Con Slobodchikoff: Chasing Dr Dolittle

Towards the end of 'Chasing Doctor Dolittle', in a section about how he contrived to confuse a trail of ants, Slobodchikoff, author, animal behaviourist and Professor of Biology at North Arizona University, runs through a series of questions that he sometimes asks his students. First he asks who thinks that humans can think. And then who thinks dogs, then cats and finally ants. To the first question every hand every time is raised. To the second usually about two thirds, and then one third and then, finally, in response to the last question, most of the time, he says, not one hand is raised. Now I know very little about animals, except what I have picked up from the occasional David Attenborough documentary, but I think if I was in any of those audiences, well I think I would have raised my hand confidently in response to all four questions. If I could say that I might have not raised my hand for the fourth, I think perhaps I might have found this book to be more revelatory than I did. And I think it does set out to be revelatory.

In 'Chasing Dr DoLittle' the reader is invited to play the role of the eponymous doctor while the author assumes the role of his faithful parrot Polynesia, interpreting for the reader the whistles, grunts, groans and movements of a varied pageant of creatures including prairie dogs, honeybees, ants, lizards, chickadees, ravens, squid, whales, chimps and chickens. And as these creatures run, shuffle, swim and dance across the pages he offers his interpretations with the attention to detail characteristic of someone who loves what they do, and with the succinct and vivid language of a writer who likes his reader. Slobodchikoff, in his approach and in his style of writing, is not unlike Konrad Lorenz, and while he is perhaps never quite as charming or as endearingly surprising as Lorenz (I'm thinking here of 'King Solomon's Ring') he does sometimes, talking to the lizards on his front porch, or avoiding a swarm of angry African bees, come close.

The swarming African bees are terrifying. Their cousins, the everyday honeybees are much more civilised. Dancing circles and figures of eight, they can communicate to their fellow bees the distance to and direction of a nectar source, and can adjust any number of the variables to account for 360 degrees of direction, and for distances of anywhere between 300 feet to several miles. That's about 100,000 'words' for the combination of distance and direction. And Slobodchikoff would argue that they are words, without the inverted commas, in that each variable can be altered to change the meaning of the communication. The type of dance, whether a circle or a figure of eight, a waggle, shuffle or tremble, is, for example, equivalent to a noun, referring to a measure of distance, whereas the angle of the dance serves the purpose of an adjective, indicating direction. In much the same way an ant can alter the chemical make-up of deposited odour packets, as well as the distance between each packet, to communicate the distance, direction and quality of a food source. And the common variety household dog, in its anal secretions, can encode enough information to assemble a reasonably dependable Wikipedia entry.

Prairie dogs on the other hand don't need anal secretions, or Wikipedia to communicate. Their alarm calls are packed with information, about the type of predator in sight for example, whether it be a man, a coyote or a hawk, and about the colour, shape and size of the predator, as well as information about its distance and speed. It is the experiments which explore these calls which take pride of place in this book. In one such experiment three students are sent out into a colony of prairie dogs, each wearing a different coloured shirt, and the resulting calls of the dogs (who are not dogs, but rodents, like squirrels) analysed. Each call is a combination of different frequencies of sound, and in the analysis only one of the frequencies, the one associated with colours, changes. The students are sent out again and again, changing appearance, distance, direction and speed, and the resulting calls analysed. And the conclusion is that prairie dogs  seem to have something like a grammar. There are parts of their calls that serve as nouns (human, coyote, hawk), adjectives (yellow, blue, red), verbs (running, walking) and adverbs (quickly, slowly) and, what's more, the parts can be combined in different ways according to shifts in context.

To the same end Slobodchikoff offers the calls of the Carolina chickadee, which are made up of four syllables, arranged into different combinations according to whether the birds are foraging near the ground, or navigating their way through dense woods. When these combinations are played back to the birds in experiment conditions their responses are as they would be out of the laboratory, but when the four syllables are rearranged, artificially reconstructed and played back, the chickadees do not respond, or are confused, as we would be if someone were to rearrange the words in this sentence into a random order.

