Death of the Hind Legs and Other Stories

Title: Death of the Hind Legs and Other Stories

Author: John Wain

Year of publication: 1966, Penguin edition 1970

Back cover blurb: 'In John Wain's stories the characters inhabit worlds of sadness, loss and disappointment.  Sometimes they win.  They always get wiser.
   What would they have thought if they'd seen Williams talking out loud to a tree that wasn't there?  But there was now something else in that garden even more compelling than the tree that was planted the day he was born.
   Dannie couldn't start looking for a new pair of hind legs at this stage of the game.  They were demolishing the theatre straight after the last performance, so the fact that the back end of the pantomime horse had a heart attack in the middle of the show didn't add all that much to his worries.
   Fred was strong but dim.  If he set himself up as an all-in wrestler fighting in rigged bouts he could get eighty quid a week to stop Doreen nagging him.  So enter King Caliban and a new Fred who stopped everyone in their tracks.'

Quick flick reveals: A short story collection from the lost man of Twentieth Century British fiction.  They sound rather intriguing and don't see any reason why they wouldn't be good.

Random paragraph: 'Playfully now, I reached out and knocked on the car.  Tinny beast.  It had bruised my flesh and threatened to break my bones, but it could not hurt the steel and whale-bone of the umbrella.  Mastery!'


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The Smaller Sky

Title: The Smaller Sky

Author: John Wain

Year of publication: 1967, Penguin edition 1969

Back cover blurb: 'The man now living on platform one is Arthur Geary and he is not a mad scientist.
   Arthur Geary left his wife and two children and went to live on Paddington Station.  It was the only place he could get away from the sounds of the terrible drums; where he could feel comfortably anonymous, safe and calm under a smaller sky.  But they had to hound him out.  They had to know why.  They had to prove him mad: friends, family, psychiatrist, even a TV journalist after the ultimate tragic scoop.'

Quick flick reveals: Another from my John Wain haul.  A man decides to live on Paddington Station.  Everyone wants to know why.  Sounds a bit like that Radiohead video.

Random paragraph: '"Well, since we talk of padded cells," said Robinson, still driven by anger, "I might as well say what's in my mind.  If you stay here you'll go mad.  The crowds, the discomfort, the sense of homelessness, will unhinge you.  Go on, laugh at me, but you'll be raving mad inside three months."'


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Hurry on Down

Title: Hurry on Down

Author: John Wain

Year of publication: 1953, Penguin edition 1973

Back cover blurb: 'The book that was the pioneer of the new kind of English novel which appeared in the fifties, linking the names of John Wain, Kingsley Amis, Iris Murdoch, and later John Braine.'

Quick flick reveals: This is the first of three books I have acquired by John Wain (who, to my knowledge, was not 'big-leggy').  Despite being seen as a link between the naturalism of earlier writers such as Arnold Bennett and that of the Kitchen Sink School, and having a place in history as part of CS Lewis's Oxford circle, John Wain's early novels have now been out of print for over twenty years.  There aren't that many clues as to what this one is actually about, but it seems to come out of the tradition of what I call British soft-realism (stories about ordinary people just sort of getting on with things in which no one becomes a crack-addicted prostitute) that I gravitate towards and include myself in, some of the time, so I look forward to reading.

Random paragraph: 'All the time he knew it was true.  He had seen the complacent pride of possession written across Tharkles's face.  It was that knowledge that was driving him mad; for, of course, it is madness pure and simple to race wildly on a bicycle down a country road, chasing a motor-car.'


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Lamia

Title: Lamia

Author: Tristan Travis

Year of publication: 1983

Back cover blurb: '"I have set out to resurrect Lamia from the obscurity of ancient legend.  A classic persona, archetypal rape victim, once ravished by Zeus, cursed by Hera, driven deeply strange by her own guilt, this beautiful, beguiling spirit slithers dwon through all literature, her motif as rich in metaphor as it is universal and haunting.... she is fiercely herself, a true demon of the distaff, embodying perhaps that which lurks in all women, the sorrow of the sexually repressed.  And the rage."
   Tristan Travis

"Ol' Tristan Travis or whatever that name is he's signing his stuff with has been an irritating success ever since I met him twenty years ago... at everything from basketball to bongos to boxing, at which he was a national champ.  So it's no surprise to me that his first novel is a bloody knockout."
   Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over the the Cuckoo's Nest and Sometimes a Great Notion

"I can think of no way in which I could prepare our readers for this."
   Australian Book Club executive'

Quick flick reveals: This strange supernatural detective story seemingly involving an ancient spirit of sexual frustration manifesting itself is notable for carrying a quote from Ken Kesey on the back, something you don't see on that many other books, to my knowledge.  This, allied with the fact that no one knows who Tristan Travis is, and no other sign of his existence has ever come to light, means that it is wondered whether Lamia is actually by Kesey himself. I'm pretty sure there's some software that could analyse the prose style and give a definite answer one way or the other, but no one's thought to enter it yet.  Anyway, the book looks pretty fucking crazy.

