Extreme Metaphors: Selected Interviews with J.G. Ballard, 1967-2008

To celebrate the paperback release this week of Extreme Metaphors: Selected Interviews with J.G. Ballard, 1967-2008, I've reprinted my Irish Times review of the 2012 hardback, below. (That original review has now vanished into the Irish Times archive, behind the paywall.) For those too busy to read the whole review: basically,Extreme Metaphors was my book of the year. I read it with delight, frequently chortling. An extraordinary alternate history of the 20th century, packed with prescient ideas which help explain the 21st.

- Julian

A photo of my copy of Extreme Metaphors, taken five minutes ago. The image links to more information, from the website of one of the editors, Simon Sellars.

Extreme Metaphors: Selected Interviews with J.G. Ballard, 1967-2008

Edited by Simon Sellars and Dan O’Hara

Fourth Estate

503pp, price £stg25

J.G. Ballard might be the greatest English writer of the 20th century. He was certainly, for much of the second half of that century, the least understood, and most misread, when he was read at all. In 1970, when Nelson Doubleday Jr, a senior executive at Ballard’s American publishing house, finally got round to reading a finished copy of The Atrocity Exhibition, he was so horrified he ordered all copies pulped. In the UK, the reader’s report for Ballard’s 1972 novel Crash famously said “This writer is beyond psychiatric help. Do not publish.”

But live long enough, and respectability eventually covers you, like jungle vegetation claiming a wartime runway. In 1984, his most nakedly autobiographical novel, Empire of the Sun, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Martin Amis says on the back of this handsome hardback collection of interviews, “Ballard will be remembered as the most original English writer of the last century.” Will Self concurs; “Ballard issued a series of bulletins on the modern world of almost unerring prescience. Other writers describe; Ballard anticipated.”

Ballard most certainly did. The chapter of The Atrocity Exhibition which so disgusted Ballard's own publisher was titled “Why I Want To Fuck Ronald Reagan”. In it, Ballard portrayed the former Hollywood actor, who’d co-starred with a chimpanzee in Bedtime for Bonzo, as President of the United States. It would be over a decade before reality caught up with Ballard’s imagination.

Indeed, some of the interviews here are almost comically prescient; Ballard predicted Facebook before the internet even existed. In 1979, dismissing the BBC and ITV news as “that irrelevant mixture of information about a largely fictional external world”, he describes a future in which we video everything, and

“…the real news of course will be a computer-selected and computer-edited version of the day’s rushes. ‘My God, there’s Jenny having her first ice cream!’ or ‘There’s Candy coming home from school with her new friend.’ Now all that may seem madly mundane, but, as I said, it will be the real news of the day, and how it affects every individual.” (And yes, he goes on to predict Youporn…)

He predicts the future; but he also questions the present. And many of the questions he raises here have not yet been answered. The real issue, behind all the fake issues, in this year's American election [2012], was summed up succinctly by Ballard in 1984, talking to Thomas Frick:

“Marxism is a social philosophy for the poor, and what we need badly is a social philosophy for the rich.”

As with a number of the more interesting American SF writers of his era (Philip K. Dick, Thomas M. Disch, John Sladek), Ballard became a science fiction writer by default. The SF market was the only available outlet for fiction this odd. But he is not a science fiction writer. He is not, indeed, a writer, in the normal sense of the term. Ballard is a visual artist. He makes the point again and again here; the greatest influences on his works are not other literary works; they are the paintings of the surrealists. As he said in an interview with James Goddard and David Pringle in 1975,“They’re all paintings, really, my novels and stories.”

And it is true. You read his spare, functional prose, and the most astonishing images erect themselves in your mind. The beauty of the sentence itself didn’t interest him. (This makes him hard to quote: reading Ballard, you drift into a dreamstate which can’t be evoked in a couple of lines.) Certainly he set much of his work in the future. But there isn't a space ship to be found. (Well, OK, one, in an early story.) As mainstream SF explored outer space, J.G. Ballard explored what he came to call inner space. He wasn't similar to SF writers like Heinlein and Asimov and Arthur C. Clark, he was their opposite, a point he makes in an interview from 1975:

“You can’t have a Space Age until you’ve got a lot of people in space. This is where I disagree, and I’ve often argued the point when I’ve met him, with Arthur C. Clarke. He believes that the future of fiction is in space, that this is the only subject. But I’m certain you can’t have a serious fiction based on experience from which the vast body of readers and writers is excluded.”

