'all that glisters...'

Goldfinger
by Ian Fleming

My first ever Bond will probably be my last, unless Kirsty Young starts issuing them along with Shakespeare and The Bible and I get bored of both of those. As I walk past the specialist bookshops of Cecil Court and Charing Cross Road I constantly see those distinctive first edition covers and I believe they remain some of the most actively traded first editions in the market, constantly changing hands for silly money on eBay (and other auction based websites). Was there any substance to their appeal I wondered; well, no, it would seem on this evidence, unless dull, dated, misogynist, racist (and other -ists) thrillers are your cup of tea.

I won't bother with much of a plot synopsis, you know how it goes: Goldfinger plans raid on Fort Knox, Oddjob lobs bowler hat at statuary, absurdly named lesbian gang leader falls for 'a real man' - actually, is she a lesbian in the film? Well she is in the book, until that is James Bond shows her the error of her ways. Bond is in a bit of a funk at the beginning of the novel, examining his conscience after ending the life of a Mexican who was sent to kill him. The solution to that problem is to make the most of a cancelled flight home from Miami and get roaring drunk at an upmarket hotel. This happens after meeting Mr Du Pont at the airport and accepting his offer of a suite for the night and $10,000 in cash if he can help figure out why he keeps losing at Canasta with a certain Auric Goldfinger. The thing that surprised me about reading a Bond book is how slowly the plot unfolds. 100 pages in and all Bond had done was to solve the Canasta problem, beat Goldfinger at golf and enjoy a close personal attachment with his personal assistant. Even summarising it like that I'm making it sound more exciting than it reads. The prose is a bit leaden and the dialogue far from the snappy, quip laden guff of the films.

What threatens to make it interesting is how a man with a licence to kill deals with that responsibility, how it makes him feel to have had the power to decide whether someone lived or died, does it close the gap between him and the men he pursues? The moment of introspection at the beginning is picked up again when he discovers that his nights of passion with Goldfinger's assistant, Jill Masterson, have led to her being killed.

Bond closed his eyes tight, fighting with the a wave of mental nausea. More death! More blood on his hands. This time, as the result of a careless gesture, a piece of bravado that had led to twenty-four hours of ecstasy with a beautiful girl who had taken his fancy and , in the end, rather more than his fancy...This death he would not be able to excuse as being part of his job. This death he would have to live with.

Which all sounds well and good until I suspect you get to the next novel and it's business as usual. Jill's sister Tilly, whom Bond interrupts in her quest to assasinate Goldfinger doesn't fare so well. His advances spurned by this young girl who gazes lovingly at Pussy Galore leads Bond to surmise that she is

...one of those girls whose hormones had got mixed up...they and their male counterparts were a direct result of giving votes to women and 'sex equality'. As a result of fifty years of emancipation, feminine qualities were dying out or being transferred to the males. pansies of both sexes were everywhere, not yet completely homosexual, but confused, not knowing what they were. the result was a herd of unhappy sexual misfits - barren and full of frustrations, the women wanting to dominate and the men to be nannied.

When she meets the same fate as her sister there's no moment of introspection from Bond, 'Poor little bitch' is all he can muster. Oddjob is the other standout character, here made physically terrifying with his hands covered in a 'yellowish carapace' of hardened skin making them formidable weapons, his cleft palate making every utterance a guttural shout. I guess you need to dehumanize your foe and you can keep your political correctness and enlightened view of the global community to yourself as Bond thinks the Korean's place is 'rather lower than the apes in the mammalian hierachy', (he doesn't discriminate when it comes to racial abuse though: Mr Solo's 'Italian swarthiness' leads Bond to guess that 'he probably had to shave every three to four hours').

You could forgive the language, views and sexual/social politics that date the book if it was simply a rollicking good read, but it isn't. Whatever you might think about the latest incarnation of Bond on the big screen he does at least seem to have some depth, some humanity, some fallibility; qualities which are vaguely hinted at here but never pursued to any satisfaction.