In other words, if animals can alter the grammar of their communications according to context, then animals, whether dogs, cats or ants, squirrel-like rodents or chickadees, can think. This is the central premise of the book, though not necessarily its most interesting. Of equal interest are the evolved means by which animals have learned to communicate, like the squid who can flash one colour on one side to warn off a rival, while at the same time flashing a different colour on its other side to attract a mate. And then there are the curious rumbles, gurgles and clicks which make up the rhyming songs of the humpback whales, sung for the most part on their journeys to and from breeding grounds.

Of equal interest too, though only briefly discussed, is the idea that animals perceive time differently, from one another and from us. Human speech played at sixteen times slower than normal speed is much like whale song, and sped up eight to ten times is much like birdsong. So although to us a whale's song might sound like a series of grunts and groans,   and a bird's song a nonsensical twittering, to a whale and to a bird, who perceive time slower and quicker respectively than we do, each may sound much like a sentence would to us.  And perhaps that explains, by way of a hastily cobbled end, why Polynesia was so much smarter than the doctor.

House Mother Normal by B.S. Johnson

After writing a discussion of Chris Ware's Building Stories last month, in which I discussed some common ground between that book and B.S. Johnson's The Unfortunates, I thought I'd have a look online and find out which of Johnson's books were available these days. Coincidentally, it turned out that this month is the 80th anniversary of Johnson's birth, and later this year will mark the 40th anniversary of his death. As a result, Picador have seen fit to republish a few of his novels that were long out of print, and have in recent years only been available in an omnibus edition. One of these books is House Mother Normal.

It's weird, really, that Johnson fell off the map in the way that he did. He might still be languishing in obscurity were it not for Jonathan Coe's 2004 biography. Why is it that Johnson was so long out of print and so little known in his own country while novels by Alain Robbe-Grillet and Georges Perec are available in most decent English bookshops? Unlike those two, and unlike his hero Joyce for that matter, Johnson never really wrote a book that was difficult to read. Some argue that his lack of popularity is simply down to the fact that Johnson's experimental modernist approach to fiction is at odds with English literary culture. All our big names of the last 30 years have been formal conservatives working in a tradition about which Johnson was scathing. We don't mind it when the French, or even the Irish, engage in high modernism, the argument goes, but when a working class Englishman tries to reinvent the novel, we see him as a pretentious irritant.

Well, maybe. But reading House Mother Normal, I was struck by some other issues that may account for Johnson's lack of readers.

House Mother Normal takes the form of eight stream of consciousness monologues from inmates (there is no better word) of an old people's home, preceded by an introduction from the House Mother of the title, who seems to be the sole carer in the institution. At the end of the book, House Mother gives the reader her own monologue and a short closing statement. Each monologue is 21 pages long, and the pages are numbered accordingly. This is because the monologues are simultaneous—while they focus mostly on a given narrator's thoughts and reminiscences, they occasionally make reference to what is happening in the room, and these external events can be found in exactly the same place in each account. For example, a song the characters sing together appears about halfway down the fifth page of each chapter. Part of the experience of reading the book is the process of trying to piece together what is going on in the care home from these fragmented accounts. I found myself flipping back to previous chapters to build a picture of what was happening to the characters. It seems clear from pretty early on that they are being subjected to abuse, but of what kind?

The old people are put to work on banal tasks, made to play a perverse version of pass the parcel, set to jousting one another, and then forced to watch the House Mother "entertain" them. Quite what this entertainment involves does not become clear until the House Mother gives her own account at the end of the book, but it is repeatedly described as "filth." What is in the package the old people play pass the parcel with? It is several chapters before that is revealed. All we know at first is that the contents represent "a dirty trick." And, even once we find out what the parcel contains, it makes no sense beyond an act of saddening cruelty. Here we're staring to get to the problem with the book. But we'll come back to that.