I get the feeling J.G. Ballard passed Ireland by. He was seldom piled high on the front tables in Easons. Seen, perhaps, as too English for our tastes? But of course, he wasn’t English at all. His sensibility was formed in Shanghai, where he was born to English parents in 1930; and in particular in the vast civilian internment camp of Lunghua, where he was interned by the Japanese (at the age of 11), along with his family. In this book he frequently talks of never getting used to the England he first encountered aged 16, in 1946, as a traumatised child of the tropics.

Exiled from Shanghai, an alien in England, Ballard nonetheless had a spiritual home. No matter where his books were ostensibly set, Ballard always wrote about America; not as a place, but as a state of mind. America as a condition. America as a psychological disorder… He loved America. Though Crash is set in England, on the motorways connecting his quiet home in Shepperton to London, the cars in Crash are American cars. His Shanghai childhood — in an Americanized Asia — was a century ahead of its time. He grew up in the future. As a result, these interviews have aged well. It helps that Simon Sellars and Dan O’Hara have edited this 500 page book with such love, intelligence, and deep knowledge of the material and its context. Extreme Metaphors presents, in chronological order, 44 interviews from the many hundreds he gave. (The editors estimate the total wordage of the novels as 1,100,000; short stories, 500,000 words; non-fiction, 300,000… and interviews, 650,000.) The interviews they’ve chosen have a very low fluff content. Many of the best originally appeared in long-vanished, never-digitised, photocopied fanzines, and are genuine, deeply engaged and engaging conversations about important subjects. Nobody is trying to sell you anything (it’s often impossible to tell what book Ballard is supposed to be promoting).

The wide range of interviewers adds to the pleasure of the book. Ballard attracted intense, usually male, interviewers, who had a deep engagement with his work. There is a pleasantly kaleidoscopic effect, as each sees Ballard through the lens of their obsession. Fellow novelists Toby Litt, Will Self and Hari Kunzru take a literary approach. John Gray is philosophical. The Russian Zinovy Zinik gets Ballard to talk about Soviet utopias and dystopias. With Iain Sinclair, Ballard discusses the design of 1970s multi-story carparks in Watford. (Ballard; “They covered them in strange trellises. It was a bizarre time.”)

And he is very open. When Joan Bakewell says of Crash, “Now, this is a deeply disturbing book. Were you very disturbed when you wrote it?” he replies “I think I was. I think in a way the novel is the record of a sort of mental crash that I had in the mid-sixties after the death of my wife…”

Ah, death. Yes, it’s everywhere in his work. Ballard’s fiction is largely set in the dead spaces of the modern world. Underpasses, flyovers; abandoned and disintegrating runways; nuclear test sites; blockhouses; drained swimmingpools. The tide of humanity has gone out. What is left is returning to the natural world. The atmosphere is that of Max Ernst’s Europe After The Rain. The organic and the inorganic are inextricably linked. Things grow, and things crumble. The work of man is absorbed by the jungle.

It’s hard, reading this book, not to think of contemporary, Americanised Ireland, with its motorways and drive-thru McDonalds. Of Dublin, with its low corporate tax rate, reckless financial zone, and Euro-HQs of American corporations; with its expat communities of British, German and US workers in gated dockside settlements, surrounded by grinding native poverty; an open city, in a state too weak to defend itself. Dublin was, for a decade there, the closest thing Europe had to the booming, buckaneering Shanghai of the 1930s.

Now, in neglected Dublin back gardens, the outdoor hot tubs fill with dead leaves. Beyond the M50, the ghost estates are reclaimed by the whitethorn bushes. Ireland has become a Ballardian landscape. Given the extraordinary relevance of his work to Ireland’s psychological condition, it might be time for more Irish people to start reading J.G. Ballard. And this lovingly curated book of interviews is a fine place to start.

