Rodge Glass

This is a selection of Rodge’s journalism, mostly pieces about other people’s books published in various newspapers and magazines since 2005. Click on the book title to go directly to something, or just scroll down….

Rant
The Opposite House
A Map of Glass
No Country for Old Men
The Fall of Troy
The Outgoing Man
One Big Damn Puzzler
The History of Love
Lanark
The New Mancunian
Life with an Idiot
The Unnumbered
An Arsonist's Guide to Writer's Homes in New England
Be Near Me
The Enchantress of Florence

Rant
by Chuck Palahniuk
Reviewed by Rodge Glass

Ever since his explosive debut Fight Club was released in 1996, Chuck Palahniuk has been one of America’s most exciting, prolific writers. In six other novels including Choke and Survivor and two non-fictions he has marked himself a very particular place in modern writing: adventurous, imaginative, often surreal, with a capacity to create believable parallel worlds that teach us something about our own. His novels tend to take huge narrative risks and sometimes turn on their heads in the final pages. This doesn’t always work, but Palahniuk’s fiction always shows a rare bravery, and occasionally hits true brilliance. Rant may be his best book yet, and the best by any novelist in some time.

Rant is written in an unusual style, which the author calls ‘Oral Biography’: instead of a traditional narrator, the story is told through a series of quotes from others who in some way knew the protagonist, or studied him. The author’s note places this in the tradition of biographies like Capote by George Plimpton – but Capote was real. This is the same, only with a fictional dead man at the centre of the action. ‘Rant’ is the nickname of Buster Casey, cult figure of the Party Crashing scene and our glittering, rabies-infected anti-hero who spreads disease wherever he goes. His life story is told by a cast of characters who all see him differently: childhood friend, teacher, dentist, mother, private detective, car salesman. The effect is to create a vivid yet also intriguingly vague picture of who Buster Casey was, with each character often giving away as much about themselves as they do about Casey himself. The device takes time to get used to – much like the way reading a book in a new dialect might do – but after a few chapters it seems like a very direct, natural way to tell a story. And it actually has much in common with a standard novel. The author positions each quote (delivered as if part of an interview conducted after Casey’s death) in just the right place, for maximum effect. Each chapter finishes with a cliffhanger. Each one starts with a bang.

Rant is a fascinating character, both in life and death. He’s self-destructive in the extreme (he searches out snakes and spiders with the aim of getting bitten) and is perfectly prepared to destroy the lives of others by spreading infection – but there’s also a more intelligent, thoughtful side to him. To his followers, Rant is a philosopher who chases extreme experience to feel alive. After getting bitten by a Jackrabbit while out thrill-seeking, with blood pouring from his hand, Rant smiles and says: “This here, far as I’m concerned, this is how Church should feel”. Which becomes a catchphrase.

Palahniuk is a master of feeding his readers information subtley, cleverly, so they slowly realise what is really going on – and, as in some of his previous best work, it becomes apparent part way through that Rant’s world is not entirely our own. It has similarities, at first glance it’s the same, but on closer inspection it’s different. Party Crashing is our portal to the other, darker side of Palahniuk’s universe, an underground scene with a strict set of war-like rules of engagement, where the desperate and the hopeless chase each other round streets with the aim of hitting each other’s cars. Through being told about this scene, we discover this part of America is divided into two types of workers: Daytimers and Nighttimers, perhaps best described as a huge underclass along the lines of Orwell’s proles in 1984 – a society within a society who have no money, no power, and who only come out after sundown. At first it’s hard to see why Party Crashing is so popular, but it becomes obvious as the book goes on and the society around it comes into focus. One of Rant’s friends, Shot Dunyan, explains: “Here’s one night I control the chaos. I participate with the doom I can’t control. I’m dancing with the inevitable, and I survive”.

But not everyone survives. Buster Casey doesn’t. He dies in murky circumstances, setting off a huge Rant cult, which sometimes seems to have very little to do with the man himself and a lot to do with everything else. Green Taylor Simms, the historian of the cast, puts it like this: “Looking back, I sometimes wonder if we didn’t invent Rant Casey. The group of us. If, perhaps, we didn’t need some wild, mythic character to represent our own vanishing lives.” And what an invention he is. At the end of the novel, one of the contributors provides the last puzzle piece like a criminal stepping out of a police line-up and there’s just enough time for one more twist.

A truly impressive novel, in scope and delivery.

Published in The Herald

This is the second novel from the author of The Icarus Girl, a hugely successful debut which launched Helen Oyeyemi instantly into every list of bright young literary hopes north and south of the border. This was partly because she was 21 when the book came out, and it was written while she was still in school; she was supposed to be revising for her A-Levels at the time. In the two years since The Icarus Girl she has produced this new book, graduated from Cambridge University and knocked off a couple of plays for Methuen in her spare time. The age issue presents a problem for some reviewers and readers who have not been able to see past it. Compliments have seemed suspiciously gushing, some criticism bitter and unfair. The truth, on the evidence of The Opposite House, is that no matter her age or background (much has been made of the fact that Oyeyemi’s parents emigrated to England from Nigeria when she was four), this is an inspiring new voice in fiction.

The Opposite House comes with the official Ali Smith stamp of approval, and Smith is an appropriate influence to cite here. The two writers’ styles have a great deal in common, both being lyrical, discreet in tone, and exploring the truths underneath the surface of human relationships, only quietly suggesting the wider world outside. They also both have a remarkable turn of phrase – like Smith, Oyeyemi is able to make ordinary things sound poetic. To describe crying she says, “my eyes filled over with tension water”. To describe a spreading blaze she says, “Fire climbed the stairs”. Only the most adept writers can make the movement of a spoon seem heartbreaking: Helen Oyeyemi may not give readers a car chase or a murder, but she will explain what it means to miss somewhere they have never been in a totally new way. Her ability to understand of how words sound, how they feel, how to fit them together in order to create something complicated and beautiful and sad all at once, is impressive, and there are few writers doing it.

