booklit

I grew up with an interest in vampire stories, working my through the likes of Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles but, despite forever hearing good things about it, I’d never got around to reading Richard Matheson’s contribution to the canon, I Am Legend (1954). However, with its third big screen adaptation currently in the cinema - and hearing word of a reworked ending - I wanted to go straight to the source before seeing the film in order that my first impressions remain faithful to the book, not to whatever liberties the film-makers have taken.

Talking of impressions, I sort of knew what to expect from the book, but only in a bare bones way: vampires, an element of science-fiction in some form or other, and character who is the last man on Earth. That the novel is held as a masterpiece of science fiction rather than horror interested me and it was to the pictured edition I turned, not wanting the film tie-in because a) these are tacky; and b) Will Smith is on it.

I Am Legend begins as just another ordinary day in the life of Robert Neville, a plant worker from California who would appear to be the sole survivor of an apocalypse seemingly caused by a bacteria that infects the hosts who then go on to show signs of vampirism: aversion to garlic, crucifixes, and daylight; death by wooden stake; a taste for blood:

…no one had believed in them, and how could they fight something they didn’t even believe in?

Neville’s days consist of foraging for food, keeping his generator running, staying sober, repairing structural damage to his home, and hunting out the vampires, who retreat to the darkness and slip into a form of coma. On a cloudy day, he stays in. But Neville’s drive to understand what has happened leads to his education in matters such as blood and microscopes:

But, of course, he knew nothing about microscopes, and he’d taken the first one he’d found. Three days later he hurled it against the wall with a strangled curse and stamped it into pieces with his heels.

Then, when he’d calmed down, he went to the library and got a book on microscopes.

At night the neighbourhood vampires gather round his house, the regular mantra of ‘Come out, Neville’, trying to entice him into their clutches, but this is nothing for Neville, who now takes it for granted:

…from a distance they’d thrown rocks until he’d been forced to cover the broken panes with plywood scraps. Finally one day he’d torn off the plywood and nailed up even rows of planks instead. It had made the house a gloomy sepulcher, but it was better than having rocks come flying into his rooms in a shower of splintered glass. And, once he had installed the three air-conditioning units, it wasn’t too bad. A man could get used to anything if he had to.

As the novel progress, his understanding of blood and bacteria grows, making him able to forms conclusions as to what has happened to the world. And if his science is sketchy - I wouldn’t know, though - then it’s only because he’s an amateur. Finally, after months of solitude, he spots a dog wandering in daylight and spends time trying to befriend it, only to discover the true nature of the bacteria, and from there events escalate to the shocking ending that, on reflection, is strangely optimistic.

Throughout I Am Legend Matheson explores the vampire myth from a scientific point of view. Neville reduces garlic, for example, to its chemical constituents to find what offends vampires so. And when tackling other conventions, of the more psychological ilk, questions are asked, such as “what would a Mohammedan vampire do if faced with a cross?” It’s to his credit that he doesn’t just accept such traits as staples of the genre and dares to question them, lifting his novel from more pulpy contemporaries.

But vampires aside, its the human angle that takes centre stage in I Am Legend, charting Neville’s passage from man to monster as he goes around by day killing the slumbering vampires. Where, in the Bible Jesus met a man possessed and, on asking his name, was told, “I am Legion, for we are many”, so Matheson inverts this notion where the many see in him a legend, a mythical beast that haunts their numbers.

The novel benefits from Matheson’s style, a straightforward, no frills prose, that is immensely readable, offering up page after page of horrific action coupled with a realistic - seriously! - study of loneliness. In the vampire canon it’s one of the better novels I’ve read, daring to be edgy by explaining a predominantly supernatural subject matter as science. Other vampire novels should be scared of this - it deserves its legend.

Ryu Murakami is an author I’ve been aware of for a while now, partly because of his literary namesake, Haruki Murakami, and also through noting a positive response to his In The Miso Soup, translated to English in 2005, although I’d never really felt the need to read his work. Then, by chance, I discovered that a film I like, the teeth-gritting Audition (1999), was based on one of his short stories and he had, in fact, written the screenplay, too. Well what else could I do but hunt down the man’s books after all? And in doing so I choose Piercing (2007), published in Japan in 1994, on the basis that I preferred its cover over In The Miso Soup’s.

