Totterdown Rising - Kate Pollard

TOTTERDOWN RISING - KATE POLLARD

When approaching Bristol by train there are two sights to look out for that tell you you're there. The first is the Clifton Suspension Bridge in the distance on the left, spanning the Avon Gorge like a veritable Eighth Wonder of the World. The second, on the right, is a row of differently-coloured houses sitting at the top of the hill just before you get to Temple Meads Station. Those multi-coloured houses are in Totterdown, and in their not so subtle way are near-iconic. A recognizable yet unspoken feature of the landscape depicting Bristol in all its off-centre, polymorphic peculiarity. Unlike the Clifton Suspension Bridge which is a tourist go-to, far more people have seen Totterdown or at least a part of it if only from a distance than have actually been there. Moreover, far fewer people know much if anything about Totterdown's history and that includes a good many Bristolians themselves which is why Kate Pollard's book, Totterdown Rising, is an important  one.

Published by Totterdown Press, an imprint of Bristol's ever impressive Tangent Books, Totterdown Rising is the story of a depressingly shameful episode from Bristol's more recent past when a community was needlessly bulldozed to make way for what city planners saw at the time as the future. That future being to all intent and purpose the motor car.

During the post-war period of the 1950s, car ownership was being viewed as intrinsic to economic growth and by the 1960s car production figures had become a prime index for measuring that growth. Encouraged by car manufacturers, car ownership was presented as a symbol of affluence, convenience and freedom with urban renewal being shaped around that ownership. Public transport and environmental impact came a poor second whilst the impact upon communities wasn't even a consideration. Subsequently, when plans for a £30 million Outer Circuit Road for Bristol was devised in 1966, the fact that large parts of the Easton and Totterdown areas of the city would need to be demolished was an inconvenient but unavoidable necessity. The required displacement of local communities mere collateral damage.

Like homes and businesses built from bricks and mortar, bold visions come with a price but what price the lives, the love, the memories, hopes and dreams of people? Under compulsory purchase orders the properties of Totterdown standing in the way of progress were bought up and the occupants uprooted and moved away in what can only be described as an exercise in mismanagement. Chaotic, shambolic and ill-conceived mismanagement.

With bold visions, however, come caveats and the bolder the vision the larger the caveat. Unfortunately, no-one mentioned this to the residents of Totterdown, in particular the caveat that said 'we will uproot your families and destroy your community but to no actual avail if the road in the end isn't built'. And that's exactly what happened. The money ran out, the vision faltered, and the enthusiasm waned, resulting in the road in the end not actually being built and leaving Totterdown bereft. One of the oldest communities in Bristol had been vandalised, devastated, ripped apart and near-destroyed for no reason at all.

It's all water under the bridge now, of course, so let bygones be bygones and let's all just move on, some might say? And that's fine because things have moved on but it's still important to ask what lessons have been learned because some might also say 'those who fail to remember the past are condemned to repeat it'.

There was a time when Bristol's city planners thought it might be a good idea to fill in the city docks, concrete it all over and sell it all off to the right bidder as highly desirable real estate. There was a time when the Council had actually sold the iconic industrial cranes down at the city docks for scrap, before being saved by local people incensed at the very idea. There was a time when it was thought to be a good idea to demolish Eastville Stadium, the former home to Bristol Rovers, to make way for the building of a huge, blue Ikea store in the middle of the housing estate there. There was a time when it was thought to be a good idea to turn buildings in the centre of Bristol over to developers to be turned into student-only accommodation. There was a time when the gentrification of Bristol was thought to be a good thing even when it meant the pricing out of locals from ever being able to afford a home there. There was a time when it was deemed the right thing that the statue of slave trader Edward Colston remain in place because apparently removing it would be 'denying our history'.

There was a time that in order to save Bristol it was thought it necessary to destroy Bristol. Totterdown being a case in point.

John Serpico

Another Green World - Geeta Dayal

 ANOTHER GREEN WORLD - GEETA DAYAL

The thing about the Brian Eno solo albums from the 1970s, as in Here Comes The Warm Jets, Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy, and Another Green World is that they all demand repeat listens. Their complexity and peculiarity make them impossible to immediately take in, soak up and understand. Every new listen is almost a fresh listen as if you're hearing them for the first time or at least for the first time from a different angle. There are seemingly constant new things to be heard in them and it's this that makes them of constant interest.

Another Green World was recorded in 1975 and from its very feel it's obvious that it's a studio album, as in having been concocted entirely within the confines of a recording studio as opposed to being incubated over a period of time from notebooks and ruminations in the bedroom. The recording studio being used as a musical instrument in its own right.

Geeta Dayal's treatise on the album, entitled - what else? - Another Green World, is from the series of booklets published by Bloomsbury Academic, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing. The word 'academic' rather gives the game away as to its seriousness of intent, forwarding the notion that these books are of an academic nature rather than fan-boy stuff.

In the preface, Dayal informs us that this short work of just 105 pages has been written and re-written over and over again, draft upon draft and unfortunately, it shows. The clumsiness of some of the sentences is at times almost jarring as are some of the geographical details about England. It's a casebook example of something being over-written, where you end up not being able to see the wood for the trees. On top of this, it comes as no surprise to see the author is based in San Francisco, which explains the geographical misconceptions in regard to the English cities and Universities that are mentioned.

Writing about music is like dancing to architecture, as they say. Writing to a deadline induces panic, and Dayal's book comes across as an example of that.

At the end of the day it's always down to personal choice of course, but Another Green World isn't actually Eno's best solo album though that's not to deny its classic status. The collaboration between the different musicians on the album such as Robert Fripp, John Cale and even a young Phil Collins make it an interesting proposition from the start though it's the inclusion of the track I'll Come Running that tips the whole thing into the realm of beauty.

I'll Come Running first appeared the year previously in 1974 on a John Peel session during the time when Eno after having left Roxy Music was playing with a band called The Winkies. The Peel session version had been called Totalled and was an upbeat, almost proto pop punk song. The version on Another Green World, however, is a lament. A contemplative daydream juxtaposing both resignation and enthusiasm. A perfect balance, a perfect moment, capturing the first tiny speck of light from the sun rising alongside the final, fading last glow from the sun setting. As a pure, fully-realised song it stands proudly, bursting with life yet possessed with sadness. A genuine work of beauty.

Of the fourteen tracks on the album only five of them actually have lyrics, the rest of them being instrumentals. As Geeta Dayat correctly points out, the album is the link to Eno's future. It's the bridge between Eno of old and new Eno, between rock'n'roll and Ambient, between the guitar and the synthesizer. It's near-equivalent is David Bowie's Low album, though where on Low one side of the album is composed of songs with lyrics and the other side is sprawling ambient pieces, the tracks on Another Green World are more evenly distributed, the ones with lyrics acting almost as segues.