The story focuses on Maja, a young woman who longs to visit the Cuba her parents left, but doesn’t really understand why. Also, she wants desperately to have a son – but when she becomes pregnant it makes her fearful, not joyful. She becomes distant from her boyfriend Aaron, her family and her friend Amy Eleni, who her mother claims will never truly be trustworthy because “a white girl is never your friend”. Each of these relationships is built up slowly and surely, like a collage. Then they crumble.

The main weakness in The Opposite House is the plot. It takes a long time to gain momentum, often digressing into flashback and daydream (which is part of the charm), but this is eventually frustrating. Also, it means that when the story does finally get going, it seems hurried. The end itself is so subtle that it hardly feels like an end at all. But none of this takes away from the overwhelming feeling you get reading this author’s work: that whether or not this particular novel is her best, here is a huge talent that reads like it is just waking up. Helen Oyeyemi has now left University and may find more time to write. Let’s hope the distracting issues of youth (patronising), country of birth (irrelevant) and colour of skin (why do we find it so amazing that a black immigrant is clever?) don’t get in the way of this amazing talent getting the respect she deserves.

Published in The Herald

A Map of Glass
by Jane Urquhart
Reviewed by Rodge Glass

Since 1982 readers and critics have greeted each new publication by Jane Urquhart with increasing enthusiasm, so it’s a shame that her first novel in five years is so weak. Urquhart is a poet too, something often referred to as a strength by critics, but good poetry is succinct, spare, restrained; this lengthy, consistently overcooked meditation on romance and art is at least 150 pages too long. It reads as if the author loves words so much that she doesn’t know when to stop using them.

The two central characters in A Map of Glass are a lonely older woman called Sylvia and Jerome, a young artist who discovers her lover’s body in ice. They sit and deliver lengthy monologues to each other about their past, speaking in a stiff, unnatural style more suited to an Oscar Wilde rip-off than a modern, authentic Canada, and it’s never quite believable that these two characters would be interested in each other. Elsewhere, there are excruciating scenes with Sylvia’s blind friend (who, predictably, sees better than the sighted) and many descriptions of snow. Those hoping for a sleepy, soppy ride may be satisfied but anyone wanting excitement will not. The temperature does not rise above lukewarm until it is too late.

Published in The Guardian

No Country for Old Men
by Cormac McCarthy
Reviewed by Rodge Glass

An ordinary guy stumbles upon a suitcase full of money and goes on the run; it takes a good writer to make this kind of opening fresh. But Cormac McCarthy is a master of breathing new life into old plot lines – where most bloody thrillers are driven by the chase, his novels are more about delivery. Each sentence is a direct bullet, dialogue is sharp, it’s fast-paced, and everything important goes on under the surface. McCarthy asks readers to see the world as his characters do: "How come people don’t think this country has got a lot to answer for?" asks one. "This country will kill you in a heartbeat and people still love it."

The setting will seem faraway to some. In McCarthy’s world men spit and swear and kill if they have to, while women stay loyal and don’t ask questions. Even death is often cause for nothing more than a smoke and a sigh from these strong, silent types. But when they do speak, they say more than most, and their words linger in the memory. Though acted out in the harsh American West, the issues of human nature tackled in No Country for Old Men are relevant to all.

Published in The Guardian

The Fall of Troy
by Peter Ackroyd
Reviewed by Rodge Glass

Peter Ackroyd is one of Britain’s most accomplished authors. For thirty years he has written fiction, biography, poetry and criticism, moving seamlessly between subjects as ambitious as Dickens, Wilde, Shakespeare and Milton. In this, his fourteenth novel, he turns his attentions to Troy.

On the surface, the story is about Heinrich Obermann, an eminent archaeologist who believes Homer’s poetry is literal truth, and of his wife, Sophia, who helps on his greatest excavation. But beneath the haunting discoveries and spiritual interventions, The Fall of Troy is really about delusion. Obermann demonstrates a rare, self-obsessed arrogance, dismissing findings he does not like or understand, and making unlikely proclamations of his own greatness. Every wordy declaration of love for his wife sounds more like homage to himself, who he treats like a child, lucky just to witness his glory. Readers may assume Sophia resents Obermann, but he does introduce her to an exciting new world, and she learns much independently. Sophia seems almost saintly at times. She is stuck with a man who thinks nothing of considering his own tombstone aloud. ‘Rest in Peace. You Have Done Enough’, he suggests, before settling on: ‘You Should Imitate Him. He Worked Hard for Mortals.’

The Fall of Troy is a great book. It is written in the stiff, starchy language of 19th Century intellectuals but is lively with it, displaying a sparky directness, clarity and faultless brevity throughout. It warns us that the world is full of Heinrich Obermanns who have decided the meaning of what they might uncover before they have even unearthed it.

Published in The Herald

The Outgoing Man
by Glen Neath
Reviewed by Rodge Glass

This novel by playwright Glen Neath launches the fiction list for new publisher Portobello Books. It opens with The Outgoing Man welcoming The Incoming Man to an unexplained room and speaking a lot about his experiences without actually revealing anything at all. The Outgoing Man says he has to follow a set of instructions that will take him on a journey to several places, at the end of which he will give, or take, something from X, whoever that is - we aren't told that either. At the first port of call this mission goes wrong, and for the rest of the novel he finds himself in a building we don't know the name of, for an unspecified period of time, with many other unnamed people who, it seems, occasionally go to the bar, eat, and visit the sitting room, but don't really do much else.

