Bleeding Edge by Thomas Pynchon

 

Set in 2001, Pynchon's Bleeding Edge is a surreal, insightful, paranoid and funny novel about the time when the Internet started to accelerate its creep into all our lives. Set in New York, the book follows Maxine Tarnow, a Fraud investigator who has lost her licence, as she gets drawn into a web of hackers, left wingers, neo-conservatives and dot-commers, centred around weird goings-on at a tech firm called hashslingrz.

I haven't read Pynchon's last book, Inherent Vice, but I understand it surprised many people . It seems it was a reasonably straightforward humorous noir thriller, while Pynchon fans are used to sprawling, weird and confusing post-modernist narratives in which everything and nothing might be a clue to some vague yet vast conspiracy. With this in mind, Bleeding Edge feels like a combination of Pynchon's older work with some of the tricks he may have learnt from trying his hand at a more conventional genre. The confusing cast of characters, shadowy government activities, paranoid conspiracies and joyously complex sub-plots running through this novel all reminded me of Vineland, but unlike that earlier book, Bleeding Edge follows a single protagonist all the way through, and while the narration is third person, almost everything that happens is focalized through the wise-cracking New-York-Jewish consciousness of our heroine, Maxine.

Pynchon has often been an anarchically comedic writer, and in some ways, Maxine's spunky persona made me wonder whether the author wasn't trolling his super-serious, high-lit loving audience by paying his respects to Janet Evanovich. But Bleeding Edge's protagonist is also reminiscent of Raymond Chandler's Marlowe—a tireless, sardonic investigator in a corrupt world, where the odds are always stacked against the little (wo)man, and where supporting cast members will suddenly turn up dead in observation rooms under swimming pools. In fact, Pynchon seems to be doing for New York in the early 2000s what Chandler did for 1930s Los Angeles. Bleeding Edge lifts the lid on late capitalism to show the grubby reality beneath, where tech firms are laundering operations for Mossad donations, there's no clear line between corporate interests and the CIA, technology is always led by military innovation, and nobody really knows whose side anybody is on.

The term "bleeding edge" appears only once in the text and is used to refer to the most advanced technology: Not just cutting edge, but bleeding edge. However, the title seems also to refer to the ways in which one thing will tend to bleed into another, until all certainties disappear and the question of choosing a side may be moot. Morally guided Maxine finds herself experiencing an unhealthy attachment to a sadistic, neoliberal hitman with a long history of torturing and murdering South Americans in the name of US interests. Deep web application DeepArcher, a kind of metaphysical VR simulator that supposedly operates beneath the surface of the Internet, appears to be a portal of some kind, and may even house the dead. Random number generators cease to be random on September the 11th, and a video appears that apparently shows American agents practicing a dry run on a roof top with a rocket launcher some days earlier, ready to shoot down the planes should one of the pilots bottle out. By the end of the book, the virtual world and the real world have melded together in subtle ways, foreshadowing the way the Internet really would colonise all our lives over the decade following novel's end.

I really liked Bleeding Edge. I love the little details as much as anything: The tech nerd with a foot fetish; the man with a forensic capacity to smell things, whose private hobby is attempting to reconstruct Hitler's scent; the young graphic designer who has spent years and a small fortune trying to get her hair to look exactly like Jennifer Aniston's does in Friends; Maxine's secretary, who almost always speaks in a kind of ironic Blaxploitation jive; the sinister presence of the novel's off-screen villain.

But more than all this, Bleeding Edge is one of the first fictional books I've read that really tries to address the world as it is now. It is a comedy, but it is also deadly serious. In going back a few years to the start of the century, Pynchon is able to say everything about where we are today. It really brought home to me the way in which we are all trapped in the Web; how even those powerful people we assume to be in some kind of control are really just avatars, working within pre-scripted scenarios—as free as the protagonist of a third-person shooter.

Electric Eden by Bob Young

Rob Young's Electric Eden is intended to provide a history of England's visionary music. More than a straight folk music primer, this book argues for the existence of a specifically English approach to alternative culture—an impulse rooted both in nostalgia and utopianism, identifiable in the works of Blake and Ruskin as much as in the music of the folk revivalists and the rock bands they influenced. It's an ambitious project, running to over 600 pages and blending social history with music biographies, album reviews and political ruminations. Young even indulges in one ill-advised foray into dream-like prose poetry, though quite why he was allowed to do so escapes me.

