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

I did enjoy Fragrant Harbour and The Debt to Pleasure, but yeah this one is garbage, and plotless garbage at that

"On the same evening, while Anthony was brooding over the Investment Review and Alison over her daughter, Len Wincobank was lying on his dormitory bed in Block D and listening to the radio. On the walls around him, naked girls in various rude attitudes winked at him and offered themselves to him, thrusting out handsome bums and eccentrically large tits"

That's from Margaret Drabble's The Ice Age. Always nice to spot a bit of proto-Lanchester in the wild.

Len Wincobank is a white collar criminal, by the way. The book was quite prescient until I reached this chapter, which is awful.

Handsome Bums are a mix between The Stone Roses and Primal Scream with the swagger of Oasis

had to be done

By half past eight, on this same long November evening, Anthony Keating had finished his sausages, idled away half an hour with a cup of coffee, switched the radio on and off several times, and done some thinking.

I wonder if Lanchester is even conscious of the extent to which he has ripped this book off, right down to its every plodding cadence.

he might be - it might even be an explanation. i haven't read the ice age. is there any aspect of it that might make a sane person sit up and say "hey this is *good*, i shd *do* something with this"?

it doesn't sound like it.

I have read the successor to THE ICE AGE which is called THE RADIANT WAY. It is in this mode.

In a way I think it is extremely prescient of post-Thatcherite Britain. But we are conditioned now to think of the late 60s and early 70s as this very innocent, social democratic, vaguely utopian time rather than an explosion of venality and greed that came crashing to a halt, which is how Drabble, writing in the late 70s, sees it. And that's interesting from my perspective in a way that, say, Capital isn't.

You also get the sense that Drabble had been regularly reading the FT and the Economist and decided to base a novel around what she was reading, which so far happens at the expense of character. At one point an unnamed economist literally sits at a breakfast table pondering inflation. But if you were John Lanchester then I can easily imagine you putting the book down and thinking "yes, this is what literature should aspire to!"

By the way I should really post that entire quote in its own right for all its Lanchestrian awkwardness:

"By half past eight, on this same long November evening, Anthony Keating had finished his sausages, idled away half an hour with a cup of coffee, switched the radio on and off several times, and done some thinking. He thought about the nature of property, and why it was that some people considered the owning of property particularly wicked: why was it more wicked to own a strip of land with a house on it than to own a sausage, a bicycle, a secondhand fur coat, or a colour television set?"

I've just come to this straight from reading Angela Carter, who really does write some sublime sentences, and on a pure prose level it's like following up Mozart with a Chumbawumba chaser.

why was it more wicked to own a strip of land with a house on it than to own a sausage
why was it more wicked to own a strip of land with a house on it than to own a sausage
why was it more wicked to own a strip of land with a house on it than to own a sausage
why was it more wicked to own a strip of land with a house on it than to own a sausage
why was it more wicked to own a strip of land with a house on it than to own a sausage
why was it more wicked to own a strip of land with a house on it than to own a sausage
why was it more wicked to own a strip of land with a house on it than to own a sausage
why was it more wicked to own a strip of land with a house on it than to own a sausage

Can picture Keith Joseph saying that at the 1974 Tory Conference.

... eight times in a row.

I wish I could agree about Carter, but actually I often find her quite a bad, clumsy writer -- whatever her virtues as thinker, polemicist, activist, etc.

Need to get around to reading an actual Carter novel, as I thought the Bloody Chamber was p trite and agree with pinefox's views on her writing. But I feel like maybe she gets into stride in novel form?

I thought The Bloody Chamber was written well, albeit flashily

(I've only read Several Perceptions and enjoyed it a lot, including on a pure sentence level. She is flashy and self-consciously writerly but so are a lot of post-war English novelists).

I've never quite got on with Carter either (and I like lots of writers the pinefox doesn't) (and vice versa). Keep meaning to give her a more serious try; keep losing interest when I go back (Nights at the Circus is the one I pick up -- someone I was fond of long ago always said it was her favourite book, and (even tho I haven't seen this person for abt 15 years) I want to work out why.

I started Whoops! but (again)* didn't get very far -- and some of the reasons Capital is bad (as per this superb thread) also apply. JL seemed to spend a lot of time over-carefully explaining fairly simple things I already understood and then nervelessly sweeping past stuff that really needed dwelling or on getting inside. (I have a close friend who used to be a banker who agrees about this; and talking to him about the sector makes me think that Lanchester's dad's connections and understanding may well not actually give as much purchase on the finance&trading world of the early 00s as you'd expect; that banking had in some key way slipped into a new phase, and that this was what needed exploring…)

*In many ways I am the world's most distractable person when it comes to reading, probably because proofing has been my day-job for such a long time.

Greil Marcus raves about the Ice Age in Lipstick Traces, like it was some protopunk prophesy, which I always thought was odd. This seems bonkerz:

Nowhere have I found the full weight of this burden assumed with such honesty and feeling as in The Ice Age. It is a rich book, full of characters that come to life in a page and grow throughout the novel—a building contractor in the Sixties who bids to escape his class and in the Seventies finds himself in prison for fraud; a spoiled, angry teenager eager for oblivion; a classics professor retreating not only from the present but from all signs of life in the past. But its richness is not really in its plot, which centers on two people in their late 30s, Alison Murray and Anthony Keating, who are trying to build a relationship in the midst of personal disasters and public decay. The richness of the novel has to do with the way Drabble connects the private lives of her characters to the public miasma they are forced to share.

https://greilmarcus.net/2016/06/07/undercover-johnny-rottens-soul-sister-102077/

the richness of the novel has to do with the sausage

(i have not read it)

but that marcus review always struck me as a reach, given that my mum loved margaret drabble and was not a noted aficionado of post-punk style anomie

Yes bonkerz is the mot juste.
This is absurd, just as Mark S says.
One can hardly think of two writers further apart.

I suppose the explanation is

a) MD was focused on 60s-70s, a period dear to GM

b) MD was writing about 'miasma' of contemporary history, confirming GM's sense of 'art as political statement'

c) above all, crucially, MD is English and GM perhaps has a tin ear across this cultural divide -- so he imagines that MD is the English Pynchon or Gaddis or perhaps Richard Yates -- as though I were to imagine that Garrison Keillor was the US Irvine Welsh. It is surely related to the fact that Americans take Nick Hornby seriously, and take G Dyer and Z Smith (who can both be very good) more seriously than we do.

Next week: Camilla Paglia on the Orphic power of Pamela Hansford Johnson.

Having read a handful of Carter novels I am doubtful that the novel is where she does best. Her last novel, always wildly praised, is particularly bad -- perhaps in part because she was ill when writing it.

Her approach to narrative can fall in with a general tendency of chortling garrulousness that I find generally a very bad thing for fiction - as in Rushdie and even, to some extent, one of the big problems with Finnegans Wake.

When she writes differently, more starkly for instance, she can be a bit better, but she is still often surprisingly cackhanded in basic ways.

I think for me her essays might be the best work. She was a pretty important commentator on style, gender, politics, linking these things together; that work seems to have some historical importance.

But I don't know the early Bristol-based novels and maybe they have something better to recommend them.

Next week: Camilla Paglia on the Orphic power of Pamela Hansford Johnson

tbf i wd read the fuck of that (once)

out of that

I wonder if people would bother to equate them at all were it not for Joe Strummer using the phrase "the ice age" in London Calling.

oddly enough big audio dynamite is named after a novel by a.s.byatt

someone on the thread i linked to said they skimmed an interview with JL in which he said his dad was a banker -- that's all the lead i have, it may be nonsense, he may be self-taught

basically if someone is not bothering to explore or explain the bits i think need explaining then i stop reading them -- i agree this is not the same as "knowing nothing" but for my purposes it is the same as "not knowing enough", since the bits i need to learn about are the bits not yet being explained properly

i could go back and reread whoops! and report to you exactly what those are but it seems a bit pointless, as you're obviously happy with what you're getting

oops

Ilxor poster oops?

only he can save me now

Taking on Facebook

a piece, in this week's New Yorker, unfurls with an almost fantastically Lanchesterian overexplanation of the term STEM: "Science and technology: we tend to think of them as siblings, perhaps even as twins, as parts of STEM (for “science, technology, engineering, and mathematics”)"

i cannot think of way to improve on this sentence as platonic lanchester

Reading this thread for the first time was a fantastic way to spend the evening, thank you.

