This week:

• The Day of Creation by J.G. Ballard
• High-Rise by J.G. Ballard
• Hollywood Ending by Kathy Charles [review here]
• Strong Motion by Jonathan Franzen
• Utopian Man by Lisa Lang
• The Guerilla Art Kit: Everything You Need to Put Your Message Out Into the World by Keri Smith
• How to Be An Explorer of the World by Keri Smith

At the Melbourne Writer’s Festival today I was lucky enough to get the lovely Ms. Charles to sign my copy of Hollywood Ending in her signature almost matching the cover pink pen. She should be congratulated for very admirably tolerating my awkward self!

I’m excited to read Lisa Lang’s Utopian Man, her fictional take on the life of Edward William Cole, a historical figure from 1880s Melbourne who owned a massive (two city blocks!) book arcade. She also wrote a biography on Cole a few years back and I reviewed it in January. The Keri Smith’s were found in an op shop, and were such an unexpected op shop find that I had to snap them up. Some of it is a bit too artsy-cutesy-hipstery but I think there are some really postive ideas in her work as well.

Reviews posted on Start Narrative Here this week:

• Monday Mini-Reviews: short reviews of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century: 1910 by Alan Moore & Kevin O’Neill, Books Do Furnish a Room by Leslie Geddes-Brown and A Certain Je Ne Sais Quoi by Chloe Rhodes.
• How to Be Alone: Essays by Jonathan Franzen: a collection of essays that appear more relevant to today’s culture than the time they were written in: on technology, the decay of the distinction between public and private, on the act of reading.
• The Dirt: Confessions of the World’s Most Notorious Rock Band by Tommy Lee, Mick Mars, Vince Neil and Nikki Sixx with Neil Strauss: sex, drugs, rock and roll – and that’s just the beginning of this sordid tale of rock debauchery.

Sadly, there’s no debauchery at my house tonight and the only pills I’m popping are antihistamines. Yes, a cup of tea and an early night are definitely in order tonight.

In J.G. Ballard‘s Concrete Island, architect Robert Maitland crashes his car through a highway barrier, and he expects that he will be easily found and rescued, returned to his safe world of family and extramartial affairs. Only he finds himself injured and unable to escape the abandoned island between motorways – he has great difficulty climbing the embankment, peak hour traffic won’t stop for him and the curve of the highway doesn’t give drivers enough time to register him. Increasingly desperate, he resigns himself to an extended period of isolation on the island.

He realized, above all, that the assumption he had made repeatedly since his arrival on the island – that sooner or later his crashed car would be noticed by a passing driver or policeman, and that rescue would come as inevitably as if he had crashed into the central reservation of a suburban dual carriageway – was completely false, part of that whole system of comfortable expectation he had carried with him. Given the peculiar topography of the island, its mantle of deep grass and coarse shrubbery, and the collection of ruined vehicles, there was no certainty that he would ever be noticed at all.

This is Ballard, and I’m surprised that such a bleak look at the world we’ve built ourselves was able to break my prose fiction reading rut. As always with J.G., the concepts are stronger than the execution, but the ideas are so compellingly prescient. Ballard’s prose style is a pornography of violence, with fetishistic details of Maitland’s seriously injured body and gleeful lingering over the twisted metal carcasses of crashed cars. It’s no surprise that this book was released only a year after Crash. In Crash the car crash was sexual, Concrete Island sees the structures which support transportation as potentially alienating, but again, offering liberation from the constraints of contemporary society.

After a few days spent in total isolation fending for himself – including a fevered psychosis that the the island is a physical manifestation of himself and his past – Robert is taken in by a brain-damaged acrobat and his young female keeper, Proctor and Jane Shepherd. They are curiously unwilling to do anything to help Robert escape the island, but do assist his survival. The return to primal instincts is a key element of the story, as Robert fights for his dominance over the two and their “conspiracy of the grotesque.” His cruelty is perhaps unwarranted – especially toward the sweetly loyal Proctor – but he is able to intellectualize it as necessary for his survival. Robert ultimately decides to remain on the island, intent on finding his own way out.

Concrete Island is full of ambiguity, lacking the closure that Robert’s escape would bring, the uncertainty about Jane and Proctor’s past, or the nature of the island itself. Otherwise innocent embankments now have a sinister implication, that element of the unknown. When so much of the earth’s land has been discovered, perhaps the only real places we can become stranded are those that we ignore daily. Ballard’s is an ugly world, where isolation in the shadow of heavily populated areas is all too possible, and when there is hope, there’s always a stolen sports car in the night, speeding with its headlights off to knock you back to reality.

