At 10:35 on an early summer's morning, John Lanchester sat down at his study desk, switched on his new Dell computer, opened up the word processing programme that the computer had come with and began

nah, nothing like, but there's a literary journalist sort who's never quite let go of Bonfire of the Vanities.

maybe we build and knock down stereotypes so quickly now that by the time novelists come to explore them they're stale? I'm not sure. I do remember liking Mr Phillips very much but I think that was due to the affectionate portrait rather than the cultural references.

I enjoyed this book from a few years ago, more in the Peace vein than anything else. It's not 100% successful (he can't really write female characters) but it works pretty well, maybe because its focus is less State of the Nation and more State of Post-Industrial Midlands.

i suddenly remembered Matt Thorne's Eight Minutes Idle which I enjoyed when it was published and is at least partly addressed to a section of "modern life". turns out it's been turned into a movie, i'm not sure how that'll work.

xps the difficulty in getting near 9/11 etc as a thing-for-fiction - there have been attempts, but mostly clunky - suggests that maybe instead we're looking for novelists to move too quickly, if anything

I'd agree with that, there's too much noise around massive events like that as it is, and we don't yet understand where they fit in a historical context - probably more the case with the economic crisis than 9/11 at this juncture, although we're still a bit too close to 9/11 as well. Someone like Roth is usually writing at a distance of at least a couple of decades when he's putting on his Serious Historical Face.

Also the problem I find with modern British state-of-nation fiction is that it usually feels like the author is thinly laying the viewpoints of three or four newspapers up against one another.

agree, and if good novels use fiction to reveal truth, then with 9/11 that's a difficult space to move in while all the conspiracy theories are still circulating. Out of interest, is there a decent novel around the Kennedy assassination, even now?

Libra by Don DeLillo is incredible, I haven't read any others. I doubt I'll need to.

American Tabloid by James Ellroy is a p gd kennedy assassination nov told mainly from the crim's POV

haven't read either but will on those recommendations. they were 25 and 32 years after the event respectively, perhaps the good 9/11 novels will be published after 2026?

according to geoffrey hill culture will unquestionably be vanquished by 2032, so they're going to have to be p quick off the mark

I was going to mention Libra actually, it's excellent, whereas his DeLillo's 9/11 novel Falling Man is ropey as hell. Also Libra's *all about* history from viewed distance vs history as it happens, it encourages you to build up your conspiracy theories and then knocks them down.

never mind all that - I think there's a chance that Lanchester might actually write the thread title at some point:

Mill took his desktop PC out of sleep and navigated to the web page.

Mill is a policeman. Another new character. The first line of his chapter is "Shit flows downhill". A cynical, common-sense policeman? No, wait.

Mill was not, demographically or psychologically, a typical policeman. He was a Classics graduate from Oxford

ffffff... Any advantage you might think this might afford Lanchester, not so far showing conspicuous flair for the indirect free speech of his culturally diverse range of characters, he neatly sidesteps by having him think? in the same neutered, maimed prose, expressive of the same slightly sub-normal fascination with the arbitrary mundane, as everyone else.

The chapter ends with this enigma:

As for the main issue, which was what this whole thing was, Mill's conclusion for the moment was that he didn't have a clue.

Navigated!

There's a very bad bit about the office Mill works in as well but I'm ion a bus at the moment.

That bit about the PC and the webpage reads like a technophobe author doing research via a "for Dummies" book.

<i>Mill took his desktop PC out of sleep and navigated to the web page.</i>

There is some perverse anti-poetry about this now. It's like Lanchester is a white-knuckle, recovering Nabokovian, determinedly sweating out the most awkwardly banal sentences, afraid that at any moment he might freak out into some psychedelic alchemy of the word.

Think you deserve public commendation for your sterling work liveblogging this, Fizzles.

Maybe the introduction of Mills will turn this into a Morse whodunnit? for the remainder.