The narrator tries to make a complaint to the building's authorities about his detainment, trying to tell someone with power that he needs to make it to his destination - but he finds his repeated, increasingly frantic attempts are failing. Relationships with friend Walter and Mr D are equally mysterious and without effect, and this is typical of the plot. Even love interest Colubrine doesn't seem to be interested in his plight. When they are finally alone, they find they can't interact at all:

"We sat for a while and neither of us said anything. Then she started to pick at her nails and the skin around her nails - I think firstly because she was bored, but also I think because somehow she felt the dark made her invisible. Or thirdly, and this is worst of all, she had forgotten I was there."

This is pretty representative of the tone of much of the book, which is funny and irritating in equal measure. Descriptions of rooms and buildings are spare. Characters end conversations for what seems to be no reason at all. They don't help each other. They just wander in and out of each other's rooms, asking vague questions and getting even vaguer answers. This is an effective trick early on, but when the reader is provided no background, setting, context and very little plot, it's hard for even the most sympathetic booklover to relate to what's happening to the end - a little juice would help readers care more. Are the repetitions and long silences that punctuate these non-exchanges between people Kafkaesque, as they would like to be, or just confusing? 'I feel I am getting lost in my own meanderings' says the narrator early on, and it seems that the author feels the same.

Though it's infuriating, there's a lot to recommend 'The Outgoing Man', and if it's an indication of the kind of thing Portobello are going to be publishing, then they are a welcome addition to the game. This is a refreshingly different, lively story that manages to make two hundred pages of not much happening for no particular reason skip by.

Published in The Herald

One Big Damn Puzzler
by John Harding
Reviewed by Rodge Glass

John Harding was first inspired to write this novel after reading about the island of Narau, whose previously isolated inhabitants became wealthy through lucrative mining contracts with the outside world - the money they received was promptly spent on snacks and bad investments, leaving the population poor, with sky-high rates of obesity and diabetes. His interest aroused, Harding then turned to Malinowski's 1920's classic study The Sexual Life of Savages in Western Melanesia, which examines a society who had not made the connection between sex and pregnancy, and drew comparisons between the two places. These strands were his starting point for One Big Damn Puzzler, which opens with Managua, initially the only literate person on an imaginary faraway Pacific island, trying to translate Hamlet into the language of his community, a kind of pidgin English: "To be or not to be, that is the question" becomes "Is be our or is be not, is be one big damn puzzler" in native language; "The sling and arrows of outrageous fortune" become the "clubs and bamboo pits of real damn bad luck." Managua dreams of putting on a production his fellow islanders will understand.

William Hardt is an American lawyer with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) addicted to alternately blinking his eyes and squeezing his palms. He hopes to compensate inhabitants for limbs lost because of landmines planted by the American army years before, and one woman in particular, who was gang-raped by three soldiers. William finds resistance to his idea from Managua, who fears introducing the islanders to Western ways will damage the society, and from Lucy, the only other white person on the island, who is writing a book about how unspoiled the place is. But once the process of change is started it gathers it can't be stopped. Within months of being introduced to the concept of money and material things, the community begins to crumble. "Why was it," says William, "that no matter how hard you tried, there were always some things you could just never get right?"

Western norms intrude on island life with both saddening and humorous impact. One of the best examples of this is when Managua's wife leaves him, saying she has found another man to read to her, with access to books other than Shakespeare's Complete Works. She disagrees with her husband about the Bard's quality:

"Shakespeare is be plenty boring," [says Lamua]. "All they words I is not understand. All they words you is not understand. All they dull stories."
"Boring? Shakespeare?" [replies Managua]. "You is no longer like Romeo and Juliet? Is be world's greatest love story. You is not remember Othello? How you is cry when I is read how he strangle Desdemona?"

"Yes, I is remember. But you is see, then I is not hear John Grisham."

Many popular books have introduced a style of language or places of their own - Rowling's Quidditch, Tolkein's Middle Earth - and this one shows how strange words and speech can draw the reader into a believable fictional world. The islanders call having sex making fug-a-fug, they get high nightly on kassa, go daily to the communal shitting beach and have a small community of she-boys among their number. Combine this with the possibilities for comedy when islanders start making up injuries on the spot in the hope of getting rich and you have a multi-layered comedy whose characters and language are still funny on repeated readings. Though a long book, William's OCD and the cultural differences between him and the islanders provide plenty of one-liners to carry the story forward, while Shakespearean techniques underpin the whole thing, giving it a satisfying depth - right down to the sub-plots, the cross-dressing, the disguises and the farcical on-stage/off-stage misunderstandings, the action in this most faraway of settings would be perfectly at home being performed at the Globe.

Harding does not simply argue against progress. The islanders often want what William brings - SUV's, Die Hard, Doritos - but the drawbacks of change are clear. Late on, some comparisons made with the supposed 'War on Terror' are laboured too forcefully, but this miscalculation is not representative of the whole book. Laugh-out-loud funny, ambitious, carefully constructed, addictive, this novel is one big damn fine achievement.

Published in The Herald

The History of Love
by Nicole Krauss
Reviewed by Rodge Glass

Nicole Krauss is young, beautiful, married to Jonathan Safran Foer (the hugely fashionable creator of Everything is Illuminated), and her first book, Man Walks Into A Room, has already been successful in America. We get her second attempt first. More cynical readers may expect an achingly hip, superficial effort, but this is a thoughtful, well-written, emotional novel about disappearing and how to avoid it.