I have to apologize for what is going to be a very brief and image-less post, our broadband bandwidth has run out until Wednesday and trying to do anything without it is tear-inducing. I don’t remember dial-up being this slow. Just another reason to move to Finland, where this week they announced that access to a high speed broadband service is a basic right. Damn right Finland. Hopefully Book Depository still do free shipping there? (I’d check myself, but it would take about three hours to load the page!)

Thankfully I have these new books to keep me company:

• Cocaine Nights by J.G. Ballard
• Concrete Island by J.G. Ballard
• The Drowned World by J.G. Ballard
• Millenium People by J.G. Ballard
• Super-Cannes by J.G. Ballard
• If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This by Robin Black
• Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell

In lieu of an array of fantastically interesting links, though I do recommend reading Flavorwire’s list of the 20th Century’s most reclusive authors, I’m going to tell you a story!

I had an interesting encounter with some young readers yesterday. Tired after a long day, I was listening to my ipod but the battery ran out, so I pulled a book out of my bag and started reading that instead. Soon after I did the conversation of the group of teenagers moved toward what they’d been reading. I really loved secretly listening to them talking about books, and convinced myself that it was me that caused the change of topic. Who knows.

So what are teens (male and female) in the North-West of Melbourne reading on their school holidays? A few of the titles that I caught were Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher (and they were very insistent about how great it is, reading up on it now it sounds like something I’d be interested in. Anyone read it?), Gone by Michael Grant, Inkheart by Cornelia Funke and The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton. I couldn’t help but grin to myself when I heard them talking about The Outsiders. No vampires!

J.G. Ballard’s ideas and nightmarish vision of an all too possible future are often stronger than his characters or plotting. Usually, this would present a problem but as the concepts explored in Kingdom Come still seem so prescient, it is easy to forgive any comparatively minor faults of the narrative. When the novel opens up with a line as commanding as: “The suburbs dream of violence. Asleep in their drowsy villas sheltered by benevolent shopping malls, they wait patiently for the nightmares that will wake them into a more passionate world” you are instantly aware of Ballard’s insight into the psychopathology of the suburbs, and what, under extreme circumstances, they could be capable of.

Richard Pearson is returning to the small town Brooklands where his father has been killed by a shooter on the rampage in a shopping centre, the Metro-Centre. As he uneasily descends from London into the outer towns, he sees their culture represented by symbols of consumerism rather than community – no history, no tradition – in part created by advertisers like himself. There are hints of a nationalism in the display of St. George flags, a pride that becomes more dangerous and unsettling as he witnesses Muslim families being evicted from their homes without protest. Arriving in Brooklands, he is unconvinced by the release of the suspected shooter and the witness statements from local authority figures. As he delves deeper into the mystery surrounding his father’s death, he uncovers a local fervour for consumerism and the Metro-Centre that borders on the neo-fascist. Vicious attacks of street violence against minority communities are seemingly orchestrated by prominent authority figures, and Richard is unsure who to trust and the motives of these people, yet determined to discover the truth about his father’s mysterious death.

Consumerism is the greatest device anyone has invented for controlling people. New fantasies, new dreams and dislikes, new souls to heal. For some peculiar reason, they call it shopping. But it’s really the purest kind of politics.

The characters, other than Richard, do seem to blur together. They appear as mere mouthpieces for Ballard’s ideas about the links between consumerism and fascism, Richard is involved in long conversations about the state of society – yet somehow, they work to get Ballard’s point across. Perhaps the narrative itself is also tentatively built around these ideas, but it captures the basic concepts in a way that makes them recognizable and relevant. As Richard befriends the local cable channel figurehead, David Cruise, he begins to use him to express his own ideas about leadership through subtle masochism of the masses. It is here, though Richard refuses to acknowledge his part in it, that the feverish love for the Metro-Centre truly turns primal, even totemistic. What is at heart a social experiment for an advertiser becomes a fascist state driven by consumerism, emotion and violence. Richard seems surprised that his messages of irony have been taken seriously as slogans for a political movement, but he himself was aware of the unquestioning devotion of the Metro-Centre shoppers.

‘Why not? We’re totally degenerate. We lack spine, and any faith in ourselves. We have a tabloid world-view, but no dreams or ideals. We have to be teased with the promise of deviant sex. [...] We’re worth nothing, but we worship our barcodes. We’re the most advanced society our planet has ever seen, but real decadence is far out of our reach. We’re so desperate we have to rely on people like you to spin a new set of fairy tales, cosy little fantasies of alienation and guilt [...]‘

After an attempted assassination attempt on David Cruise’s life, the supporters, authorities and Richard are barracaded in the Metro-Centre for months. Trapped in the revered centre, the religious instinct takes over the shoppers: altars to the sick and the dying, no looting of the worshipped consumer goods, an unofficial power structure begins to establish and finally destroy itself. This section is much shorter compared to the build up, more time spent locked inside the Metro-Centre could have heightened the anxiety, and the inescapable violence.