Billed as “a dark psycho-thriller” by the Daily Mail and by the Times as “creepy and gripping”, Piercing is certainly that. Or, perhaps, was. It’s been thirteen years between the original and the translation and in that time Asian cinema has enjoyed wider popularity, especially the more violent material, and as a result, the novel’s effect is lessened as the content is what’s expected of Japanese thrillers of this ilk, and therefore it comes across as more schlock than shock. Still, if you can pleasd innocence of Japanese cinema in recent years, then the novel’s intended effect may apply.

Kawashima Masayuki lives with his wife and newborn child in their apartment, which doubles as his wife’s class for teaching bakery to locals and is therefore “permeated with the buttery smell that for Kawashima had come to symbolise happiness.” While to all extents and purposes they are a happy couple, Kawashima suffers a form of panic attack and for the last ten days, with the wife asleep, has found himself standing over his child’s cot with an ice pick, sweating:

Every time he studied this instrument, with its slender, gleaming steel rod that tapered down to such needle-like sharpness, he wondered why it was necessary to have things like this in the world. If it were truly only for chopping ice, you’d think a completely different design might do. The people who produce and sell things like this don’t understand, he thought. They don’t realise that some of us break out in a cold sweat at just a glimpse of that shiny, pointed tip.

It’s an implausible scene, the type you’d expect in movies, and there’s a knowing reference thrown in to Basic Instinct, to show that Murakami knows exactly how implausible it is. But he doesn’t care, this is a thriller after all, and so Kawashima’s panic attacks inspire real fear for himself and of what he is capable:

You wouldn’t do something like that, you would never stab the baby, he told himself hundreds of times, but the voice inside him never stopped replying: I just might.

The fear that he may harm his own child leads Kawashima along a dangerous road as, like the major players in this Piercing, he has a past, and the only way to protect his child is to take himself off elsewhere and what begins as a sadistic urge soons becomes a feat of meticulous planning, horrifically mixing the inhuman with the mundanity of everyday living:

There was no way to be one hundred per cent sure of not getting caught - this had been his first thought on waking - but merely wounding some woman was out of the question. If she lived, she’d surely go to the police, and that would be it for him. He’d mulled over such problems while brushing his teeth and washing his face.

The story builds from there, chapter by short chapter, and then, when all hell breaks loose, Piercing opens up into a non-stop catalogue of cat-and-mouse drugs and violence that, in a single chapter consuming half the novel, leads to a conclusion that’s hard to accept, yet strangely fitting.

The piercing of the title, while it could relate to puncturing someone with an ice pick, relates to the thoughts of Kawashima’s eventual target, a young woman who has pierced her own nipple, but these reflect the novel’s wider concerns:

To be able to choose your own pain - it’s a little scary, she thought, but it’s wonderful, too.

Murakami’s delivery is deadpan throughout, never passing judgement on the events in his novel, regardless of how wrong or stupid they seem, as if to say, this is the story, accept it. Sadly, it’s too pulpy to stir a sense of wrong or right in aligning with characters, but the weaving in and out of their perspectives is done well, increasing the dramatic irony with each incident, and is what makes Piercing particularly gripping and worth having a stab at.

When I think of Finland, the impressions I get are twofold. The first, as should be obvious, is of a country covered with lakes and forests touching upon the Arctic circle, which was the case in Arto Paasilinna’s The Howling Miller. The second is of its darker side, of how it has one of the higher suicide rates in Europe and how bleak the impression it gives. During a recent browse of a book shop I happened across Dark Paradise (1989) by Rosa Liksom, a Finnish author, artist, and filmmaker, and on picking it up I’m happy to report that it falls into the latter camp and, rather than dwell on the darker side of Finland, it revels in it.

Dark Paradise is a collection of untitled short stories, most of which rarely stretch as far as four or five pages. They are split into two sections, Domestic and Foreign, and provide sketches of Finland’s dark underbelly, covering all manner of nefarious subjects, a mere sample of which includes murder, suicide, drugs, and sex abuse.

The stories tend to be told in the first person by unnamed narrators, a trick that offers out a multitide of voices ready to be claimed by the people of Finland who may sympathise in this or that direction, such as the militant:

I’m a sixth-generation nationalist, and proud of it. I’ve made it my mission to lead the country forward, to promote its traditions and ideologies, and I intend to do so at every opportunity. At school I tried to explain to my class that one day those goddamn Russians are going to come and stain red our blue-and-white flag, but something must be wrng with them, because they didn’t pay attention.