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Telstar

Nick Moran's film started life as a play, which he co-wrote with James Hicks. It was Con O'Neill who took the lead role of record producer Joe Meek in the West End and who revives it in the film version. The film is well made, well acted on the whole and certainly has a courageous central performance from O'Neill and only falters in one major way: Joe Meek was a complete c**t. This is why O'Neill's performance is courageous, he's not afraid of making him unsympathetic, his moments of clarity and affection few and far between, not to mention fully committing to his Gloucester accent (O'Neill used to work as an accent coach), a first surely for the silver screen. Meek was the man behind hits like 'Johnny, Remember Me', 'Just Like Eddie' and 'Telstar', recorded in a ramshackle studio housed above a handbag shop on Holloway Road, which is faithfully recreated for the film and where most of the action takes place (spot the script adapted from a stage play). This combination of manic genius producer and upstairs/downstairs comedy makes it a bit like watching an episode of Are You Being Served starring Phil Spector. Well, not really, but it's as bonkers an image as what you get, with opera singers recording in the loo and marbles being tossed down the toilet to record sound effects there's a manic energy to the proceedings.

O'Neill is excellent as I said and there's no doubt that his life lends an interesting narrative (one of many who passed on The Beatles it seems) to the film but there's no escaping the fact that despite the spiralling depression and mental instability you don't ever really care about him, so unpleasant has he been to those around him. His song writing partner Geoff Goddard is portrayed brilliantly by Tom Burke in a well judged and subtle performance. His protege Heinz is served equally well by JJ Feild and there is good support from brit flick regulars James Corden and Ralph Little. What to make of Kevin Spacey as Meek's backer Major Banks though. It isn't that the performance is particularly good or bad, it's just that it's Kevin Spacey in the middle of this very British film, looking about as conspicuous as he would if he walked into, well, a handbag shop on Holloway Road. Maybe he was part of the financing deal but there's no excuse for some very weird cameo performances from Marcus Brigstocke, Jimmy Carr, Justin Hawkins (from The Darkness - as Lord Sutch - I kid you not) and even author Jake Arnott. Carl Barat (of The Libertines and Dirty Pretty Things) takes the honours though in a cringeworthy turn as Gene Vincent, his American accent does not bode well for his upcoming stage debut alongside Sadie Frost in Sam Shepherd's Fool For Love. All of these celebrity turns don't do anything to help the film, especially when the real gold is coming from O'Neill and Feild, two actors who many won't have heard of, quietly getting on with things whilst the circus whirls around them.

Meek's sexuality allows the film to take a look at attitudes to homosexuality in the period leading up to the sexual revolution but this isn't a film trying to make a point much beyond the four walls of Meek's studio. It's a shame in that case that there isn't more of the music, or more of an insight into what he did as a producer to so hone that sound (especially given that he was tone deaf). I should be recommending this film, it's certainly streets ahead of most of the drivel that we seem to produce here with alarming frequency, but it's just not that enjoyable.

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'the past is of no importance'

Oracle Night
by Paul Auster

Whilst everyone else has been tucking into Auster's latest, Invisible, I felt I needed a little primer first. It has been a long time since I read (and loved) The Book Of Illusions and even longer since I first tackled The New York Trilogy and Leviathan. Auster is a writer who returns to similar themes, using similar tricks and techniques, so that when you are in the loop and into it each successive book develops on the one before it to give the reader another satisfying dose of playful fiction. Out of the loop however Austerland can be a pretty unforgiving place but receiving this book as a gift came at just the right time, almost as if it was meant to be, and if you've ever read a word of Auster then you'll understand the significance of that.

