Cormac McCarthy; No Country for Old Men

A man walks into a bar; he orders a drink, a bag of crisps, unholsters his gun and shoots everyone.  Not really much of a joke but No Country For Old Men isn't very funny either.  In fact, it is dark, it is gritty, it is upsetting in the extreme but it is brilliant.  It is amongst McCarthy's best work.

The year is 1980, the Mexican drug cartels are sweeping along the Untied States-Mexico border, drugs are being sold like caviar at the Bullingdon Club.  Llewelyn Moss the standard Vietnam veteran come tough guy stumbles across a briefcase in the Southern American outback, inside the briefcase he finds millions of dollars.  He takes the money and is pursued by carious drug cartels for days on end, staying at various motels and encountering various bad people along the way.  Ultimately he is tracked down and killed by the protagonist Anton Chigurh, a hitman who endures wild psychopathic tendencies as well as being completely amoral, as such he is endlessly engaging.  Somewhere in there, there is a moral message about money being unable to bring you happiness, but the fact that the main bad guy steals the money and lives ever after would appear to conflate this.  Simultaneously Sheriff Ed Tom Bell works tirelessly to reclaim his once traditional town from the drug dealers, he is not as interesting as the other characters and he himself becomes an extended metaphor for the loss of values and morality.  He has mixed success tracking down the drug cartels and for the most part ambles around thinking about his dead dad, he might be boring but he gets the last laugh, he doesn't die.

McCarthy has been described as 'our greatest living author,' and in a lot of respects No Country For Old Men justifies this title.  It is incredibly well written, it has that incredible balance of making you feel saddened without feeling upset.  It seems like a bit of a paradox but it is so very amoral that it illicit s no reaction, it manages to make the reader feel nothing which in many ways is worse than making us feel at all.  Many suggest that we read to make ourselves feel more human, McCarthy goes the other way, we read his work to remind us that life isn't fair and that we may be less human than we think.

So far, my favourite book of 2012.

The First Edition

Hello all,

Far later than I had hoped I have entered the world of antique book buying. My very first purchase was made at Jeremiah Vokes' store in Darlington. Having been open for well over thirty Jeremiah offers a huge range of fiction, specialising in Sherlock Holmes. My first two purchases were; A first edition of W.H Auden's poetry collection Thank You, Fog and a signed first edition of Peter Ackroyd's The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde. Anybody who would like further information with regard to the purchase of these books please get in touch via the blog. I have read a lot of books that have not made the blog in recent weeks; they will soon appear

Homeless

'Classic.' A Book Which People Praise and Do Not Read.'

Dear readers,

Not so much a book post but a statement of intent. Starting from Thursday I am going to be entering the world of antique book dealing. I am starting off with £50 and will only buy and sell books from antique dealerships or those who contact me via the blog; no eBay in sight. The hope is to make enough to survive my second year of university with more comfort than I have survived the first. Whilst writing about my progress on the blog I hope to draw attention toward the antique book market, one which has been truly ravaged by the advent of e-books and cheap paper backs. Clearly we must recognise that paperbacks and e-books are an excellent means of conveying the written word to a large audience, what I hope to achieve is a more realistic understanding how much the written word is worth to different people. Wish me luck, get in touch

Homeless

Gabriel Garcia Marquez; One Hundred Years of Solitude.

"During that interminable night, while Colonel Gerineldo Marquez thought about his dead afternoons in Amaranta's sewing room, Colonel Aureliano Buendia scratched for many hours trying to break the hard shell of his solitude." How we can empathise with Colonel Aureliano Buendia, as we become more and more engrossed in One Hundred Years of Solitude we soon realise the book has in turn made us one of the many isolated figures the book depicts.

Usually in this part of the blog I would give a general overview regarding the book, unfortunately in a book of this scale it is hard to say what the book is "about." One Hundred Years of Solitude is the quintessential postmodernist text, it uses the abstract and the unusual to form a tale of epic proportions. Even the characterization is bizarre, within 420 pages of literature there are over twenty characters whom at some point could be considered the "main character," only to consequently die and be replaced.

If this book is about anything it is about the passage of time and how time is recorded through the experience of our families. There is little description that can be added to that; that will not give away the plot or under-sell the story in some way. The only narrative point that seems pertinent is that offered by the blurb; "Through plagues of insomnia, civil war, haunting and vendettas, the many tribulations of the Bunedia household push memories of the manuscript aside. Few remember its existence and only one will discover the hidden message that it holds..."

