'Loose Talk'
By Benjamin Benedict

  Book Reviews

I recently recommended ‘Another Bloody Love Letter’ by Anthony Loyd and thought that I might as well list and comment on some other books that I have read recently.

I served the King of England by Bohumil Hrabal

This book matures like some extraordinary wine. The story, which is ostensibly a rags to riches to rags story about a boy who becomes a waiter in Prague between the two world wars starts out being interesting with lashings of picturesque sex and ends up being remarkable.

There are two other things about it. There are paragraphs, which go on for seven or eight pages and Mr Hrabal makes you forget it is a novel, convincing you that this is truly the story of his life.

 Reflections on a Marine Venus by Lawrence Durrell

You might know Mr Durrell from his famous fictional work, The Alexandria Quartet. I bought this much shorter, non-fictional piece in a used bookshop. I think it was published in 1960, but can’t be sure because they have put the date in roman numerals and I don’t know my l’s from my c’s. At just under two hundred pages, this is an ideal book to take on holiday. It is the story Mr Durrell’s time on the island of Rhodes and the neighbouring islands during the short interlude of British occupation in the Second World War.   The chapters contain some interesting and pertinent excerpts of Rhodian history, descriptions of the islands, their towns, villages and their people at that odd moment, and of events, which he can take pages (with not a word wasted) to describe what took place in a few seconds. It is a fine piece of English prose, which can border on poetry, and at the same time makes you privy to reflections of depth and sensitivity. Here are couple of examples:

‘For it is always the child in man which is forced to live through these repeated tragedies of European conscience. The child is the forfeit we pay for the whole sum of our worldly errors. Only through him shall we ever salvage these lost cultures of passion and belief.’

 ‘- for surely history’s evaluations are wrong in speaking of civilized and barbaric ages succeeding or preceding one another, surely they have always co-existed – for one is the measure of the other? Everywhere the dualism of the human personality has created side by side profanity and piety, truth and falsehood, hate and love. Time is always aspiring to a dance-measure which will entangle the two in a dance, a dialogue, a duet: dissolve their opposition.’ 

H E Bates   An Autobiography

H E Bates is probably best known today as the author of ‘The Darling Buds of May’. He also wrote one of my all-time favourite books, ‘Fair Stood The Wind For France’. He died in 1974, just two years after finishing his autobiography, which is divided into three sections, ‘The Vanished World’, ‘The Blossoming World’, and ‘The World In Ripeness’.

Three things stand out about this five hundred-page tome: the clarity of his recollection, the diverse nature of the fiction that he wrote and the transitions in our culture that he witnessed over the course of his life.

I was fascinated by the mental processes behind the creation of his fiction, and by his view that good fiction must be more real than life itself, also by his sometimes less than complementary opinion of the work of some other well-known writers.

This is I suppose for those who know something of his work. If you don’t, then perhaps even he would prefer you to read ‘Fair Stood The Wind For France’ or ‘The Jacaranda Tree’ instead.

Notes on The Lanquedoc by Rupert Wright

Rupert Wright is a journalist who has settled with his family in the North section of my part of France, which is generally known as The Lanquedoc. I see some of what he sees, but it is a two to three hour journey to get from where I am to the region he mostly describes and as he readily admits he has hardly ventured into my part. I have to make the same admission about his neck of the woods, which is why I’m keeping his book as a reference guide. His main omission is not to mention that most importantly the South (my part) of Lanquedoc is Catalan, as is Barcelona in Spain; two and a half hours drive from me in the other direction.

Another great holiday book, not at all taxing and filled with enough descriptions of Mediterranean scenery, food, wine, sailing boats, bike rides and amusing bits of local incident and history to keep you very happy. He also tells of the fierce winds, scorching heat and flash thunderstorms that we have here, but if on the strength of it you come to this part of the world, keep to his section if you want to see ‘the undiscovered Provence’ as ninety-nine percent of the French discovered my bit a long time ago ago.

1599 A Year In Shakespeare’s Life by James Shapiro.

Mr Shapiro has picked on a year of great incident in both Shakespeare’s life and the life of the British Nation. It starts in London on a snowy December 28th 1598 with a gang of armed thespians, including Sir Will dismantling the timbers of ‘The Theatre’, with which to build the famous ‘Globe’ in the spring of the following year. They accomplished this removal, in the absence of the owner of the land on which ‘The Theatre’ stood.

1599 was the year in which Shakespeare completed Henry V, wrote As You Like It and Julius Caesar and drafted Hamlet. The scholarship employed to tie this into what was happening on the contemporary artistic and political scene is impressive, enlightening and highly readable, however Mr Shapiro cannot resist taking an oblique jab at what must be Peter Ackroyd’s ‘Shakespeare’, which in his eyes ‘presumes too much’. I read Peter Ackroyd’s book last year and in it he constantly points out that the only way to write a biography about someone who so little is known is to make some educated guesses. As he lets you know when he is guessing and gives the reason for his assumptions, I think Mr Shapiro might himself ‘presume too much’ in his complaint.

I, in turn would guess that the main cause for the friction is Mr Ackroyd’s hunch of Shakespeare’s Catholic connections in a post-reformation England. Shakespeare’s father was severely fined for not attending Protestant communion, and there was a history of covert Catholicism in the Stratford area, not to say amongst those well known to the Shakespeare’s. Although on one occasion Mr Shapiro mentions this financial issue, he refrains from giving the reason for it and he generally avoids the topic of surreptitious Catholic practise in those volatile times. Both authors seem agreed that Sir Will himself was very unlikely to have been a Catholic in either belief or practice. It is Mr Ackroyd’s theory of this network of connections, which seems to separate them and this should not bother us.

