Blood Triangle

Blood Work, Michael Connelly (1998)

This is the cleverest and best-plotted crime novel I’ve ever read. That’s why it would be a bad place for newcomers to start reading Michael Connelly’s work. As good as some of his other novels are, none of them pack the punch of Blood Work and they’re all going to suffer by comparison. So the Connelly-curious should start with some of the early Harry Bosch adventures, then come to Blood Work later.

That’s what I did: started with the Bosch novels. So I was familiar with Connelly and knew he was an excellent writer, but nothing prepared me for the cleverness of the twist at the end of Blood Work. An FBI detective called Terry McCaleb has retired and gone back to civilian life after a heart-transplant. He needed a new heart because the stress of his job had wrecked his old one: he worked to catch serial-killers, sometimes succeeding, sometimes failing. It was the failures that ate away at him and triggered the virus that attacked his heart. He almost died waiting for a transplant, because he has a rare blood-type and a suitable donor took a long time to arrive.

The donor, a young Latina called Gloria Torres, had to die to give him life, of course. In fact, she was murdered but the police can’t find her killer. She was just unlucky, a random victim brutally but casually shot in the head as a potential witness to the robbery of a convenience store in Los Angeles. The owner of the store was shot dead too and with no witnesses and just blurred CCTV footage from a single camera in the store, the hunt for the killer hasn’t gone anywhere. That’s why Gloria’s sister tracks McCaleb down after a story about him appears in the LA Times. She asks him to put his old FBI skills to work again and he can’t refuse: he and Gloria have the most intimate of connections and he owes her his life.

What he doesn’t realize is that he and she are two corners of what you might call a blood triangle. The third corner of the blood triangle is revealed when McCaleb finally works out who the killer is and visits his abandoned lair. A deadly message is waiting for him there on a live computer:

He clicked the mouse and the document quickly filled the screen. McCaleb began to read like a man reading his own obituary. The words filled him with dread, for he knew that they unalterably changed his life. They stripped his soul from him, took any meaning from his accomplishments and made a horrible mockery of them.

Yes, that’s when the twist is sprung and Blood Work may become for you what it is for me: the cleverest crime novel you’ve ever read. I had a distinct memory that the twist appeared on the last page of the book. And that once I’d recovered from it, I turned to the first page and read the whole book again straight through, marvelling at how everything was now cast in a new light. Well, I know I’m right about re-reading the book, but I’m wrong about the twist being revealed on the final page. The book has 47 chapters and the twist is revealed at the end of chapter 40. Maybe I re-read the earlier chapters before finally finishing the book or maybe I carried on to the end and re-read the whole book then. But I understand why my memory was at fault: the final chapters just aren’t memorable by comparison with the power of the twist. The loose ends are tied up but Blood Work would have been more powerful if they hadn’t been. That twist, that literally heart-wrenching twist, should have been the last page of the book.

That’s what my subconscious obviously thought after I’d finished Blood Work for the first time, which is why I had the false memory of reaching the last page, then immediately re-reading the book because of what I’d found there. Memory isn’t static but dynamic. It can’t be trusted. And in fact that’s another of the themes of Blood Work. What and who can we trust? McCaleb lives on a boat after his retirement and the sea is one of the characters in the book. And one of the sources of symbolism. The sea is salty like blood and sometimes surges and quickens like blood. And it can be treacherous and deadly like blood. All of those themes run through the book and help make it the best of a very good author’s many books.

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Haute Coltour

The World According to Colour: A Cultural History, James Fox (Penguin 2021)

James Fox is what you could call a sense-mensch. He’s one of the good writers and clever researchers who do humanity a service by teaching us to understand and appreciate our senses better. Harold McGee does that in Nose Dive (2020) for smell. Trevor Cox does that in Sonic Wonderland (2015) for hearing. David Linden does that in Touch (2015) for you-know-what.

Fox does it in The World According to Colour for sight. Except that “sight” is too a big word. English doesn’t have a single simple word meaning “the sense by which we apprehend and appreciate color.” We have to use the clumsy and inadequate phrase “color-sense.” But really all words are clumsy and inadequate when it comes to the senses. And particularly when it comes to colors. Words merely circle them; it’s only eyes that can feast. And there are feasts for the eyes in the images Fox has chosen to accompany his Grand Coltour, like the sumptuous red of a “Ming dynasty dish” in carved lacquer and the lapis lazuli that “resembles a fragment of the firmament” in its “combination of deep blue lazurite, streaks of white calcite and specks of golden pyrite”.