The early part of Electric Eden is fascinating, especially if you are not well versed in the history of English folk revivalism. After an introduction in which he sets out a theory of folk culture as a type of time travel or liminal space, Young tells the story of Vashti Bunyan, a young folk singer in the 60s who first lived in a forest with her boyfriend, and then, having been evicted by the bank who owned the land, walked most of the length of the British Isles with a horse and cart before disappearing from public view, leaving only one record behind her. That's until, in the early 2000s, she got an Internet connection and a letter from Devendra Banhart, leading her to discover that she was a cult favourite. She finally got the confidence to release a second record. Bunyan's story is an endearing one, but for Young it also exemplifies how folk music works. For him, folk music is a journey into one's self as much as it is a geographical or temporal journey. Learning about folk culture also the act of creating that culture.

 This concept of folk culture as both a personal journey and the on-going invention of an imaginary past is convincingly brought home again and again throughout the book. Because folk songs were transmitted in an oral tradition, each singer has always been free to alter and invent, meaning that the original version of any song represents a kind of unknowable platonic archetype. The people who travelled around putting together the first collections of folk songs adapted the lyrics to fit with their conservative tastes and entirely neglected to record the most obscene material. Composers, like Vaughn Williams and Holst, who did a lot to popularise and rehabilitate the common man's music in the early 20th century, did so in the framework of a new style of composition. Even the guitar, now such a ubiquitous symbol of folk song and protest, was practically unseen in the UK before the late 1950s.

 The early chapters on the British folk revival, both within classical music and within circles of folk historians and musicians, are where this book is strongest. Anyone wanting to investigate the subject could do worse than to start here. Reading this book with a laptop to hand makes for many evenings of interesting listening and provides a decent introduction to the people who invented English folk music as we now know it. Young is also convincing on the natural progression from the early English folk revival scene to the folk-rock fusion style of bands like Fairport Convention. The story of the making of their album Leif and Liege is a fascinating one, full of tragedy and inspiration. Later the book covers the ways tragedy and inspiration also marked the life of Sandy Denny, the singer who, on Leif and Liege, interpreted the old songs so well and provided her own haunting murder ballad towards the album's end. For me, having little knowledge of this material before hand, it was a pleasure to get to know the music and these small histories were fascinating.

 However, Rob Young also dedicates many, many pages of this book to a series of late 60s and early 70s bands and musicians whose stories are less interesting and whose music has not dated nearly so well. How much a reader enjoys many of the chapters towards the middle of this book will depend on how much one cares about people like The Extraordinary String Band. For me, there came a point when I grew sick of the period in question and felt a weary sense that Young was aiming to be exhaustive purely so as to avoid the criticism that he had left someone out. What's more, the bands and musicians I most would have enjoyed reading about—people like Pink Floyd and Kate Bush—figure more as supporting characters.

 Fortunately, as the book goes on, Young expands his focus. He writes a long section about the cult film The Wicker Man, and explores the mid-20th century development of witchcraft as a spiritual and cultural movement. A long section of the book also provides a discussion of the growth of the music festival, the origins of Glastonbury, the travellers movement, and the ultimate war Thatcher's government waged on freedom of assembly, culminating in the Battle of the Beanfield, at which a large number of travellers, revellers and crusties were given a serious beating on their way to their annual gathering at Stonehenge, around which the police had erected a barbed wire fence. Young frames all this as a kind of battle for the soul of the nation—a fight for the right to use certain sites. He argues that the free festival scene had its origins in an idea of a less technological, more cooperative and nomadic form of living that was as much a paranoid response to the idea of a post-nuclear world as it was an idealistic rejection of consumer society. As much as this vision was only ever really available to a marginal few, Young argues, it's indicative of the utopian power at the heart of what may at first seem to be the conservative impulses of folk culture. This plays to a well known narrative of the 1980s as the point in time when Great Britain lost its ability to dream, an ability Young would seem to like to see restored via a semi-spiritual engagement with an idea of Avalon.

 It's difficult to know, really, how honest this account of the free festival scene actually is, given that the whole thing was over by 1985. Was there ever a real possibility of social change? I knew a lot of people who went to free parties in the early 2000s, and I went to some of them too. People used to talk a lot of against-the-social-contract, smash-the-state talk, but the whole thing always seemed to be more about drugs and getting attention through terrible Drum & Bass "freestyling" on the topic of Iraq than being about any kind of plausible challenge to the status quo. Maybe that's because the people I knew were just folks who had read No Logo and started slumming it, while the crusties in the 80s really lived the life, dreamt the dreams and had real dogs on ropes. I don't know. What I do know is that as Electric Eden wears on, it becomes more and more difficult to trust Young.

 Rob Young's history of folk echoes his own insight into folk culture as an invented past. His aim is to create a reality, as much as to chronicle one. Electric Eden is all about presenting a dream of a better England. It is vitally important to Young's narrative that folk music and folk culture are seen to be progressive forces, not conservative ones. He puts it like this:

 "In the global history of class struggle, revolutions are typically assumed to bring about fundamental changes, recasting political and social paradigms and remaking the world anew for a permanently altered future. That was true of the Communist Manifesto... just as it was true of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, the social engineering of Hitler's Nazis, Mao's Great Leap Forward, and the Pol Pot Khmer Rouge of 1970s Cambodia, to name a few. But revolutionaries are equally inclined to turn the wheel backwards, fighting to restore a perceived lost estate or denied birthright, than campaigning for a gleaming, high-technology future. From Winstanley and his Diggers ... to the Parisian Situationist sloganeers of the May 1968 disturbances, daubing walls with "Sous les paves, la plage!" (Beneath the paving stones, the beach!), there has always been this desire to prise open the veneer of modern industrial society and reconnect with a fundamental mode of existence. "

 The problem here is that in order to align folk music with the more acceptable face of revolution— the Diggers and the Situationists, as opposed to the Nazis and Khmer Rouge—Young has grossly distorted the truth. Despite what his cherry-picked quote might suggest, the Situationists were not a nostalgic, anti-modern movement. Amongst other things, members of the Situationist International wanted to use modern technology to redesign the city so that it was a constantly moving place of play. They were universalists who rejected tradition and aimed to use modern architecture as a liberating force. The Khmer Rouge, on the other hand, far from aiming to "remake the world for an altered future," wanted to turn the clock back to the Middle Ages. After year zero was declared, you could get your hand cut off for wearing a watch and get killed for wearing glasses, since both of these were perverse western innovations. If anyone ever wanted to "prise open the veneer of modern industrial society and reconnect with a fundamental mode of existence," it was Pol Pot.

 Likewise, when Young argues that the image of horses on the cover of Jethrow Tull's album Heavy Horses shows an unimaginative Luddism, it hard to see this as anything other than a convenient reading designed to support his narrative and play to his tastes. There is no reason this image is more conservative than the artwork for any of a million folk record sleeves, except that it was released in the year that Young wants us to believe marked the end of an era. This kind of opportunist reading of symbols will be familiar to anyone who has ever written an English literature essay in which they began with a theory about a book and then browsed the unread volume for quotes they could twist to support that theory. In other words, Young is writing a polemic, and the veracity of the details are less important to him than the overall arc of his argument.

 This is why, while towards the end of the book Young dedicates a lot of time to Julian Cope, a man who researches stone circles, makes rock and roll music influenced by pagan ideas and subscribes to a hippyish, liberal, left wing philosophy, he says very little about the neo-folk scene. Neo-folk is rife with bands suspected of holding far right, even fascist sympathies. Though Young alludes to the scene's existence, Death in June's use of Nazi uniforms and SS runes, and David Tibet's strange religious theories about Hitler would muddy the waters of Young's lake so badly that he ellects not to discuss these issues at all.

Electric Eden is a music book that doubles as a social history, but it is one with an unreliable narrator. Reading it is like spending a long night drinking in the company of a talkative man with a massive record collection, a good knowledge of English history, a personal politico-spiritual vision which he believes ties it all together, and a burning desire to share all of this with you. How much you enjoy the experience probably depends on the degree to which that kind of night appeals to you, and how far you think his enthusiasm compensates for his biases. As you wander home in the early light, your hangover already creeping in, you'll probably find yourself muttering, shaking your head—partly in wonder and partly in frustration—your mind full of new knowledge and snatches of old songs, but echoing too with all those counter-arguments he wouldn't let you finish. 

  

Doctor Sleep by Stephen King

When I was 15 I had a girlfriend with big curly hair and a gap between her teeth. This being the 90s, my girlfriend was a fan of Friends, and from that show she got the idea that we should read each other's favourite book. This is how I came to read Desperation by Stephen King, a book I did not like at the time, and which I still think had a terrible ending, but which contained images and scenes I remember vividly to this day. That book has stuck with me in a way that the Graham Greene novels I read that year have not. Having no favourite book, I gave her What a Carve Up by Jonathan Coe, thinking it would play well with her animal rights obsession, but in the event she never read it.

While this introduction to King wasn't enough to convert me, the way Desperation kept popping up in my brain eventually brought me back to his work. I got around to The Shining only a few years ago. I found bits of the book genuinely scary, parts of it touching, and other bits ludicrously ill judged, such as the hedge animals that come to life and engage in threatening behaviour. Despite any faults, The Shining is a compelling book. While reading it, I accidentally left it at a friend's house. I felt an urgent need to get hold of another copy the next day, in order to finish reading as soon as possible.

At its core, The Shining is about alcoholism and a dysfunctional family.  Jack Torrance, played with such memorable mania by Nicholson in the movie, is a man haunted by his own abusive childhood. He wants to be a better man, but ultimately the anger and addiction within him make him a target for demons. This is a story that has been told many times, and lived many more, but in Stephen King's world the ghosts that haunt the Overlook Hotel, where the Torrances spend the winter, are demons just as real and threatening as any suppressed oedipal rage. Recognisable real-world issues sit side by side with the fact that Jack's five-year-old son, Danny, has psychic powers—a phenomenon called the shining, from which the book takes its name. Drowned women come alive in the bath tubs of deserted rooms. Long-dead men quote Edgar Allan Poe at midnight.

King waited over three decades to start work on a sequel to The Shining. In tone, it is a very different book, but the same kind of imaginative free-reign operates in these pages as in the earlier novel. Danny Torrance, the scared little boy trapped in the Overlook Hotel with his violent dad, has grown up into Dan, a man with his own alcohol problems and dark secrets. He finds a degree of peace in AA meetings and his work at a Hospice, where he can use his supernatural gift to help the dying leave this world. He comes into psychic contact with a young girl, Abra, who has her own version of the shining. Meanwhile, a group of middle aged and old people who tour the country in mobile homes are really a tribe of ancient monsters who feed on the energy of such gifted children, torturing them horribly and burying their bodies in shallow graves.

These monsters disguised as old folks, led by a beautiful woman in a top hat, are reminiscent of Roald Dahl's Witches. They also have something in common with vampires—a point King references perhaps a few times too often. They never really become frightening, and Doctor Sleep is not really a horror novel. It is very suspenseful, masterfully so, and it does have some grim passages, but the aim of the book is not to horrify readers, or even scare them. In a sense, this is a fantasy work, which builds, as so many American narratives do, to an inevitable confrontation.

King writes action incredibly well. Reading Doctor Sleep is like seeing a film in your head. Long stretches of the book amount essentially to chase sequences or showdowns, and yet they are never boring. People jump in and out of each other's consciousness, experience visions and live flashbacks without any of this ever becoming abstract. The writing is visual without ever being too descriptive, and it is simple enough to be almost invisible, yet it manages largely to avoid becoming banal. King is a popular author for a huge audience, and whether this is a consequence or a reason, I think it explains the way he leaves no thread untied. Every idea is explicit, every reference is explained, and every plot point is clarified. This is impressive, given the huge and apparently unrestrained imaginative scope he allows himself. Many authors of more "literary" fiction make ambiguity a point of honour, and while there is doubtless something to be said for letting the reader do some work, King makes ambiguity in fiction look like an excuse to be lazy. Reading this book, I found myself wondering: how many contemporary authors would actually be capable of tying this many ideas and plot points together coherently?