At its core, House Mother Normal is a collection of Beckett influenced stream of consciousness monologues which present the reminiscences of eight elderly individuals, each given a distinct and convincing voice. That said, one of them is too preoccupied with hellish pain in his anus to reminisce so very much, and at least two others are demented to the point of being largely unintelligible. To represent a lack of mental agility in some of his characters, Johnson uses stretches of blank space on the page, a technique which can feel a bit contrived (is there ever a time when the mind is completely without content?) but which is also effective and at times genuinely distressing. To drive home his point about the decline of the mind with age, he also arranges the monologues so that they become progressively more senile as the book goes on, such that the reader can get a sense of what it might be like to lose ones faculties entirely. This dimension of the book shows some real compassion, mixed with a real bleakness. The characters sit and relive parts of their past as best they can until the day comes when their confusion becomes too great. The lives Johnson gives his creations are fully imagined, realistic and scattered with striking details and pathos. As a passionate atheist, and also someone committed to truth in writing, Johnson uses the book to stare down what he perceives to be the inevitable horror of aging and dying. As House Mother says in her closing passage, "worse times are a-coming, nothing is more sure."

This is grim stuff, make no mistake, but it's made all the grimmer by the fact that this is also a book about abuse of the elderly and institutional sadism. House Mother is a monstrous character; so much is clear from early on. She beats her charges with a "twitcher," she feeds them food which she literally considers too poor for her dog, and she organises a farcical jousting game in which two of the more able inmates (or "friends" in House Mother's parlance) push two people in wheelchairs towards each other. The two people in the wheelchairs have to try to strike each other with mops. The game ends with a severely confused man being knocked unconscious.

Here is one of the core issues with the book. Every event that does not take place only in the mind of one of the characters is either an act of exploitation or an act of abuse. Further, the abuse is of an active and perverse kind and I found it deeply sickening. It is often said of Johnson that his books are infused with black humour. A case in point is Andrew Motion's foreword to this edition, in which he claims the author's novels are "lit with bleak comedy." A part of what makes House Mother Normal quite an unpleasant book to read is the suspicion that the acts of degradation and humiliation the characters are subjected to are supposed to be read with a guilty mirth. This possibility seems all the more likely when you know that the book's full title used to be House Mother Normal: A Geriatric Comedy.

It's not more than a couple of years since hidden cameras showed a nurse in an English residential home walking into the room of a frail old woman and punching her in the head unprovoked. The kind of abuse presented in this book is not so far from what still happens today, and it is not amusing. If Johnson wanted this side of the book to be funny on any level, he shot himself in the foot by making the characters convincing and human enough for the reader to empathise with and pity them. If he hadn't done that, but had instead created a farcical tone and two dimensional characters, maybe the insanity of the abuse could have been slightly funny, but this approach would have undermined everything the book says (very effectively) about the decline of human life.

So what I'm getting at here is that House Mother Normal presents a hellish view of life, but also makes you question whether you are being asked to laugh at something which you find deeply shocking and sad. It seems to look for humour where there is none. On the other hand, this is a grim, sometimes scatological, rather perverse, but in some ways brutally honest book about an area of life that most writers either sentimentalise or avoid. It makes the reader look at fears most people try to forget, and then says explicitly: this is coming to you.

In his foreword, Andrew Motion is at pains to point out that Johnson's book is a call to celebrate life in the here and now. I don't buy that. Or at least I would say that if the book is anything of the sort, then it fails on that level, just as it fails on the level of comedy. It is not the tricksy modernist structure that makes the book difficult (in point of fact, the textual innovations make it more readable), but rather the abject nature of the content. Not that House Mother Normal is a bad book. It is far from a being bad. Purely on the level of execution and writing alone, it is excellent. But it is a foul book with a grim vision; it is dark and almost unremitting, with only occasional flashes of beautiful humanity that make it all the more sad and disturbing. So, perhaps it is not so surprising after all that Johnson's work has struggled to find a wider readership.

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.

Susan Hill - The Woman In Black.

The best ghost story I know is Henry James' 'The Turn of the Screw.' It may be the only really good ghost story I have ever read. James' ghosts occupy psychological spaces, for the most part, and are the more disconcerting and the more convincing for it. Susan Hill's 'The Woman In Black' is different. It's ghosts are more old fashioned, and are to be found in graveyards, behind locked doors and barred windows, and in fog choked swamps and marshland. And when I first met them, on the London stage.

Stephen Mallatratt's theatrical adaptation of Susan Hill's short novel has been running at the Fortune Theatre, London, since time began, or thereabouts. I went to see it a couple of weeks ago, just as time was rumoured to be winding down. The cast of characters is played by two actors, both excellent. The staging is simple and clever, the theatre small and intimate. When the play finished I bought the book, and I read the book with the images and the sounds of the stage still resonating. And so this review can not help but be a review of the play and the book together.

