of catching the local wildlife, and killing it to display on his totemic poles. Animals are not the only things Frank kills though…

Two years after I killed Blyth I murdered my young brother Paul, for quite different and more fundamental reasons than I’d disposed of Blyth, and then a year after that I did for my young cousin Esmerelda, more or less on a whim. That’s my score to date. Three. I haven’t killed anybody for years, and don’t intend to ever again. It was just a stage I was going through.

For those that haven’t read this book, I’m not giving things away with the above quote. It’s part of the back cover blurb of my original copy and comes at the end of chapter two. However, by then Frank has told us quite a lot about his family history, how he became a murderer, and we know about his ‘accident’. His certified brother Eric is at large, and on his way home, which is a cause for concern for everyone except Frank, who although he loves his brother thinks he may rather cramp his style. He finds solace in a boozer in town with his only friend, Jamie, a dwarf, but I can tell you no more about the plot.

When I first read this novel, I was stunned; it made an instant fan of me.  It was so dark and twisted, yet had a strong vein of black humour running through it. Between Frank’s cruel experiments, Eric’s deranged rantings on the phone, and the father’s secretive behaviour, it’s clear that what is left of this family have real problems.

Banks’ prose still has the power to shock, even knowing what was to come.  This is definitely still not a book for the squeamish.  I could pick up on more clues in his Gothic coming of age story this time.  I also saw parallels between Frank and the horrorshow of Alex in Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange – both vicious adolescents growing up; and also with Merricat in Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle – another flawed young person who uses her own version of sacrifice poles to warn off intruders onto the family estate.

It feels as if Banks arrived on the scene as a fully fledged author with The Wasp Factory.  He’s taken it from there with each subsequent novel, always experimenting, always having a strong vision, and keeping that sense of humour underneath.  Still 10/10.

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I bought my copy decades ago. To explore further on Amazon UK, please click below:
The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks – Abacus paperback, 256 pages.
A Clockwork Orange (Penguin Essentials) by Anthony Burgess
We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson