Favourite Books #26

During the first lockdown in March (ah! those halcyon days!) my friend Deirdre Irvine, owner of The Open Window Gallery in Rathmines, kindly asked me to post the covers of 7 books, with no reviews, as part of a challenge to create a library of great classics. Deirdre wrote: ‘It was difficult choosing one book over another and leaving swathes of beloved authors behind. But, now I nominate Des Traynor to take the baton and run. He has been known to read a few books, so I look forward to seeing his choices.’ I stopped at 25. As we are in the midst of another lockdown now, at least until the end of November, I’ve decided I’ll press on. Will I reach 30? 50? Most of my library is in storage still, which makes this a more difficult task, but I’ll see what I can do. Note: I didn’t adhere to the ‘no reviews’ stipulation.

 

A Roland Barthes Reader, edited by Susan Sontag, who did so much to popularise Barthes’ work in the Anglophone world. A compilation is the ideal introduction (although I’d previously enjoyed the accessible and witty Mythologies). Just look at the table of contents to get a flavour of the material covered in these essays:

 

Table of Contents

 

  Writing Itself: On Roland Barthes by Susan Sontag p. vii

Part 1      

  On Gide and His Journal   p. 3

  The World of Wrestling   p. 18

  from Writing Degree Zero   p. 31

  The World as Object   p. 62

  Baudelaire's Theater   p. 74

  The Face of Garbo   p. 82

  Striptease   p. 85

  The Lady of the Camellias   p. 89

  Myth Today   p. 93

  The Last Happy Writer   p. 150

  Buffet Finishes Off New York   p. 158

  Tacitus and the Funerary Baroque   p. 162

Part 2      

  from On Racine   p. 169

  Authors and Writers   p. 185

  The Photographic Message   p. 194

  The Imagination of the Sign   p. 211

  The Plates of the Encyclopedia   p. 218

  The Eiffel Tower   p. 236

  Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives   p. 251

  Flaubert and the Sentence   p. 296

  Lesson in Writing   p. 305

Part 3      

  The Third Meaning   p. 317

  Fourier   p. 334

  Writers, Intellectuals, Teachers   p. 378

  from The Pleasure of the Text   p. 404

  from Roland Barthes   p. 415

  from A Lover's Discourse   p. 426

  Inaugural Lecture, College de France   p. 457

  Deliberation   p. 479

 

My copy is covered in pencil underlinings – the sure sign of a riveting read. (George Steiner: “An intellectual is, quite simply, a human being who has a pencil in his or her hand when reading a book.”) ‘Flaubert and the Sentence’ is a particular favourite. (‘For Flaubert, the sentence is at once a unit of style, a unit of work, and a unit of life; it attracts the essential quality of his confidences as his work as a writer.’) But so are the extracts from The Pleasure of The Text and A Lover’s Discourse – which I went on to read in full, along with my own personal favourite, the last book he published before he died, Empire Of Signs.

https://www.nytimes.com/1982/11/10/books/books-of-the-times-020710.html

Diana Rigg RIP

Here's a piece I wrote for The Irish Independent circa 1996. I remember at the time features editor Marianne Heron telling me that I needed to be more famous before I could start writing features like this. Hmmm.

The Avengers television series is exactly the same age I am, debuting in January 1961, and it has always held a special place in my affections. According to RTE’s autumn schedule yet another rerun is imminent, so it seems timely to ask: what is it about the programme that accounts for its continued and enduring appeal?

    The Avengers began life as a vehicle for Ian Hendry, a popular actor whose own programme Police Surgeon was not proving to be a hit. His character, Dr David Keel, was aided by fellow investigator John Steed, played by Patrick Macnee, a mysterious undercover agent who became increasingly suave, wielding a steel-rimmed bowler hat and a brolly which hid a rapier. While the show started off as a crime thriller series with tough, gritty storylines, it found a new style after Hendry's departure, and the arrival of Honor Blackman's emancipated anthropologist Catherine Gale. I'm too young to remember her contribution (I was still in nappies), but my elders tell me the character stunned early sixties audiences with her stylish leather outfits and her ability to handle herself in a fight. The Avengers' popularity soared, and it became a ratings winner for ITV.

    But it was with the arrival in 1965 of Blackman's replacement, Diana Rigg, as Mrs Emma Peel, the wife of a missing pilot, that the show first came to my childhood attention. Steed and Peel's adventures grew more bizarre than those which went before, as they encountered karate-chopping killer robots and vegetable monsters from space. The Rigg/Macnee episodes are the most oft-repeated and fondly remembered, typified by their inventive, sci-fi tinged storylines, their crazy villains and eccentric characters, and the intriguing, understated (but all the more powerful because of that) sexual chemistry between the two leads. The show was camp before anyone, except Oscar Wilde or Ronald Firbank, knew what camp meant, and it helped to extend the realms of fantasy fiction on the small screen. It is no coincidence that both Blackman and Rigg went on to star in what were at the time the most extravagant of latter day big screen fairytales, the Bond Movies, Blackman as Pussy Galore in Goldfinger, and Rigg as Contesse Teresa di Vicenzo in On Her Majesty's Secret Service (the only woman to ever get the action hero up the aisle).

