nixsight

More and more, the SD header becomes a misnomer… these clearly aren’t books I’ve read in the last seven days – seven weeks wouldn’t even cover it – but they are books worth praising.

Generation Kill by Evan Wright

The last non-fiction book I had read before this was David Simon’s “Homicide – A Year On The Killing Streets”, and prior to that, you have to go a few years before you get Michael J Fox’s biography “Lucky Man” – yes, yes, I have incredible taste.

The truth is, I wouldn’t have even heard of Evan Wright or “Generation Kill” if it hadn’t been for Simon’s own TV adaptation of this exceptional book.

Wright’s beautifully nuanced piece of war reporting describes the invasion of Iraq through the eyes of First Recon, who were among the first US soldiers to make their way across the confused social and physical geography of the country to take Baghdad in the early weeks of the war. Wright was an embedded reporter for Rolling Stone with the First Recon, and through a rigid journalistic approach to his experiences, he paints a picture of highly competent young men placed in the most extreme of circumstances, at the mercy of the sort of bureaucracy and leadership uncertainty that most of us face in our own much less life-or-death careers.

The writer is honest from the off about his left-of-center ideals, and if anything this makes the book more effective, as he examines his feelings about the war through a growing sense of admiration for the men around him. By default, he has to write more of himself into the events than Simon did in “Homicide” – the earlier work was the result of a year of being in the car with actual Baltimore homicide detectives, but the role of detective is a naturally reactive one – without a crime there is nothing to detect. A cop has to know how to fire his gun, but firing his gun at people isn’t the key objective of his job. A Marine’s whole existence is about making things happen and moving on, not trying to work out what it means afterwards.

It stands to reason that an embedded reporter in one might draw more fire than one in the other, and when you’re in a vehicle with four other men, and that vehicle’s stated mission is to draw enemy fire to give away enemy positions, it makes sense that your own response to this completely surreal new experience you’re having would make it into the account you give of it.

One gets the impression that Wright had half expected to write a “War Is Hell” piece, and there’s something of that here, for sure – but there’s also a sympathetic ear and an honest voice that makes the account often hilarious, always profane, and ultimately incredibly human, from the smallest individual foible of the soldiers to the largest and most insane excesses of the military.

The book comes highly recommended, and can be picked up at Amazon here.

Other People: A Mystery Story by Martin Amis

“Other People” is a story about a beautiful amnesiac girl – Mary – and her relationship with the city that she comes aware in – London – the people that she meets, and her own fractured sense of identity. It also seems to be about everything and everyone else… how we interact with each other, how we measure the differences between good and bad and worthless and worthwhile, and how we become either good or bad people, either by decision or default.

The “mystery” of the subtitle is, perhaps obviously, Mary’s past and real identity. She is observed and accompanied in her loosely defined quest by a cast of characters that vary wildly, from the dangerously unreasoning to the alcoholically soft, the cold and knowing to the awkwardly besotted, and these characters, while often caricatures, are crafted in sure and easy prose.

The fact is, Amis is so good that I almost don’t feel qualified to have an opinion on his writing. He effortlessly makes statements, or strings together prose, that stick with you for hours after you’ve stopped reading, and shifts tone and pace from the earthy and uneventful to the frenetic and abstract so smoothly that the reader doesn’t even notice. Many of his better passages make me feel like never writing prose again!

It doesn’t feel like this is going to be the case at first. “Night Train”, the only other Amis book I’ve read thus far, begins at cleanly delivered noir prose and maintains its clarity throughout, but “Other People” begins in delirium – at first, Mary doesn’t know who or what Mary is, and Amis persistently forces us to see through her eyes, so instead of definitive environments and surroundings the first two chapters are a cavalcade of abstractions and allegory, and the reader has to close the gap between amnesiac description and reality themselves.

It is as Mary learns new things – words and actions and the way things work – that the narrative voice clarifies; as a reading exercise it is fascinating, and it’s easy to imagine that Amis wrote it in a similar spirit, as a test to himself.

However, there is a rich vein of humour running through the writing that, while often veering into darker places, is fairly simplistic and easy on the reader, and helps you through the author’s greater excesses. By the end of the first act, the pages zip by.

The only thing I’m undecided on is the ending, which devolves into high metaphysical noodling – the writer’s equivalent of a beautifully played but overcooked guitar solo that takes place at the end of a song instead of around the middle where self-indulgence is more appreciated. Despite the experimentation of the book’s opening, the more artistic literary leaning of the book never quite hobbles it – it’s not just a worthwhile read, it’s also a fun one, that reflects Graeme Greene’s keen observational eye and wit more than JG Ballard’s heady and heavy idea-grinding. But somewhere around ten or so pages from the end, it becomes apparent that the sort of closure the reader wants isn’t what’s on the author’s mind, and it leaves one feeling decidedly nonplussed.

Still, it is a hell of a read, and comes highly recommended, if you are the sort of reader whose day isn’t going to be ruined by an ambiguous ending!

Amis tends to turn up in charity shops a bit – that’s where I found both this and “Night Train”, but you can also pick it up at Amazon.

Bad Things by Michael Marshall

Michael Marshall, or Michael Marshall Smith, is another writer on the short, short list who makes me very uncomfortable about my own writing, though he is an utterly different kettle of fish from Martin Amis.

Having said that, until now I have found his output under the name Michael Marshall – which he uses for his more mainstream, thriller novels – has always left me faltering just a little bit in the first few chapters. Don’t get me wrong: as a thriller writer, he has a deft touch and a willingness to do awful things to his characters that means you are never on a steady footing.

But whether it’s because of my love for his work as MMS, or something to do with his narrative style – solid and hard prose that retains his tendency for more whimsical spot-on characterisation and observations, that I much prefer in speculative rather than real-world fiction – I’ve always found my enjoyment of the beginnings of his thrillers have left me feeling nostalgic for his more off-beat, earlier novels.

The simple fact of it is no-one is better at generating brilliant, thought-provoking ideas, and folding an exciting narrative around it. And when I read the spark of whimsy in his prose, it makes me want more.

But anyway, the reason I bring it up is that this is the first of his “Just Marshall” novels where I was fully hooked, with no reservations, from the first few paragraphs.

The novel opens with an account of terrible loss, and persists in a fairly bleak manner for several chapters as it introduces its cast of characters. However, the sadness of tone is alleviated by the crispness of the writing, and I suppose it’s possible that Marshall’s self-control in keeping the narrative diversions minimal and to the service of the book are what made all the difference in my relationship with this book above all of his ultimately great “Straw Men” sequence.

(You know, he’s done a few of these now… it might just be that I’m getting used to the idea that this is what he writes now. An unkind critic might suggest that I could have done this a while back, at the point when he had put out more MM books than MMS, and saved myself the upset. But that critic would be unkind. And should fuck right off.)

It’s hard to say too much about the novel without ruining the process of discovery that the reader goes through, but Marshall has created a backwoods town setting worthy of a Stephen King Maine story, and in John Henderson, his narrator, he has written a sympathetic addition to what is admittedly becoming a bit of a trademark roster of first-person nails-hard but a bit nihilistic every-man characters.

Ignoring that particular trend is one of those concessions you make as a grateful reader, getting to sit down with another well-paced and insight-rich piece of thriller writing by an author that you love. The downside is that if Amis makes me feel a little dumb writing literary prose, Michael Marshall Marshall Smith makes me feel clumsy when it comes to both speculative fiction and the very rare bits of thriller I want to write.

“Bad Things” is at this writing priced at under £4 at Amazon, and is worth every penny.