There is some perverse anti-poetry about this now. It's like Lanchester is a white-knuckle, recovering Nabokovian, determinedly sweating out the most awkwardly banal sentences, afraid that at any moment he might freak out into some psychedelic alchemy of the word.

I genuinely think there's something in that, Stevie. I mean, I think he thinks he's doing something. Take this sentence:

She put the pot of tea, which had now steeped for four minutes, onto the tray, then picked up the tray, then put it down again.

I think he may think that he's detailing the essential details of our daily lives and thought processes. The things that no one else catalogues. I think that is potentially a good idea, really pushed to some sort of avant-garde obsessive level. Unfortunately the tedium of content is matched by the tedium of style, of insight, and character. More importantly, as I say, it's arbitrary, often bizarre, and as a consequence more revelatory of what is in his head when he looks at the world, which unfortunately, to come back to the beginning, is a load of very very boring stuff.

Take this description of the office:

Two dozen Met officers were in constant motion, most of them also talking, joshing, making off-colour jokes, often while simultaneously keying data into computers, or flicking through files, or dialling phone numbers, or eating muffins, or lobbing crumpled paper into the bin, or carrying piles of forms from one end of the office to the other.

He forgot about people chewing the ends of their pens, leaning back on their chairs, holding doors open for people, pinning charts on a cork board...

Then you get into the detail (because you've had to ignore the detail to get through the sentence). I break down the absurd bits in this sentence something like this:

1. "Two dozen Met officers were in constant motion" (something about this makes me want to snigger - suggestive of people sitting at desks flailing their arms about, or running from one end of the office to the other)

2. "Most of them also talking" But not all of them. Some of them, a smaller number, are not talking.

3. "making off-colour jokes" Off-colour jokes! Maybe he is Petunia Howe in disguise.

4. "often while simultaneously keying data into computers". This actually deserves to be broken down into three, as it does the individuals-as-collective absurdity of (1), the strangely diverting non-specific non-detail of (2) ('often while'), and his more general habit of sounding like he's just arrived from an alien planet ('keying data into computers').

3. "eating muffins". 24 policemen in constant motion eating muffins. It's like a mnemonic.

4. "lobbing crumpled paper into a bin" oh come off it, this off the tv or an ad. I mean yes, it happens, but it's the suggestion that somehow it's a telling quotidian detail that drives me nuts (like with the fucking teapot earlier)

5. "or carrying piles of forms from one end of the office to another" Reminds me of the bit in Watt is it? with the milkman on the station platform moving the milk churns from one end of the platform to the other and back?

The proprietor of 51 Pepys Road, the house across the road from Petunia Howe's, was at work in the City of London. Roger Yount sat at his office desk at his bank, Pinker Lloyd, doing sums.

I still love this. Apparently he knows bankers in real life? You wouldn't have thought so. "Hmmm, what would a banker be doing while sitting at their desk? Sums, yes, of course". Presumably followed by writing down what he did at at the weekend and then a butterfly painting.

I think he may think that he's detailing the essential details of our daily lives and thought processes. The things that no one else catalogues. I think that is potentially a good idea, really pushed to some sort of avant-garde obsessive level.

That would be Nicholson Baker territory, but (iirc, it's been a while) Baker manages to find the exceptional within the everyday, he has a kind of autist's eye for the interesting detail that is normally overlooked. Lanchester seems (from these extracts) to focus on the things that are overlooked precisely because they are devoid of such detail and intrinsically banal.

Yes Baker is a whole different moulinex of mackerel.

The use of "sums" suggests there is some kind of irony going on in Lanchester's narrative voice - iirc Peppa Pig goes to visit her Daddy Pig's office in one episode and finds out that he too does "sums" all day (actually I think he tells here he works out "load-bearing tangents") - but... it seems like a very feeble gesture? It's like the opposite of the mock-heroic of Fielding. Mock-banal.

That 'sums' one was slightly unfair of me, because they turn out to be him working out his bonus, so there's a sort of (v lame) joke there.