There are things I don't like about King's writing though. He appears to have a desire that his narrative voice will be down-to-earth, but the result is that there are times when it ends up sounding mannered. This is never more obvious than in the bizarrely frequent references to shit and toilets. To me, his dialogue can suffer the same problem. On those occasions when it's supposed to be snappy and witty it often rings hollow. Sometimes he labours a point for several paragraphs where his initial attack at the idea was succinct and sufficient. It must be said that these are all issues that I've had with other works by King, and they are no worse here than usual. Doctor Sleep is definitely not one of the ones where you find yourself asking what the hell happened to the editor. It also bears saying that while the dialogue can sometimes be weak, the characterisation is not, and the different people in the pages of this book are rounded, believable and easy to invest in. King is traditionally much better at drawing men than women, and that's largely still true here, but 13 year old Abra is a likable and believable teenage girl.

One of the major themes of this book is redemption. Every alcoholic has to let go of the awful shit they did in their drinking days in order to stay dry. Stephen King, himself a recovering alcoholic, seems still to be channelling that darkness into his work, but now in a more hopeful and reflective fashion. Dan Torrance's work in the Hospice is part of his way of atoning for the hurt he brought the world. His opportunity to help Abra is also a chance for him to be the man his father was not. But while there is this sense that children provide an opportunity to break away from the pain of the past, there is also an acknowledgement that each child has to find their own way of dealing with the anger and pain passed on. 

Doctor Sleep is an entertaining book. It avoids casting a shadow on the memory of The Shining because it is a different type of work that still manages to stay true to the characters and world of the first novel. Strangely it is also quite a comforting book, despite handling issues that have no easy answers.

Coda by Simon Gray

I was staying with my wife's family in Trondheim the Christmas when Harold Pinter died. My father in law told me at the dinner table that the playwright was dead. I instantly felt sick. I had to go upstairs and take a minute to myself to process the news. While I was sitting up there, I wondered how it could be that this news had hit me so hard.

I am no devotee of Pinter. At that time I had read maybe one of his plays and a couple of admittedly excellent short stories. I had read and admired his impeccable Nobel Prize acceptance speech and I knew of his relationship to Beckett, whose work I had loved since I was a teenager. But I wasn't someone who read Pinter. Not really. Not like the vast numbers of people who really read Pinter. So why was I so affected by his death?

And then I realised it was because of Simon Gray. Pinter was a close friend of Gray's, and as such he is a recurrent character in The Smoking Diaries, the series of supremely engaging and tangential autobiographical books Gray began writing when he had to give up alcohol and began to have sleeping trouble around the turn of the 21st century. In the books, Gray presents himself as somewhat in awe of Pinter. As a fellow playwright, Gray finds his own life's work far less valued both by public and critics than the work of his friend, and at one point in the series it becomes clear that a very famous publishing house are courting Gray only because they believe that a contract with him might lead to a subsequent deal with Pinter. Despite this, Gray draws his friend with such affection and clarity that when he died I actually felt I had lost a personal acquaintance.

Towards the end of the time that Gray was writing the third book in the Smoking Diaries series, The Last Cigarette, he was himself diagnosed with cancer. Lung cancer, appositely. He was trying to kick the habit at the time, and so he closes the book by reflecting that he'll soon be coming, one way or another, to his last cigarette. 

Coda is the book Gray wrote after being given a one year prognosis from a doctor. The moment the news is broken is appalling, because neither Gray nor his wife has any wish to know. He is actually in the process of framing another question entirely, but only gets as far as "How long..." before the doctor jumps in with the predicted limit to his life. From that point on he is a man sentenced, faced with the task of consciously living his last days. He and his wife travel to Crete, and it is from there that he writes the majority of the book.

It's a running gag in Gray's memoirs that he always ends up writing around the topics he feels he really should be addressing. He will often break off in the middle of a childhood story to reflect, for example, on some perceived humiliation visited upon him by the staff of a local cinema. On the island of Crete he tries to write the story of his initial diagnoses, and of the subsequent medical treatment to establish the details of his illness, but he spends at least as much time discussing his hotel room, other tourists and the books he has brought with him. Where this style is one of the great joys of reading the earlier books, in Coda the habit takes on a new poignancy, because who wouldn't want to avoid thinking about the situation Gray now finds himself in?