Leo Gursky, the first narrator, is a retired locksmith with a bad heart - a lonely man trying "to make a point of being seen" as often as he can. Someone in a flat near his lay dead and undiscovered for weeks. He doesn't want the same to happen to him. So he does all he can to get noticed: spilling drinks in Starbucks, trying on shoes he can't afford, posing as a life model. Leo followed the girl he loved from a small Polish village to America sixty years before the action begins, only to find her a married mother who thought he was dead - he has never loved since and the reader sees the harsh consequences of that - his sections are always understated, showing an author's uncommon ability to expose emotions without actually saying what they are. The index card Leo keeps in his wallet reads: 'MY NAME IS LEO GURSKY I HAVE NO FAMILY PLEASE CALL PINELAWN CEMETERY I HAVE A PLOT THERE IN THE JEWISH PART THANK YOU FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION.'

Unfortunately, Leo's potency shows up the comparative weakness of the book's other narrators. The story skips between strands that intertwine at the end, which is a style that can be exposed when one strand is stronger than others, and in this case Gursky overshadows all others, particularly Alma, a fourteen-year-old trying to put her family together by tracing the author of a book called The History of Love. There is also Bird, her brother, who believes he is a lamed vovnik (chosen one) and "may well be the messiah", and their mother, a translator. It's not that this family is uninteresting, just that they are fighting a better, more loveable creation. The other small problem is that this is partly a novel about writers writing. Most characters here are writers, or readers preoccupied by them, and there are many extracts from fictional books, including sections about sitting in front of a blank page and reaching inward for inspiration - many of the things an author of fiction might struggle with. These aspects bring the reader too close to the creator and away from the story.

The History of Love is strongest when dealing with human interaction, and weakest when discussing itself. It is stylistically inventive, sad and occasionally very funny, usually when dealing with death and the threat of it. Nicole Krauss has an individual style, a natural ability to make an unlikely story about the importance of love seem likely, and a keen eye for the minutiae of life. She is a rare talent who deserves to be judged independently of her connections.

Published in The Herald

Lanark
by Alasdair Gray
Reviewed by Rodge Glass

Where do you begin with Lanark? It took over 25 years to complete, it runs to four books, a prologue, an epilogue and an index of plagiarisms; it proudly boasts stealing from everyone from Burns to the Bible, starts near the end, features a mournful Oracle who speaks out of quotation marks and contains repeated intrusions by the author. This is demanding reading. In tone, it openly attempts to glue 1984 and The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man together in a Glasgow setting; it's fantastical, realistic and pessimistic all at the same time, and it is undoubtedly Scottish literature's most ambitious, sprawling work. Is it even possible to describe? As Gray's alter ego grimly claims, "All reports simplify and twist." At the risk of simplifying and twisting, here goes.

Lanark is the story of Duncan Thaw, an artist born into mid-20th Century Glasgow, transported in adulthood to Unthank, a futuristic, hellish modern version of the city, where he calls himself Lanark (because he can't remember his real name) and tries to find out who he used to be. The unchronological story begins with the Unthank strand (Book Three), introducing a cast of characters which will be replicated in both worlds, rewinding to Thaw's youth in Riddrie and at Art School (Books One and Two) then skipping to the end (Book Four) with Lanark searching for love and sunlight. And if the darting around in time confused you then hold on, because there's more. The author has made Thaw/Lanark a very disagreeable character to spend four books with - he is a stubborn, selfish, guilt-ridden intellectual, self-pitying in the extreme, and is often too self-obsessed to even notice other people coming and going from his life. But don't let this put you off either - it's there for a reason. Thaw/Lanark's weaknesses are what make him so engaging. The unlikely hero is a portal to Gray's universe, where hope can only be found by suffering along with this most flawed of characters.

Thaw and Lanark struggle in their respective societies because they see faults in the system and will not conform to it, though self-doubt stops full-scale rebellion. So when his father excitedly describes a dull, workmanlike future as a professional to his son, Thaw breaks down in tears. When he finds his Art School is to be spoiled by rules, still-life drawings and dry, uninspiring tasks involving depicting washing lines, the young man becomes even more withdrawn. Sex is no different. "It's all examinations!" says Thaw, frustrated by discovering this is also something that can be 'failed'. "Must everything we do satisfy someone else before it's worthwhile?" Both protagonists grapple with the process of getting older, having the bad news of life explained to them and then struggling against it in a depressive, dramatic way - the only difference between them is, one does it in an ordinary city setting, and the other does it in a diseased, deserted place where mouths grow on hands and sunlight is a rare commodity not to be wasted.

This vast novel is a challenge to current ideas. In one of it's most famous passages, when thinking about whether to give up his artistic ambitions and accept an offer of a job as a village librarian, Thaw says: "People in Scotland have a queer idea of the arts. They think you can be an artist in your spare time…As for this library in a quiet country place, it sounds hellishly like Heaven, or a thousand pounds in the bank, or a cottage with roses round the door, or the other imaginary carrots that human donkeys are shown to entice them into all sorts of nasty muck." Lanark isn't just a book about an artist - it's about the possibilities for future society, told through Thaw's life and the stifled lives of everyone around him; the mother who gave up singing to be a housewife, the father injured in the war. Part of what makes it a remarkable novel is it's sheer scope, daring to tackle the grandest themes in personal ways: family, religion, love, class, belonging.