The story begins as so many ghost stories do, with a frame narrative, in which our narrator, an ageing, somewhat subdued, "even-tempered . . . predictable" Arthur Kipps, sits by a fire blazing in the hearth, engaged in the "soothing business of lighting a pipe", his family sat around him. He is invited to join in with the traditional Christmas Eve telling of ghost stories. Shaken, he abruptly makes his exit, leaving his family "in a state of consternation and bewilderment" and the reader with the lingering, ominous thought that, "the truth is quite other, and altogether more terrible" than the "ghoulish, lurid inventions" of the usual stories. This is how the book opens. The play opens with Kipps standing centre stage reading the opening lines of the book ("It was nine-thirty on Christmas Eve. As I crossed the long entrance hall of Monk's Place on my way from . . .") in a slow, deliberate monotone. Both beginnings point to the ostensibly plain, unadorned, and so credible character of our narrator, and, in turn, the credibility of his story.

The "altogether more terrible" truth unfolds in Arthur Kipps' past, in a small, insular, fog-swathed town called Crythin Gifford, where, as a junior solicitor, he is sent to attend to the affairs of the recently deceased Mrs Drablow. And it is here that the eponymous 'Woman in Black' appears (a young woman "so pathetically wasted, so pale and gaunt with disease, that it would not have been a kindness to gaze upon her") and disappears, usually preceded by a rustle. Soon after Kipps moves to Eel Marsh House, a suitably gothic structure, surrounded by marshland, approachable only via the narrow "Nine Lives Causeway" and isolated from the town when the tide is in and the causeway submerged. Here he is haunted by strange, ominous sounds - a horse and carriage sinking into the surrounding marshland, the screams of its occupants, one a child; a rhythmic bumping, a "familiar sort of sound" from behind a locked door. When reading these passages I could not but hear again the sounds from the theatre, and so recall the tension evoked there. The success of the theatrical adaptation depends I think on these sounds, which in combination with the simple, sparse staging, commit the audience to engaging with the story on their own terms, and with their own imaginations. Little is directly shown. Susan Hill does likewise. Enough is left unsaid, and enough unseen.

In both the novel and the play, the space that is most vividly seen is that of the room behind the locked door. In the novel it is described with the same detail as are the marshes, or the house, but it is more vivid, more conspicuous, because it does not fit. It does not fit with those other settings, or with the impression of the woman in black who stands gazing out over the marshes from its barred window. Outside of the room, and until the room, the story is monochromatic, a sort of dull russet brown. And until this point, everything has a feeling of weight, and decay. When Kipps finally shines his torch into the room there is colour and lightness. The effect is, in context, disconcerting. On the stage the effect is similar. Whereas for most of the story the staging has been minimal, a couple of chairs and a basket serving for half a dozen different settings, the room behind the door is busy and cluttered. For the first time the audience is jolted from their own imaginations and asked to really look at something - a fixed, meticulously arranged space. The sudden shift is disconcerting, and disorientating. It is doubly so when our eyes fix upon the source of the rhythmic bumping "familiar sort of sound" that has been haunting Kipps' nights.

This then is a ghost story which in its component parts is familiar. There is the frame narrative, the reliable narrator, the claustrophobic settings, the barred window and the locked door. There is also the twist at the end, which although not especially surprising is perhaps all the more dramatic for its tragic inevitability. And yet, despite or because of its familiarity, it works. The book is well written and the play is entertaining. In both, the plot is well handled. I don't know if I would have liked the book as much if I had not seen the play first. Both together took about five hours. I would gladly have given a few more.

Ambulanse by Johan Harstad

Ambulanse begins with a story narrated by an paramedic who is haunted by the memory of a woman he was too late to save many years ago on his first day on the job. He is also haunted by the idea that his wife might some day leave him, and by the thought that his young son will one day be alone and won't know how to cope. "Hold on," he says, "the important thing is just to hold on." Until the ambulance arrives, or just in general. Life is a matter of not giving up. But he's concerned about Andreas, his son, because he and his wife have never given the boy any cause for anxiety. Each night the boy comes into their room and waits for one of them to wake. They invite him into their bed. They've made him feel so safe and secure that he is totally unequipped for the loneliness of life. Little Andreas thinks there will always be someone there for him. 