I will be very surprised if any novel this year gives me as much pleasure as this book. And I can guarantee (now that Ballard is dead) that no novel will contain so many provocative, intriguing, and visionary ideas.

Julian Gough is an Irish writer, living in Berlin, whose work was shortlisted this year for both the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize and the BBC International Short Story Award. His latest novel, Jude in London, is out now in paperback from Old Street Publishing.

ENDS.

Jude in Waterstones - a new and exciting adventure for Jude, with an unfortunate ending

Two copies of Jude in London

Waterstones are the biggest book chain in the UK, with 296 shops. They sold five hundred million pounds worth of books last year. I’m very happy about that, because I write books. In fact, Jude in London, my most recent novel, came out in paperback this month. The Observer just named it their Paperback of the Week.

The paperback is the cheaper, mass market edition. It’s the one covered in great reviews of the more expensive trade paperback, or hardback, from a year earlier. The paperback is how you reach a mass audience.

I’d had a busy year since Jude in London first came out. The kind of busy year retailers like; one that raises your public profile, and brings new people to your work. My second BBC radio play starring Jude — The Great Squanderland Roof — had picked up roughly a million listeners. My stageplay starring Jude (The Great Goat Bubble), had sold out its run, every ticket, every night. The novel itself had been shortlisted for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize (former winners: Will Self, Ian McEwan, Howard Jacobson…) It was even shortlisted for the Guardian's anarchic anti-award, the Not The Booker Prize. And, since Jude in London first came out, I’d written the long narrative at the end of Minecraft. (Winning every award going, Minecraft was Time Magazine's Computer Game of the Year for 2011). Given that Minecraft had by now sold nine million copies, my work had quite possibly had more readers than that of any other quirky literary novelist this year.

One of the exciting things about being a writer is when your publisher tells you how many copies Waterstones have ordered. It is exciting partly because they completely dominate the retail market for literary fiction in the UK. (If they don’t stock you, your book is dead.) But it is also exciting because I love Waterstones. Theirs are the shops in which I browse, and buy, when I’m in England. Their staff are terrific; friendly and knowledgeable. It’s a special pleasure to ask someone in the fiction section to recommend something odd and interesting. (Last time, in their flagship Picadilly branch — which has eight and a half miles of shelves — I was lovingly introduced to Daniil Kharms.) Their Oxford Street branch is a delight, and its witty Twitter account is a must-follow. Of course, those staff and managers are no longer allowed to order anything. It all has to come from head office. But that means head office can put in a huge order. (Waterstones ordered 12,000 copies of the paperback of my first novel, back when I was even more obscure than I am now.) My hopes were, cautiously, high.

So, how many copies did Waterstones order of the paperback? Two. Two copies. Not two copies per shop. Two copies to share between all 296 stores. That's less than 1% of a copy per shop. That’s… (Does the maths on a napkin)… exactly three pages for each manager. (Hmm. That reminds me of something… It’ll come to me.)

Now, I have no problem with this. I understand that nobody wants to read highly praised novels that have been shortlisted for well-known awards, especially when they’ve been written by award-winning cult writers whose writing gets millions of listeners and readers in other media.

What’s been puzzling me is…  why did Waterstones order two copies? Why not no copies? I mean obviously they don’t like the book. Fair enough. My stuff has a strong flavour that is not to everyone’s taste. Ordering no copies would make sense. But a head office order that comes to only three pages for every shop? Why would they want… wait a minute. (Googles feverishly. Returns a couple of minutes later…)

Hey, did you know that, in the UK, the average person uses three sheets of paper to wipe their backside after a crap? Obviously, some use less, and some use more, but the UK average is three.

So, Waterstones have ordered two copies of Jude in London.

Just enough to give every manager of every shop in the Waterstones chain exactly three pages each…

Hmmm.

They REALLY don’t like my book.

Help save civilization by reading a funny book

It's not every day you get a chance to help an award-winning impoverished author (er, that's me) solve a major dilemma, while simultaneously helping to humanise Capitalism, revolutionise Publishing, and save Civilization. But today is that day.