But Fox’s words enhance those feasts for the eyes. And sometimes the words themselves are feasts for the eyes, because he quotes the names of colors in non-Roman scripts, not just in transliteration. That means you get to see the beauty of Arabic calligraphy in his discussion of the color of paradise:

The Qur’an deploys a unique adjective to denote this miraculous hue. Madhammatan (مُدهَامَّتان) is a rich dark viridian that pulsates with ever-lasting life. It has a very special status: it is the only word in the Qur’an’s shortest verse. – ch. 7, “Green: Paradise Lost”, p. 206

If you follow the footnote, you’ll discover that the verse in question is “Qur’an 55:64”. So I looked up that verse in a translation of the Qur’an, where it ran “Dark green with foliage.” I wouldn’t have guessed that a single Arabic word lay behind that translation. But then I’d never have gone to that verse if I’d not read about it here. I like books that send you off investigating for yourself. The World According to Colour does that a lot.

And not just with words from Arabic: Chinese calligraphy appears in the book too. There’s a symbol on the red lacquer dish mentioned above and Fox explains that it’s shou, meaning “longevity”. In Chinese culture, red is a symbol of good luck and happiness. But different kinds of red are important in that culture, each with its own name and set of associations. I like the way Fox includes the Chinese characters with the transliterations. But tone-marks would have been even better and Fox gets something wrong in another part of his col-tour of red:

Red (English), rouge (French), rosso (Italian), rojo (Spanish), rot (German), rood (Dutch), rød (Danish), röd (Swedish), rautt (Icelandic), rudý (Czech), ruber (Latin) and ερυθρός (Greek) all probably derive from the Sanskrit rudhira, meaning “blood”. – ch. 2, “Red”, p. 51

That’s like saying your aunt is your grandmother. The Sanskrit word isn’t the ancestor of the words in English and the other languages. It resembles them because it comes from the same source: Indo-European. But mistakes like that are inevitable when someone is covering such a big subject. Fox could have devoted an entire book to any one of the seven colors he describes and dissects: black; red; yellow; blue; white; purple; and green. As it is, he crams them into one book. But by coltouring seven, he can enhance their power by contrasting them:

Pulsating within us every second of every day of our lives, red is the hue with which we most consistently identify. ch. 2, “Red: Inventing Humanity”, p. 76

In its highest purity, [yellow] always carries with it the nature of brightness, and has a serene, gay, softly exciting character. – ch. 3, “Yellow: Twilight of the Idols”, p. 102

For most of history, blue was the quintessential colour of other worlds: distant mountains, unfathomable oceans, unreachable skies, the uncharted territory of the soul. – ch. 4, “Blue: Beyond the Horizon”, p. 140

The description of yellow comes from Goethe: in touring those seven colors, Fox is also touring millennia of literature and art, discussing and quoting from dozens of authors and artists. You’ve seen Goethe; now try Renoir: “Black a non-colour? Where on earth did you get that? Why, black is the queen of colours!” (ch. 1, p. 43) That’s a good quote in itself, but it raises an obvious question. If black is the queen of colors, what is the king? I would say red. And I would say that the wizard of colors is purple. The chapter devoted to it is the strangest in the book:

Purple is a chameleon of colour. A mixture of red and blue, it is made when two ends of the spectrum come together. This might make it the most versatile colour on the palette: it can rove from all-but-red to all-but-blue and never cease to be purple. It can be light and dark, hot and cold, belligerent and bashful – occasionally all at the same time. In spite of these many moods, purple is rare in nature. Few organic compounds can pull off the precarious balancing act on which it depends, reflecting short and long wavelengths of light while absorbing the narrow range between them. – ch. 6, “Purple: The Synthetic Rainbow”, p. 169

Purple’s rarity in nature explains its imperial associations: it was very difficult and costly to prepare the purple dye for the togas of Roman emperors: “a pound of the finest Tyrian purple was priced at up to 150,000 denarii – seventy-five times more expensive than saffron, more than twice as expensive as gold and five times the price of a healthy male slave.” (p. 170) Century after century, purple remained rare and expensive. And then chemists in the nineteenth century learned to synthesize purple dyes and “mauve mania” began: “In the 1860s, mauve migrated from dresses, ribbons and bonnets to morning suits, school uniforms, wallpapers, leather-bound books, household appliances, even confectionery.” (p. 175)

