Don't go out tonight

Sharp Teeth by Toby Barlow

Never judge a book by its cover. But when you are looking blindly for something to read and the book in question is a lovely hardback with slightly embossed boards, blurb from John Burnside among others on the inside cover and the word werewolves in the plot description, then maybe that should be enough to tickle the tastebuds.

Sharp Teeth is a strange concoction; a free-verse novel concerning a group of lycanthropes in modern LA. I am not any kind of expert on poetic structures but free verse looks suspiciously like prose broken up into easier to digest lines. Barlow clearly wants to create something in the line of the epic and mythical poems of the past and as the book progresses, to a large part, he succeeds. There is a rhythmn created and enhanced by the structure and it somehow seems right that this tale of gangs and those living outside of normal society should look and sound a little like a cross between Ginsberg and The Odyssey.

Lark is the leader of the pack. He has his 'Girl', he has plans and an eye on the the other packs that may be operating in the country but he fails to see the coup that wrests his control of the gang and sends him on the run. Whilst he hides as a domestic housedog in Pasadena, 'Girl' has stayed in human form and captured the heart of Anthony a local dogcatcher. As she tries to keep her past hidden from him she works on how to elicit revenge from those rival gang members who tore apart her pack. Lark meanwhile is building a new pack from the outcasts of LA to make moves of his own. This is a novel filed with animal violence neatly summed up by one of the gang members.

'We are wolves,' Cutter chants
in his mind.
'We don't find the weak. We
don't prey on the slow.
We simply eat absolutely
fucking everything

There is also a fantastic description of one initiate undergoing his first 'change' which brings to mind the thrill of watching David Naughton transform in front of your eyes in An American Werewolf In London.

But this is also really a love story and when you strip away the setting and circumstance you are left with lines of very simple beauty which describe what it is like to fall in love.

There love is just about the weight
of the casserole she's taking out of the oven right now.
Their love is eternal because time
seems to have fled, embarrassed
to be sharing such a small apartment with so much dumb affection.

This is a book which hits the right spots, a modern telling of an ancient tale, stripped of the Hammer clichés . LA seems the perfect setting for a tale of the violence and pressure that builds when you treat a group as an underclass. Above all, this is a highly enjoyable book, very entertaining and devoured quickly.

And for those who remember that iconic scene from the movie here is a little track to take you back.

Creedence Clearwater Revival - Bad Moon Rising

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Radiohead - In Rainbows

The method of release for this, Radiohead's seventh album, has caused quite a stir already in the music industry. It isn't the first time that a band have chosen to cut out the record company and release music directly to the fans, it isn't even the first time that they have let those fans decide whether they want to pay for it or not, but it is the first time that a band with the calibre of Radiohead have made such a move and as a result there is already talk of Oasis, Jamiroqaui and Nine Inch Nails following suit.

After all the hoo-ha though is the album any good? Well I awoke yesterday to find an email from the website with my download details, so much nicer to receive a message like that rather than 'your new bill is ready to view online'. I quickly downloaded it, transfered it onto disc and also onto my phone as I was off to work in the car and it only has a tape player. Now let's be honest, listening to a new release through the slightly tinny speaker of a mobile phone is not the full sonic experience the boys were probably hoping me to experience, although there was something rather apposite about the setting of a traffic jam on the A10 with a light rain covering the windscreen.

So I had a greedy first listen on the way there (and a little refresher on the way back) but the first listen proper was at home and I'm happy to say that it's great. Opener 15 Step has the kind of skittering beats that show the influence of the Warp Records catalogue on our Thom (and is that children shouting 'Yey' towards the end there?). I have always been a fan of The Bends and so it's a bit of guitar I look forward to and on Bodysnatchers we have them in spades, it sounds a little like the wonderfully messy Radiohead of Pablo Honey days. Sure enough we have a ballad up next in Nude, is this fatherhood having an effect on Mr Yorke? And then we have some of the more experimental, boundary testing side of things in Weird Fishes/Arpeggi. And that's only the first four tracks.

Hail To The Thief was an album which was filled with the protest of living in the era of George Bush, Tony Blair and Iraq. In Rainbows sounds more like the sound of a band learning to live in the fallout. Yorke's lyrics sometimes seem to have gone a little soft, 'You're all I need' or 'I don't wanna be your friend, I wanna be your lover' but worry not, both of these lines are quickly followed by 'I'm just an insect trying to get out of the light' and 'Infrastructure will collapse'. This is a fanatastic collection of songs, an album in the proper sense of the word. Thom's voice sounds great (if still a little mumbly) the playing of the other band members is extraordinary at times, making guitars soound like strings on House of Cards, John Barry-like harpsichord and strings on Jigsaw Falling Into Place, a Beatles-like lightness to Faust Arp.

Anyway you don't need me to convince you, you can get the album yourself for whatever you'd like to pay here. Just to help you along the way there is a track below. We should all be thankful that there are bands like Radiohead; asking questions, pushing boundaries and all the time producing haunting beautiful music.