And when the rare third person story comes along, the prose continues with unnamed characters, always getting involved in the scene yet maintaining its distance:

The sun was shining behind the factory, coloring the water turquoise by the shore. A boy stood barefoot on the pier with a broom in his hands, squinting in the sunlight. On the pier there were chunks of meat being washed by small waves. The planks were sticky with blood, and white blubber floated on the edge of the shore in long strips. The boy felt small and dejected…He felt sad. All these ice-covered mountain, surrounded by water on every side, the sticky blood and stinking meat would be his fate, too. He would live only in order to lose his life.

The stories of Dark Paradise take place all over Finland, in is cities, fish factories, and churchyards; its bedrooms and prisons; and the tone remains icy throughout, as it brings, with a few broad strokes, the broken lives of its people. Where the Domestic section tends primarily to people’s inner turmoils, the Foreign stories explore when people collide. Amazingly, no matter what happens - shop keeper killed for small change, a rapist subverted, someone living with their dead mother - there’s the sense that what’s happening is right, not in a moral way, but that there couldn’t be any other way for the story to go. It brings the reader to accept these strange people, to accept their strange ways.

As a journey through the underbelly of Finland, Dark Paradise does an interesting job of bringing voices to the disillusioned and unhinged, to the depressed and dependent, although some cases are extreme and stretch credulity. What Liksom does is somehow make these short portraits believable and, with the occasional epiphany thrown in, dliver stories that somehow linger long after they’ve ended, partly for their strangeness, partly because they could happen. If this is Liksom’s idea of paradise, then it belongs to the lost.

In Lisey’s Story King continues with one of his favourite subjects: writers. In a departure from previous novels like Misery, The Dark Half, and Bag Of Bones, the author is dead two years prior to the novel opening. Scott Landon, survived by his wife Lisey, won the Pulitzer and the National Book Award during his short life. It’s no mean feat for an author of horror novels. (Wake up, Stevie, you’re dreaming!)Now, as the story begins, Lisey is preparing to pack up Scott’s scribblings and move on with her life. But, as she enters his study she is taken on trips down memory lane by the objects therein to such events as the couple’s first date and an assassination attempt, John Lennon style, on Scott. The novel, however, isn’t just a nostalgic journey; Lisey’s Story is, at its core, about madness, and there’s a fair peppering of characters a slate short of a roof: Scott’s father, Lisey’s sister, and a loony fanboy who just happens to be in the area. Nice. And it’s this lunatic, threatening Lisey to offer Scott’s papers to the local university, that forms much of the drama within the novel’s here and now.

As a read, the first 150 pages were a disorganised mess. It is apparent that King has attempted something different to his usual work, grappled with stylistic decisions, and not managed to pull it off. What we have here is a collection of memories, one after the other, that serve to portray Scott Landon as the man Lisey loved. They are lifeless recollections, told in the present tense for immediacy, but they fail to connect with any empathy the reader may have for their predicament. And so it continues, stories told without lustre, which is disappointing given that, while told in the third person, the scenes often delve into Lisey’s mind. Aren’t her memories exciting? The reason, to take the assassination attempt as an example, is that King is trying to cram every detail into the scene (and one which happens all too fast) rather than giving only the pertinent details.

It picks up, however, with the introduction of the aforementioned fanboy as the drama begins to mount in the present, bringing Lisey out of her dull reveries. And, just as soon as the book becomes interesting, it commits literary seppuku and delves back into the past. The more we learn of Scott, the more Lisey remembers of him. So it comes to pass that, like King himself, Scott had a personal demon in the booze. Scott, also, to give the book a supernatural twist, has a place called Boo’Ya Moon in which he retreats. It’s a place that he finds both a relief and terrifying in equal measure.

The biggest problem with Lisey’s Story is that it is wordy. Not just verbose to the point where an editor’s red pen may have saved it, but wordy in the sense that it’s full of meaningless words. In an attempt to catalogue the interior language of the Landons’ marriage, King puts some of the stupidest twee phrases ever put in print into the mouths of his own characters. Thus Lisey, around fifty years old, goes around calling her elder sister ‘Big Sissa Manda Bunny’ and excessively using the word ‘smucking’. Scott, in the past, talks of nonsense such as bools, which seem to be some confused mess of clues and/or gifts. Attempts to explain it fall by the wayside and this reader was left just as confused as Lisey first was when Scott came up to her, his wrists bleeding on their first date and offered her his blood-bool. The biggest problem with this twee verbage isn’t that it’s utter nonsense, it’s that King actually declares it as ‘the interior language of their marriage.’ I guess he’s never read the show don’t tell part of his own On Writing.