    On a personal level, what was it about Rigg's Mrs Peel that made her my four-year- old self's first screen goddess? Apart from the obvious fact that she was great looking, I must have figured that she was my kind of girl because when she wasn't busy beating up baddies without batting an eyelid, she was usually to be found relaxing by dipping into a hefty volume on astrophysics. She also seemed completely unruffled, no matter how big a jam she found herself in. When Rigg left the series in 1967, I sent her a card wishing her well for the future, and was rewarded with an autographed photograph in return.

    After Rigg's departure, Macnee's new partner was Linda Thorson, a Canadian fresh out of drama school, who became Tara King. Now operating under orders from their crippled boss, Mother, the duo took on strange cases involving highly improbable threats to national security, but the show had passed its halcyon days for me and started to go downhill, and I began to lose interest.

    The series was cancelled early in 1969 but was revived briefly for two seasons as The New Avengers in 1976 and 1977, when it reached its nadir. Macnee returned as Steed alongside Gareth Hunt as Mike Gambit, a younger man contrived to appeal to younger women, and Joanna Lumley as Purdey, a too traditionally feminine woman to cut it as an Avengers girl. Lumley has since proved, with Absolutely Fabulous, that her forte lies more in comedy.  But as a product of the sixties, a decade it could be said it helped to define, The Avengers could not be rehashed to suit the seventies.                                                                                               

    Aside from her stint as a Bond babe, Diana Rigg moved on to pursue a career as a 'serious' actress, playing Regan in the BBC's production of King Lear, and Lady Dedlock in their Bleak House. Most recently she has been in Ibsen's Master Builder and Brecht’s Mother Courage at the English National Theatre.

    It was only as I got older that I realised my earliest object of screen desire, my first fantasy fodder, was actually more than 20 years my senior. But she's captured forever as she was then, pristine and timeless, in those at once innocent and knowing adventures with Macnee from the mid-sixties.

    Now where did I put that photograph?

 

 

Favourite Books #25

I'd recommend this tome to anyone who wants a greater understanding of the historical context on the current situation in the Middle East (and Far East).  

Favourite Books #24

For such a funny and formally inventive writer, Donald Barthelme managed to evoke with wistfulness the everyday sadness of much of contemporary life. His stories were so original that I find it hard to credit that so many of them were first published in The New Yorker, where it is in any case difficult to get published at all, but in addition to which the literary values are decidedly traditional. I’ve read Forty Stories, and from it, many times. I haven’t read its predecessor Sixty Stories, but I hope to do so before I die. And also to reread yet again Forty Stories.   

Utopia Avenue by David Mitchell

Utopia Avenue

By David Mitchell

(Sceptre)

Utopia Avenue is a happy book about a happy band. After all, they are called Utopia Avenue. Not that things were always so rosy during their rapid rise along the rocky road to rock’n’roll stardom.

  When we first meet Gravesend-bred blues bassist Dean Moss, he gets mugged, loses his bedsit and his job serving behind the counter in a cafe, all within the space of a few hours. He also has ongoing issues with an alcoholic, abusive father. Oh, and he’s just been kicked out of the band he was in, the politically hardline Battleship Potemkin. Home counties folksinger Elf Holloway is going through a bad breakup from her garrulous Australian boyfriend Bruce – who also happens to be the other half of her performing duo. Virtuoso Hendrixesque guitarist Jasper de Zoet is the ‘illegitimate’ scion of a wealthy Dutch family who, in a characteristic call-back to one of Mitchell’s previous novels, 2010’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, suffers from schizophrenia/demonic possession (delete where applicable), and has spent time in a psychiatric institution in Holland, after being hidden away as a boarder at a posh English Public School. Their drummer, gruff Yorkshire man Griff Griffin, a sticksman who learned his trade on the northern jazz circuit, is – as the only non-songwriting member of the ensemble – very much the shadow man of the group, although he does endure a personal tragedy of his own.  In addition to the four performers, also integral to the set up is mild-mannered, gay, Canadian manager Levon Frankland, who has the vision to put the band together in the first place. A failed musician, his background is that he is estranged from his Christian evangelical family back home in Toronto because of his sexuality.

  Set mostly in and around Soho in 1967/1968, the epicenter of Swinging London, with subsequent sorties to Italy, New York and California, the narrative features walk on appearances by many of the great and good of the time, including, but not limited to (deep breath): Sandy Denny; John Martyn; David Bowie; Marc Bolan; Syd Barrett; Allan Ginsberg; Mick Farren; Brian Jones; Steve Marriott; Jimmy Savile; Francis Bacon; Humphry Lyttleton; Lucian Freud; John Lennon; Jimi Hendrix; Leonard Cohen; Janis Joplin; Frank Zappa; Jerry Garcia and various members of The Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane. This recurring conceit can amuse or annoy in equal measure, depending on one’s attitude, or even one’s patience.