Because of this 'crossover' status, Dayal is able to explore some of Eno's influences which led to the creation of Another Green World and it's here that the book proves to be most interesting. Steve Reich, Gavin Bryars, Harold Budd, Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music album are all given mention, acting as a sort of road map to a musical education that if paid proper attention to is actually life-enhancing.

Nowadays when you think of Eno, you associate him with being a superb record producer and the perpetrator of, if not the well from which Ambient music sprang. You visualise him as either the alien person in feathers and leopard-print, twiddling away on an analog synth in Roxy Music times, or as the balding University lecturer polymath applying an intelligence to music and the arts whenever he pops up on YouTube. In Roxy Music days, however, Eno was apparently a veritable shag monster, cutting a picaresque swathe through the heartland of student virginity whenever out on tour. It's a sobering thought, betraying his past-life 'alien' persona and his subsequent studied yet relaxed seriousness, and revealing him to be as human as the rest of us. Though with added genius.

John Serpico

The Postman Always Rings Twice - James M Cain

THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE -

JAMES M CAIN

There's the film starring Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange with the scene on the kitchen table and then there's the book by James M Cain on which the film is based. What might not be so well-known, however, is that the book was said by Albert Camus to have inspired his own book, The Stranger. You live and learn.

In regard to Cain's book, by page 9 the two main protagonists are at it with a 'Bite me! Bite me!' and well, I don't remember reading anything like that in The Stranger or indeed in anything Camus has written. And hang on a minute, when was this written? 1934? And there was me thinking (as Philip Larkin once put it) sexual intercourse didn't begin until 1963, between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles' first LP.

By page 45, the cheating wife and her errant lover have murdered the husband and with a 'Rip me! Rip me!' and a 'Yes! Yes, Frank, yes!' they're at it again down in the dirt and dust next to the crashed car where the husband's body is, after staging the crash to make it look like an accident.

If The Postman Always Rings Twice was a competitor in a 100 meter sprint then before the starting gun had even been fired it would be half-way down the track ahead of all the others. In its immorality it certainly sets the pace and in terms of being no holds barred, for its time it's way ahead of its time. Of course, nowadays it's all pretty tame stuff but for its mix of sex and violence it comes as no surprise that it was banned in certain states in America.

The influence upon Camus is discernible in its depiction of immorality and the subsequent reckoning with the Law, though in The Outsider it's not so much for the crime that the main character is tried but for his general attitude toward the mores and values of society.

In its style of writing, The Postman Always Rings Twice is very straight to the point; very lean and very mean. There are shades of Dostoevsky's Crime And Punishment in there as well as Zola's Therese Raquin but it's all condensed into a much purer and much more easily read form. It's pulp fiction, essentially, but pulp fiction at its best.

John Serpico

Gramsci - James Joll

GRAMSCI - JAMES JOLL

The importance of Antonio Gramsci cannot be overstated. It wasn't me who said that but Noam Chomsky, one of the greatest intellectuals of our modern era, and when such a man says such a thing about another person it's intellectually sensible to take note. Gramsci, I would argue, holds the key to understanding the world and how it's run but that's not to elevate him to any sort of guru status as that would be wholly missing the point and would negate the reasons for making such a suggestion. Gramsci is there if you're interested in such matters and he should be read as part of that general discourse, though on reading him it's akin to laying down the final piece of the jigsaw to complete the whole picture.

Gramsci's greatest doctrine was that of 'hegemony' that he used to explain how a particular social and economic system maintains its hold and retains its support and how a minority can impose its leadership and its values on a majority. Gramsci saw that the rule of one class over another does not solely depend on economic or physical power alone but rather on persuading the ruled to accept the system of beliefs of the ruling class and to share their social, cultural and moral values.

Echoing Chomsky's assessment, according to writer James Joll, Gramsci is one of the most interesting and important thinkers of the twentieth century and the most important European Communist theorist since Lenin. He's not wrong in this and so it's somewhat baffling how so few people have ever heard of Gramsci - but then again, maybe not so baffling when taking into account Gramsci's hegemony theory?

Joll's book, entitled simply 'Gramsci', is an interesting and very readable account of Gramsci's life and of his Prison Notebooks that Gramsci composed after being condemned to twenty years imprisonment by Mussolini. Not that Gramsci should be read, Joll points out, as any kind of guide to revolutionary methods or as a key to a successful revolution because Gramsci was more interested in the long-term process by which a revolution would come about than in what society would look like after a revolution. Moreover, Gramsci was concerned to reach a general understanding of the nature of historical, social and economic change, along with the role of the working class, the intellectual and the political party in it.

Apart from the importance of culture and its relation to politics, Gramsci's attention was also focused on the rise of Italian Fascism but then how could it not? Mussolini at the time was making inroads into the seizing of power although to Gramsci it was obvious that Fascism was the only remaining way at that time in which the capitalists could maintain their authority and preserve their economic system.

Herein lies the lessons from history.

Any political theory is only really relevant if it has a relevancy to the present-day world. Gramsci's doctrine of hegemony is blatantly relevant to modern-day Britain, for example, in regard to the culture wars that inform politics of all stripes but more profoundly it's in regard to who controls the mainstream and even indeed the independent media. Right-wing and conservative values are ubiquitous, insidiously seeping and oft times brutally bludgeoning their way into everyday life and becoming so much the norm that they are presented as being 'common sense'. 

Subsequently, conservative liberalism as practiced by the BBC can be cast as Left-wing bias and no-one bats an eyelid.  A centre-right Labour Party under the governance of Kier Starmer can be cast as Socialist when clearly it's no such thing. Judges, lawyers, chiefs of police and other pillars of the Establishment can be cast as 'woke' when not bending to the will of the Tory government. Political agendas, prejudice and propaganda can be cast as both 'news' and entertainment.

More disturbing, however, are Gramsci's thoughts on Italian Fascism and how his descriptions of it very much match the politics and characteristics of prominent elements within the British Conservative Party. 'The cold contemplation of the suffering of others', for example, is Conservative MP Suella Braverman's modus operandi to a tee.

Whether or not such a thing as hegemony is a good or a bad thing is a moot point. What matters is that hegemony is a very real thing. It exists, whether those living under it or indeed those enforcing or pursuing it are conscious of it themselves or not. To be aware of hegemony and to understand how it works can be eye-opening though that's not to say this can be of any actual, practical use. It can be the same thing - as Gramsci points out - as when politicos use revolutionary language without preparing for a revolution and without actually believing that a revolution is even possible.