Precision of language also sets it apart: characters say exactly what they mean, no matter how hurtful that may be. Sentences are cut down to the barest elements; ordinary, short words convey maximum emotion. This creates a parallel universe to the one in which we live - where questions are answered directly, and speech is used for true, direct expression. Gray has suggested we may be lucky for language and literacy to survive another hundred years; his novels are a suggestion as to how it might be used more meaningfully. In Lanark he examines how nations might be better appreciated by their citizens through greater knowledge of other ones, past and present by putting his home, Glasgow, at the centre of the narrative, and portraying it as it is - beautiful and ugly, inspiring and depressing - a real city.

When voting for the best book this country has produced, consider what you'd like it to represent - if you like fluffy tales about magic, vote for Harry Potter. But if you think it should be uncompromising, ambitious, funny, tragic, Scottish from first page to last and show future generations what could be achieved in "the early days of a better nation" then this is the one for you. Lanark currently runs third in this competition. Alasdair Gray has responded (with tongue-in-cheek) to that recent poll by modestly suggesting that he'd only put his book "about eighth or ninth". He is wrong.

Published in Sunday Herald

The New Mancunian
by Rodge Glass

Cast your mind back, if you can, to a Manchester where the word 'Hacienda' didn't stand for luxury flats, Manchester's University's were still rivals, not partners, and a young lad called Phil Neville was on the bench in Europe for United. (Okay, some things don't change, but I stand by the others.) This was the Manchester I left in the first week of October 1997, for seven years my own personal wilderness - Glasgow. Apart from occasional visits to see family and friends, I haven't been back. On my return I find the place looks very different, but is it just a case of a few swanky bars popping up in place of the old battered ones, or have things really changed? And is it better or worse? I remember Mancunians being a down-to-earth sort of people, characterised by an absence of bullshit, an independent spirit, and a refreshing open-mindedness that too many places don't have. A real city should be easy to mark out from others, and so many have been sanitised - identikit high-streets replacing anything that was ever interesting. Looking around the city centre's flashy new buildings, I worry that the Manchester I remember might have been swallowed up by the trendiness of what has followed it. So, I set myself a task: a whole day and night, alone, as a tourist searching for the spirit of New Manchester, going only to places that didn't exist when I left.

I get off the train and run straight into the nightmare that is Deansgate Locks: this was exactly what I feared. Distant memories of the odd miserable night in one of its soulless little boxes, paying a fiver for a drink and watching people pretend to have a good time appear in my mind. Did Manchester still want to become London? Is the Met Bar really that great? This was a warning, I was sure, of what I was NOT looking for. But then, hope. A red sign flashing desperately from one of the windows: Drinks £1! Perhaps these places were struggling a bit. I headed off in the direction of the Northern Quarter with renewed hope.

Resisting the cosy familiarity of Night and Day, I step into Café Pop, which has been open for one year. Upstairs is a peculiar little clothes shop, and downstairs next to the café is the music section, full of vinyl oddities from the 60's onwards. I buy a coffee, sit down and look around. Alright, so I don't have a record player, I have no fashion sense, the free jazz in the background is getting on my nerves and I don't fancy any of the food, but somehow I'm pleased places like this still exist. Also, the paintings on the wall by a local artist are excellent. One, of a girl whose speech bubble reads I Don't Know If I'm Being Foolish reminds me not to get carried away and go see other things. So, after a short but intense conversation with a stranger about Twisted Nerve Records, I leave, finding myself delighted that the counter assistant has a large and ugly ring through her nose. Surely this kind of thing wouldn't be tolerated at Starbucks.

A few hours later I have drunk a lot of coffee, spent far too long in Vinyl Exchange and met a lot of New Mancunians. Everyone has something to say about how the place has changed. Opinions aren't always glowing - "Everyone's a tosser these days," says one Taxi Driver, as if this is wisdom he has worked for years to acquire - but on the whole, people are positive. I keep walking, this time through the arched entrance of The Printworks. Just being here as the night kicks into gear depresses me, but, I decide, there have always been idiots out on the piss, and I quietly write the area off and go straight to somewhere with a bit more soul. The world does need some places like this I suppose - drinking holes where the short-skirted, check-shirted beer brigade can be hemmed in every Friday and Saturday so everyone else know where NOT to go - but I'm thankful this seems to the exception rather than the rule.

To me, Tib Street is a perfect example of how the city has changed. As a kid it was the road my mother always warned me about, filled with porn shops and nasty ladies of the night ready to pounce on underage boys like me who'd somehow sneaked into Band in the Wall and were bound to get slung out any minute. Now it's all DJ shops (The Spin Inn), New York-style clothes shops (Mao) and people sitting out in the open drinking cappuccino and talking about the American election (Simple). The filth barely takes up a quarter of the street any more! Passing another table of stylish young things sipping red wine and Hoegaarden, I wonder how similar to Paris the city would be if it wasn't always raining. Centro is a good example of how European we've become - now they hide their real ales round the side of the bar, if they sell any at all; the New Mancunian doesn't drink that kind of thing. Day becomes night, and I switch drugs: from coffee to alcohol.

Tonight Matt and Phred's is hosting another night of Manchester's Poetry Festival, which boasts an impressive line-up and is packed as if for a sweaty rock gig. Manc performance poet Segun, (like Malcolm X, he says, no surname) gives us 'Christmas Kisses', a brutal, funny take on Piccadilly Gardens at three in the morning; and glorious transvestite Chloe Poems, who shocks and impresses in equal measure, particularly with the anti-drag queen rant 'Canal Street's Biggest Celebrity' is astonishingly good. THIS was what I was looking for. Something Manchester. Something peculiar, but alive. Matt, who runs the club tells me: "The independents are fighting back. Things are much better than they've ever been." And so it seems. I finally give in to nostalgia and go to Night and Day to finish the night off.

Actually, this was a bad idea. Too much good luck can make you forget to be selective, and tonight's bands are depressingly average. But even here I feel positive. Short, well-made films are being shown in between the music, portraits of northern heroes stare down at the clientele, and on the bar I find a few copies of a novel called If God Were a Manc. 11 o'clock on a Thursday night is far too noisy for the film to really work, and I am sorry to say the novel is pretty bad, but if I was looking for a bit of life, flawed or otherwise, yet again I found it.

I go home, grinning widely. Manchester is changing, but don't listen to the taxi drivers. It's still full of colour and individuality, and plenty of good people. Mark, who's just bought a flat in the city centre, sums it up for me. He calls New Manchester a place of "comfortable contrast" that is "in the process of clearly establishing itself as Britain's second city", increasingly stylish but still with a scruffy heart. "The place has yet to become a giant airport terminal," he says, "and I doubt that it ever will be. There's too much local history for that."

Published in City Life

Life with an Idiot
by Victor Erofeyev
Reviewed by Rodge Glass

On the first page of this collection, written in the last stumbling years of the USSR, translator Andrew Reynolds invokes the popular Soviet self-definition that Russians were "born to turn Kafka into real life," claiming that Erofeyev's writing is a good example of how true that can be. Once this image is planted, it's hard to get rid of while reading the short stories that follow. Tragedy and farce come in equal measure.

Born the son of a senior Russian diplomat, life could have been very pleasant for Victor Erofeyev. But instead he aligned himself with other side, referring constantly in his work to Russia's rich history of writerly resistance and in 1979 organising Metropol, a literary magazine that lead to him being banned from publication there. Until recently, he lived in exile in Paris. Much of this story might seem familiar to anyone with a basic knowledge of Russian literary history; it's a well-worn path. Writer says something against the state in carefully symbolic story, writer gets exiled, writer becomes people's hero. Easy. But this collection, which brings together work from 1978 right up to 1990, shows Erofeyev is no cliché, and contains evidence to suggest he might have struggled to be heard in other countries too. Large parts of America, for example, that famous land of free speech and expression, wouldn't accept some of this material, even now. Especially now. Life with an Idiot is not for the delicate of stomach. It is difficult, urgent stuff.

Erofeyev expressed his frustration with Communist Russia not by writing subtle tales of intellectuals sitting in cafés and talking about Dostoyevsky, but with brutal stories like "Shit-sucker", "How We Murdered the Frenchman" and "Pocket Apocalypse", all included here - furious, foul-mouthed tirades that involve the very extremes of human behaviour - rape, murder, mental abuse, defecation. Indeed, Erofeyev seems to have something of an obsession with shit. And with shock, too. Just when you think you can't possibly get more appalled, you are. For this reviewer it was at the point where, in 'Mother', the protagonist rapes her son, questions him on the experience and then turns him into sausage meat.

But, underneath all this vulgarity, that traditional allegorical quality so often found in Russian literature, and so necessary in a country where a wrong word could have you suddenly having a KGB-organised 'accident', is very much present. 'Life with an Idiot' itself, about a man ruined because he has been convicted of an unnamed crime, and 'The Parakeet' are both good examples of where this works particularly well. Both are rightly famous. It's frustrating, however, that sometimes the language in these stories doesn't feel quite right. Russian is complex, and Erofeyev's writing is littered with allusions, in-jokes and obscure Soviet literary references the English language reader can't hope to understand. Reynolds does well, and tries not to intrude too much on the text, but even he concedes that something is lost.

Erofeyev still fights for freedom. In 2002 he wrote an open letter to President Putin, complaining on behalf of a fellow writer whose novel had been banned for depicting sex between Stalin and Kruschev. So his struggles did not end in 1990. The world needs courageous artists, and this man is one of them. He is not always brilliant - when these stories don't work, as in 'Cotton Wool', they become a mish-mash of faeces, swearing and aimless despair - but most of the time his message of freedom of speech no matter what comes through clearly and starkly. "My hands are itching to write," he says, in 'Letter to Mother'. And they are.

Published in The Herald

The Unnumbered
by Sam North
Reviewed by Rodge Glass

Back in the days when the words 'educational' and 'grant' could be heard in the same sentence without prompting sniggers, Sam North was sleeping off his student hangovers in a lorry parked on a street in Muswell Hill, bathing occasionally at friends houses and nurturing an understanding with the local traffic warden. By his own admission he was just a scrooge who preferred braving the cold to paying rent, but that only makes the imaginative feat he has achieved with the characters in this novel, many of whom have few choices, all the more impressive.

The Unnumbered concerns itself with the lives of a richly realised and diverse set of creations, most of whom wouldn't exactly qualify for one of David Blunkett's proposed ID cards; illegal immigrants, the homeless, London's rejected. How refreshing it is to find then, in this society often so keen to jerk its knee, a refugee heroine entirely opposite to the cartoonish hate figure we hear so much about. Fifteen-year-old Mila, the book's centre of gravity, dreams of dragging herself and her family out of their caravan and up in society honourably - she is a proud, honest, mature young woman any reader will be able to admire. Mila shames many of the surrounding adults with her furious energy, maturity and sense of purpose, and will shame many readers as well: she's the kind of intoxicating creation that makes you want to get up and run a marathon, at least around your front room. But don't mistake this for a heavy-handed social crusade. At its core The Unnumbered is a love story, and what's crucial in any great love story is that the reader should want to will the lovers together right up to the last sentence - after all, if you don't want to find out if Romeo and Juliet get it on, why bother to stay to watch them die? (I do hope I haven't spoilt the ending for anyone…)

It is by succeeding in making you care that North makes The Unnumbered so easy, but so hard, to read - indeed, so excitingly tense that it's sometimes difficult to continue at all. He has created a love utterly fixed in the real modern world, one that wants to be believed in, and can be. Mila and her boyfriend Nio are complex, as people are, confused, as people are, and often foolish, but they are a rare example of an author pulling off that most impossible of tricks - creating fictional characters that are unmistakeable and new but somehow comfortingly familiar as well.