So, when the paramedic and his son go to a cafe together on the way back from the cinema, the ambulance worker disappears to the toilet and doesn't come out. He leaves the little boy at the table and sits in a cubicle for over twenty five minutes. He sits and wonders if the little boy will be panicking, crying, or just frozen in silent terror. Or maybe he'll just be sitting there at the table, singing happily, secure in the knowledge that Daddy will return. Finally the narrator snaps out of it, gets angry with himself for testing the child and comes back out of the toilet. Of course, the little boy is nowhere to be seen.

This moment of horror doesn't last long. The man finds his child sitting at another table, singing to and chatting with an older man, who is writing something on a piece of paper. The child was never for a moment concerned. They make their way home and neither of them says much about the incident, since for the child it amounted to little more than a happy distraction. Later that night the ambulance man is called out to an emergency at the same flat where he found the dead woman on his first night on the job. In that flat he finds the man from the cafe. The man is still breathing. It's just a matter of his holding on. And so they drive into the night.

In this first story the groundwork is already laid for the themes and connections of the book. Each of the stories here is narrated by a man. All of the stories relate in some way or another to loneliness. The ambulance from this first story drives through many of the others, until near the end of the book we get the story of the man lying on his back inside, speeding towards the hospital.

There are various other connections between each of the 11 short narratives in Ambulanse. So many in fact that I would argue this book is actually an unconventional novel, even if it was published as a short story collection. For example, several of the characters find themselves sitting up late at night watching someone calling himself Las Vegas trying to win credits on a remotely activated TV gambling game, while text messages from lonely teenagers scroll across the bottom of the screen. One narrator joins the game on a whim, calling himself Caesar's Palace, and this leads to a brief text-message communication between two stories. Nokia phones are another connecting factor, as is Sarah, an anorexic 15 year old who is mentioned by characters in at least two stories before she appears in person; first as the daughter of one narrator and, a little later, as the love interest of another.

The story in which Sarah features most centrally concerns a teenage boy who can't manage to rescue a practice dummy from the bottom of the swimming pool in swimming class. He needs to do it so that he can get a passing grade in Physical Education and go to the same sixth form as the troubled anorexic girl he is in love with. In his frustration he breaks into the leisure centre one night and uses a rock to sink himself to the bottom of the pool, where he kisses the dummy and has a conversation with her. It is the closest he can get to kissing Sarah, who was the last person to give the dummy CPR.

This theme of stunted communication runs all through the book. A man trapped in a collapsed building uses his Nokia to play Snake instead of ringing his family for help. Sarah's therapist spends his evenings in sessions with a fully automated and extremely limited online psychiatrist. "I'm not doing any progress," he types. "How long have you not been doing any progress?" comes the reply. At least two characters have almost given up on communicating all-together and are more or less house bound. Neither of them is quite sure why. And the last, perhaps most beautiful story in the book concerns an old man ascending in a air-balloon into the heavens, where he hopes to be reunited with his deceased wife. He talks to her memory the whole way up and drops photographs of their time together down onto the city.

Johan Harstad was born in 1979, which means he is two years older than me and he published this book when he was in his early 20s. What struck me most when I was reading it was that it was a book I would have wanted to write at exactly the time he wrote it, except that I didn't have anything like the skills to pull it off. Reading this book, you know that you're reading someone who got their first mobile phone around the time they got their first serious girlfriend, who listened to Radiohead as a teenager and believed deeply in the alienation of millennial life. This is also someone who was playing with form and trying to link disparate elements together into a whole, in the way PT Anderson did in Magnolia (or David Mitchell did, to a more half-arsed degree, in his early books). For all these reasons I would say that Harstad articulated a moment in time here, a moment which has not yet been reappropriated as fashionably retro: the moment just after the 21st century began.