When is Capital set, Fizzles? I mean apart from while Flouressa Glunt is polishing her sideboard at 11.15 on a Wednesday morning in mid-May etc. Is it 'The Eve Of The Crash' 07/08 or anything?

Yes, exactly then.

Alternative/additional genealogy: Feel like Bonfire of the Vanities is nearest american equiv of this form, and might be directly to blame for a good few of the British versions of the last 25 years.

Along with a feeling of badly impersonated M Amis (which naturally brings to mind Money although I guess it's more London Fields he'd be thinking about) Bonfire of the Vanities is the clearest model, certainly for the banker parts.

Just wrt the state of the nation novel generally, I think I'd agree with the suspicion that it's just a bad idea as a subject and driving force. The sensibilities of an age are embedded in the culture that age produces and to approach them journalistically, as Lanchester does, in a work of the imagination, a creative work, is to betray the very point of an imaginative work. The point here being that if you DO approach your State of the Nation novel journalistically, then it's not really going to succeed as a novel (imagination not allowed to work on the subject) and if you don't, then in some ways it's not going to look like a State of the Nation novel!

I was reading a John Dickson Carr novel over the weekend - as I often do! it's become a bad habit and is pure comfort reading - and there were some sections in the opening chapter that reminded me of how much a period can be observed in works that don't have the requirement of social evaluation as their reason for existence:

On his left, as he stood at the corner of Romilly Street, was the east wall of St. Anne's Church. The grey wall, with its big round-arched window, stood up almost intact. But there was no glass in the window, and nothing beyond except a grey-white tower seen through it. Where high explosive had ripped along Dean Street, making chaos of matchboard houses and spilling strings of garlic into the road along with broken glass and mortar-dust, they had now built a neat static-water tank - with barbed wire so that the children shouldn't fall in and get drowned. But the scars remained, under whispering rain. On the east wall of St. Anne's, just under that gaping window, was an old plaque commemorating the sacrifice of those who died in the last war.

Unreal!

No, Miles Hammond said to himself, it was no good calling this feeling morbid or fanciful or a product of war-nerves. His whole life now, good fortune as well as bad, was unreal.

This is already much better than anything Lanchester has written! For a start Lanchester very rarely describes any physical spaces with any interest or accuracy. Secondly, Lanchester isn't at all interested in creating atmosphere, doesn't even consider it. Atmosphere is a big thing in non-realist novels, more important than author's 'voice' or tone usually, I think it's probably a good thing in realist, or lit novels as well, but it doesn't seem to me to be worked on very often.

Then, gasping out to the end like a gauleiter swallowing poison, the war is over. You come out of hospital - a little shakily, your discharge papers in your pocket - into a London still pinched by shortages; a London of long queues, erratic buses, dry pubs; a London where they turn on the street-lights, and immediately turn them off again to save fuel; but a place free at last from the interminable weight of threats.

People didn't celebrate that victory hysterically, as for some reason or other the newspapers liked to make out. What the news-reels showed was only a bubble on the huge surface of the town. Like himself, Miles Hammond thought, most people were a little apathetic because they could not yet think of it as real.

But something awoke, deep down inside human beings' hearts, when the cricket results crept back into the papers and the bunks began to disappear from the Underground. Even peace-time institutions like the Murder Club...

I realise the end of World War II was more epochal, the transitions more obvious, there's a feeling of well-picked detail - those cricket results! Also, tellingly, even in this brief opening to a brief crime and detection novel, the newspaper version of events, the public version, is contradicted. You immediately get a sense of character and of the outside world, something JL hasn't managed in however many bloody pages I'm in. Just in the brief excerpt there's a sense of an independent person (not a cipher) and objects and events that differ from the public record, not it fulfil it: it's not just colouring in the newspaper version of events.