Despite the possibly intentional blankness of the characters, Ballard extrapolates upon a consumerist culture to create a bleak image of the future that is frighteningly possible, using the motifs and messages we are all familiar with and turning them into something unsettling and disturbing. For a novel written in 2006 Kingdom Come is conspicuously lacking any reference to internet or surveillance technology, though the damning condemnation of our buy any/every thing culture remains startlingly relevant.

Say hello to the latest little darlings to join my evergrowing book collection:

• Kingdom Come by J.G. Ballard
• The Philosophy of Andy Warhol by Andy Warhol

And, I was lucky enough to have a kindly someone slip a bookmark with one of the Book Depository bookmark competition winning designs into Kingdom Come. Not my favourite one: “Bob was so stuck into his book he didn’t realize he was in SPACE” but a very cute bookmark nonetheless. I guess I’ll just have to keep buying more books until I get the Bob in Space bookmark.

This week I renewed the startnarrativehere.com domain for another two years, so it looks like I’m going to be around for little while longer. Speaking of which, my one year anniversary is coming up … I wonder what I’ll do to celebrate? (No, seriously. Any ideas?)

Until then,

• Listverse lists the Top 10 Difficult Literary Works. I’ve only read 1/10 – T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land – hooray for first year Literature university courses!  (Listverse is easily of my favourite non-book related websites, I spend so much time here and have way too many random “no one cares Jess” facts from reading their various lists.)
• Even though I too favour marginalia and such in physical books versus the cold, hard plastic of e-readers sometimes I wonder whether it is just the old “But physical album art is so important for the experience of music!” argument rehashed for the literature crowd. In the latest bit of heartwarming reportage, a man tracks down and reconnects with an old friend after finding a bunch of old books in a second hand bookstore with the friend’s ex-libris sticker inside.
• More John Waters promotional articles as Role Models is released, The New Yorker recounts a recent event with Waters:

“I love feel-bad books,” Waters said, perched cross-legged on the edge of a couch. “I want to have a hate book club where we all come over and read about hateful characters.”

• And The New York Times reviews Role Models, calling him America’s “best funny uncle.”
• The Washington Post has a great article with lists of the top 10 best selling books for the years 1990, 1980, 1970 and so on, down to 1910. Even though they don’t cover whole decades, just the first year of each decade, it’s surprising how many of the previously best selling books are now probably forgotten. I wonder how many of them are even still in print?
• Chip O’Brien over at Forbes‘ Booked blog has a few words about what book publishers can learn from the film and music industries.
• J.G. Ballard’s archives have been acquired by the British Library.
• This photography slideshow – titled “Remember reading on Paper?” as though the act itself is already obsolete – showcases some lovely photos of grand libraries and private images of people reading.
• John Feffer has been reading books he bought from a book sale as a teenager.
• Summer has started for those in the Northern Hemisphere (and we’re just beginning to get a real taste for Winter down South), and here is a complete compilation of all the Summer 2010 Reading lists that have been published so far. Just in case you needed something else to read.
• I know I linked to it last week, and I’ve also spent a lot of time this week pimping it out to as many sources as possible but I have really high hopes for the Australian Book Bloggers Directory. Be sure to spread the word, and join up if you haven’t already.

I’ll admit it is very possible I went a little overboard this week, but this is what happens when your sister tells you about a street near her house with a multitude of good book shops with strapping young bookstore lads manning the counters. Resistance is futile.

• The Crystal World by J.G. Ballard
  

  Book Loot: Week Ending November 22nd, 2009

• The Drought by J.G. Ballard
• Rushing to Paradise by J.G. Ballard
• Virgin: The Untouched History by Hanne Blank
• Underworld by Don DeLillo
• The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
• The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith
• Carnal Knowledge: A Navel Gazer’s Dictionary of Anatomy, Etymology, and Trivia by Charles Hodgson
• A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes
• Ironweed by William Kennedy
• The Sickness Unto Death by Søren Kierkegaard
• Days of Reading by Marcel Proust
• The Little Friend by Donna Tartt
• Julian / Williwaw / The Judgement of Paris / Messiah / The City and the Pillar by Gore Vidal

I went into the secondhand bookstore, completely expecting to hand over hard-earned cash in exchange for novels, the guy who works there – who usually gives me a significant discount anyway – gave them to me as a gift? I mean, that was a really wonderful thing for a rainy Sunday morning, but it doesn’t excuse the ridiculousness of this week’s haul.

There’s always this fabulous list of Reasons for Buying Books to try and ease the guilt.