The fact is, of course, that he can never really stop thinking about it for long. He interviews himself on the relative merits of his work, and discusses the feeling of shame which has dogged him through his whole life, a feeling which tempts him to view his cancer as something deserved, not just because of the abuse he has subjected his body to, but also on a more metaphysical level. At night his usual insomnia is augmented by panic attacks. When reading the newspaper he finds himself turning first to the obituaries. Yet, Coda is not a morbid book. In fact, it seems Gray might finally have mellowed towards the end of his life. There is a sense throughout that he doesn't want to waste his last days on bile or negativity, and as much as he can be brutally honest about the fear and anger he inevitably feels in his circumstances, he will just as often pause to reflect over the sheer pleasantness of a day gone by.

One of the great strengths of Coda is that Gray assimilates a subject almost impossible to write about into a style he has already made utterly his own. The book is constructed of his signature looping, discursive, virtuosic sentences and the incredible tonal balancing act will be familiar to readers of his earlier books. But this book is necessarily a unique creature. The most touching moments are often simple anecdotes, as when he visits an ailing Pinter, or speaks with a local beggar he knows well and discovers that her friend of seventeen years has recently died. He can't help but see everything through the prism of his diagnosis, and, though he never labours the point, neither can you. 

Coda is quite a beautiful book. For a memoir of terminal illness it is surprisingly warm and positive. You could read this book without having read the other memoirs—Gray's voice is strong enough that the book would stand easily alone—but it probably functions best as the close of his work. It is always a tragedy when a gifted artist dies, and Gray certainly showed no sign of losing his skills, but his readers are blessed that he had the opportunity to make a final statement. A few pages from the end of Coda he writes that he will soon write his last words on the subject of himself. It's difficult to imagine how that knowledge must have felt to a man who had spent the last five years chronicling his life in the most impressively unflinching fashion.

On the same page however, just slightly earlier, Gray has already made what could be the definitive statement regarding the purpose and value of his work. Craftily, he hides it in a discussion of the writer Stefan Zweig. The weakness of Zweig's autobiography, submits Gray, is that he avoids the tackier, grimmer side of life. Zweig lived through a devastating period of history, and ultimately took his own life, yet his writing is clean, polite, almost saintly. "He was a good and honourable man," writes Gray, "in ways which we no longer know much about, but finally no man can speak for the turmoil of his time unless he speaks from the turmoil of himself."   

Building Stories by Chris Ware

In 1969, English experimental novelist B.S. Johnson published The Unfortunates, his "book in a box". A kind of autobiographical novel, it dealt with the protagonist's journey to Nottingham to report on a football game and the memories awoken in him by this trip—specifically the memories of a close friend he had lost to cancer. Johnson chose to publish each chapter as a separate pamphlet collected together in a box in order to avoid imposing a structure on the story. Each event, reflection or anecdote could be read in any order. He felt that this better reflected the workings and experience of real memory, which, unlike a bound book, is not at all a linear phenomenon.

I can't help but think that Johnson also did this because he thought it was a cool idea. He tried to reinvent the novel with every new book he wrote and, as one of the few fiercely modernist English writers, he was actively hostile to conventions in fiction writing. What's interesting is that now, 43 years later, Chris Ware has published a graphic novel that takes a very similar form, and he seems to have done it for very similar reasons. It turns out that it's still a good idea. 

Building Stories comes in a large cardboard box which makes it look like a 5000 piece jigsaw puzzle. The comparison is in many ways apt. Inside, there are two hardback books, a series of more conventional comics, several strips printed like broadsheet newspapers, some stories on pieces of A3 card and some small single-strip stories on long folded pieces of paper. There is also a four-panel folding board, which can be stood on a flat surface like a concertina screen. This board features four images of the same building, one for each season of the year, and each of these larger images is surrounded by small narrative boxes and lines of text which move through several decades and across many of the novel's main characters. They live on different floors of the same old apartment building, a building which serves as occasional narrator. On the back of the board are line drawings of each of the building's four levels.