Of course, this book is in no way a SoN novel - it doesn't have the capaciousness NV was talking about, or the social spread (although crime novels do tend to include a wider variety of social backgrounds than a lot of lit fic) - but it seemed to me a decent example of how the sensibilities of the age being congenitally embedded in the culture may be expressed, and more importantly for 'literature', analysed in a work that isn't setting out to do so.

I wouldn't want to say the SoN novel as a genre piece is impossible! Got Lee Perry in my ear 'all things are possible, nothing is impossible', and my mind keeps on getting drawn towards thoughts about The Canterbury Tales - social spread + multiple voices - and Pickwick Papers - great SoN stuff like the hustings, but as has been pointed out several times, the SoN work as we see it today is very much a post-Victorian lit-page thing, so these aren't relevant specifically to the genre, apart from THIS IS HOW YOU DO IT.

But if you are going to do such things, you need a first class ear (Kingsley Amis was always very particular about new speech patterns and sounds in his novels) and a good eye + excellent observation - the Petunia Howe bits of this novel look painfully inadequate next to the remarkable novel about ageing Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont by Elizabeth Taylor. Maybe it helps to have a philosophical centre as well, and I'm not sure if Lanchester does. I was just thinking about the mid 20th C French political novels, which vary in their success as novels I guess, but which nevertheless have a strong motive force for presenting events and people in a certain way. Ciphers of a different sort perhaps though.

Christ, rambling.

I mean, there are plenty of better examples than JDC (the way the short stories of Julian McClaren-Ross encapsulate an age, and a national state for example) but I just happened to be reading it. And i know it's all a bit melodramatic - it's still much better than anything Lanchester has written.

top post xp

This thread has whetted my appetite right enough - I've just ordered that John Dickson Carr novel

He Who Whispers? I hope you enjoy it! I'm always v wary of recommending him, well i'm not, but I feel that I turn a blind eye to quite a few demerits when I'm reading him. (Keep leaving Capital at work, by accident I suppose, hence this JDC interlude).

i've only read 'the hollow man'. for entirely predictable reasons. d'you happen to know if his conan doyle bio is any good?

No I don't. The only non-detective story stuff I've read by him is his account of the sensational Victorian society Murder at the Priory case. It's perfectly adequate as a piece of true crime, but nothing spectacularly fascinating.

Yes, He Who Whispers. I'd like to get into genre fiction a bit more & he seems a good place to start for mysteries. He certainly gets praised enough. I liked the passage you quoted.

Mostly out-of-print though, how can that be?

Bit of a thread derail - but well, even Lanchester nods after all. Answer, not sure. Biggish appetite for the avatars of Golden Age detective fiction obviously - A Christie, Dorothy L Sayers, + Margery Allingham? - partly TV driven for the first two. JDC not as well known. Over-production was a problem at the time, less so now surely. (Was a problem to the point that he also wrote under the pseudonym Carter Dickson - I know, I know - his original suggestion was Carr Dickson tho). I think his very technical solutions to the problems are probably quite off-putting. Basically his principle is to set up something that looks totally impossible and work out how it could have been done/have happened. It doesn't always work, even now I'm more interested in the atmosphere I cited above, than working it out/the technical ingenuity (the solution to a very good novel of his The Ten Teacups is absurd - i'm still not sure I fully understand it), well to a certain extent - that technical ingenuity is like the formal constrain of a verse form, it forces JDC into his pyrotechnics. He confronts this problem in a reasonably famous section of The Hollow Man usually referred to as The Locked Room Lecture.

He's absolutely right to say that often the criticism of his work is similar to the criticism of a magician showing how his trick is done. That there is always disappointment in the revelation. At the same time that is the nature of the detective story, the Golden Age detective story, so i think he's being somewhat disingenuous. He's a very good writer in all sorts of unexpected ways tho - to take one example, although his characters are always distinctive (as they have to be in a novel of this sort with several suspects) no two are alike. That takes some doing.