Far more important is to be aware of Fascism - of what it is and what it entails - because to not be aware of it is to leave the door wide open for a population to sleepwalk into it, before waking up and finding itself under totalitarianism where those deemed to be inferior or problematic are being pointed to the gas chambers or whatever their modern-day equivalent might be. 

When it comes to such matters, the importance of Antonio Gramsci cannot be overstated.

John Serpico

Utz - Bruce Chatwin

 UTZ - BRUCE CHATWIN

Another book that I went into blind, not having a clue what it was about before starting it. Sometimes, of course, that's the best way. Bought on a whim for something to read when my train was cancelled and I had to catch a bus which means Great Western Railway are to thank/blame for this. Utz, by Bruce Chatwin. Consisting of 154 pages, so a relatively short read. Short enough to be read on a bus journey, at least.

It turns out that Utz is actually the name of a person - Kaspar Utz, to give him his full name - who is a collector of porcelain figurines. His hobby has amassed him a spectacular collection that he has managed to keep safe from the ravages of the Second World War and the subsequent imposition of Stalinism upon former Czechoslovakia where he lives. It has, however, become the focal point of his life to the extent that it has come to define his life, or so it would seem. Utz is the proverbial hunter captured by the game.

Utz keeps his collection of over a thousand figurines crammed in a tiny two-room flat where he resides, a reflection and result of his antipathy towards such beautiful objects being housed in museums.

'An object in a museum case' according to Utz 'must suffer the de-natured existence of an animal in the zoo. In any museum the object dies of suffocation and the public gaze. The collector's enemy is the museum curator. Ideally, museums should be looted every fifty years, and their collections returned to circulation.' In addition, he surmises that 'wars, pogroms, and revolutions offer excellent opportunities for the collector.'

The book starts with Utz's funeral attended by the author who by this process plants himself at the centre of the story. The author has only met Utz on just one occasion in the past but such a fascinating character was Utz that he is the perfect subject for a book. He is also the perfect pivot on which to spin ideas and points of interest which is what Bruce Chatwin as the author does, and it is here that the book excels. 

Alchemy, identity, entomology, idolatry, iconoclasm, the legend of the golem and obscure figures from history; all these things are woven around the story of a man in Czechoslovakia who collects something so apparently innocuous as porcelain figurines. All told and channeled through a sense of humour not too dissimilar from the wit and comedic eloquence of Vivian Stanshall when reciting the story of Sir Henry At Rawlinson End.

Utz, as in the book, is brilliant and clever, and little wonder it was shortlisted for the 1988 Booker Prize. It didn't win - the prize that year being taken by Peter Carey for his book Oscar And Lucinda - but it probably should have done.

John Serpico

New Poems Book One - Charles Bukowski

 NEW POEMS BOOK ONE - CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Charles Bukowski was never an alcoholic as such, though he was certainly a drunkard. Let's just say he liked a bit of a drink and that he made a good drunk, if there can be such a thing? Bukowski knew how to drink. Often he would just shut himself up in his rented room, close the curtains, prop himself up on his bed and swig down bottles of the most noxious, cheapest wine he could find and drink himself into oblivion. He knew, however, to always lie on his side when slipping into unconsciousness so as not to end up choking on his own vomit. It's the little things in life such as this that are important and what differentiates the amateur from the professional. It's a sort of life skill, in a way. One that in the scheme of things is probably more important than being able to write. And Charles Bukowski certainly knew how to write, just as certainly as he knew how to drink.

New Poems Book One is part of an archive of  work that Bukowski left to be published after his death in 1994. It's a collection of random poems though I'd hazard a guess and say a fair few of them were originally written as vignettes and then edited into poems. Some of them are but cursory glances and wry observations but others are moments of reflection and illumination captured for eternity.

In one piece, entitled The Column, Bukowski describes how in 1942 at the age of 21 he's sitting on a park bench alongside a bunch of other bums when 'the war chariots' roll by, and how the soldiers on their way to war see him and hate him. Bukowski describes the soldiers yelling, cursing and screaming at him because they want him to be going with them. After the column passes, one of the old bums next to him asks Bukowski why he's not in the Service, at which Bukowski gets up and walks down to the public library where he sits down at a table and starts reading. The meaning of the book is too deep for him, however, so he puts it back on the shelf and walks back outside 'to wait'.

There are some who won't understand what Bukowski is talking about here but for those who do, it's like suddenly recognising a kindred spirit.

If you feel there's something wrong with the world, something you can see with your own eyes but that you can't put into words, then what do you do? Well, there's very little that you can do. How can you talk about it if you don't have the words? How do you explain not only to others but to yourself? And then one day if you finally have the words then who do you talk to if others don't share those words also? The answer is that you don't talk, you write. And that's exactly what Charles Bukowski did.

In a piece entitled Commerce, Bukowski remembers his father's words of 'work hard and you'll be appreciated' but later Bukowski learns that this is true only if you make much more for them than they pay you. 'America at work, where they rip out your intestines and your brain and your will and your spirit. They suck you dry, then throw you away. The capitalist system. The work ethic. The profit motive.'

In another piece entitled The Great Escape, Bukowski relays a conversation between himself and a colleague at work one day, where his colleague is comparing working for the postal service to a bucket full of crabs. Every now and then, his colleague tells him, a crab will climb on top of the others and begin to climb toward the top of the bucket and just as it's about to escape, another crab will grab it and pull it back down. Mid-conversation, a supervisor approaches Bukowski and his colleague and says 'you fellows were talking. There is no talking allowed on this job'.

Eleven and one-half years Bukowski has been working there so he gets up off his stool and climbs right up the supervisor, reaches up and pulls himself right out of there. 'It was so easy it was unbelievable,' Bukowski writes 'but none of the others followed me, And after that, whenever I had crab legs I thought about that place. I must have thought about that place maybe 5 or 6 times - before I switched to lobster.'

Bukowski became a writer and years later as he describes in another piece entitled About The Mail, people write to him to say that his books have helped them through tough times. And there was Bukowski thinking his writing was for the purpose of keeping him from going under but it now appears he's helped any number of others. 'Well, being helped happened to me too,' he writes, and then goes on to list those who he means: 'Celine, Dostoevsky, Fante, early Saroyan, Turgenev, Gorky, Sherwood Anderson, Robinson Jeffers, E E Cummings, Blake, Lawrence and many others.'