Random paragraph: 'He slipped the arms back under the sheet and then tied the ID tag with its wire to the big toe of her right foot.  Before rolling the drawer back into the locker, he ran his hands under the sheet again, felt her breasts.  Not a half-bad pair.  He pulled at them roughly, poked and slapped them about.  Suddenly he felt a twitching in his pants.'


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The Grounding of Group 6

Title: The Grounding of Group 6

Author: Julian F. Thompson

Year of publication: 1983, Magnet edition 1984

Back cover blurb: 'Coldbrook Country School is a highly exclusive boarding school.  To be there you have to have rich parents.  And it's a very nice place.  It treats you like an adult and expects you to behave like one.  With its beautiful mountain setting and its caring staff, it should be just the place to straighten out a difficult kid.
   For the five sixteen-year-old misfits in Group 6, Coldbrook was the last resort.  But it took them some time to realise that Coldbrook's solution to their problem was going to be very final indeed.  And when they found out who was paying - it seemed impossible.  But it was all too terrifyingly true.'

Quick flick reveals:  Not really a lost book, as it made a considerable impact on its YA audience in the US at the time and has been held in affection by Generation Ws ever since, I'm including it here because it didn't quite so much of an impression in the UK.  And besides, I paid my 20p, as you can see.
   Essentially I'm just in love with the concept of SPOILER ALERT a school for problem children trying to kill the problem kids.  It seems like a way-ahead-of-its-time cross between Battle Royale and what I imagine The Hunger Games to be about, which probably has nothing to do with what The Hunger Games is actually about.  Bet it's amazing.

Random paragraph: '"My strategy," he said to Mrs. Ripple, "is simply to eliminate, eliminate, eliminate.  Every time I know a place they're not, I'm that much closer to the place they are."'


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A Garden of Sand

Title: A Garden of Sand

Author: Earl Thompson

Year of publication: 1970, W.H. Allen edition 1971

Inner cover blurb: 'Readers of A GARDEN OF SAND will not be surprised that the book is dedicated to Nelson Algren, for like Algren, Earl Thompson writes in rhythms and accents uniquely his own and, also like Algren, exposes the public to a level of American life generally closed to the pages of fiction.  Thompson's world is that of the poor, semi-urban Middle West (and later the South), the world of people who run truck-stop cafés, work in oil-fields and shipyards, and live in cheap rooming houses and dubious hotels.  They are people who die "in rented side-street rooms as stylelessly and miserably as they lived.  A son in the Marines.  A daughter who isn't speaking - like that."  To them Earl Thompson has imparted the dignity born of desperation and a will to survive adversity that ultimately becomes a tribute to the human spirit.
   The story he tells will no doubt shock some and perhaps even offend others, containing as it does a rawness and candor incompatible with gentility.  If its central theme is the formation of a young boy's obsessive sexuality, its even greater power lies  in its depiction of people and places at a time when "girls who scorned bandeaux beneath their middy blouses hung a Wings on their lip, rolled their stockings below their knees and cocked a man's hat over one eye....  Their heroes were John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, the Barkers, Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, Alvin Karpis and Homer Vanmeter."
   Just such a girl was Wilma MacDeramid, who got her ideas of class from the movies ("I'm no nickel and dime dollie.  Gimme a fifty, you crumb, for the powder room") and her satisfactions wherever she could find them.  Her father, John MacDeramid, was hybrid, part Populist, part Wobbly, and his own man.  Her son Jacky was born out of wedlock.  The happiness that each could seize lasted no longer than a night or a day, and it is Jakcy's frantic efforts to find warmth and love in a world of deprivation and casual brutality that provide the continuing thread of the narrative.
   As a novel of social and sexual realism, A GARDEN OF SAND marks the debut of a major new American writer.  Even in this day and age, its power is remarkable, its evocations overwhelming.   It stands out boldly in the line of American fiction from Sister Carrie to Studs Lonigan to Last Exit to Brooklyn that will force the complacent to realizations they have previously chosen to deny.'

