A real adventure

Elephant Adventure
By Willard Price

Stumbling across a fun-loving Red Fox edition of one of the Willard Price Adventure books recently in a second-hand bookshop, the ten-year-old lad in me leapt with excitement. I first read the adventures of Hal and Roger Hunt, as described by Price, when I was a schoolboy. I found them to be the perfect way to learn about the natural world (entire islands floating down the River Amazon?!), its inhabitants (tapirs, chameleons, giant insects to name a few) and the spirit of adventure (the sons of a zoologist up against jungle beasties, poachers or tribesmen known for cannibalism).

On second read, the book still delivers. I found myself hooked as the adventure unfolded and Hal and Roger had to track down the son of the tribe they’re staying with on the Congo/Rwanda border. Not to mention the overall mission of capturing an elephant to sell to a zoo in Tokyo.

That does all seem very dubious now, though. I’m not sure I like the idea of capturing animals for zoos (I personally don’t visit zoos). The books are tremendously good at educating people about different animals around the world and why we should respect them and preserve their place in the biosphere. But still, the reader is left with the impression that man is superior to the members of the animal kingdom and I’m not sure it sits easily with me anymore. Price’s treatment of humans is even more problematic. While his characters have the knack of finding remote indigenous populations that speak Oxford English, they do not treat such people very well. The Hunts are in many ways respectful of native people, acknowledging, for example, that they can teach Westerners very much. But in many years the Hunts undermine their hosts. “Hal had no patience for native superstitions,” is one line that had me chuckling.

Casual racism aside, the books are rollicking good reads. And just in the same way that we now read Tintin, I think that they can still be enjoyed. I certainly had fun again.

Booker of Bookers (Okri was robbed)

The Famished Road
By Ben Okri

This is one of those books that make a writer like me consider giving up. What is the point of fiddling around with words when someone like Mr Okri has already captured on the page everything that can ever be said? For such is the achievement of this Booker winner that it seems no other writer can ever come close. The Famished Road is an immense, epic and adorable series of beautiful images and happenings. This is wonder, captured. No superlative of hyperbole is possible; for its coherence alone this novel should have beaten Midnight’s Children to be named Booker of Bookers.

The story follows the adventures of Azaro, a spirit-child who has chosen to take human form and live among people. His traversal of the spirit-human world brings with it consequences, confusion and, well, inter-dimensional conflict. Of course, Okri would never use such crude terms: he speaks of “death’s embrace”, of “chaos and sunlight” and “dwellers in their own secret moonlight”. But to extract such phrases from the text in this way denigrates them: the reason why this novel is so powerful and affecting is its relentless stream of coherent images. They trickle from one another like a stream hopping over rocks and coursing through a curving valley. Okri has encapsulated a perfect nature and, more impressively, humankind’s place in it.

In contrast to my last review, I could write about The Famished Road until my fingers drop off. I could probably write more pages about it than there are pages in the novel itself. The heartbreaking thing is that none of my words would come anywhere near the beauty of Okri’s. But that won’t stop me trying.

Victorian insight

The Diary of a Nobody
By George and Weedon Grossmith

Although I enjoyed this book very much, I feel that I don’t have a lot to say about it. The Grossmith brothers have put together a very fine piece of satire on the Victorian middle class and for that I commend them. The diary is written in clean, simple prose, refreshingly distant from the style of some of the so-called great Victorian writers. Yet the book reveals a great deal about Victorian character. Through Mr Pooter’s experiences, the reader learns an awful lot about Victorian etiquette, ambitions, financial pressures, class systems, humour, employment – not to mention DIY. In this way it is an incredibly useful history book, more entertaining than a textbook and more accessible than a Dickens social epic.

Charles Pooter is indeed a vivid character of comedy and one whom I would love to encounter in a public house near Holborn or off the Strand. He takes himself so seriously – except when making one of his typically naff jokes. In this way, Pooter is expertly brought to life. In addition, Weedon’s illustrations help you picture him and his peers as they trot around London. What great companions they would make for an evening in the boozer.

My criticisms are expected but fair nonetheless. I wanted desperately to hear more from Pooter’s longsuffering wife Carrie. The scaffolding for some of the humour seemed too obviously constructed and not subtle enough to produce the level of humour that it should have. And finally, towards the beginning the diary entries are so obviously written for a magazine column that they don’t lend well to the book form. However, after a while the reader is firmly in Pooter’s world and enjoying the ride.

Grim up north

Talk of the Town
by Jacob Polley

This review was first published in Notes From The Underground.

It’s grim up north. And Jacob Polley knows it. He opens his debut novel opens with the sentence: “Town stinks.” Chris, the novel’s 14-year-old narrator, then elaborates on the odour’s composition, perfectly and succinctly dumping his audience in the middle of dirty, industrial, crumbling Carlisle. Readers are lugged by Chris through the cluttered homes of the town’s residents, along its grey streets and into neglected parks littered with teenagers and tramps. Excitingly, Chris’s reach extends even further, to the surrounding villages and the countryside which, with its boggy marshes, is just as unwelcoming as the urban sprawl.

But Polley knows there’s much more to the north than the grimness. He knows that the people who populate Carlisle have fascinating stories to tell and, moreover, a distinctive way of telling those tales. So the author adopts a demotic voice that sparkles on every page. It captures expertly the characters’ thoughts and words, as if they are not invented by a writer but rather have steamed from the chimneys over the “bicky factory”. All Polley seems to have done is drag them down from the groggy air above Carlisle and paste them onto the page. It is a towering achievement. Never once is it self-conscious or contrived (which it could so easily have been); the triumph of the novel’s form is that it both subverts and celebrates English.

In fact, Polley records an entirely new vernacular, a feat not unlike that of Russell Hoban’s in Riddley Walker. In this way, he elevates this novel’s setting above 1986, the year in which it is set, to another time. Such is the distinctive power of this language that Talk of the Town exists in 1986 and some undefined, post-apocalypse, dystopian future. To some extent, this perfectly characterises countless post-industrial northern towns, especially those that were unable to scratch out a new identity for themselves in the late 20th Century. Carlisle, like many other crap towns by the end of the eighties, was left hollow. Only a coarse residue remains in its core.

It is this through which Polley wades with Talk of the Town. The novel tells a simple story about Chris, a young lad who, on the last day of the summer holidays, is worrying about the disappearance of his closest friend Arthur. Chris begins his search, which leads him to, among others, local “gorilla” Booby Grove, his menacing buddy Carl ‘The Black’ Hole and gobby Gill from down the road. Chris is alone in his search; he never pairs up fully with any other character. This makes him seem worryingly vulnerable as he slips into Carlisle’s more dubious corners, home to frightening foes and adult worries. Talk of the Town is definitely a coming-of-age story – but not in a rosy, nostalgic way. This is Chris waking up to the harsh realities of living in a crap town where there is little to do except sniff hairspray, tease tramps and make choices with heavy consequences: “Sometimes yer do summit and yer dunno where it’s gonna land yer, says Gill… But yer never know before it comes if it’s gonna be a good change or a bad change. Yer just know that doin this thing’ll change the most stuff round the most.”

Here is Polley’s final accomplishment: he has managed to regale an adventurous story with dazzling language and a crisp, poetic insight. Through this book Polley’s success is secure. Let’s get everyone talking about it.