It's an interesting reading list, particularly in regard to his admission in The Column that he didn't understand the book he had pulled off the shelf at the library and therefore had 'to wait'. Waiting obviously paid off because once he was ready he devoured the most heaviest of books and this time understood their meaning. Consecutively his own writing came bursting out of him. Roaring out of him, even, as it should do if you're ever going to call yourself a writer.

Bukowski can be a divisive figure. His writing appeals to some but to others it repels. It's undeniable, however, that when he's good he's very, very good indeed. The main problem with him was that he was never consistently good and sometimes came across as a sexist, negative boor. Happily, there's no such problems here in this particular book.

John Serpico

White Line Fever - Lemmy Kilmister

WHITE LINE FEVER -

LEMMY KILMISTER

Well, it starts off with an anecdote about being thrown off a plane after being spotted sipping from a bottle of Jack Daniels by a stewardess, and Lemmy's explanation for boarding a plane with a pint of Jack Daniels in his pocket is that he finds it helps with the sobering up. And it continues in the same vein from there, really.

There's a knack when it comes to writing an autobiography and whilst some people have it others clearly don't have it at all. 'A man needs to know his limitations', as Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry says in The Enforcer, and Lemmy against all the evidence clearly knew his which is presumably why he got in writer Janiss Garza to help out? Lemmy might well have been a God as Dave Grohl once stated but he was also a professional who knew he owed it not only to his fans but also to his reputation to not present a badly-written book. You only write one autobiography in your life (unless you're John Lydon) so it should never be a half-arsed one.

White Line Fever reads as if you're sat down in your living room at the end of an evening and Lemmy's there with you, laid out and relaxed on your sofa, drinking double brandies and pulling on a cigar as he regales you with the story of his life. It's very personable, very friendly and very entertaining. But what would we want from a Lemmy Kilmister autobiography? Well, we would want things we never knew before. Little facts and details to fill the gaps and flesh out the bigger picture. And we would want anecdotes and good ones too about 'huge women doing things to him with raw carrots', as an example - and those are Lemmy's words, not mine.

'Motorhead', of course, is American slang for speedfreak so with such a blatant drugs reference from the get go, it's no surprise that Lemmy has a lot of drug anecdotes. His time in Hawkwind in particular is an example of drug taking on an industrial scale with tales of three-week speed binges, going berserk on belladonna, and of talking to trees on acid, with the trees sometimes winning the argument.

Come 1980 Lemmy put in for a blood transplant, the same process Keith Richards is rumoured to have gone through. After some blood tests, however, his doctor informed him that it's not going to be possible because he no longer had human blood anymore. 'Pure blood will kill you,' his doctor told him 'And you can't give blood either. Forget it, you'd kill the average person because you're so toxic.'

So Lemmy was a medical phenomena. Half man half pharmacy. 

Drugs do things to a person, and according to Lemmy they certainly did something to Mitch Mitchell, the drummer in the Jimi Hendrix Experience who bounced up to Lemmy one day in the middle of Oxford Street and exclaimed 'Hello, I don't know who I am!' before running off again. Drugs also might have done something to Dave Brock of Hawkwind who Lemmy says developed a habit of leaning out of his car as he drove along and yelling at schoolgirls 'Spank! Spank! Spank! Hello, girls, spanky-spanky!' As for Nik Turner, let's just not go there, shall we?

When it came to a lot of things, Lemmy was totally unreconstructed. Some of his more lurid tales in regard to his relationships and backstage conquests are questionable and though his attitude toward women was one of macho hyper-sexuality he always held women in much respect and love. Interestingly and thankfully he always remained very perceptive, at one point in the book when talking about him getting gastric flu even going into Nostradamus mode: 'These viral things are gonna keep getting stronger, 'cause every five years a new strain comes out that they didn't plan on, and some day one of those bugs is gonna kill half the planet.' He was saying this in 2002.

White Line Fever is a good read and is definitely one of the better rock autobiographies. Though seeing as it's the autobiography of the once snorting, drinking rock god legend that was Lemmy Kilmister, you really wouldn't want or expect anything less.

John Serpico

Dreamers - Knut Hamsun

 DREAMERS - KNUT HAMSUN

Knut Hamsun does 'whimsy' and who'd have thought? After the delirium of his masterpiece, Hunger, it would be reasonable to expect more of the same from the writer who Charles Bukowski once described as 'one of the greatest writers ever' but Hamsun is just full of surprises, some of them welcome some of them not so. Against what is probably my better judgement, Knut Hamsun is one of my favourite writers though I wouldn't go so far as Bukowski in saying he was one of the greatest. 

Just as Bukowski could no doubt have explained why Hamsun was so good (and I can probably guess why he would have held that view, particularly after having read Hunger) I could just as easily explain why he's one of my favourites though I don't think it would be very helpful to anyone or even myself. Sometimes something just is, and it's best to just leave it at that. A bit like life, really.

Dreamers was written in 1904 and is set in a small, isolated fishing village in northern Norway where we follow the trials and tribulations of Ove Rolandsen, the village telegraph operator as he drinks, fights, flirts and schemes. He's not the only one though. All the residents of the village are at it even if only within the privacy of their own homes. From housekeepers, factory owners, lay-helpers, curates and even wives of curates, they're all flirting and scheming like cast members of an endless soap opera. Roalandsen the telegraph operator is the biggest, however, albeit all done with an almost innocent charm.

In the way of storyline, there isn't much to say without giving away spoilers only that it's beautifully crafted and misses not a beat. It's precise, subtle, light, wry, amusing and a joy to read. What makes it all very likeable in fact reminded me of the magic realism as captured by Hilary Mantel in her 1989 novel, Fludd. Even more so, it very much reminded me of Federico Fellini's 1973 film Amacord, where the village of Fellini's childhood is depicted as a place of comical, beautiful and magical strangeness. Compare and contrast. Amacord being, in fact, one of my all-time favourite films so comparing Hamsun's Dreamers to it is actually high praise indeed.

John Serpico

Jimi - Curtis Knight

 JIMI - AN INTIMATE BIOGRAPHY OF JIMI HENDRIX -

CURTIS KNIGHT

According to Curtis Knight, apparently Jimi Hendrix was a messenger from another world. 'Genius guitarist, sent from another time and another place, to give us a message of Love, Peace and Freedom'. Well, I'm not too sure about that. We know Hendrix was a genius guitarist because we've heard him, we know he was a fantastic performer because we've seen him, and we know he was the Penis de Milo of plaster casts because we've seen it, but a messenger from another world sent from another time and another place? I think I'll take that bit with a pinch of salt. And on that point it very much sums up much of this book.

