Still Life With Woodpecker - Tom Robbins

STILL LIFE WITH WOODPECKER –

TOM ROBBINS

 

I remember having a copy of Still Life With Woodpecker by Tom Robbins given to me by a friend  now long gone and on reading it finding it very clever. Published in 1980, there was something about it as though it was a weird hang-over from the 1960s. A kind of last hurrah from West Coast Americana Hippydom. On reading it again years later I find it's lost none of its charm and that it's still an enjoyable and clever romp through a world as seen through rose-tinted, hashish-rinsed glasses.

 

It's funny how memories become distorted. I recalled Robins’ book as being about the hidden and subliminal messages contained within the design of a packet of Camel cigarettes and at the time it making me go out and buy a packet so that I could see for myself. And sure enough, everything it said about a packet of Camels was true. On re-reading the book, I'm again led to checking out the design of a Camels' cigarette packet but this time I use Google images and yes, those same subliminal messages are still there. From the naked woman and the lion drawn into the lines of the camel's body, to the pyramids (as copied from a dollar bill) to the word 'choice' that when held upside down and reflected in a mirror remains exactly the same. The difference being that I now dismiss as bunkum the meaning of the messages as explained by Tom Robbins, though that's not to deny that if you look, they're all still there.

There's a line in the book also that on first reading struck a chord and that has remained with me ever since. That line being 'A bomb is not an answer but a question'. On re-reading it, I see now it actually says 'Dynamite is a question not an answer'. A small difference, I know, but a difference all the same.

 

As it says on the cover, Still Life With Woodpecker is 'a sort of love story' regarding a princess and an outlaw bomber, and that's all you really need to know because what story there is, is essentially a vehicle to weave ideas in and out of. Those ideas, however, seem now to be eclipsed by the humour and a plethora of witty one-liners.

As an example of the kind of humour we're talking about, here's just one where the outlaw bomber is telling the princess about the time he and his fellow jail inmates were lined-up for a rectal probe after three kitchen knives and a seventeen-inch in diameter meat-slicing blade went missing from the jail kitchen: 'Of course, they didn't find the missing cutlery in any of us. But they did find four bars of soap, a Playboy centrefold, three ice cubes, five feathers, Atlantis, the Greek delegate to Boys' Nation, a cake with a file in it, a white Christmas,  a blue Christmas, Pablo Picasso and his brother Elmer, one baloney sandwich with mustard, two Japanese infantrymen who didn't realise that World War II was over, Prince Buster of Cleveland, a glass-bottom boat, Howard Hughes's will, a set of false teeth, Amelia Earhart, the first four measures of 'The Impossible Dream' sung by the Black Mountain College choir, Howard Hughes's will (another version), the widow of the Unknown Soldier, six passenger pigeons, middle class morality, the Great American Novel, and a banana.'

In the way that he goes off on these full-scale rants, the outlaw bomber character is like the Johnny character as played by David Thewlis in Mike Leigh's film Naked but a lot less fatalistic and world weary.

 

Ideas-wise, Tom Robbins lays out his table after the first few pages and writes 'Albert Camus wrote that the only serious question is whether to kill yourself or not. There is, however, only one serious question. And that is: Who knows how to make love stay?' And yes, that is a very valid question to ask.

He also tells us of a word that though little known has apparently dominated human evolution, that word being 'neoteny' which means 'remaining young'. 'Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced,' Robbins writes 'not because it has been sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature'. It's a good word, even if it might be made up?

 

Still Life With Woodpecker is a sprawling, hashish-fuelled day dream in miniature, dripping with wry humour and wider-eyed innocence. It's the kind of book that could only have been written in the last quarter of the twentieth century after the hippy Sixties dream has somewhat soured. It also includes a bunch of homemade bomb recipes that wouldn't go amiss in The Anarchists Cookbook, that I suspect if highlighted to the FBI, for example, would lead to its immediate banning. It just goes to show that under a cloak of humour you can still get away with an awful lot of things that might otherwise get you a jail sentence.