House of Cards

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Shhhh

Tintin and the Secret of Literature
by Tom McCarthy

I have not read a lot of Tintin, in fact I would be surprised if I have read any of them cover to cover. Along with Asterix they were the kind of book I was likely to find in a friend's house or lying around the library somewhere, things were all a bit more classical and British in my house. Nor have I studied literary theory. So what on earth was I doing reading this book then? Well, a good question. It's all down to Tom McCarthy really, as I have said here before, his novel Remainder is probably my favourite book of recent years and I also found lots to admire in his latest, Men in Space (see review here). So I had to have a look at this non-fiction book which was his first published work.

The basic question is whether Hergé's adventures of Tintin can be considered literature. McCarthy argues that contained within the comic strips of Georges Remi are all of the 'keys' that we would expect to find in a novel. He argues with an energy and enthusiasm which means that even when he is stretching the boundaries of credibility you can't help but go along for the ride. I can't pretend to have understood all of it, due to the gaps in my knowledge I pointed out earlier but it is book filled with persuasive ideas and above all written with a genuine love of the subject matter. There are fantastic sections where McCarthy explores the ancestry of Captain Haddock, the comedy of pratfalls, and the shifting politics of Hergé himself.

What is really interesting is to see how many of the themes contained in McCarthy's fiction are prefigured in the panels of Tintin. The idea of authenticity so rigorously tested by the protagonist in Remainder is a recurring theme in Tintin. And just as we follow the attempts to crack the visual codes and signs contained within the icon painting in Men in Space, McCarthy in this book is using the same tools to find the hidden meaning of Hergé's work. We even have an artist making two copies of the painting he has been asked to forge, just as Manásek does in Men In Space.

After all the code-breaking, crypt entering, puzzle solving, boys own adventure, it does make me want to stumble across a copy of Tintin once again and see if I can spot any more of these hidden clues. I wonder if the library's still open...

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diminishing returns

The Marriage of Souls
by Warwick Collins

This book is the second part of a projected sequence of novels set in the eighteenth century which began with The Rationalist (reviewed here). Continuing the story of Silas Grange, a young doctor in Lymington who has been left physically shattered after an affair of the heart (and body) with the mysterious Celia Quill. For those who have read the first book the first 150 pages are a pain, as the story is recounted. Alternating between third person narration and letters written by Grange's colleague Harwood to a silent correspondent, this limiting structure is a further annoyance. It is almost 200 pages in that we get the first bit of interest; Harwood announces to Grange that he had known Mrs Quill previously, that in fact she had been his mistress.

This kick-starts things a little, beginning with a couple of punches which Grange metes out to Harwood's face. The revelations do not end there and Grange begins some amateur detective work to discover more about Mrs Quill and to find where she may be now. Slowly, Harwood does some detective work of his own as he pieces together what may have happened between his colleague and former mistress in the first novel. That is not to say that there is enmity between the two men, for these are both rational men struggling to work through their emotions.

Rumbling along beside the internal examinations of these two men is the story of the local community, in particular the workers of the local salt furnaces which burn along the coastal horizon and serve as a symbol of the increasing heat and pressure of the two men's passions. This is where Collins is strongest; the alien imposition of these structures as they continue burning into the winter season, how this affects not only the look of the local area but the people who make up the community. As the pressure builds we feel that things are moving to a climax. Where we want the novel to head of course is the reunification of Silas Grange and Celia Quill. But do they meet again? Well after 480 pages one would hope so.

Hargood had said of Mrs Quill's absence, 'It is like a novel, sir, which should leave some presence with you, some aftertaste, which shall remain widowed away in the soul.'

It is a brave thing to write a novel and leave the most intriguing character absent for the vast majority. It is Harwood again who says that a ghost is 'nothing more or less than an intense absence' and Mrs Quill does haunt this novel but, like all ghosts, hers is not a substantial presence and I think that the novel suffers for it. Collins writing is at its strongest when he is describing landcape, not only the coastal areas around Lymington but also his description of London which, for a city boy like me, is fantastic.

... the rhythmn of walking brought a sense of equalibrium. Constantly moving, pursuing the narrow intimacies of the streets, he had a compulsion to walk off the rest of the evening. The plan of that poor area seemed to become part of his mind, a map of his restlessness. The streets where like some grammar which he knew but did not understand, a vast shadowy web which he almost felt that he could conjugate without thinking: the riverside and its ropewalks, the rotting hulks that lay there, the strange hinterland of old houses and warehouses and odd, out-of-the-way homesteads, with their own large barns that seemed always closed and locked, and the strange silent people with their carts and transport moving in and out. He wandered among them unseeing, protected from their suspicions by his own manifest blindness towards their activities, his mind's eye instead focused inwards, on the dark...

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she's a rainbow

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