Jude in London - soon to be a major bookHere's the background (the dilemma will follow): my new novel, Jude in London, has just been longlisted for the Guardian's Not The Booker Prize. Now, The Not The Booker Prize is the most entertaining prize in the literary calendar; an annual online flame-war-slash-literary-debate that can be very helpful in drawing attention to unusual books. (The prize itself is a mug, worth about £1.50. But the glory is incalculable!)

BUT: For a long-listed novel to make the shortlist, readers have to nominate the book, and post a very short review on the Guardian website (to prove they've read it). The process is explained in detail here.

Here's the dilemma: Jude in London is officially published on September 6th. But the shortlist votes (and reviews) have to be in by this coming Wednesday. As my novel isn't in the shops for another fortnight, I don't have any readers yet to nominate it.

So, if any of you would like to read Jude in London, for free, I can send you a pdf of the entire finished book, nicely laid out and readable, today. And if you like it a lot, I'd be extremely pleased if you would post a 150 word review, and nominate it for the shortlist by Wednesday. You're under no pressure to review it or vote for it: only do that if you genuinely like it a lot and think it's worthy of going through to the next round.

There you go. Anyone who wants a free pdf of Jude in London, just ask in the comments below, or on Twitter (I'm @juliangough), or email me at juliangoughssecretemailaddress@gmail.com...

Now, here's the bit where we revolutionise Capitalism. My beloved publisher Ben, who runs Old Street, has conniptions at the thought of a professional-quality pdf of the entire book escaping into the wild before publication. Understandably so - he's sunk a lot of time and money into making a beautiful book out of Jude in London. But I think the future for peculiar writers like me has to be a kind of love-based mutant version of capitalism where you trust your readers, and in return your readers help to keep you alive. Because the free market isn't going to. Bear in mind, I've gone bust and been evicted while writing this book. I've wandered Europe homeless, relying on the kindness of friends (and the occasional stranger) to get it finished. So I, too, would like to see it, somehow, earn me enough to keep going and finish the next one.

So here's the deal: I give you the book for free. You don't have to review it or nominate it. But if you really like the book, if you read all the way to the end and have a good time... I'd love you to buy a copy for a friend. Does that seem fair?

And if you do like it, and buy a copy for a friend, tell me, and I'll tell my publisher, and maybe this trust-based model (where a book is always a present, and yet small publishers stay in business and weird writers get to eat) could take off.

Hot New Band Discussed In Guardian Music Podcast

Wow, Toasted Heretic are discussed on the new Guardian Music Weekly podcast (about 32 minutes in)

Note for younger readers: Toasted Heretic was the band in which I invested the golden coin of my youth. Back in the 1980s, we looked a bit like this:

And we sounded a bit like this. Think lo-fi. Now think even lower-fi. No, lower... (There's a "play" button for each song, down the left side of this page.)

In 2005, after rather a long break, we looked a bit like this:

We are currently all growing long white beards, in preparation for the next performance in our grueling schedule, pencilled in for late spring of the year 2039.

Carnival in Budva

Well, the floods finally overwhelmed us, and we fled to Budva... One of the nice things about being a Tipperary lad is that, no matter where you go, you have a global Mafia of excellent cousins who will aid and assist you in times of affliction. Thus a splendid time was had in Budva, thanks chiefly to my cousin Colm Mitchell, who runs the Irish bar in the old town, Chest O'Sheas. (Yes, there is a story behind that name, but I cannot tell it to you...)

We ate, we drank, we Carnivalled in splendid feathered masks. Photos may - or may not - be posted when I get back to Berlin and run them past the lawyers. Much film script got written, over many cappuccinos, each morning in Hemingway's. And we had two of the most enjoyable meals I've ever had. The first was on our first night, in the huge and atmospheric Jadran, on the seafront. Grilled squid, octopus salad, spuds and Swiss chard. Stunning domestic wines, whose names I, shamefully, do not recall. (A red as rich as port... a white as crisp as apples...) Extraordinary singing from the vocal quartet who drifted from table to table, singing a glorious mixture of songs, from Serbian Orthodox religious stuff to Stand By Me. And a waiter who really should run for president. (His name is entirely comprised of those syllables which you can write in Cyrillic but not in English, so I am not brave enought to try putting it down here.)