I honestly think that the biggest problem that I had with Lisey’s Story is that King’s prose is just one big ramblesnooze. That, and the fact that it’s full of annoying phrases. Not signature phrases attributed to characters, as there’s nothing wrong with that, but the continual poor attempt at introducing them: ‘like so-and-so used to say’, ‘as they say’, ‘so-and-so used to call them’ ‘what so-and-so referred to as’, and so on ad infinitum. The other annoying aspect to the prose was the way that, rather than just tell the reader what the character was thinking, he would interrupt a paragraph with a bracketed sentence before continuing the narrative.

As for the characters, they just lacked spirit. Lisey, despite being the eponymous title of the novel, doesn’t have much of a story to tell. She wanders about, remembers a few things, and not much else until the denouement. Scott, as a character, came across much better but that’s because he had a more interesting past, a broken home, the death of an older sibling, and a father certifiably mad. The other major player, the lunatic, works, although his appearances are few, his spectre still lingers throughout. Lesser used characters come and go, some more believable than others, but King really needed everyone to be plausible for his work to be more credible.

While I didn’t like Lisey’s Story, I can find no fault with the idea, the notion of a spouse cleaning up the unfinished works of an author while grubby hands wait to get their eyes on them. And to catalogue a love that endures, even after death. It’s just a pity that King thought of it. But I think that the novel would have been much better if King could tighten his prose, ditch silly get-out devices like Boo-Ya Moon, cut the glut of phrases and just write, and finish the story when it has met its natural conclusion rather than just saunter about for sixty pages cleaning up the loose ends. Next time Lisey has a story to tell, I won’t be listening.

For months now, a number of people have been reading Patrick McGrath and talking him up. The novel they’ve usually read is Asylum but, just to be contrary, I thought I’d try a different introduction to the man. Thus I chose Dr Haggard’s Disease, McGrath’s third novel.

Set in pre-war London, the novel is based around a monologue from the eponymous Dr Haggard. Haggard, a general practitioner living in a house on the southern coast of England, is a man who has loved and lost. But, when the son of his former lover pays him a visit old feelings are renewed, former loves remembered, and madness begins to show from beneath the cracks.

Crucial events in Dr Haggard’s Disease, being those that shape the later narrative, happened years before in Haggard’s life when he was a promising young surgeon under the tutelage of Vincent Cushing - a nod perhaps to a couple of actors well known for playing doctors in low-budget horror movies - and under the spell of the senior pathologist’s wife. But it’s the events now, as recalled by Haggard, that drive the narrative on. And, being just ever so slightly mad, there are many moments in which you doubt his version of events, if not everything he has to say. And rightly so. He’s crazy! But ever so poetic with it.

The tone is a modern take on the Gothic, so while there are no clanking chains, ghostly castles, and other supernatural happenings as in previous centuries, there are grim hospitals and dark, rugged coasts with waves crashing against the cliffs. The language here is exemplary and showcases McGrath’s ability to turn a phrase. As an example, one only has to look at the novel’s opening:

I was in Elgin, upstairs in my study, gazing at the sea and reflecting, I remember, on a line of Goethe when Mrs Gregor tapped at the door that Saturday and said there was a young man in the surgery to see me, a pilot. You know how she talks. ‘A pilot, Mrs Gregor?’ I murmured. I hate being disturbed on my Saturday afternoons, especially if Spike is playing up, as he was that day, but of course I limped out onto the landing and made my way downstairs. And you know what that looks like - pathetic bloody display that is, first the good leg, then the bad leg, then the stick, good leg, bad leg, stick, but down I came, down the stairs, old beyond my years and my skin a grey so cachectic it must have suggested even to you that I was in pain, chronic pain, but oh dear boy not pain like yours, just wait now and we’ll make it all - go - away -

It’s testament to McGrath’s ability that he manages to continue this style for nigh on two hundred pages, right up to the gruesome denouement, making the book an absolute delight to read despite the dark subject matter. The characters, while we only have Haggard’s account of them, are strong and easily envisaged - both as the doctor sees them and as we, looking between his words, see them. But however certain Haggard is about his story, as readers our reflections upon them will always be cast in doubt.

As a portrait of a man falling into madness brought about by the ignition of past passions, Dr Haggard’s Disease does no wrong (and if it did, I was too busy enjoying the prose) and its dark tone, tinged with erotica and horror, create an almost perfect novel. Almost, because there were times when I did find the lengthy paragraphs overwhelming, despite their quality. But, now that I’ve joined the ranks of those gushing over McGrath, I know that the next time I need to get away from my usual fare, I’ll be running for Asylum.