Jimi, by Curtis Knight, is written from the perspective of the author who worked with and was friends with Hendrix prior to Hendrix leaving America for England in 1966, with the friendship remaining right up until Hendrix's death in 1970. The fact that Knight was close to Hendrix is of benefit when writing a biography such as this but it also means that what he does is to weave himself into the story as well and quite often it's hard to tell what is true and what is him simply hitching himself onto the Hendrix comet tail in a bid to boost his own importance and his own credentials.

Fairly prominent in the book is the issue of recordings released by Knight that weren't ever welcomely received by the music press, recordings that Knight was accused of releasing in a bid to cash in on Hendrix's death. There are two tracks in particular, both of which make for interesting listening that now with the benefit of YouTube are easily accessible.

The first is a song called How Would You Feel that was recorded in 1965, which is very similar to Dylan's Like A Rolling Stone, a song of course that Hendrix practically made his own. The second is a song called The Ballad Of Jimi, again recorded in 1965 almost five years before Hendrix's death where the lyrics are all about him having already died.

Knight tells us that after Hendrix's return to America in 1967 after having spent a year in England, they met up again to discuss among other things the contract Hendrix had broken when he departed for England. Their friendship was immediately rekindled and they went into a recording studio and over just one night recorded a whole album together. Now, this to me sounds mightily implausible. That Jimi Hendrix, after having already released his debut album and established himself in Europe would - on his way to the Monterey Pop Festival - without any objection from his Management enter a studio with his old friend and record a whole album in one session? 

'That is my position, and that is the real story,' King writes. Well, I'm not so sure.

Die-hard Hendrix fans would probably already know about all the legal wrangling that entailed and the settlements over royalties just as they would probably know about some of the other stories Curtis writes about such as The Jimi Hendrix Experience going on tour with The Monkees - a mismatch almost made in heaven. They would probably even know that someone at one point stole Hendrix's gravestone? For all that, there are still other anecdotes they maybe wouldn't be aware of, particularly in regard to private conversations between Curtis and Hendrix. Take the subject of the Electric Ladyland cover design for example, with the photograph of twenty or so nude girls. According to Curtis, Hendrix didn't like it much but there was nothing he could do. "They never consulted me about those kind of things," Hendrix is quoted as saying. 

Near to the end of the book there's a chapter about Hendrix's last few days in London just before he died in 1970 which is interesting to read as it's all about him walking among the trees and gardens in Hyde Park, or floating around Notting Hill, Kensington Market and the Fulham Road. It's interesting because it seems strange to imagine him - this Rock'n'Roll icon, this Rock God - just wandering around these places, almost as if the surroundings doesn't match the legend. A bit like reading about Nico of The Velvet Underground ending up on heroin in Manchester.

Overall, the book does offer some insights but not really enough to add anything new to the story of Hendrix's life or to make it essential reading. Much better - as is often the case - to just listen instead to the music because a lot of it really is the music of the spheres that still to this day in terms of guitar playing remains unsurpassed.

John Serpico

The Friends Of Eddie Coyle - George V Higgins

 THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE - GEORGE V HIGGINS

The book on which the 1973 film starring Robert Mitchum was based and the only thing wrong with it is the cover because if the guy in the picture is meant to be the main character, Eddie 'Fingers' Coyle, then it looks nothing like him. The book describes Coyle as being stocky and in his forties which fits Robert Mitchum's description but the guy on the cover is at least ten years younger and not stocky in the slightest. Perhaps it's meant to be one of the other main characters, the gun seller by the name of Jackie Brown? It's unlikely though, and probably more to do with not paying proper attention.

It's not a bad cover, of course, and it's actually a good picture - painted, interestingly enough, by Paul Roberts, who went on to being the vocalist for British rock band Sniff 'n' The Tears who had a world-wide hit with the song Driver's Seat.

Apart from the issue with the cover, The Friends Of Eddie Coyle by George V Higgins is classic pulp fiction. It's a crime caper involving a gang of hardened criminals robbing a series of banks who like to use a new set of guns every time they rob a new bank. The guns are being supplied to the gang by Eddie Coyle who gets them from a gun dealer called Jackie Brown. And that's the gist of it but being a crime caper the cast of characters is going to be a nest of vipers with everyone playing everybody off against one another, including girlfriends, bar-owners and police.

The whole pace of the story suits Robert Mitchum's demeanour perfectly as it's very languid, very world-weary, very life at the end of its tether. It's totally narrative-driven with conversations and monologues written phonetically in an often surreal, wise-guy vernacular. The bottom line is that it's a joy to read and is the perfect example of why books such as this are so good. They're not a challenge, they're not written to educate or to make the reader think, or as a vehicle for any kind of lesson in morality. They're written to be read - actually. They're written to entertain and to make the act of reading a pleasure not a chore.

The film of the book is a classic, directed by Peter Yates (who also directed Bullitt) that as well as starring Robert Mitchum also stars Peter Boyle. It's a perfect cast and the book in a similar fashion is perfect pulp fiction.

John Serpico

The Drought - J G Ballard

 THE DROUGHT - J G BALLARD

Is it fanciful to imagine the occurrence of a world-wide drought? I can assure you, it's most certainly not. J G Ballard wrote his novel, The Drought, in 1965 and now just almost 60 years later it looks mightily prescient. In Ballard's book the drought is caused by a pollution-generated membrane forming over the world's oceans preventing all evaporation of surface water into the air above, leading subsequently to no clouds being formed and subsequently to no rain. It's not a sudden occurrence at all but a gradual build-up over ten years, the first major effect of it being food shortages due to seasonal rainfalls failing to materialize in important agricultural regions.

Farmlands turn to arid dust-basins, reservoirs and rivers run dry, and the world goes awry as cities are abandoned. Populations head to the coasts to be nearer to water even if it's undrinkable. Huge distillation units are constructed and run by the army before being taken over by citizens' militias as millions of people start living in cars and shacks on the beaches that turn into salt dunes from the distillation process. Water, food and guns become the currency, anything else is useless surplus apart from such things as abandoned cars which act as make-shift coffins.

The actual plot and storyline of Ballard's book isn't really up to much and although this is a bit of a problem (as well as the fact that it could have been edited a lot better) it doesn't really matter because the premise is all. Ballard is essentially imagining what it would be like if a world-wide drought was to occur, focusing on a stretch of England not more than a hundred miles in diameter. We're not just talking a seasonal drought here, it should be said, but one that stretches over a ten-year period.

Society, of course, collapses as the landscape turns to desert. There being no water means there being no crops, which means there is no livestock. The only food to be had is from scavenged canned goods and fish from the sea. Fiefdoms of various sizes are established whilst other groups eke out an existence on the peripheries.