Reading reveals: Not so much a lost book, it's been reprinted a few times over the years, it is however a somewhat neglected one, with US writer Thompson pretty much a non-figure on this side of the Atlantic.  The first part of a trilogy, it explores the life of a sexually precocious young boy growing up during the Depression, sprawling out to include the exploits of his family along the way.
   When I watch a film featuring Sean Connery or Jeff Bridges or whoever playing a distinguished American author holed up in a university somewhere, working on a novel they've been hammering away at for years, this is exactly the sort of book I imagine them writing, with a broad historical and geographical sweep, and muscular imagery such as 'the glaring, heat-bleached denim sky'.
   This is a beautiful novel that takes you into a world and surrounds you with fantastic details and great characters and engrossing situations etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.  More than this, though, it captures perfectly a sense of falling through the cracks, of the loss of integrity and dignity needed to survive when at the very bottom of a society in trouble.  It really is quite frustrating to see A Garden of Sand languish, while something like Ironweed by William Kennedy is canonized, when the difference in quality between the two really isn't that great.  In fact, I would go so far as to say I think you should read this book.

Random paragraph: 'In May the castor beans hung like sleeping bats in the lop-eared trees.  A shimmering river of asphalt ozzed past the door.  With a kitchen knife Jacky could dig up a chaw of butyl-tasting tar from the edge of the highway that would last all day.  Men carried raffia fans in the street.  Lemonade was consumed like air.  Kids were set out in yards in tubs of water.  No one wanted to go anywhere.'


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Lost Book Library Reading Round-Up no. 2

Another summary of my attempts to read the books featured in the Lost Book Library.

Moral Tales by Giocamo Leopardi

Status: Completed

This is one I actually read before I started the library, and I have already sung the praises of it elsewhere.  Just to say it's a remarkably imaginative work, in which multiple ways are found to make possibly the most depressing philosophical point ever.

Hers by A. Alvarez

Status: Abandoned p. 142

Although a noted poet and critic, on the evidence of this book Alvarez is a truly dreadful author.  The main character, a German child of WWII transplanted to Cambridge as a grown woman, is as much a stranger to Alvarez as she is to the reader, and the psychology is basic, somewhere along the lines of 'I have unresolved issues from my past.  I'll have an affair!'  The sex, meanwhile, is of the troubling seventies variety where it all starts off quite rapey, but by the end of it everyone's having a whale of a time.  There is also possibly the most unconvincing reaction to tragic news in the whole history of literature.
  I did, however, make it nearly three-quarters of the way through because of a truly deranged subplot in which the protagonist's husband, a professor of literature, is menaced by a motorcycle gang straight out of British cult horror Psychomania, and declares war on the entire younger generation.  This bit works rather well, in a pulpy kind of way.  Alvarez, however, fails to realise his talents lie as a schlockmeister and continues trying to be a serious author, with woeful results. When it became obvious the motorbike gang weren't going to come back, I made my excuses and left.

Too Long a Sacrifice by Mildred Downey Broxon

Status: Completed

While Alvarez's work reeked of the will-this-do attitude an author can only achieve when they are so well connected they stand a good chance of knowing their reviewers on a personal level beforehand, it is obvious that Broxton put heart and soul into every word of her tale of a husband and wife from Ancient Ireland transported into the Twentieth Century.   Plonking them down in the middle of the Troubles and getting them mixed up in sectarian violence may not have been the most tasteful move, but it kind of works.  The story occasionally feels like it's being narrated by Yoda ('Comely they both were, and young'), and the lack of a solid villain except for something called the Hate Beast who turns up occasionally and 'gibbers' means that at times the narrative meanders when it needs to be tightening, but there's a startlingly imaginative idea every few pages and it's all quite breezy and fun.  My favourite moment is when the pagan healer from 1500 years ago has the NHS explained to her.

Return to Elysium by Joan Grant

Status: Abandoned, p. 26

This tale of a proto-feminist Ancient Greek cult leader seemed competently written, but I'm not that big on historical fiction at the best of times, and I still haven't even read I, Claudius.  It simply wasn't glaringly mad enough for a book allegedly inspired by the memory of a past life, and I just couldn't be bothered with it.

Far Memory by Joan Grant

Status: Completed

Grant's autobiography, on the other hand, is truly a wonder.  It begins with an anecdote of her mother throwing tissues to French peasant children from a motorcar in 1906, wrapped around stones so that they don't blow away, and pretty much stays at that level of craziness for the rest of the book.  Born to wealthy parents in the early years of the 20th Century, Grant's dubious paranormal abilities (which seem uncannily close to 'making stuff up') are actually one of the least interesting things about her life, taking in as it does meetings with HG Wells and Aleister Crowley, Brazilian sex/dinner parties, Egyptian dust storms and a deranged snake expert.  Sometimes a terrible snob, looking down on people who eat 'buns out of bags', Grant is also something of a character, repeatedly attempting to purchase a cheetah and parade around London with it in an open-topped car, and being discovered naked somewhere she shouldn't be with alarming regularity.  This is a masterpiece of improbable autobiography, right up there with Confessions of a Dangerous Mind by Chuck Barris.  Highly recommended.