What's also impressive is how easily the author seems to become each of his cast - from inside the mind of middle-aged Ahmed, a frustrated businessman who secretly desires Mila, to Elinor Ginsberg, a lonely water-birthing midwife - North slips quietly between his big-city outcasts almost as if each is a natural, alternative incarnation of the last. The succession of first person narratives, written sympathetically even when dealing with the most despicable of characters, forces readers to find their own moral line in amongst the thieves, drug-takers, rapists and liars. This adds an extra dimension to the experience, something particularly relevant with Lucas Tooth, a sexual predator whose encounters with Mila and others drive the novel on to its brutal conclusion. Amongst the sweetness and warmth generated by Mila and Nio, Tooth provides an essential counterpoint to the sleepy mornings, blissful kisses and hopeful idealism they surround themselves with. A shockingly amoral villain, his continued reappearance at the most unexpected moments ensures the book never tips over into the sentimental, and stays in a credible, if harsh world.

Sam North makes simple, ordinary things, like hunger, tiredness, and getting your girl that Shogun she joked about seem real but also magical. It may be one leap too far to suggest that any woman, no matter how desperate to lose her virginity, might fantasise about sex lasting under a minute, but this is one of few moments when the voice of the middle-aged creator intrudes on that of the fifteen-year-old. And anyway, these are minor quibbles. Largely, North deals with the physical and the emotional turmoil suffered by each of his Unnumbered in a truly convincing way, at times evoking the spirit of some of Salman Rushdie's best work, or the voice of Janice Galloway's complicated heroine in The Trick is to Keep Breathing. This is special writing.

In receiving the Somerset Maugham prize for his debut The Automatic Man, Sam North joined some intimidating names - past winners include William Boyd, poet laureate Andrew Motion, and more recently Alan Warner and A.L. Kennedy. Much is expected of those who achieve the accolade. After writing The Unnumbered he can stand confidently in any company, perhaps even letting slip a self-satisfied smirk.

Published in The Herald

An Arsonist's Guide to Writer's Homes in New England
by Brock Clark
Reviewed by Rodge Glass

This book isn’t actually an arsonist’s guide – it’s a plan for one. Or it’s a memoir. Or it’s a novel. Or maybe it’s a plan for a novel, about a memoir, which may one day be turned into an arsonist’s guide. None of this is clear at the beginning of Brock Clark’s fourth book which is narrated by Sam Pulsifier, a self-confessed ‘bumbler’ who is known in New England for being the man who burned down the Emily Dickenson house – accidentally. (Or so he keeps telling everyone.). He spent ten years in jail for that crime, which cost the lives of two people trapped inside on the fateful night. After Sam came out of jail he got married, had children, pretended nothing bad had ever happened to him, and also pretended he had never done anything bad to anyone else. That meant lots of lying. Ten years later those lies begin to make life complicated, and that’s where this story really begins. Sam is something of a dreamer, and is constantly asking himself questions, like: “What lie could I tell that would sound less like a lie than the truth?” The answer he finally comes up with only makes things worse.

Most of the plot is given away in the first few pages: years after the Emily Dickenson episode, one by one more writers’ homes are set ablaze, and everyone thinks Sam is back in the habit. But this time he’s not guilty – or at least he thinks he’s not. In order to protect himself from prosecution he sets out to find out who the new fire starter is, and why they are trying to frame him. This makes The Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England a whodunit of sorts, but in the hands of a good literary writer like Brock Clark this search is not the main focus. The book is far more concerned with what Sam discovers about himself and his family during the process. In some ways the narrator is a simple human being – sometimes he appears to be purposefully making himself out to be an idiot – but in the quiet moments between the action his meandering style includes as much thoughtful philosophising as dumb wrong turns. He says at one key point in the story: “As everyone knows, once you start looking into one thing, you can’t help but start looking into others.” He does start, and does keep looking, and later wishes he hadn’t bothered.

Though strong, this book is not entirely consistent. Sometimes the quality of the narration dips, and it feels like the author is just not concentrating, particularly when dealing with fringe characters who all seem to be entirely crazy. Readers may react by trying to reach for some kind of sense in all this madness, when in fact there is none; it’s just that some characters are not fully realised. Also, there are cosy references dotted throughout to Brock Clark himself – at one point Sam picks up Clark’s last novel The Ordinary White Boy in his local library and isn’t interested by it – there’s even a scene where Sam turns up to a talk by a smug Writer-in-Residence at one of the writers’ homes. (Clark teaches Creative Writing at the University of Cincinatti and is currently on tour, doing exactly these kinds of events.) All this may be too much for readers not interested in writers writing about writers writing about writers writing.

But despite lazy self-references and occasional weakness in tone that sometimes breaks the illusion, this is obviously well-written fiction, and it’s easy to see why Brock Clark has a fast-growing reputation in America. In this book, whatever it is, he explores the nature of making mistakes and telling lies, our relationship to storytelling, and also addresses such pressing issues as: Is Mark Twain a genius? Is he overrated? Or is he, in fact, merely ‘a female pudendum’? Clark also shows a sharp wit, and is clearly satirising the cult of the writer here as much as he is writing a novel. Or a memoir. Or an arsonist’s guide.