Despite the fact I'm claiming Harstad expressed in 2002 something many people his age wanted to, it's also true that few of us had yet developed the skills for the job, and as a result this book feels peerless. The closest touchstone I can think of as a writer is Douglas Coupland (who I will defend against any comers—just try me) but Harstad doesn't have the observational irony born of Coupland's generation gap, and his world is somewhat weirder. Harstad is also more experimental with his prose. He works dialogue into his stories without using quotation marks, writes in a style that echoes speech and uses repetition in long sentences, broken up with commas, to build hypnotic, melancholy monologues.

The only downside is that Ambulanse has never yet been translated to English. There are other Harstad books available in translation though, including the book he wrote next: Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion? There's a good chance I'll come back with a review of that in the new year.

Nicola Barker - The Yips

                                                     
Following the release of her previous novel, Darkmans, in 2007, Nicola Barker revealed, 'There are writers who exist to confirm people's feelings about themselves and to make them feel comforted or not alone. That's the opposite to what I do. I'm presenting people with unacceptable or hostile characters, and my desire is to make them understood.'

And nor does Barker like to sum those characters up in a couple of hundred pages. The Yips weighs in at 560 of them. A comparative lightweight compared to Darkmans, which was nearly 300 pages longer, but it’s still advisable to remember to bend your knees and keep your back straight when you pick up the hardback edition.

This preoccupation with the mundane and the ugly extends to the setting for her novels. Not for her the romance and beauty of Yorkshire or Scotland. Her characters exist (for they could hardly be said to be living) in forgettable places like Ashford and The Isle of Sheppey. Or in the case of The Yips, Luton.

Installed as ‘Britain’s crappest town’ in 2004, a less prepossessing place in England is hard to imagine. But while Luton would appear to be the canvas for only the broadest brush strokes of satire, Barker’s characters are layered and affectionately drawn; believably grounded in darkest Bedfordshire. Just as the Yips describe the inability to hole a relatively easy putt, particularly at a moment of high anxiety, Barker’s characters are all, to some extent, failing to hold their nerve; orbiting around Stuart Ransom, an Amisesque monster. An anti-hero for our time. The name is apposite - he appears to have an inexplicable hold over those in his milieu. From his world-weary, word-chewing manager Esther, to his new ‘friend’ Gene. Barman by night, meter reader by day, Gene has also, astonishingly, survived cancer eight times.

They’d all like to leave him, but for various reasons, find themselves unable to. Ransom is a washed-up golfer. A man who in his youth had the (golfing) world at his feet. But his cockiness and verve have been his undoing and we first find him in the bar of an anonymously awful hotel in Luton, drunkenly sounding off about the relative merits of Japanese and Korean female golfers. Similar in style and stature he avers, but your Korean has bigger tits.

The paparazzi are outside, sniffing blood after an anonymous tip off. We get it - Ransom has become tabloid fodder. A 21st century George Best - an alcoholic, unpleasant has-been, with premature hand tremors and a mobile phone addiction.

Medical miracle Gene’s meter reading brings him into contact with Valentine, an agoraphobic tattooist with a penchant for the 1940s. She lives at home with her mother, who since being hit on the head by a golf ball believes she is French, calls herself Frederique and possesses an unnervingly high sex-drive.

After the bender in the hotel, Ransom wakes in an unfamiliar house to find at the end of his bed...

A woman and a girl. Yes. But the woman isn’t a woman, she is a priest (in her black shirt and dog collar) and the girl isn’t a girl. She’s a...What is she? He inspects the girl, horrified. She’s half a girl. The lower sections of her face is....It’s missing. A catastrophe. It’s gone walkabout. Or if not quite missing, exactly, then ...uh...a work in progress. A mess of wire and scar and scaffolding.

This sequence is so beautifully realised that we hardly care whether any of it is true at all.

Or how about this for the moral anxiety and ambiguity of an illicit kiss...

But the tongue in his mouth is no longer his instrument. It is heavy with longing; unwieldy; a damp, feather eiderdown of desire. It is too late, he tells himself (never more cynical and adept than in this instant): the trigger has been squeezed, the deathly mechanism has been enabled, the fatal course of a bullet has now been set. No amount of bleating or praying or willing or cajoling can halt it or stall it or call it back.