In short, purple became what you could call hue-biquitous. But one of the decadent writers of the fin de siècle fought back, turning the huebiquity of purple back on itself. And back on humanity: purple outlives people. Fox devotes an entire section of this chapter to “THE PURPLE CLOUD”, which is named after a novel by the perverse – and perverted – porphyrophile M.P. Shiel (1865-1947). In Shiel’s book, the world is engulfed in a purple cloud rather as, in reality, culture had been engulfed in mauve-mania. But the purple cloud is poisonous and empties the world of people. There’s only one survivor, who “slides into a state of maniacal decadence, travelling the empty planet in a vicious cycle of consumption and destruction.” (p. 190)

I’d long known about The Purple Cloud, but Fox’s descriptions and quotes have finally prompted me to read the book. No other color would have worked so well in the title: purple is as perverse and perverted as the anti-hero and the author. Of course, there’s also The Yellow Book, because yellow carries associations of decadence and perversion too. But purple is more powerful, in part because yellow is more primal. Fox also looks at the fascinating way color vocabularies evolve:

[V]irtually every human language developed colour terms in the same order. All began with a distinction between black and white; then created a word for red; then green followed by yellow (or sometimes yellow followed by green); and then – and only then – came blue. – ch. 4, “Blue: Beyond the Horizon”, p. 113

Color is a big subject and Fox does an excellent job of guiding his readers on a grand tour of its marvels and magic, from the science of sight to the wickedness of white, from the boundlessness of black to the beyondness of blue.

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Previously Pre-Posted on Papyrocentric Performativity

• Chrome Tome — a review of Kassia St Clair’s The Secret Lives of Colour (2018)
• Be Ear Now — a review of Trevor Cox’s Sonic Wonderland: A Scientific Odyssey of Sound (2015)

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Mini Miki

Maximal Mikita: The Mostly Morbid Memoirs of Mikita Brottman, Mikita Brottman (HarperCollins 2024)

[This is a guest-review by Dr Reuben Silberschwanz]

Apology by Donald Trump.

Autobiography by Mikita Brottman.

At the end of 2023, those two would have been right at the top of my list of Things-That-Ain’t-Never-Gonna-Happen.

I mean, c’mon, look at the facts.

If there’s one thing that Donald Trump has made abundantly clear down the decades, it’s that he’s a malignant narcissist.

And do malignant narcissists issue apologies?

No, they don’t.

Sure enough, Donald Trump has never issued any kind of apology for his crypto-fascist assault on the very foundations of American democracy.

Indeed, far from issuing an apology, he’s currently preparing for another and worse crypto-fascist assault on the very foundations of American democracy.

As for Mikita Brottman: if there’s one thing that she has made abundantly clear down the decades, it’s that she doesn’t like talking about herself.

And do people-who-don’t-like-talking-about-themselves write autobiographies?

No, they don’t.

I mean, the whole point of an autobiography is that you talk about yourself. The clue’s in the word: autobiography. It’s not allo-biography, writing about the life of another. It’s auto-biography, writing about the life of oneself. And Mikita doesn’t like talking about herself. You’ll learn a hundred-and-one fascinating things whilst reading one of Mikita’s many previous books, but you’ll learn very little, if anything, about Mikita herself. She’s the living refutation of an atrocious accusation recently levelled by the evil and unacceptable Vox Day against the fairer sex (trigger warning for toxic sexism):

[T]he concept of female solipsism is derived from the philosophical concept of solipsism, which is the perspective that the self is the only reality. […] Female solipsism can therefore be described thusly: the female tendency to perceive all things solely as they relate to and affect her. […] This female tendency toward self-centric perception is readily observable in casual conversation, so you can easily test it for yourself. Throw in a new topic at random at any point and see how fast the woman being addressed is able to discover a tangent and utilize it in a manner that allows them to turn the conversation back to themselves. – “What is Female Solipsism?”

Any half-way competent Freudian will readily recognize that Day is projecting his own unacceptable characteristics onto the Other. It’s men who are solipsistic and self-obsessed, not women. And particularly not that woman called Mikita Brottman. As I can never repeat often enough: she doesn’t like talking about herself. Her given name is richly ironic: she shoulda been called He-kita or She-kita, not Me-kita.

Got that?

If you have, you’ll understand why, at the end of 2023, I would’ve put “Apology by Donald Trump” and “Autobiography by Mikita Brottman” right at the top of my list of Things-That-Ain’t-Never-Gonna-Happen.

So, at the beginning of 2024, what happens?

Mikita Brottman publishes an autobiography.

You could have knocked me down with a feather.

I’d got it wrong.