At the end of the book Sam Pulsifier has to come to terms with the stories he has told himself for years: “The world is full of bumblers,” he admits, “and to think that you’re special is just another thing you’ve bumbled.” So he tries to find a way to accept who he really is, and learn how to take responsibility for it. Which makes for a compelling ending to a fine book.

Since publishing his critically acclaimed non-fiction debut The Missing in 1995, Andrew O’Hagan has carved himself a distinctive place in modern writing. Two novels, Our Fathers (1999) and Personality (2003) established him as a thoughtful, mature voice, demonstrating a fierce command of words and a love of language; that reputation will be enhanced by Be Near Me, a beautifully constructed novel following the life of Father David, an English priest stationed in a small parish in the West of Scotland who gets caught up in the lives of two teenagers. It’s well delivered, the action takes unexpected twists and O’Hagan never falls into the trap of preaching, despite including several scenes with extensive dialogue about the war in Iraq. Perhaps this is because his narrator isn’t a character readers will naturally warm to, or perhaps because his flaws are tenderly described – but whatever the reason, O’Hagan never lets us relax into a set view of his narrator, even when the plot takes a dark turn.

Some of the issues tackled in Be Near Me may appear distant. O’Hagan opens by quoting Tennyson, explores the inner workings of an Oxford University clique who love Proust, and describes 1960’s English boarding schools sympathetically. But he always asks readers to question their assumptions, dealing deftly with issues of class, sex, and the tensions between the UK nations, moving the story on all the while. This may sound serious – there aren’t many jokes in Be Near Me – but it’s one of the novels of the year.

The Enchantress of Florence
By Salman Rushdie
Reviewed by Rodge Glass

The Enchantress of Florence is Salman Rushdie’s first foray into historical fiction, but despite featuring several famous historical characters (including Machiavelli, Queen Elisabeth I and Vlad the Impaler), it is immediately recognisable as another fictional tale from the creator of Midnight’s Children and The Satanic Verses, being a fable set in partly in the real world and partly in the author’s magical one. Rushdie slips effortlessly in and out of the imaginations of his characters, in and out of reality, and continually questions the nature of that reality, even inventing several characters that only exist in the minds of others. From beginning to end the book is an argument against worshipping false gods, against superstition and religion – here they are one and the same thing – and that too is the mark of a Rushdie novel.

This is an ambitious story of many strands, partly set in the court of a Mughal King called Emperor Akbar and partly in Rennaissance Florence. It begins with a fair-haired traveller calling himself Mogor dell’ Amore – or, The Mughal of Love – enduring a treacherous journey on his way to meet the Emperor. He has a story to tell “which could make his fortune or cost his life,” but the truthfulness of his story is in question. This is a good indicator of what is to come. The Enchantress of Florence is about the power of storytelling, but is also about the elusiveness of truth, as the many stories told are often in conflict with each other, and when he hears it Emperor Akbar agonises over whether to believe Mogor’s fantastic tale or not. Meanwhile, the visitor becomes famous in the court and beyond, as does his story.

The Enchantress of Florence immerses itself in the wild, highly hedonistic worlds the characters live in, and contains a remarkable amount of sex. Orgies and nudity abound, with multiple references to ‘harlots’, ‘strumpets’, ‘tarts’ and ‘whores’ as well as one bizarre strand of sub-plot involving two prostitutes named the Skeleton (very skinny) and the Mattress (very fat). For reasons that are not entirely clear, a great deal of attention is paid to the 2-for-1 deal these two specialise in, and also in their own ability to enchant their clients with potions, treatments and odours – especially Mogor dell’ Amore, who takes a particular liking to the Skeleton. Like these prostitutes, many of the other women in the story are portrayed in a two dimensional way and defined only by subservient relationships to their men, but that is supposed to be balanced out by the character of the Enchantress of Florence herself, who mesmerizes all those she meets, and is described as “a woman attempting to command her own destiny in a man’s world”.

The further this novel progresses the more it loses its way, for a number of reasons. There is lots of flashing forward and back in time, which can be disorientating, especially when the characters are moving between the two worlds of Florence and the Mughal Kingdom. Also, there is a large cast of characters who have multiple names, which becomes increasingly confusing as the novel goes on. And the plot seems to tail off too. The whole final section is disappointing, mainly because the enchantress the book is named after comes into the foreground in later chapters, and she is the least intriguing character – not a strong, independent woman at all, as advertised. This may partly be a comment on the shallowness of those she attracts, but it is hard to understand why so many men fall in love with her, and harder still to be fascinated by a woman who seems no more remarkable than the many other beauties described elsewhere, or indeed the many wives, sisters and mothers who pop up from time to time. The Enchantress just seems to be given much more attention than anyone else, and that is not because her personality is enchanting – it is simply because she is born uncommonly attractive, and appears to have strange powers over others because of this.

Fiction should show a reader a place they cannot easily go in the real world, and despite weaknesses here it should be said that even at its most compromised The Enchantress of Florence does this incredibly well – Rushdie certainly brings the “drink-sodden daily life and sex-crazed nocturnal culture” of Renaissance Florence brilliantly to life in a way few others could. He also has a rare mastery of language, and when you read his work you cannot help but feel you are in the company of a mighty intelligence. However, that intelligence is not put to the best use in this book which is at times too wordy, sometimes even slipping into sentimentality, especially when dealing with women and why men fall for them. Salman Rushdie is undoubtedly one of our greatest storytellers, but this is not one of his best stories.