John Serpico

Mr Love And Justice - Colin MacInnes

MR LOVE AND JUSTICE – COLIN MACINNES

The third of Colin MacInnes' three great London Novels and again as with City Of Spades I'm struck by the thought as to why it's always Absolute Beginners that is touted as being the best of them and why it was made into a film (albeit a very bad one) and not the others?

Mr Love And Justice centres upon two characters, a seaman turned pimp called Frankie Love and Police Constable Edward Justice, newly promoted to Detective Constable in the Vice Squad. Being both in the same line of business as it were, their paths inevitably cross.

As with Absolute Beginners, the plot is neither here nor there and of little consequence, and as also with his previous books it's a bit long-winded and nothing really happens until half way into it. The difference between Mr Love And Justice and MacInnes' two previous books, however, is that whereas Absolute Beginners accent was on the emerging new youth cultures of that time, and City Of Spades dealt with the new immigrant culture in London, Mr Love And Justice is solely about prostitution.

From the start, it's very apparent that MacInnes has done his research into the subject and has obviously spoken to and interviewed prostitutes, pimps and police officers alike. It's all in the detail. Noticeably, there is also a more liberal use of the word 'fuck' than there was in the first two books, both in the narrative and in the dialogue.

The book's strength lies in the way MacInnes has managed to enter the relatively secret and twilight worlds of both prostitution (particularly the pimping or 'poncing' aspect of it) and the police and how he reports back on what he has observed. Essentially, he offers an insight into what drives these two worlds both morally and ethically. From these insights he then slips into the text a fair few of his own thoughts and deductions regarding the police and the law they uphold.

For example, at one point he writes 'For the true copper's dominant characteristic, if the truth be known, is neither those daring nor vicious qualities that are sometimes attributed to him by friend or enemy, but an ingrained conservatism, an almost desperate love of the conventional. It is untidiness, disorder, the unusual, that a copper disapproves of most of all: far more, even, than of crime, which is merely a professional matter.' And isn't that the truth?

'I think we can do without them,' says Frankie Love, referring to the police 'They're the only profession, the coppers, who've never had a hero – ever thought of that? They've put up statues to Nell Gwynne and Lady Godiva, but never so far as I know to a copper.'

And then in a discussion between Frankie Love and Edward Justice there's this: 'If you hear a scream in the night these days you say, “Oh, the law will take care of it”. A hundred years ago or even fifty, our grandfathers would have grabbed hold of the poker and gone out and taken a look themselves. They'd have done something: not just dialled 999.'

'I guess that's the age we live in,' Edward said.

'Yes, but I don't like it. Because you cops – well, you'll switch to any boss: any boss whatever. Whoever's got a grip then you'll obey him however good or bad his acts and his ideas may be.'

And again, isn't that the truth?

At another point in the book, MacInnes describes the audience at a wrestling match: 'Surrounding them was a cross-section of that part of the London populace which is rarely to be seen elsewhere (except at race meetings, certain East and South London pubs, and courts and jails), and whose chief characteristics are their uninhibited violence, their heartless bonhomie, and their total rejection alike of the left-ish Welfare State and the right-ish Property-owning democracy: a sort of Jacobean underground movement in the age of planned respectability from grave to cradle.' This being a very good description of a working class strata that is probably more common than MacInnes suggests, though hardly ever spoken of or written about.

All these things are almost obviously and exclusively the thoughts of MacInnes himself put into the mouths of his characters or slipped into various paragraphs along the way that interestingly reveal an almost anarchist bent to MacInnes. Having now read all three of his London books, though it might grate with some of his fans of his work, I would say that MacInnes himself is actually more interesting as a person and as a writer than the books themselves, and that perhaps it's not the books that should be highlighted, celebrated and held in such high esteem but the actual man himself?

John Serpico