  From foundational texts like Don DiLillo’s Great Jones Street, through Salman Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet, on to Sway by Zachary Lazar and Stone Arabia by Dana Spiotta, right up to more recent essays in the sub-genre like Toby Litt’s I Play the Drums in a Band Called Okay, Joseph O’Connor’s The Thrill Of It All, D. J. Taylor’s Rock and Roll Is Life and David Keenan’s This Is Memorial Device, the list of novels set in the rock music milieu is already long, and getting alarmingly longer. It is almost coming to seem as though it is a rite of passage for every novelist worth his salt to attempt one. But this is hardly surprising: any band that last any length of time – real or fictional – is a soap opera waiting to happen. What mostly differentiates Mitchell’s foray is the nostalgic aspect occasioned by the fact that all of this happened in a period now firmly fifty years ago. Also, rather than being written from one character’s perspective, as a pseudo-memoir, Mitchell employs multiple points of view. This is facilitated through the cute structure he uses: every chapter is titled after one of the band’s song titles, which are laid out in the order they appeared, Side 1 and Side 2, on each of the band’s three albums; the chapter is written, albeit in the third person, from the viewpoint of whichever member wrote the song. The only exception is a short afterword composed by Elf in the present day.

  The novel is very good at hinting at the difficulties of being a woman in an otherwise male group, or indeed of being a female solo artist, in the late ’60s. Similarly, it also alludes to the vicissitudes of being gay when homosexuality was still illegal. It accomplishes all of this without indulging in the smug, retrospective moral superiority so common in historical revisionism. Despite the new-found freedoms of the era, sexism and homophobia were still almost taken for granted, according to Utopia Avenue the novel – but not in Utopia Avenue the band. Remarkably, considering they were mostly manufactured by their manager, the level of camaraderie and cooperation between the players is almost too good to be true. While he does receive one joint songwriting credit, it is difficult to believe that Griff would be happy being a virtual session man in his own group, especially when one considers the huge disparity in income which would ensue between him and the three songwriters of the group. There is also remarkably little ego friction between those three. The incident where Dean, off his face on coke at their showcase gig at L.A.’s famous Troubadour venue, plays badly but is covered for by his bandmates, speaks to the bonding within the group, but might well incur more wrath in a real life scenario.

  It is notoriously difficult to capture the thrill of playing music, much less describe the music itself, in prose, but Mitchell succeeds for the most part, although he does rely on quoting lyrics as much as musical expertise to get this point across. Despite the idealisation of the band’s internal workings, this is an enjoyable read for anyone who likes music and is interested in the period. ‘Utopia’ is, after all, ‘no place’, and remains an aspiration even if it is by definition unrealisable in reality.

First published in The Irish Times. The link is below. Slightly longer version above.

https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/utopia-avenue-a-happy-book-about-a-happy-band-1.4295669

Favourite Books #23

He’s no stylist (at least in translation), and his more pedantic passages of data can rival the Marquis de Sade for inducing boredom, but he does hold a mirror up to a society which disdains to see the uglier parts of its reflection. Is he an Islamophobe, a misogynist, a misanthrope? Maybe. But as I used to tell my students, none of his targets should take it too personally: he is an equal opportunity hater. As Jason Cowley wrote in the New Statesman:

‘Platform is certainly full of witty, unhinged attacks against Islam – characters are introduced for no other reason than to deliver page-length denunciations of true believers. But Muslims ought not to be unduly offended. Houellebecq is a writer of perpetual attack. Protestants, capitalists, liberal-leftists, the revolutionary generation of 1968, the French, les Anglo-Saxons, hippies, Frederick Forsyth -- all these are among his targets. There is considerable comedy in Houellebecq's wild misanthropy. There is also a peculiar poignancy.’

Most of his novels are worth reading: Atomised is a take down of narcissistic hippie culture; The Map And The Territory is a take down of the art world; Platform, our representative, is a take down of sex tourism. It takes the machinations of capitalism, when applied to the global tourism industry, to its logical end:

"Therefore, you have several million westerners who have everything they could want but no longer manage to get sexual satisfaction... On the other hand, you have several billion people who have nothing, who starve, who die young, who live in conditions unfit for human habitation and who have nothing left to sell except their bodies and their unspoiled sexuality."

Guess what happens. Enjoy.

http://www.desmondtraynor.com/books/Houellebecq.%20Platform.html

Favourite Books #22

Are friends allowed? I first met Éilís Ní Dhuibhne when I wrote a laudatory review of this short story collection, first published in 1997 (link below). She contacted me to say thanks. Myself and my wife Jane subsequently became friends with her and her husband, Bo. That’s a long time ago now – but it feels like nothing at all. Of course, I’ve written negative reviews of Irish writers who’ve then shunned me from a great height. It’s all so obvious and predictable, really. Would the ones I wrote negative reviews of now be bosom buddies if I’d written positive reviews of them? Who knows? But that’s not the way life went.

Read the review to find out what’s so good about he book. Meet Éilís Ní Dhuibhne to find out what a good person she is.

http://www.desmondtraynor.com/books/nidhuibhne2.html