Apart from the initial mass exodus from the cities to the coasts there is no great, uncontrolled panic that takes hold, just a gradual but inexorable slide into desperate living. There is almost a complacency about it all, an abandonment of hope against the inevitable. At times it's reminiscent of Nevil Shute's On The Beach, where against the slow but inescapable approach of mass death by radiation from a nuclear war, people tend to try and continue as normal. Taking it on the chin with grim acceptance as the surreal becomes the new normal.

So, could such a vision of the future ever become reality? That is the question. Could such a drought as described by Ballard ever happen? Could the water to our cities, to our agriculture, to our homes simply one day run out? The answer - worryingly, disturbingly, depressingly - is 'yes'.

Who could ever have imagined that one day the world's economic systems might be closed down and whole populations told to stay at home and to not venture out? This is one of the great lessons from the Covid pandemic: to not dismiss anything as being impossible and for it to be said it could never happen. Imagine the unimaginable and then with a cold, clear eye just look to see how far we might actually be from it. Or rather, how close we actually are.

John Serpico

Fight Back - Punk, Politics And Resistance - The Subcultures Network

 FIGHT BACK - PUNK, POLITICS AND RESISTANCE -

THE SUBCULTURES NETWORK

The obvious question to ask in regard to a book called Fight Back - Punk, Politics And Resistance is 'What's the point of it?' What is its intention? What is its aim? If writing about music is like dancing to architecture, then what is writing about punk as a space for political expression and action? According to the blurb on the back cover, the book's objective is 'to advance general and scholarly understanding of punk and youth culture more broadly, and to reveal the importance of youth culture as a site of political expression and to stimulate scholarly interest in the relationship between subcultures, popular music and social change.'

So it's a crash course for the ravers? A drive-in Saturday?

If approaching this book either as a reader or even as one of the contributors seeking or looking to provide an explanation of punk, then from the start you're barking up the wrong tree. If you need to have punk explained to you then it's obviously something not for you, so you might just as well spend your seed on some other more fertile ground so it might bear some fruit of actual use to you. If you feel the need to explain punk to others then you need to think twice and ponder the cliche about that which is taught by the teacher themselves need to learn the most.

That being said, what then is this weighty tome called Fight Back? What is this punk rock axe to grind? Well, without being overly dramatic, all this punk rock stuff is the stuff of life. Take away the 'rock' and what you're left with is the substance: Punk. Fight Back, then, is a collection of essays written by various academics and scholars and collated by the University of Reading-hosted Subcultures Network. And yes, it's a weighty tome but then so it should be, because it's a weighty subject it deals with. It's not a frivolous book, you might say.

If a tree falls in a forest and there's no-one around to hear it, does it make a sound? Is there any one singular meaning to life? The answer is ultimately 'yes' but when you think you know it, you're most likely going to be wrong so instead it makes better sense to be aware of multiple meanings that will bring you just as much benefit on whatever level you're looking at it on.

It's an uncomfortable truth but as ethnobotanist Terence McKenna once said 'Culture is not your friend', and once you understand this then things can start to be put into perspective and can be seen as to what is important and what is not so. This then begs the question, however, that if culture is not your friend then is subculture even less so? It's a pertinent point and it's actually here that things get interesting. 

Punk was originally a subculture that following the Bill Grundy/Sex Pistols debacle became an overnight mainstream culture, entering into public discourse. With this transformation a lot of the nuances, subtleties and contradictions within the original punk idea were lost, to be replaced by much more simple and much more easier to communicate messages and signals. Due to punk's very contradictory nature, however, those nuances and numerous unresolved contradictions though hidden, remained like honey at the core. Like essence rare.

Punk in the cultural mainstream needed to be played out and its main players to crash and burn for the nuances and contradictions to take root. They needed to be left alone and shielded to allow them to grow and even flourish, to be later explored and encouraged. In one respect, this explains the later rise of the New Punk, Crass, and Oi! scenes.

And yes, there it is: the dreaded Oi! word. The subculture within punk culture that still to this day has - as Matthew Worley points out in what is one of the best essays in the book - resisted assimilation into the 'respectable' narrative that now binds punk more generally into the nation's cultural fabric.

Oi! is the bete noir of punk, politics and resistance because of its confrontational adherence to its working class origins, and why this has caused such a problem speaks volumes. Much to his credit, Worley approaches Oi! with an open mind and in doing so concludes 'meanings have been projected onto Oi! rather than drawn from it' and that in actual fact 'Oi! was far closer to what its adherents claimed it to be than it was to what its critics accused it of being.'

And what did Oi!'s critics accuse it of being? Racist, sexist, homophobic, violent and parochial. An incubator, essentially, for Right-wing ideology. The same Right-wing ideology spewed day in day out by the Daily Mail and the Telegraph to their middle class readerships but did you ever see a so-called Nazi bonehead reading these newspapers? No. Their chosen source of news would always be The Sun and the Daily Mirror, and whilst The Sun was always Right-wing it was on a comic level and never as insidious and mean-spirited as the Daily Mail, and never as humourless and straight-faced as the Telegraph. Worley concludes that the way Oi! was castigated is an early example of what is nowadays labelled the 'demonisation of the working class', which is basically the editorial policy of the Right-wing press. All in all it's a very good essay and one that needed to be written.

So too for Peter Webb's essay on 'Crass, subculture and class' if only for the fact that any book on 'punk, politics and resistance' that doesn't include Crass is either ill-informed or in denial. Essentially, Webb describes the milieu created around Crass that enabled people from different class backgrounds to come together and creatively work towards a shared though very individualistic transcendentalism. What the essay does as well - if even inadvertently - is to highlight that the areas in which Crass were strongest such as in their promotion of pacifism and their rejection of class were also their weakest - their Achilles Heels. 

The issue of class had always been a thorn in their side from the start but it was the Falklands War that brought it to a head. Rather than chastising themselves for being too slow off the mark for not including anything about the Falklands on their newly released album at the time, what Crass missed was that it was working class boys (on both British and Argentinian sides) who were being killed. That it was working class boys who were sacrificed to protect the ship that Prince Andrew was on. Come the miners' strike of 1984, it was working class mining communities that Thatcher was destroying, not 'classless' enclaves in leafy suburbia.

To Crass, class may have mattered less than not eating meat but in the end it was issues around class and the way to deal with them as in violently or non-violently that tore them apart. In hindsight, Crass were hoisted on their own petard and if not slain were mortally wounded by their enemies because they didn't understand their enemies. Taking on Thatcher, for example, without understanding that Thatcher was out to destroy working class power (in the form of unions) and working class ethics (such as helping your neighbour and community solidarity); replacing these things instead with an accent on the individual (as in 'no such thing as society') and greed being good, well - Crass politically were on a hiding to nothing.