And I guess that’s the point. Despite the frankly bonkers cover and a reputation for being a ‘challenging’ writer, Barker is Self with characters you care about. As elegant as Barnes, as evocative as Carey, and as uncanny as early McEwan.
Admittedly there are times when the dexterity and spinning plates can leave the reader on the verge of dizziness. And, perhaps inevitably with a novel of this length, there are moments of bagginess, and some of the meaningful conversations are perilously close to overdose.
However, these are only minor gripes. The joyful prose and the interweaving of plots and characters make The Yips about as impressive and simply enjoyable as a novel can be.

And Stuart Ransom, an over-the-hill, egotistical substance addict, is a star for the new millennium.
Perhaps they’ll rename Luton Airport after him.

Nicholas Carr - The Shallows: How the Internet is changing the way we read, think and remember.

'The Shallows' is haunted by the presence of HAL, the malfunctioning supercomputer in Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey,' and specifically by the scene towards the end of the film when HAL pleads for its life, or rather for its memory circuits: "Dave, stop. Stop, will you? . . . Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it. I'm afraid." At the beginning of the book Carr positions himself as HAL, his mind, like the computer's memory circuits, not going, but changing: "I feel it most strongly when I'm reading . . . I feel like I'm always dragging my wayward brain back to the text." By the end of the book, having explored the impact of the Internet on our brains, our minds and our emotions, Carr has changed places. He now stands with the human figures in the film, who, in contrast to HAL's "outpouring of feeling . . . go about their business with an almost robotic efficiency." This, he argues, is the inevitable outcome of our increasingly addictive, and increasingly dependent relationship with the Internet.

The thrust of his argument is that the response/reward distractions of the Internet, the multimedia, the hyperlinks and the adverts, the tabs and the windows within windows, the e-mail alerts, the social web-site updates, are all together eroding our mind's long established habit, born of Gutenberg's mechanical printing press, of deep and linear reading. And in turn our inclination and ability to think deeply. This is the 'intellectual ethic' fostered over centuries by the 'technology' of the book. It is not, Carr argues, the intellectual ethic of the Internet: "we have rejected the intellectual tradition of solitary, single-minded concentration, the ethic that the book bestowed on us. We have cast our lot with the juggler."

Much of the earlier part of the book charts the biological and neurological history of the human brain, from Aristotle's theory that the brain acted something like a refrigerator to cool the blood, to the Industrial Age metaphor of the brain as a mechanical contraption, each part fixed and unchanging, to the prevailing modern day understanding of the brain as something altogether more organic, as something that is able to adapt, sometimes within a period of days, to environmental stimuli. Thus our brains "register and record experiences in neural pathways" and these pathways strengthen or weaken according to habit. Our brains behave like plastic.  Carr cites lots of research to illustrate the point. For example, a British research project  involving London cab drivers, which found that, "the drivers' posterior hippocampus, a part of the brain that plays a key role in storing and manipulating spatial representations . . . was much larger than normal . . . (and) the longer a cab driver had been on the job, the larger his posterior hippocampus tended to be." And then there is an experiment in which two sets of pianists are asked to practice a melody, each group with keyboards but one group only imagining that they are playing. The result is identical brain activity in both groups. The point of course is that our brains, and specifically the pathways therein, evolve according to our thoughts, and our thoughts in turn evolve with the technologies we use.

From this premise Carr asserts that the technology of the internet, as well as fostering a more distracted 'juggler's' mode of thinking, has encouraged a shallower way of thinking too, in large part because we have come to use the internet, and the computer more generally, as an external source for our memories. Put simply, and in modern parlance, we have outsourced our memories. And while this in itself may not be a revolutionary idea, the simplicity and clarity with which Carr illustrates the workings of our memories makes it at least a forceful, and subject to your way of thinking, a frightening idea. He explains that we have two parts to our memory, our working memory, capable of storing no more than four or five separate ideas at any one time, and our long term memory, a much larger space where some of those working memories settle down, and take root. It is how the Internet effects the dynamic between these two parts of our memory, one the thimble, the other the bath-tub, which provides, to my mind, the book's most compelling indictment of the Internet's influence on our brains.

Just a note here on that "to my mind." This book is not set out as an indictment. It does not read like a polemic. It is not a Luddite's attack on the Internet, informed by a nostalgic conviction that the best of times are in the past. It is a lucid and empirical, and also human account of the impact of a technology that has become an integral part of so many of our lives.