Genre fiction generally is great at tangential state of the nation stuff! Thrillers and crime fiction usually incorporate a wide range of society, as I've already said, and the nature of how and why we kill seems like a good barometer of the SoN (like the economic basket of goods). Likewise supernatural stuff - what is it we are supposed to be finding frightening? what is our credulity? our crypto-religious belief/fear system? - and science fiction will often take elements of the now and use them to create a future which is automatically a critique, a non-satiric distortion, of our current state.

Two problems, the titanic intellectual ability of George Eliot, say, tends to be misplaced in genre fiction - they are generally page turners at bottom - and so any analysis or critique tends to be implicit. Second:... ahhhhh, someone just texted to see whether i wanted to pop to the pub and I've completely forgotten what I was going to write. Can't have been that often genre stuff isn't very good? Surely not!

To answer the question a bit more directly - not popular enough to publish while still in copyright?

can't even

it's like a boring party emulator. where are you from? then chatting about house prices.

have you...

http://storythings.com/

"In 31 years you've gone from London to London. That's a distance of 0 miles."

"If you own a house, that's worth £0 more, too"

Average annual income in London - £80, 358 (?!).

I suspect someone hasn't thought this through.

The aim of Pepys Road was to get people reading John Lanchester’s brilliant book, so the behaviour we wanted to base the project around was reading

oh, y'think?

Do you feel as if you’ve travelled further?

In 107 years, you've gone from Hairy Arm to Fan y Big.

OFFICIAL STATISTICS

Hairy Arm Fan y Big

Average house price:
£0 v £303,223
Average life expectancy:
( ) v ( )
Average annual income:
( ) v ( )

Over 10 days, we send 10 emails asking questions about your attitudes to things like health policy, immigration, travel and culture, and send you to 10 new mini-stories written by John Lanchester,

It's like an incredibly tedious Choose Your Own Adventure!

ah shit I know one of the ppl behind it & he's ok.

ah, these things happen. I wonder what the mini-stories are like... no, I mustn't.

In fairness this is only day one, it's possible you only see the full, splendid effect once it gets onto incorporating health care or immigration.

Fizzles, EAST COAST TRAINS have just told me it's LAST CHANCE again to get one of those £25 tickets to Scotland, if you're interested.

Thanks, pf!

Leafed through this in a bookshop, read the start of a chapter where one of the cornershop fellows is walking along observing western society in all its filthy lasciviousness: a poster with a women bending over and looking between her legs - advertising tampons!; a woman pushing a pram and her jogging bottoms exposing more than half of her bum! Lesbians walking dogs! Idk maybe he was aiming for a "world through someone else's eyes" effect but all the examples were so obvious, and crude, and implausible.

not that lesbians don't walk dogs.

maybe he was aiming for a "world through someone else's eyes" effect but all the examples were so obvious, and crude, and implausible

this book in a nutshell. it's that obviousness + implausibility that gets me on every page (I had a break over the weekend, back to it this evening I think), in every sentence really, on most innocuous level, like the muslim's description of his cycle ride to the mosque. You just think, congratulations you have made a dull everyday process sound totally implausible. Not in a good way.

congratulations you have made a dull everyday process sound totally implausible. Not in a good way.

If it were implausible in a good way, then it would have been entertaining. Note the subjunctive.

I've picked this up again. First sentence I read:

Mary liked change, movement, colour, walking, sex (with her husband), Ikea, going out to the pub with friends for Sunday lunch, being well-off in a pretty part of the country, being married to a man who had done well for himself (he owned a string of garages).

Yet Lanchester mauls the idea of free indirect speech like a dog a rubber ball, before dragging its useless remnants some distant to the sentence conclusion. Boring and laborious, posing inutile questions of the reader (does she prefer colour or Sunday lunch with her friends? walking to movement? change to sex with people other than her husband? ), exuding that implausibility ledge mentioned, and generally being an extraordinarily unpleasing sentence to read, and what the fuck is going on with those thoughts in parenthesis.