Many of Auster's familiar tropes are here: writers writing, chance, meta-fiction, stationary, yes - stationary; in fact stationary might just be the most important element of this novel. Writer Sidney Orr is slowly recovering from a near-fatal illness when he pops into the Paper Palace stationary shop and buys a blue notebook from Portugal on a whim. Why this particular notebook should draw him to itself or indeed why he has never before noticed this particular shop on his many walks around the neighbourhood is all part of the mystery but
he finds himself encouraged by this purchase alone to begin writing again, taking as his inspiration the tale of Flitcraft, a small character from Dashiell Hammet’s The Maltese Falcon. It is something he had discussed previously with friend, and fellow writer John Trause (anag. Auster). In Orr's version successful editor Nick Bowen is almost crushed by a falling gargoyle and undergoes a similar realisation to Flitcraft: that life is governed by chance, he has been given a second chance at his own and with that and the recently discovered manuscript by 1930's writer Sylvia Maxwell (called Oracle Night) he walks away from his life and gets on a plane to Kansas City. The book we are reading is made up as much of Sidney's writing as his own tale and that's before we even go in to the plot of Maxwell's Oracle Night in which Bowen 'begins o see a connection between himself and the story in the novel, as if in some oblique, highly metaphorical way, the book were speaking intimately to him about his own present circumstances.' This is important because of course whilst all this is going on Orr is struggling to recognise the crisis unfolding in his own life, in his own marriage, and the echoes from each text rebound and rebound until Orr has to question whether he has made things happen in his own life by writing about them in his fiction.

Blimey, that was a bit of a paragraph, wasn't it? That's Auster for you. I'd forgotten how he does that with his plots and what a stimulating writer he is. It's no wonder that he is so beloved by other writers whilst at the same time seen by some to be far too self-reverential. Personally I think there's a lot to be said for the novel that combines the excitement of the thriller, with the analysis of a far more philosophical book, with a dash of eroticism thrown in occasionally. the transformative power of the act of writing is so vividly imagined here when Orr visits the apartment of his friend Trause, the apartment he has been using as his template for Nick Bowen's in his fevered writing.

I had visited Trause's apartment countless times in the past, but now that I had spent several hours thinking about it in my own apartment in Brooklyn, peopling it with the invented characters of my story, it seemed to belong as much to the world of fiction as to the word of solid objects and flesh-and-blood human beings.

Having been at home writing about this imagined apartment he now finds himself in the actual apartment imagining himself writing about it back at home, a kind of 'double consciousness.'

I was there, fully engaged in what was happening, and at the same time I wasn't there - for there wasn't an authentic there anymore. It was an illusory place that existed in my head, and that's where I was as well. In both places at the same time. In the apartment and in the story. In the story in the apartment that I was still writing in my head.

Given the nature of both the novel's plot and that of the book within the book (and the book within that) the energy is always moving forwards. In his work, in his marriage, Orr is always looking forwards, failing to learn from or look properly at what has lead up to the present moment, which contributes to that sense of the thriller or detective novel and keeps your brain ticking over nicely as Auster/Orr/Bowen/Flagg feel there way around the developing plot. However, by allowing Orr to improvise his writing as we read he ends up taking us down a narrative dead-end - all very ironic and post-modern (and he does make use of it) but it does make you feel at times that Auster could literally do this in his sleep. This is a small niggle though, especially at what is only playfulness. Despite the big themes and ideas that his work explores Auster is just as happy to stick a pin in any pretensions to meaning. As Trause explains to Orr when talking about that seductive blue notebook (you stationary-lovers out there know what I mean).

'It's funny, but when I looked over the pile this morning, I went straight for the blue myself. I felt drawn to that one, as if I couldn't resist it. What do you think that means?'
'It doesn't mean anything, Sid. Except that you're a little off in the head. And I'm just as off as you are. We write books don't we? What else can you expect from people like us?'