Very wrong.

Very, very, very wrong.

Or so I thought.

But when I got my sticky paws on a copy of Maximal Mikita and began to read, I realized that I hadn’t got it so wrong.

The book proved to be not so much autobiography after all. Nah, it’s much more allobiography (y’know, allo, “other”, mentioned it above). The title of these alleged memoirs is obviously ironic. You don’t get maximal Mikita, you get minimal Mikita and, for example, maximal Miriam in the chapter Mikita devotes to the friendship she forged at Oxford with the soon-to-be notorious underground psychoanalyst Dr Miriam B. Stimbers:

I first met Miriam at an end-of-term party organized by the English faculty. She came up to me swaying dangerously, waved (and sprayed) a glass of cheap Chilean wine in my face, and slurred in an instantly unforgettable Glaswegian accent: “Darling! That hair! That skin! Those teeth! You must be a Morrissey fan!”

I laughed and admitted that, yes, I was a Morrissey fan. Miriam clapped me on the back and threw up on my shoes. I soon learned that she got drunk very easily and very quickly. When I travelled later to Glasgow to meet her parents and younger brother, it would become distressingly apparent that alcohol was a core component in a heaped-up host of familial pathologies. – chapter 3, “Of Hypoxia and Heresiarchs”, pg. 84

Mikita then proceeds to write for pages and pages about Miriam, not about herself. As I said: allobiography, not autobiography. This isn’t a me-moir: it’s a he-moir and she-moir. You get only the outlines of Mikita’s life, not the intimacies and intricacies. As I may have mentioned once or twice already: Mikita doesn’t like talking about herself.

But so what? It might not be a genuine autobiography, but it’s a mighty fine read regardless. I’m already certain that, come December, Maximal Mikita is going to be one of my picks of the year.

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• Dr Reuben Silberschwanz is the Pedro L. González Professor of High-Energy Physics at the University of Seattle

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Gnostalgie du Perdu

Gnosticism: An Anthology, ed. Robert M. Grant (Collins 1961)

I’ve always been fascinated by gnosticism. But that’s a bit like saying I’ve always been fascinated by invertebrates. Spiders are invertebrates. So are butterflies. And centipedes. And octopuses. And jellyfish. Invertebrates are a very big and varied group and so were the gnostics. In both cases, the groups are more defined by what-they’re-not than what they have in common. Invertebrates aren’t vertebrates; gnostics weren’t mainstream Christians.

That’s what gives gnostics so much of their glamorous appeal. They have the romance of rebels, of outsiders, of heretics persecuted by a cruel and power-hungry establishment. And they vanished long ago, leaving behind only legends, rare texts, and the polemics of their enemies. So there’s a gnostalgie du perdu about them – a gnostalgia of the lost. But perhaps Christianity as we know it today could easily have lost the battle for supremacy in the early days. And one of the glamorous gnostic sects could have won supremacy and become the mainstream, the staid and conventional orthodoxy against which the glamor of gnosticism is still defined. Not that mainstream Christianity is staid and conventional when you look at it properly. At the center of Christian ritual is the eating and drinking of the flesh and blood of God. Where on earth did that come from?

From nowhere on earth, according to Christians. It came from Heaven, from God Himself. But some gnostics thought that the God of the Old Testament was a usurper, an ignorant and arrogant spirit who ruled the material world and didn’t realize that there was a true God above him. That’s one of the ideas you can find in Gnosticism: An Anthology, which brings together a bewildering variety of gnostic and anti-gnostic texts, all the way from a biography of Simon Magus to a critique of the Sethian-Ebionites by the Christian scholar Irenaeus to the Gospel of Mary in Coptic. Except that it’s not in Coptic: it’s translated into English, like everything else. That was one of the disappointments of the book, for me. It isn’t seriously scholarly, more like a popular compendium for interested amateurs. There’s no use of Greek or Coptic script and there’s little reference to the original languages behind the translations.