For all that, Peter Webb's essay is useful and somewhat important in regard to culture and resistance because it gives rise for such questions on the significance of class to be considered. It's often like opening a can of worms, it should be said, but it's also something that shouldn't be shied away from.

At another tangent, Jonathyne Briggs in his essay questions why punk initially failed to take off in France, and actually it's a really interesting question. All the right ingredients were there for punk in France to become huge: Geographically it was just across the water from the London punk explosion, just a bit more of a distance in fact as that between London and Manchester. It was only 9 years after the events of May '68 so there should still have been elements and remnants of revolutionary zeal in France, embers still glowing and just waiting to be blown to life again by a fresh wind. The Pistols, The Damned and The Clash went over to France to play in the very early days of punk, before they'd even played a lot of places in England. Metal Urbain from France recorded a version of Anarchy In The UK and were the first band to have a record released on the Rough Trade label. And of course there were all the Situationist slogans adopted by Jamie Reid for the Pistols. 

With all this, punk should maybe have been even bigger in France than in England? So why didn't it happen? Briggs puts it down to any development of a French punk subculture being hindered due to being unable to find its own identity, becoming instead a caricature in terms of fashion and musical conventions. I'm not sure this is completely true but it's an interesting notion, particularly as it begs the question if whether 'the perception of conventions that govern subcultures also confound their movement?'

Giacomo Botta's essay on the other hand suggests the complete opposite, that punk represents a complex set of ideologies and practices that transcend any specific national culture, an example of this he cites as being the Colettivo Punx Anarchici of Torino, in Italy.

But then we have another essay concerning Czech punks and skinheads where the authors suggest that subcultural identity is, in part, determined by the nature of the dominant society in which it's situated and it's relationship to subcultures that differentiate against one another.

In another essay concerning punk in East Germany, the author declares that 'punk does not exist outside of the society but within an existing framework of values, expectations and social norms'. Which is probably more like it, if not indeed very true.

All of this and more goes to show that punk is a lot more than just heads down no nonsense mindless boogie, though it should be said that Fight Back isn't going to be for everyone due in the main to it being academic and the essays presented in that typical thesis style with lots of footnotes to back everything up. The foreword to the book is written by Steve Ignorant and call me a cynic but I don't believe for one moment that he actually read the whole thing. I mean, why should he? And if he did, then he would have spotted some of the glaring mistakes in one of the essays concerning the Crass and Small Wonder labels.

The afterword, however, is an interview conducted by Matthew Worley with writer Jon Savage, presented in a typical, fanzine-style verbatim question and answer format where Savage discusses the cultural impact of punk. It's a very good interview, full of interesting and thought-provoking ideas - and it's accessible. I'd wager, in fact, that if any of the book it would have been this part that Steve Ignorant read and if he didn't then he should have done because in it Savage heaps a lot of praise upon Crass.

Above all else, however, the important thing is that Fight Back is food for thought, and in an age of oven-ready Brexit deals, post-truth Trumpian world views, and of culture wars waged by neo-conservatives in free fall, this can only be a good thing.

John Serpico

Pincher Martin - William Golding

 PINCHER MARTIN - WILLIAM GOLDING

Have you ever been a castaway and stranded on a rock in the middle of a vast inconceivable ocean? Of course you have. You're here on Earth, aren't you?

William Golding's first published novel was Lord Of The Flies in which he depicted the effect upon a party of boys on being abandoned on a coral island somewhere in the Pacific. Pincher Martin is almost a continuation of this same theme but boiled down to its most base level and then some. The whole of the first chapter describes a man drowning. That's not just a few paragraphs but a whole chapter describing everything going on in what is probably in actuality just a few moments.

As you read it becomes clear that the drowning man is a sailor whose ship has been torpedoed by a German U-boat and whilst all number of thoughts race through his mind, the prevailing one is that he must survive - that he must not die. Survive he does and he finds himself washed up onto a rock projecting through the vastness of the ocean. 'Where the hell am I?' he asks, and how many miles from dry land? It is here at this point that the story really begins or rather, it is here that it ends and the descent into madness begins.

Even though every detail of the rock is described meticulously it's still hard to gauge the actual size of it but then you come to realise it's not something that actually matters. It is instead the fact that the rock is barren though by some miracle it does hold a small amount of rain water trapped in a crevice and there is food albeit only in the form of mussels and limpets. What matters above all, however, is that the man is alone and that his one and only end desire is that he be rescued. To this end the bare minimum is that he keep his body going and that the thread of life remains unbroken.

His only weapon to aid him in this is his intelligence and so he knows that at all times he must be visible and to only sleep at night and never in the day so he might spot any passing ship and vice versa. He knows too that he must maintain to the best of his ability his health though being exposed to the elements he fully anticipates himself falling sick. And just as importantly he knows that he has to watch his mind and not let madness creep up on him. He expects to hallucinate but he knows he must not succumb to hallucinations though in the end it is on this where the real battle is to be fought. 

The apparent reality of the present collides with and weaves in and out of memories of the past; fear and anguish entangle with jealousy and guilt, whilst faith in the divine duels with spiritual apathy. The man is both Prometheus chained to the rock and Atlas holding up the sky but at the same time he's a Bedlamite, a poor mad creature clinging to a rock in the middle of the sea, bearing witness to black lightning.

Pincher Martin is a tale of terror and in this respect is an existential nightmare that if read with earnest attention has the power to disturb. How long the man is on the rock for is central to the whole story as there is no way to discern if it's for just one day, a week or months - or even if he is there at all?

Before he took up writing, William Golding served in the Navy where he saw action against submarines, aircraft and even the Bismark. He was also present at the D-Day landings so he was obviously an authority on what it is for a man to drown and no amateur when it came to facing death. For all that, you can but wonder if when writing Pincher Martin did Golding have the whole thing plotted out in his head in advance or did he simply follow where the writing took him? I'd hazard a guess that the story developed as he wrote it and that he bore down on the intensity of it with each agonizing sentence wrought from his pen.

Whatever the process, the end result resonated with Arthur Koestler - a writer who himself was no stranger to the subject of solitary confinement having been imprisoned by Franco during the Spanish Civil War - who selected Pincher Martin as the Novel of the Year, that year being 1956.

Pincher Martin isn't a masterpiece but its power to disturb the reader is something that many books have attempted but with very few succeeding. It is this power to disturb that makes Pincher Martin stand out - above and beyond.