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The Antlers - Hospice

Radiohead may have grabbed all the headlines when they gave fans the chance to pay what they liked for In Rainbows, effectively giving their music away for free to some people, but others have been quietly doing exactly that for years. One such act was The Antlers, who back when I discovered them after reading the Kwaya Na Kisser music blog consisted of just Peter Silberman. He released the ep, In the Attic of the Universe, as a free download for a while, it was marvellous, full of ambient atmospherics, was followed by another ep, Cold War, and then I sort of lost track. Big mistake. The Antlers now consist of Silberman, Darby Cicci and Michael Lerner and their first album proper is a difficult listen which rewards your effort if you stick with it. The sound has been fleshed out but the attention to detail remain and Silberman's gift for creating an atmosphere remains undiminished. Elliot Smith, Grandaddy, and Arcade Fire are acts that spring to mind when trying to make comparisons so if any of those entice or you have a thing for Sylvia Plath then read on.

Ok, so a concept album set in a hospice dealing with the death of a loved one from bone cancer is going to be the kind of CD that plenty of people are just not going to want to listen to, no matter how good it is, or how uplifting the experience might be. That's fine. Nothing I write here could force anyone to do anything but the difficult subject matter and the fact that no matter how sensitive you are with them, lyrics which include words to do with medical procedures or instruments are always going to sound a bit clunky, shouldn't deter you away from an accomplished album.

Silberman has been reticent in interviews to go into too much detail about the story behind this album. It certainly comes from somewhere personal and based on the lyrics and song titles we are listening to an album inspired by the loss of someone to bone cancer in the Sloan Kettering cancer ward in New York. Very feintly at the beginning of Prologue you can hear a sound similar to a respirator before a reversed cymbal ushers in the echoey chords and choral voices that begin the album. Kettering starts with a quiet piano before Silberman's voice, the microphone so close you can hear every breath and mouth noise, tells of his first encounter with the patient they call a 'hurricane thunder cloud', and whom he will stick beside despite being rejected initially (because of the tone of his voice). The quiet piano stabs and vocals swell into something much grander, backed up by electronic reverb and strings, before breaking down again at the end. My reference to Sylvia Plath earlier comes due to the track that bears her name, the one track on the album that I'm still struggling to fully appreciate. Perhaps it's hearing Silberman's usually quiet and graceful voice wailing or the slightly grandiose feel to the song. Either way it does at least communicate well the anger of this person he is attempting to soothe and talk to.

That devotion is made plain in Atrophy where he sings that he's '...bound to your bedside, your eulogy singer./I'd happily take all those bullets inside you and put them inside of myself.' The gentle piano is accompanied by the ambient sounds that Antlers produce so well, and which in fact bury the melody in the middle of the track before an acoustic guitar brings Silberman back in - almost two tracks in one. A similar trick to Radiohead's No Surprises is pulled on Bear where a glockenspiel-like melody plays under a song whose lyrics use images of abortion and the unforgettable line 'And all the while I'll know we're fucked/And not getting unfucked soon.' If I described the music of this track as jaunty you'll get an idea of the contradictions on this album.

The euphoric guitar swell of Thirteen lifts up into ethereal vocals before the track that had me thinking of Arcade Fire the most begins. Two has those dense, narrative lyrics that made Funeral such a satisfying album used in this case to detail the troubled relationship of this couple. 'I didn't mind the things you threw, the phones I deflected./I didn't mind you blaming me for your mistakes,/I just held you in the doorframe through all of the earthquakes.' At the end of it all there is just the two of them. A farewell of sorts is made in Shiva where Silberman sings of her ring left in his fist. The dense lyrics return again on Wake which is punctuated by what sounds like an amplified in-breath, the song a kind of taking stock, of moving beyond the point of death, letting people back into his life. It is here that Silberman addresses himself I think, as a vast organ fills out the final lines, the last one repeated again and again, 'Some patients can't be saved, but that burden's not on you./Don't ever let anyone tell you you deserve that.'