The second great meal was in Knez, in the old town, on our last night. The restaurant is so intimate (three tables, and the kitchen's in the corner), that you are in severe danger of joining the family by the end of the evening and never leaving. Petar was both chef and maître d', welcoming guests with one hand while doing extraordinary things to fish with the other. A remarkable performance from a top chap. (And he gave us free strawberries and biscuits! Hero!)

To set your mind at ease, we had some rotten meals elsewhere, but I shall not name and shame. These two really stood out (and were of course the two recommendations Colm made... run to him! Seek his wisdom, oh visitor to Budva!)

Anyway, that idyll has now ended, and a new one begun in Dubrovnik... more on that later, perhaps... Got to order some coffee and write in the sunshine now...

Mugger's Remorse. (Or why I shouldn't have kicked James Wood.)

(James Wood teaching in Harvard, shortly before being kicked in the knee from behind)



My short essay on David Foster Wallace has appeared in Prospect, under the title The Rest is Silence.

The first two responses I received were both from James Wood, one of the three finest literary critics of the age (and currently top book bloke at the New Yorker). His first email started, “You have a lot of gall…”

I couldn’t really disagree. I took a wild swipe at him out of nowhere, late in the article. This is partly the result of the extreme overcompression that all my essays undergo as I write them. I try to jam about a book’s worth of ideas into the single page available, and so a long, nuanced sequence of subtle, gossamer-delicate thoughts gets reduced to a blow from a brick in a sock.

Though I do disagree with some of James Wood’s notions, I don’t disagree nearly as strongly as is implied by my rude and unfair sentence. (In fact, having reread it, I’m thinking of writing a letter to Prospect complaining about myself.)

(James Wood’s second email, an hour later, was a fine, dignified and reasonable restatement of his position on David Foster Wallace. Such a civilised response to being mugged reflects very well on the man. I look forward to arguing with him properly sometime. If he’ll ever speak to me again.)

Other interesting reactions to The Rest Is Silence are appearing on the blogs. Some thoughtful stuff on suicide and universities over at Inside Higher Education.

The pro-guns, pro-liberty blog  The Smallest Minority has suggested that a line from my piece ("If it has an off-button, it is not oppression"), should be put on T-shirts. A splendid idea.

And over on Prospect’s First Drafts blog, I am accused of fascism, and told to hang myself.


As ever, I agree with everyone. Many fine points, splendidly expressed. I shall go away, brood upon them, and reform my character.

Books of the Year 2007

BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2007


These lists are always ridiculous, because no matter how much you read, you've only read the thinnest sliver of all that's been published in the year. (And what freak only reads books that came out that year? As though books went off, like cartons of milk?) Back when I was utterly broke, I could quite easily read a couple of hundred books annually, not one of which was published that year. Even now, I spent far more of this year re-reading 1960s and ‘70s science fiction (by Philip K. Dick, Ursula K. LeGuin, Frederick Pohl and Thomas M. Disch), than I did reading new stuff. (I have my reasons...)

Also, I still tend to read things a year or two after they've come out. That's partly because they're cheaper in paperback, but partly because I like to let history sort them out a bit for me, or I'd waste too much of my precious reading life on each year's most-hyped books. A couple of years after publication, the word-of-mouth is still doing its wonderful job. As a result, the few books that made a real impact on people are still hanging in there on the shelves, while the hyped and empty have long been remaindered. (This year I finally bought Mobius Dick by Andrew Crumey, after thinking about doing so for ages, because people I like kept mentioning it. And I’m halfway through it, and it’s great…)

But I did read some freshly delivered books this year, still with the umbilicus attached and throbbing, and some of them were very good. So here are my favourites, and why. (Recycling is good and wholesome and approved of by society, so a version of these may well pop up in the Irish edition of the Mail on Sunday soon, and also on Mark Farley’s excellent and bolshy blog, The Bookseller to the Stars):


BEST BOOKS OF 2007 THAT I’VE READ

Then We Came To The End – Joshua Ferris.