The title of the book is thus a many-layered pun. On one level this is a collection of narratives related to houses and homes, and it focuses on people who live or have lived on different stories of the same building. Taken together, all these boxed fragments also form a single story with several subplots. To the extent that a story is created by the order in which it is told, you could argue that each new reader of this book constructs a different story from the same constituent parts. It actually feels like quite a responsibility, deciding which bit to pick up next.

But it's not only the readers who are engaged in a process of story-building; the people in the book are too, especially the woman who emerges as the novel's central character. A woman with a certain degree of personal insecurity related to her weight, creative potential and her prosthetic leg, she seems to narrate her own life to herself as she lives it. We watch her change from an insecure art student into a lonely and mildly depressed graduate, and then into a somewhat self-involved suburban wife and mother (although not necessarily in that order, of course). And this is where Ware outstrips even Johnson, because a single page in this novel is often a collage of many different times in the woman's life, linked together by a theme or a feeling, in just the way our memories follow their own winding and unpredictable logic.

Everything about the form of Building Stories seems intrinsically interlinked with the concept of memory as a form of story-telling, and what Ware has to say about memory is subtly instructive. When the central character lives alone in her one-floor flat she dreams that she might one day marry and have a child, an ambition she sees as unlikely. The days pass her by and look exactly the same. She lies at home on the sofa or walks to her unfulfilling job in a florist's. She seems stuck in an affectless limbo. In another section of the comic, when she is a married mother, we find the woman reminiscing about her young and single past. She remembers it as a time in which she was freer and had a sense of purpose. A time when her days had meaning. The idea here is not only that we idealise the past or future at the expense of the present, but also that there is no clear way to separate these periods of time. Wound in with this theme is the idea that happiness is not necessarily a state one can aspire to reach. Happiness, in Building Stories, is something that comes momentarily and might sometimes come as a warm memory of a melancholy past, a past which we are, regardless, doomed to recall. How you once felt and how you now feel collapse together with no clear defining line. One of the key themes of this book seems to be that what we recall and what we dream can form the greater part of our daily lived experience.

Reading a graphic novel ordinarily takes me an hour or two, occasionally a bit longer, but Building Stories demands the kind of sustained dedication and engagement you normally associate with written fiction. Although Ware's drawing style is simple, each frame can contain a lot of information and several visual clues. Any given page, many of which work as a kind of puzzle, can be a deeply affecting and involving experience. Because of the way the work is constructed, I had to give over an area of my living room to the project of reading it. For several days it was an ever-present part of my life. Ultimately I would have liked it to have been even longer. The story of the couple who live above the main character, who are stuck in a cycle of mental abuse, was for me as compelling as any part of the novel, as were the lonely landlady who owned the building and the main character's needy daughter. I could happily have read more strips dedicated to any of them.

This is a quiet achievement on Ware's part, since there's not a sensationalist moment in any of the stories. Although Ware doesn't always limit himself to naturalistic storytelling, he is determined, like B.S. Johnson before him, to present realistic characters in realistic, often mundane situations. Even the book’s most cartoonish character, Brandon Bee, is a honey bee beset by recognisably ordinary issues, such as the difficulties of providing for his family and his lust for a woman who is not his wife. There's a telling moment in Building Stories which reflects on this. The main character is trying to find a classic novel to take on holiday and, after rejecting Lolita and Crime and Punishment, she asks herself why she can't find a "great" book about ordinary people doing ordinary things. Chris Ware seems far too self-effacing to be claiming that his work fills this gap, but we as readers might reasonably feel that it does.

If there is any problem with the way Ware's book is constructed, it is that the end of the reading experience can be anti-climactic. There is no natural close to the text, and for me the main character became less sympathetic as she grew older, so it was unfortunate that I ended the book on a section which came late in the chronology of the story. On the other hand, there are few memories which are recalled only once, so maybe it was somewhat artificial to stop just because I'd read everything there was to be found in the box. To meet the book on its own terms a reader might simply continue to shuffle and read, identifying new connections and themes, until eventually their mind is satisfied and moves on to other things. 

Further Reading: 

For more on B.S. Johnson I can enthusiastically recommend Jonathan Coe's fantastic biography, Like A Fiery Elephant.
You might also like this interview with Chris Ware, in which he talks to Rookie's Tavi Gevinson about Building Stories, his drawing style and other things.