The New Yorker piece is indeed feeble:

Walter Benjamin, the great German Jewish cultural critic, who committed suicide while trying to escape Nazi-controlled Europe, said that “there is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” He meant that every complicated and beautiful thing humanity ever made has, if you look at it long enough, a shadow, a history of oppression. As a matter of plain historical fact, that seems right. It was a long and traumatic journey from the invention of writing to your book club’s discussion of Jodi Picoult’s latest.

thank fuck somebody was able to mansplain what Benjamin wrote

it is with a certain amount of shame that i have to tell you that for well over a week now i have been aware that john lanchester has had published in the latest issue of the london review of books a short story by the name of 'Coffin Liquor'.

Since then I have done all I could to avoid reading it: I assiduously read other articles in the issue even one on Gordon Brown to tell myself that i had extracted all the worth that was to be had from it, I folded it and put it on the lower magazine shelf of the front-room table, eventually I removed the paper from the front room entirely, throwing it idly in a place i hoped i would forget, so like unpaid debts and avoided chores it has sat at the back of mind like an oppressive shadow.

Finally, and as 2017 draws to an inauspicious close, I feel it's time to start as i mean to go on, aware that if 2018 is going to be anything like an improvement on the scorched earth and wreckage of 2017, I must show the same sort of indefatigable spirit John Lanchester seems to be able to show.

So I'm going to read it LIVE on ILX now.

I should say that I have no intent of deliberately guying lanchester, or mocking where mockery has not been earned. I'm not expecting fireworks, but equally it seems only reasonable to allow the possibility that it might be an unexceptionable piece of prose.

i will approach with the purest of intentions.

just going to make a cup of tea.

*settles in*

It was a darkening afternoon on the last day of the year 2017 A.D. and Noodle Vague sat down in his mother's living room and began reading the internet browsing program on his Toshiba Satellite laptop computer to discover what the celebrated London author John Lanchester had been up to lately.

great.

Coffin Liquor, by John Lanchester.

Monday

lol

I realised things had gone wrong as soon as I arrived at my hotel. The receptionist spoke no English. Only when I showed them my passport did they seem to accept, with reluctance, that I had a booking. I was given a key and took my own bag upstairs. the room was a cramped, over furnished space with thin brown walls. On the desk was an envelope of conference materials including a laminated pass on a lanyard and a printed programme.

now i have to confess that my flatmate and friend, aware of the strong feelings lanchester provokes in me, had already read me this paragraph out loud before I had to ask him to stop. but we both noted that, although we both use hotels in our separate work very frequently, we have never ever encountered a receptionist who didn't speak English.

I do remember a place in Italy about twenty years ago, which was more of a boarding house, where the late night receptionist didn't speak any English, and where there was a gunshot in the middle of the night and loud shouting. But it wasn't the sort of place that would host a conference.

I note warily the Lanchester signature of non-specific descriptions of material contents, 'Laminated pass on a lanyard.'

i mean basically it already feels like one of those stories that once memorably caused a friend of mine to say to someone after they'd finished, 'I'm sorry I don't believe a word of it.' (Again, as I think I said upthread, he has a habit of making you exclaim 'No, they didn't, no you weren't, no it *wasn't*.')

Ok, he's at a conference that he feels he's been misled into attending.

The first talk on the first morning was titled 'What String Theorists Can Learn from Vlad the Impaler: Narrative, Belief and the Immanence of the Imperceptible'. The other events were given similar names and had the same preposterous emphasis on the idea of an engagement or 'conversation' between areas that are manifestly questions of proof and fact, on the one hand, and, on the other side, a degenerate mass of of whiffle and nonsense.

It brings to mind a line in the address on the liner notes of The Wonderful and Frightening World of The Fall: 'Forcedcomedy, Lancs.'

oh god he's a Sokal guy, of course he is

In short, I find I have been brought to this godforsaken country in Central Europe – I say godforsaken purely as a figure of speech – to attend a conference on the 'dialogue' (emetic term) between science and mythology under entirely false pretences. My views on this subject are well known.

ok, unreliable narrator. we must tread carefully. any pomposities or imbecilities of statement may not be the author's own. I do note the not all covert hostility, as in lol how funny this sort of thing is, to the notion of theory - let's make it look silly or small. This isn't a narratorial thing I think.

I get the feeling his dismissiveness may be intended to be of the same category as MR James' academics, and that there will be some supernatural happenings.

yes! of course. xpost.

Bah! I have to go out now.