A smart, funny, painfully accurate book about office life (and death). And he’s written it from the collective point of view of all the workers (“How we hated our coffee mugs!”) Technically amazing, and FABULOUSLY difficult, he makes it look so easy you forget about it after sixty seconds. A Great American Novel. Serious respect is due.

There Are Little Kingdoms – Kevin Barry.

Vinnie Browne, in Charlie Byrne’s bookshop in Galway, forced me to buy this. Ignoring my anguished protests that modern Irish short stories are shite and I hate them. Well, I don’t hate these ones. Vinnie was right. This is the best Irish short story collection since Mike McCormack’s Getting It In The Head, which was the best since Frank O’Connor’s My Oedipus Complex. Small-town Ireland, given a good, loving, seeing-to, from behind.

The Uncommon Reader – Alan Bennett.

The Queen joins a library, late in life, and, lost in literature, starts to neglect her duties. Her courtiers, concerned, take ever more drastic action… An utter, utter delight. I’m giving my mum a copy.

The Paris Review Interviews (Volume 2) – edited by Philip Gourevitch.

Writers from Isaac Bashevis Singer through Alice Monro to Stephen King discuss everything from their philosophy of life to their choice of pencil eraser. If you’re addicted to this sort of thing, as I am, then this is a lucky bag full of fecking huge rocks of crack.


OK that’s the official list I sent out. But writing it up, I totally forgot that Milan Kundera's The Curtain had  been published earlier this year. I'd read it so thoroughly (several times), and it had sunk in so deep, that I'd vaguely assumed I'd had my bent, trashed copy for a couple of years. (And of course it overlaps a little with his earlier book, The Art Of The Novel - ie he nicks bits and reuses them – so I had read some of it years ago). But The Curtain pretty much replaces The Art of the Novel. There’s a few extra years thinking and reading gone into it.

So add that to my list. Milan Kundera is one of the great thinkers about the novel, what it has done and what it can do. (And, as a gifted novelist, he's a lot easier to read than the most brilliantly original 20th century theorist of the novel, Mikhail Bakhtin, whose genius is muffled by godawfully impenetrable Russian Formalist prose).

Kundera's key image is of the novel as a great forest, which writers have only just begun to explore. The Curtain is enlightening, entertaining, intriguing, and reassuring. Especially if, machete in one hand and pen in the other, you happen to be trying to cut your own path through that forest.

Sunday Tribune Books of the Year - Jude: Level 1

Back in Ireland, the Sunday Tribune just picked its books of the year.

I was INTENSELY pleased to see Jude: Level 1 among the (eight) Irish fiction titles. Especially when they called my darling little book "the picaresque bastard lovechild of Flann O'Brien and Matt Groening".

Anyway, here's what they said in full:

"Jude: Level 1

Julian Gough (Old Street Publishing)

Gough's novel is like the picaresque bastard lovechild of Flann O'Brien and Matt Groening, and yet is all Julian Gough. Possibly the finest comic novel to come out of Ireland since At Swim Two Birds, it recounts the story of Jude, an orphan, as he wanders through Ireland in a quest to find his true love and uncover the secret behind his parentage. Along the way he gains an erectile nose, and a startling resemblance to Leonardo Di Caprio. Each absurd episode is constructed meticulously, and is delivered with the kind of momentum which should collapse in on itself, and amazingly manages to ascend even greater heights of hilarity. Gough makes it look deceptively easy, with an instinctive sense of timing, and a razor-sharp and subversive intellect."

 The entire list can be found here...

Galway Advertiser reviews Jude: Level 1! Wild celebrations in Gough apartment! Neighbours call police!

Well, if you've ever lived in Galway, as I did for twenty years, this is THE BIG ONE. Oh, the Irish Times is all very well, the Washington Post has its charms, the New York Times... (hmmm, let's not go there, girlfriend...), the Observer is good and well, and the Guardian is very nice... but the Galway Advertiser review is the one that has you holding your breath. Everyone that you know, everyone you will casually bump into for the next month, will have read it.

And the Galway Advertiser verdict is in on Jude: Level 1... and it's good!