The Caretakers

Title: The Caretakers

Author: Dariel Telfer

Year of publication: 1959, Corgi edition 1968

Back cover blurb: 'THIS IS A SHOCKING, POWERFUL, COURAGEOUS BOOK.  ONCE BEGUN, IT CANNOT BE PUT ASIDE.  ONCE READ, IT CANNOT BE FORGOTTEN.

   It is the story of men and women who live and work behind the locked doors and barred windows of a mental hospital.  It is a novel of people trapped in a world where emotions fester and tensions explode into murder and violence.  These are the strong and the weak...

   THEIR ACTIONS MAY SHOCK YOU, BUT YOU WILL NOT BE ABLE TO DISMISS THEM.

   Dariel Telfer wrote THE CARETAKERS out of first-hand knowledge and passionate concern.  She has herself worked in a large mental institution, been a witness to events such as those she so candidly describes.

   "Her obvious sincerity is more convincing than the slick platitudes of professionalism.  And her rough-drawn characters may well be more true to life because drawn from fact."

   FRANK G. SLAUGHTER, M.D.'

Quick flick reveals: Love-triangle soap opera plot.  And a mental hospital.

Random paragraph: '"God!" she said, hooding her eyes.  "Is this ever going to be a day.  The office is sending us six patients from Surgery and we have to transfer two to Untidy.  I tell you, I've been going around this morning like a cockroach in a bowl of chili."'


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Emu and Little Red Riding Hood

Title: Emu and Little Red Riding Hood

Author: Michael Sullivan, illustrated by Elphin Lloyd-Jones

Year of publication: 1977

Front cover blurb: 'ROD HULL and his EMU present...'

Quick flick reveals: The story of Little Red Riding Hood we all know and love, with Rod Hull's Emu inexplicably wedged in.  Despite his getting top billing, he contributes little to the narrative, and is, frankly, a weak protagonist.  Book is presumably meant to be read with Rod Hull's voice in your head.  This is quite easy for me to imagine, as Rod Hull's voice is constantly in my head anyway.  Illustrations are as Disney-esque as you can get without the lawyers calling.
   Other titles in this series were Emu and the Beanstalk, Emu and Goldilocks, and Emu and the Three Little Pigs.

Random paragraph: 'Emu felt like nipping and snipping that tail.  But he did something else with his beak instead.'


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The Memory of Eva Ryker

Title: The Memory of Eva Ryker

Author: Donald A. Stanwood

Year of publication: 1978, Corgi edition 1979

Back cover blurb: 'APRIL 14, 1912   The TITANIC sinks after it strikes an iceberg.  Among the survivors are young honeymoon couple, Jason & Lisa Eddington...
   NOVEMBER, 1941   The Kleins, a middle-aged couple holidaying in Hawaii, are brutally murdered in one of the most sensational unsolved crimes of the decade...
   SEPTEMBER, 1962   As a multi-million dollar salvage operation explores the wreck of the TITANIC, an elderly couple scheme to lay their hands on a fabulous treasure they know will be found in the rusting hulk...
   THREE UNRELATED STORIES?  OR ONE SINISTER TALE OF GREED AND TREACHERY THAT SPANS MORE THAN FIFTY YEARS?
   One woman - Eva Ryker - has the answer.  The only witness to events so horrifying, so painful, that she has spent a lifetime erasing them from her memory.
   One man - Norman Hall - is determined she WILL remember.  Who'll stop at nothing to uncover the monstrously evil plot that has already taken seven lives and threatens to claim yet more.
   THE MEMORY OF EVA RYKER
   A NON STOP THRILLER THAT WILL GRIP THE READER UNTIL THE FINAL, SHOCKING PAGE'

Quick flick reveals:  Fantastically high-concept Titanic-themed thriller that sadly escaped being revived for the Centenary celebrations of all those people dying.  Was made into a TV move starring Natalie Wood.  I refuse to draw attention to the fact that ironically she herself would drown several years later for reasons of taste.

Random paragraph: 'Loosening my tie, I walked around the end of the bed.  Naked except for sunglasses, William Ryker was a burned red lobster.  Surrounded by olive green sheets, his gnarled body looked like a strip of bacon floating in a bowl of pea soup.'


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