To close, this is perhaps the most ambiguous of all my blog posts but unfortunately there is little I can say to do service to such a marvellous book. A book of such epic proportions and huge scale can only be understood through reading. Reading is all too frequently described as an "experience," or an "adventure," but if there was ever a time for such clichés this is it.

Douglas Coupland; The Gum Thief

Douglas Coupland first came to worldwide recognition as the author of, Generation X: Tales for an accelerated culture. This novel, published in the 1990s, came to be regarded as the definitive text of the generation defined by new technologies and greedy capitalism. Not to sound pretentious but Generation X can be regarded as one of the first pieces of; post, post modern literature. The Gum Thief explores the greed and tedium of greed caused by the system of exploitative capitalism we live under today.

In The Gum Thief we are presented with a middle-aged and divorced counter assistant named Roger. He is employed at the stationary giant "Staples" which he frequently refers to as "Stooples." Sick of his mundane life he begins a friendship with fellow employee Bethany. Unfortunately for Roger Bethany reads his diary wherein he pretends to be her, just to make things more perturbing and confusing he also writes a story simultaneously known as Glove Pond which is a fictional exaggerated version of his own life. Think of "The Mousetrap" in Shakespeare's Hamlet for a similar comparison. Just to add to the mystery around this novel it is written in an epistolary manner meaning we are presented with several stories rather than one story in a linear sequence. Confused? Good.

The Gum Thief is self consciously post modern. With metafiction and the epistolary format even the structure is interesting. The novel is superbly written and is entertaining throughout. There are numerous surprises and the novel written with grace and an intelligent aloofness. Perhaps the only criticism that could be levelled is that the way in which the novel is written means there is no grand complex moral message. Other than this, an amazing novel well worth a read.

The Iraq War

Hello dear readers, I know this is primarily a blog of books but I would like to use my role as a blogger to highlight something truly shocking. The Iraq war is drawing to a disgraceful and bloody end with no obvious benefit to any country involved, including Iraq. The argument that America invaded Iraq for oil is rendered redundant by the fact they have year on year imported less oil from Iraq from 2003 onwards. The real cost of war can't ever be truly quantified but this is the best guess we have. Here are the figures.

US Troops killed in action: 3,492
US Troops injured in action: 32,000
UK Troops killed in action: 136
Iraqi Civilian deaths: 654,965

Financial cost of war by the US: $801.9bn
Real cost to the US economy: $3tn
British cost of war: £9.24bn

A costly war in terms of lives and finance. With the country on the brink of civil war it is apparent that America and her servants have yet again made a balls up of this. George Bush and Tony Blair are war criminals, no morally sound human being can argue the death of nearly 700,000 innocent civilians can amount to anything other than genocide. Never forget, it is our taxes which funded this illegal campaign.

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-11107739

Ian McEwan; Enduring Love

How far can we believe those we love when what they are telling us seems so very improbable? When the version of the world they portray contains sexually obsessive monsters. Where God represents all that is evil. Where your life is controlled by the actions of strangers.

Enduring Love is concerned with the life of Joe Rose, a member of the affluent middle classes. His life is changed forever when alongside a set of strangers he attempts to moor a hot air balloon which has torn free of its moorings. The men all grab the balloon but upon realising they may die if the balloon goes to high they let go, bar John Logan who falls to his death. From here on in a member of the group, Jed Perry, becomes sexually obsessed with Joe and believes he is the only means in which he can find God. Jed's obsession is born out of de Crembault's syndrome which is an illness that rationalising dangerous sexual obsession. This obsession quickly begins to threaten Joe's life and family; soon enough Joe is driven near to murdering Jed.

The book explores the tension between chance events such as the hot air balloon accident and those who bring stability to our lives such as Joe's family. Jed can be seen to embody this instability. He is a man of God which suggests the unpredictable nature of forces we cannot see or control play a huge role in our lives. He is also suffering from an illness which makes him hugely irrational and dangerous further indicating his representation of instability. On the other side of the coin we have the stability of Joe's previous life, he is middle class, he is happily married, and he has a good job. The introduction of this instability in Jed threatens to unravel Joe's once perfect life.

The book itself is exceptional well written. We are all aware that McEwan is unable to write a poorly crafted sentence. Time and time again the biggest frustration that can be found with his work is that it is so uncomfortably middle class. His protagonist is a struggling journalist with a wife who is a university lecturer. Everything about Joe is middle class, unfortunately this means that when he encounters a character such as Jed who is clearly unwell we find it hard to empathise with his constant complaints of a man he is often cruel to.

Make no mistake this is an excellent book. An accurate commentary on the real workings of people's lives and relationships? It certainly is not.