Here's how it starts:

"Jude: Level 1, the hilarious new novel by Julian Gough, is a tour de farce, a comic chronicle of the history of the Irish psyche which takes the reader from the middle of the 20th century to the post-Celtic Tiger ennui of today, at breakneck speed. "

I may well be sticking that on the back of the next edition. Very happy. Very proud. I can safely show my face in Galway at the Arts Festival (I'm reading there on the 24th of July).

Read the rest here....

American Gods, and London literary novelists

I just read a book review, in Saturday's enjoyable and infuriating  Guardian Review, which throws some interesting light on what's wrong with the modern literary novel, and with modern literary criticism, and with the modern literary ghetto. (A ghetto that doesn't know it's a ghetto: a ghetto that thinks it is the world.)

The review is by Kamila Shamsie (author of Broken Verses, a literary novel, published by Bloomsbury). It is of The Opposite House, by Helen Oyeyemi  (also a literary novel, also published by Bloomsbury... but that incestuous connection isn't the main problem, thought it does reveal a lot about the tiny size of the British literary pond).

This is the first line of the review: "The Opposite House is not the first novel to suggest that migration is a condition, not an event; but it may be the first to contend that the condition afflicts no one so profoundly as the gods." 

Now, I couldn't quite believe that was her opening claim. But it was.  She really thought that her stablemate at Bloomsbury was probably "the first to contend" that migration "afflicts no one so profoundly as the gods". And editors and sub-editors had let this stand.

Which means that nobody involved in the whole process was aware that Neil Gaiman had spent nearly six hundred pages, in his novel American Gods (which is not "literary", nor published by Bloomsbury), writing about nothing but how migration profoundly afflicts the gods.

Now, American Gods is not an obscure book: It is recent (published in 2001). It was immensely successful (a New York Times bestseller in both hardback and paperback, a best-seller all over the world). It was very, very widely reviewed (my current paperback edition contains four densely-packed pages of rave reviews, which range from the Washington Post through William Gibson to The Independent).  And it has won about as many awards as a book can win. It lifted not only both of the biggest science fiction awards (the fan-voted Hugo, and the writer-voted Nebula), but also the main horror award (the Bram Stoker Award), as well as the Locus Award for best fantasy novel. A novel by a British writer, set firmly in modern America, it crossed genre boundaries. It found a huge readership.  It could not have made a bigger splash.

But American Gods is not a "literary novel", so it is perfectly acceptable for a literary novelist, reviewing a literary novel which is (among other things) trying to do the same thing as American Gods (but years later, on a much smaller scale), to totally fail to mention it. Not only fail to mention it, but to claim that the idea may well have just been invented by her fellow Bloomsbury novelist.

I  don't mean to pick on Kamila Shamsie by pointing this out. The fault is in the literary culture, it's certainly not Shamsie's. Her review is a perfectly honourable and fair-minded review from inside the literary tradition.  Anyone that the Guardian was likely to ask to review  The Opposite House would have done pretty much the same. And if Kamila Shamsie hadn't boldly said "but it may be the first to contend that the condition afflicts no one so profoundly as the gods," she wouldn't have revealed the limits of her reading (always a brave and dangerous thing for a writer to do). Most current literary reviewers are just as limited in their reading. (And most SF reviewers are also stuck in their ghetto: and most crime reviewers: but they at least know they live in a ghetto, and that what they read is a genre. The problem with the literary novel is that it is becoming a genre again, and doesn't know it...)

I am discussing Kamila Shamsie's single, revealing line in such depth, not because it is unusual, but because it exposes something absolutely typical. Literary novels are reviewed only in terms of other literary novels, by people who do not read outside that ghetto, and who are quite unaware of how tiny a world they inhabit. (Though surely a London-based, literary novelist, published by Bloomsbury, who finds themselves reviewing a London-based, literary novelist, who is published by Bloomsbury, must start to get the vague feeling that their world is shrinking alarmingly.)