With the Epilogue Silberman returns to some of the imagery of haunting that has appeared earlier but this time it is a question of redemption, of finding some kind of solace and, that most American of terms, closure. 'But you return to me at night,/Just when I think I may have fallen asleep./Your face is up against mine,/And I'm too terrified to speak./You're screaming,/And cursing,/And angry,/And hurting me,/And then smiling,/And crying,/Apologizing.' The music and voice appear in their most unadorned or enhanced state, his voice floating in that area that Jeff Buckley used so well. As I said earlier you may not want, or be able to listen to an album that makes so painfully clear the toll of caring for a loved one through chronic and fatal illness but there is something incredibly powerful about what Antlers have taken on in their début album. It will always be there waiting for those who will understand it when they want it.

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the articulation of silence

Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid On Earth
by Chris Ware

I am always going on about this book, recommending it to all sorts of people for all sorts of reasons and with my recent forays into graphic fiction I thought it was time to revisit the one I hold in such high esteem. I'm glad to say that it is still as beautiful, enchanting, moving and exciting today as it ever was, a benchmark I think for what graphic fiction can achieve and a weapon to unleash on anyone who questions its standing alongside the classic novels of old. If after reading this you are at all tempted let me say first that you must spend the few extra pounds that will get you the hardback edition (only £11.99 on Amazon or The Book Depository). The dust jacket of this book is a work of art in itself, folding out into a large poster with intricate design and text, enough to keep you busy for a while before getting into the book proper. If you have come across Ware before it may be through his series the Acme Novelty Library which are similarly bursting with invention, containing cartoons, adverts, cut-outs etc. The spine and boards are beautiful too, every part of the book exuding quality, craft and attention to detail. What is it that lies inside though?

Chris Ware was brought up by his mother and grandfather, his father having left when he was a baby. It was in a Chicago newspaper that these strips first began to appear, Ware using Corrigan as a kind of alter-ego to work through the embarrassment and discomfort of meeting an estranged parent before attempting to do the real thing himself, perhaps. Whilst working on turning it into a book, which details the faltering relationships between fathers and sons, he received a call from a man claiming to be his own. In a section on the final page and boards of this novel Ware gives a vague summary of what happened next in order 'to admit the artless, dumbfoundedly meaningless coincidence of "real" life and my weak fiction - not to mention my inability at knitting them together.' Ware is heavy on the self-deprecation and his lack of confidence continued into bafflement when the accolades started pouring in after this book was published.



The meeting of Corrigan and his father after all those years apart is just one strand of the story. Ware also casts back further into the Corrigan line and explores the life of his grandfather and great-grandfather. The latter is working on the construction of 'The White City' for Chicago's World Fair in 1893. Though separated by generations there is still a lack of connection and familial care between all of the Corrigans, the mothers in each case having a large impact but in very different ways. The men are left to struggle to communicate well and to struggle also to relate to women. This may make it all sound a bit dour and self-pitying (Ware would be the first to accuse himself of that) and whilst its true that the book has attitude of someone with their head permanently tilted down to the floor it manages to lift itself above navel-gazing through some truly beautiful artwork and structure. He also manages to rouse your sympathy too, not by making any of his characters particularly sympathetic or even showing them coping well in the face of adversity. Somehow by doing almost the opposite he shows how difficult it can be to make the simplest gesture without being clumsy about it, how difficult it can be to say the simplest thing. One of the great achivements of the book is to articulate the silence between the characters, the uncomfortable moments between conversation, the 'ahems', the coughs, the awkward physical gestures. Perhaps only in this graphic form could you render those moments so perfectly.



Ware also plays around with the panels; not only with their size but also their orientation and direction. Some pages include arrows to help you along, some panels seem to merge pictures together, some are busy, others sparse and every now and then you come across a page that takes you completely by surprise (not many books like this contain a cut-out zoetrope). There differing styles of illustration and text as well to compliment the different time periods but the seamless transition from one to the other is one of the joys of following the flow of the book. The colouring has such a satisfying solidity to it too, and that combined with the first-rate prodction values make the book a joy to hold, read, leaf-through and show-off. Ware reckons it should take about 4 or 5 hours to read in total, which happens to be about the same amount of time that he ever spent with his father.

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