From either book, you may come away not remembering what was written when, but you will be left with a vivid impression of the outrageous ‘stuff’ that went on at that time. They were a bunch of colourful chancers and out of the stew that was their lives came something unsurpassed.

The Black Dahlia by James Ellroy

James Ellroy wrote LA Confidential, which as you probably know was made into a particularly elegant movie and he takes the title of this book from another story of the genre that was made into a movie, back in the thirties. It is interesting to think that not only can a writer successfully set a story in another time, but that he can convincingly write in the style of that era. He is not a Raymond Chandler or a Dashiel Hammet, but is his own man and I have never read a more compelling description of a boxing match, even be it by Mailer or Hemmingway.

The story itself is a great read, if a little convoluted. It is based on an LA cop’s fascination with a particularly ugly piece of human butchery, carried out on a young lady who as they say was, ‘no better than she should be’. There is a platonic ménage a trois and a heap of cheap sex to keep the pot boiling between scenes of brutal action and our hero travels to Mexico as well as to the East Coast before the pieces of the jig-saw start to fit.

The book was lent to me by a friend, who has since read a further trilogy of stories by Mr Ellroy entitled LA Noir, and he says that the first one of these, called Blood On The Moon knocks the socks off The Black Dahlia, but not having read it, I couldn’t possibly comment.

Brazzaville Beach by William Boyd

I have long admired Mr Boyd’s African sagas, notably An Ice Cream War and A Good Man In Africa. On this occasion, Brazzaville Beach is the place in Africa that Hope Clearwater ends up in and she tells the story that has led to this semi-retirement at an early age with great skill, juggling between three time zones in the process. It has its moments, and there are some intriguing asides into matters of higher mathematics, but I found her character too aimless and with no particular humour. I have a much clearer picture of some of the chimpanzees in the story than I have of her.

Read one of the two other books I have mentioned, rather than this one. I suppose it can at least be said that Mr Boyd can spin a yarn so well that almost any yarn will do.

Paris by Andrew Hussey

Four hundred and thirty-three pages of small print (in the paperback edition) make this book something of a slog, but while I am grateful to have finally reached the end, I am also glad to have read it.

I have always thought of European cities as having much in common. They might look different, but they have all been through the same basic process. I therefore expected to come across many historical convergences with say Peter Ackroyd’s rather less precise but far more splendid book, London. In fact, although these two cities must be only two hundred or so miles apart, they might as well have been on different planets. Mr Hussey is impressively detailed while still being readable, but he lacks the narrator’s flair for something a little tongue-in-cheek now and then.

The theme of Paris must be greatness through adversity. Blood, sex, filthy stench and the most outrageous philosophical presumptions are there in bucket-loads. You have to laugh not to cry, but Mr Hussey doesn’t do either. However, if you want to know what went on, it’s all there.

King’s Road by Max Decharne

The cover of this book shows a long legged blonde in a mini skirt getting into a taxi, providing some much welcome exposure and like it or not, it is the swinging sixties that fully exposed this street.

Mr Ducharne gives us both the build-up and the follow-on to this, but whereas he at least sketches in the historical past of the road, back to when it was the King’s private thoroughfare, he does not find anything to say about it since it’s Punk and Glam-Rock days. Having walked it at night a few years back, I can sympathise with this to a degree, but then again The Royal Court Theatre (one of his pivotal establishments) has just been spectacularly refurbished and whereas he imagines property prices have priced out anything worth talking about, I would be inclined to think that this has simply changed the game somewhat and hidden it from view.

Although the reportage is impressive and there is an interesting mix of music hall, theatre, films, fashion and music with jaunts into restaurants and clubbing, Mr Decharne seems stronger on the fifties and seventies than he is on the sixties. I got a lot out of it, but then I was there in the sixties and it filled in a lot of gaps before and after.

I can’t help believe that there aren’t one or two people still around with some tales to tell, that could have livened things up a bit.

Animals in Translation by Temple Grandin and Catherine Johnson

I have not finished this book but it must be mentioned. Temple Grandin is autistic, and because of this it seems that she sees things more from an animals perspective that a ‘normal’ human being. She is an associate professor of animal science at Colorado State University and a eminent expert on livestock management as well as an authority on many other animals and has contributed much towards their mental and physical comfort.

By understanding something about the way animals see things, we can learn a lot about ourselves. The book should be required reading for every administrator on the planet, the message being that the key to good administration is simplicity, which is why half the meatpacking plants in North America use Ms Grandin’s ten-point welfare audit, rather than a one hundred point paper audit system. She tellingly says, ‘They also do better on the smaller details because the smaller details are part of the big ones.’

There are a few lines, which give a clue as to how hard a road it has been for Ms Grandin to travel, but many more on horses, dogs, cats, geese, cranes, squirrels, chimps, gorillas, pigs, giraffes rats, mice, poultry, wolves, crows, parrots, starlings, dolphins prairie dogs, reptiles, elephants and whales, to name just some. One of the most extraordinary passages – and there are many extraordinary discoveries here – comes in respect of the sophistication of animal language: prairie dogs using nouns, verbs and adjectives, for instance, and then there’s the animal language of music.

The brains of animals and autistics ‘specialise’ more than ‘normal’ human beings, but the brains of domestic animals and humans seem to have become mutually specialised since they began their relationship together. This is particularly true in the case of our partnership with wolves and then dogs. We have actually evolved to compliment one another’s activity. I can hear you saying, ‘oh, you mean that dogs have evolved to compliment ours.’ No, I mean that both our brains seem to have evolved to compliment each other’s. Read the book, that’s all I can say.

It is a fascinating but hard read being something of a textbook, but so worthwhile. I came across it in the process of researching an idea for a story and I am so glad I did. Not only has it confirmed a lot of what I was edging towards, but it has illuminated my understanding of these people we call animals.

If there are any of these books that you should read, then this is the one.  

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