If you don't know either book: Helen Oyeyemi's book (set in the modern world), in dealing with a troubled modern woman also deals with the Yoruba gods, including Yemaya, "who", according to the review, "has travelled with her believers to different parts of the world, including Cuba.." One of the most powerful sections in American Gods deals with exactly those Yoruba gods, coming with their believers to the Caribbean islands. But then, Gaiman's American Gods tries to deal with pretty much all the ancient gods, struggling to survive, as belief in them dies, in the modern Americas.

American Gods is an epic attempt by a British writer to write the great American Novel. It isn't perfect (a perfect novel is an oxymoron), but it blows almost everything in the literary pages of the Guardian Review out of the green water and high into the blue sky.

Helen Oyeyemi may well have written a wonderful book, I don't know.  Kamila Shamsie may well be a thoughtful reviewer, and a fine literary novelist in her own right, I don't know.  But a review of The Opposite House should at least mention American Gods. The contrast would be useful, interesting, revealing. An intimate story, in contrast with an epic. A woman's story, in contrast with a man's. But two books by ambitious writers, dealing with the same idea; displaced gods, struggling to adapt in our modern world. You can't  ignore the writer who did it first, just because he wasn't published by Bloomsbury.

A literary culture that can't connect these dots has serious nerve-damage.


 

First reviews are in!

Well, the first reviews of Jude: Level 1 are in, and it isn't even officially published till Monday (July 2nd, 2007). A great review in the Guardian. No, not that Guardian. You're obviously not from Tipperary. Let me start again.

The Nenagh Guardian has scooped the world!

Unfortunately I can't link to the review, because the Nenagh Guardian (or to use its full, historic title, "The Nenagh Guardian or Tipperary (North Riding) and Ormond Advertiser, incorporating the Nenagh News and the Tipperary Vindicator"), hasn't updated its website lately. But it was a good review, trust me, my mother read it out to me down the phone.

Meanwhile, in cyberspace, the first review is also in, and it's a doozy. A lot of people had pre-ordered Jude: Level 1 on Amazon. Now, Amazon, being Efficient and Modern and Devoted to Customer Service, sent out the pre-ordered copies as soon as the books arrived in the warehouse, way ahead of the publication date. Thus I have my first five star review on Amazon.co.uk, from the delightful Peter Kettle. (He has also just sent me one of the most charming emails I've ever received.) It is such a splendid review, I am going to quote it in full here, and then go to bed and dream happy dreams:

"What happens when you cross Douglas Adams with Sam Beckett?", 29 Jun 2007 By Peter Kettle (Sussex, United Kingdom) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

"If you're one of those people who skip to the end of reviews for a sound bite I'll be kind and start with one: Jude: Level 1 is that rare thing, a novel that's funny and beautifully written.

For those who like a bit more meat in a review I'd say this is funny, stimulating, vividly exciting, and brilliantly written without a single boring cliche in sight. It's got a bit of Douglas Adams in it, and a smattering of Flann O'Brien. A small portion of it got minced up with Beckett, enough to get you imagining some great Irish heavy drinker like Jack McGowran. His fruity voice would be exactly right for this story of serial demolitions. McGowran would probably embroider the whole mad story into the creamy top of his Guinness. How often do you come across a writer who can make humour deep? Joyce of course, Beckett certainly, but it's pretty thin after that. Nutbeam's party in Annie Proulx's fab `The Shipping News' gets close to the same feeling, so if you enjoyed that one you'll go for this one.

Okay, who the hell am I to say this? I'm just a painter scratching a living who happens to be a fan of reading. I'm also keen on exploding buildings, and this novel manages to destroy lots of them. It also runs circles around those everyday Oirish accounts of hard times, famines and gangsters. Despite having several orphans in it the story doesn't for one moment get syrupy, and every time an orphan gets killed you'll laugh.

I shall be rooting for the next bits of this story on the net. I'll be ordering the hardback as soon as I can. It's a cheerful book with a skewed logic of its own, and I hope it becomes a major prizewinner. I want to see it issued as a film; as a range of kitchen utensils; and most of all in a signed limited edition, bound in the skin of the Salmon of Knowledge. You'll just have to read it to find out what the hell I'm talking about."

-Peter Kettle

Hurrah! Hurrah! And now I'm off to bed.