Then again, can even the greatest modern scholars make much of some gnostic texts in the original languages? To outsiders, some of them may always have seemed like gibberish:

When all these things had been fashioned, another Archon arose from the mixture of seeds; he was greater than everything below him except the Sonship which had been left below, but he was much inferior to the first Archon. This Archon too is called ineffable. His place is called the Seven, and he is the governor and fashioner of everything below.[…] This is the emanation of the Father and his revelation to his Aeons. He revealed his hidden self and explained it. Who is it who exists if it is not the Father himself? All the spaces are his emanations. – Basilides’ System, pg. 129

There is a perfect pre-existent Aeon, dwelling in the invisible and unnameable elevations, this is the Pre-Beginning and Forefather and Depth. He is uncontainable and invisible, eternal and ungenerated in quiet and in deep solitude for infinite aeons. With him is Thought, which is also called Grace and Silence. Once upon a time, Depth thought of emitting from himself a Beginning of All, like a seed, and he deposited this projected emission, as in a womb, in that Silence who is with him. Silence received this seed, and became pregnant and bore mind, which resembled and was equal to him who emitted him. Mind alone comprehends the magnitude of his Father: he is called Only-Begotten and Father and Beginning of all. Along with him, Truth was emitted; this makes the first four, the root of all: Depth and Silence, then Mind and Truth. – The Valentinian System of Ptolomaeus, pg. 163

The Saviour, who is from all, is the All because of the expression “All, a male, which opens the womb” [Luke 2:23]; he, being the All, opened the womb of the Desire of the suffering Aeon [Sophia] and banished it [desire] outside the Pleroma; this Desire is the second Eight. … Limit has two modes of operation, confirming and dividing. As he confirms and strengthens, he is Cross; so when he divides and delimits, he is Limit. – The Valentinian System of Ptolomaeus, pg. 169

Reading stuff like that, I was reminded of Evelyn Waugh’s mockery of gnosticism in Helena (1950), his historical novel about St Helena, the mother of the Emperor Constantine and discoverer of the True Cross. In one scene, Waugh portrays a scholar called Marcias, alleged to be a “Gnostic of the highest distinction”, as he lectures to a group of rich but foolish women in Rome:

“Sophia,” he was saying, “who, as Astarte, abandoned her flesh in Tyre, and as Helena was the partner of Simon, the Standing One, she, of many forms, who is the last and darkest of the thirty Aeons of Light and by her presumptuous love became mother of the seven material rulers. […] All things are double one against another,” said Marcias and Minervina nodded. “So the things of error come, then the Gnosis intervenes. Dosithus knew himself not to be the Standing One, acknowledged his error, and in his knowledge was made one with the mensual twenty-nine, and with Helena, the thirtieth half-one, who is both mother and bride of Adam the primal.” […]

The hostess said her words of thanks: “I am sure we are all a great deal clearer than we were on this important topic. The lecturer has kindly consented to answer any questions.”

No one spoke immediately.

Then: “I was not quite sure whether you said that the Demiurge was an Aeon.”

“No, madam. It was one of the aims of my poor discourse to demonstrate that he was not.”

“Oh, thank you.” – Helena, ch. VI

Yes, Marcias is a charlatan and Helena sees right through his nonsense. Waugh was contrasting the smoke-and-mirrors of gnosticism with the clarity and solidity of Catholic Christianity. Gnosticism flitted away into mists of speculation and offered nothing substantial; Christianity was set in real history and offered real salvation. Or that’s how Waugh saw it. When I read some of the texts in Gnosticism: An Anthology I was inclined to agree with him about the absurdity and mistiness of gnosticism. Or some of it anyway. But even the seemingly silliest gnosticism has its charms. Who wouldn’t be charmed (and intrigued) by a passage like this?

But the Phrygians further say that the Father of All is an almond, [amygdalos] – not the tree, they say, but that pre-existent almond which has within itself the perfect fruit, palpating [so to speak] and moving in the interior; it rent its own womb and brought forth its own invisible and unnameable and ineffable child, of which we are speaking. To rend [amyxia] is to tear and cut through, just as physicians call “scarifications” [amychas] the incisions which they make in inflamed bodies or in those which contain some tumour. Thus the Phrygians give the name “almond” to the being from which the invisible one came forth and was begotten, “through whom everything came into existence and apart from him the non-existent was made” [John 1:3] – the Naasene Exegesis from Hippolytus’ Refutation of All Heresies, pp. 113-4

“Pre-existent almond” is a wonderful phrase and justifies reading the book on its own. So do resounding gnostic names like Harmozel and Thauthabaoth. You can find lots more of the glamor and absurdity of gnosticism here, but deciding how much of the absurdity was real and how much just apparent is another matter. A lot of gnosticism seems as though it could be used by a modern con-artist or fit straight into a mad modern cult in California. But is it fair to think that it was consciously fake? I’d say we’re too far away in time and have too little original material to know for sure about many things. But perhaps more texts will emerge from the deserts of Egypt or Israel and more light will be shed on these strange cults and baffling doctrines. In the meantime, the gnostalgie du perdu will continue give those cults and doctrines their possibly spurious appeal.