John Serpico

Wanderland - Jini Reddy

 WANDERLAND - JINI REDDY

The past is another country but in nature is where you'll find the weird. Foreign countries can be referred to as being 'exotic' but in the depths of an English city or even out on the weather-eaten council estates you'll also find exotica and mad fauna along with quark, strangeness and charm. There is mystery and city hobgoblins in our man-made environs but in the English countryside dwells monsters, demons, life-force. magick and essence rare. That's my opinion at least, and that's the reason for me reading Wanderland by Jini Reddy.

In her book, Reddy takes heed of her inner voice and sets off on a personal quest to find the arcane and the mystical, or what she calls the 'Otherness' of the landscape. Indeed, the strapline of the book is 'A Search for Magic in the Landscape' but right there straightaway in the way she spells 'magic' is a clue as to where she's coming from and where she's going wrong because as any good alchemist would tell you, the way to spell 'magic' is with a 'k'.

You would have thought spirituality and 'New Age' would be classless, egalitarian and non-hierarchical, but it's not. It's absolutely riddled with class prejudice from a mealy-minded, entitled, middle class perspective and Jini Reddy's position in it is a prime example. She would deny it vehemently of course but that's because she's unaware of it herself, which is mightily ironic if not tragic for someone who has written a book on 'awareness'.

Wanderland is chick lit for New Age steppers. There's a very girlish-gosh!-dashing-hither-and-thither feel about it with a lot of anecdotal mentions of where the author was last week and who with. All along the lines of 'I was talking to a friend of mine, an ex-barrister who now lives on the foothills of Tibet drinking nothing but a finger bowl of water a day, and I mentioned that I'd recently spoken to our mutual friend, a neuro-brain surgeon from Hampstead who in her spare time is a tree hugger'. It's tedious, to put it politely. 

She contacts a woman who owns a labyrinth in Cornwall, who has a longhouse on 70 acres of land with her own beach. 'Just whizzing off to set up the Festival of the Sea in Looe' the woman tells Reddy 'But it's all yours for three nights.' And you just know Reddy is telling these people that she's a journalist on The Times or some other newspaper she freelances for who's writing a book and can she come and visit? Which is why everyone she contacts says 'yes'. The fact that she's on a quest for the 'Other' on the back of a book deal casts a shadow of inauthenticity over the whole thing, however, as in even if she doesn't find anything at the end of the Yellow Brick Road it will all be a jolly jape anyway and she'll get a book out of it at least.

In the process, unfortunately, she has to suffer the indignities of travelling to 'boringly tame' places such as Hastings, sharing train carriages with Sun newspaper readers. Can you imagine? For someone who throughout the book gushes about previous places she's been such as remote river valleys in Iceland, the desert in northern Namibia, remote tree-lined valleys in Australia, and so on, it must have been terrible.

But a book out of it she got, published by Bloomsbury and available at all Waterstones. And what a book it is. What a disappointment. What a let down. What a boring load of middle class, self-serving, pretentious piffle.

If nature is a language then it's one that Reddy neither reads nor speaks. At one point in her book she admits to feeling no connection to tales of King Arthur, Merlin or The Green Man and that's fine but then she also admits to having never been to Stonehenge or Avebury which is pretty incomprehensible given the subject matter of what she's writing about. At another point she admits to having never taken magic mushrooms. Well, perhaps she should try them one day? Or at least watch Ben Wheatley's film A Field In England? Or the film Enys Men? Or even Lars von Trier's film, Antichrist? 

Near to the end of her book Reddy writes of meeting musician Nitin Sawhney who quotes from Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance where Robert Pirsig says Buddha is not to be found only in the petals of a flower, but also in the circuits of a computer. 'I think that's absolutely true' Sawhney tells her and Reddy admires him for his honesty. But does Reddy actually understand what he's saying? Possibly not, because if she did then her book may not have ended up being so rubbish.

Sometimes I read these books so that you won't have to. I sometimes literally read 'em and weep.

John Serpico

A Diet Of Treacle - Lawrence Block

 A DIET OF TREACLE - LAWRENCE BLOCK

More pulp fiction, this time from 1961 and involving 'sex, drugs, and murder in the land of the lotus eaters', as it says in the blurb on the back cover. What this means is that it's set in Greenwich Village when that particular area of New York was being newly populated by Beatniks and stoners who, of course, over the coming years would evolve into hippies. Written by Lawrence Block, A Diet Of Treacle takes its name from a line in Alice In Wonderland where the dormouse is telling Alice about three sisters who lived at the bottom of a well.

'What did they live on?' asks Alice. 'They lived on treacle,' the dormouse replies. 'They couldn't have done that, you know,' Alice remarks 'They'd have been ill'. 'So they were,' the dormouse says. 'Very ill'.

A Diet Of Treacle is a sort of morality tale, but also by accident rather than design it's very much an Existentialist novel from almost the same school as works by Camus and Sartre. That's not to say it's in any way philosophical but there are passages that are clearly echoes of Camus' The Outsider and Sartre's general brooding in any of his Roads to Freedom trilogy.

A college girl from Uptown New York visits Greenwich Village because she's bored with the life on offer to her and feels there must be something else, something more. She finds it in the form of Joe, ex-Korean War veteran who after two years of dodging bullets in Korea has returned home and after a short spell at New York University has dropped out and is now part and fixture of 'the scene' in the Village.

In reality this means hanging out at down-at-heel cafes, living in a rented hell-hole of a single room with his soon to be heroin dealing friend, and contemplating being, nothingness and what Joe refers to as 'immobility'. The girl moves in with Joe and his friend forming a sort of anti-Jules et Jim menage a trois, whereupon she's one day raped by Joe's roommate before him killing a police officer forcing all three to go on the run.

For a pulp fiction novel such as this, the allusions to Existential thought are quite surprising although the morality it espouses not so, in fact it's a little disappointing. The treacle the title of the book refers to can be interpreted as either the Beatnik lifestyle it describes as in the mythological lotus eaters' preoccupations, or more specifically - drugs.

The first time the girl tries marijuana, for example, is at a house party where she becomes so stoned that she takes off all her clothes and has sex with Joe in the middle of the floor, watched by all the other party-goers. As you do whenever you first smoke weed.

Smoking marijuana also leads on to taking heroin, which then leads to murder and prostitution, apparently. All good, American 1950s moral majority type-stuff and conservative to the hilt. But apart from this, so long as you can keep the morality from eclipsing everything else,  A Diet Of Treacle is a decent enough book and is worth anyone's few cents at the dime store.

John Serpico