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Tight-Trope Man

The Tightrope Men, Desmond Bagley (1973)

In a way, I read J.G. Ballard and Philip K. Dick before I ever opened one of their books. That’s because I read The Tightrope Men before I read anything by Ballard or Dick. It isn’t one of the best thrillers ever written, but it does have one of the best openings. It’s a Ballardean or Dickean opening, because it’s about alienation and uncertain identity and the way a simple shift in perspective can make the everyday seems exotic, unsettling, even angst-ridden and anguishing.

So how does the book open? The protagonist, an English film-director called Giles Denison, wakes up in a foreign hotel with someone else’s face, someone else’s dental work, and someone else’s identity. The driving licence and cheque-book he finds in the hotel-room belong to Harold Feltham Meyrick. And there’s luggage monogrammed “HFM”. Denison has no idea how he got there, no idea who Meyrick is, and no idea what is going on. And his memories of his real self – or what he thinks of as his real self – are incomplete and disturbing.

Bagley does a good job of setting the scene and describing Denison’s initial bewilderment and fear. In fact, he does too good a job, because the rest of the book comes as an anticlimax. It’s almost as though Philip K. Dick or J.G. Ballard has written the first few chapters, unsettling and intriguing the reader and promising good things to come. But then someone like Jeffrey Archer takes over and turns things banal and boring.

So banal that, coming back to the book in 2023, I found I had completely forgotten the final two-thirds. But I’ve never forgotten the opening since I first read it as a kid in the 1970s. In fact, I’ve realized that The Tightrope Men has been an important influence on my own writing. This bit, for example:

Denison sat down, switched on the table lamp, and picked up one of the silver coins. The head depicted in profile was that of a fleshy man with a prow of a nose; there was something of the air of a Roman emperor about him. The wording was simple: OLAV.V.R. Denison turned the coin over to find a prancing horse and the inscription I KRONE. NORGE.

Norway!

Denis began to feel his mind spin again and he bent forward as a sudden stomach cramp hit him. He laid down the coin and held his head in his hands until he felt better. Not a lot better, but marginally so. – chapter 2

I first read that as a kid, maybe when I was eleven or twelve. And re-reading it decades later I realize that I’ve been influenced by it ever since. There’s what you might call a tight trope there: a shift in perspective and a new language mean that a simple, everyday object like a coin has suddenly become exotic, alienating, fear-inspiring. So Bagley was a tight-trope man. But I hope that one thing that hasn’t influenced me in The Tightrope Men is the banality of Bagley’s prose. There’s an example of it in the quote above: “Not a lot better, but marginally so.”

Bagley’s ideas were often very clever; his prose and plots were sometimes very clumsy. In this, he was the reverse of his great rival Alistair MacLean, another best-selling thriller-writer of the 1970s and ’80s. MacLean wrote tautly and compellingly, but he never came up with anything to match the opening of The Tightrope Men. And MacLean never made an observation to match one made by Bagley in The Spoilers (1969): that a beautiful villainess is wearing a bikini that weighs less than the sunglasses through which she’s surveying the hero.

That’s a highly erotic image, but in an unexpected and offbeat way. Bagley’s mind worked in an unusual way: he saw things that other thriller-writers didn’t. Part of this came from his interest in mathematics and computing, which often pop up in his books. The Spoilers also has some quirky stuff about probability in it. I didn’t notice or appreciate Bagley’s mathematical side when I was a kid. I do now. Or I try to, at least. The Spoilers is a better read than The Tightrope Men in part because it doesn’t have such a good opening, so the rest of the book isn’t an anticlimax. But in one way it’s definitely like The Tightrope Men and most of Bagley’s other books. That because it’s partly a wish-fulfilment fantasy for its male author and male readers. MacLean’s books are like that too. In The Tightrope Men, Denison is middle-aged and a bit overweight. But he fights his way very competently out of two early attempts on his life. And here’s one of the other characters discussing him and the mystery of his new identity:

“That man there is not Meyrick. I know Meyrick – he fights with his tongue and uses sarcasm as a weapon, but if you put him in a real fight he’d collapse. Denison is a quiet-spoken, civil man who, in an emergency, seems to have the instincts of a born killer. He’s the antithesis of Meyrick.” – chapter 17

That’s a wish-fulfilment fantasy. Who doesn’t like to think that they’d react well in an emergency? But the other big flaw of The Tightrope Men is that the thesis of Meyrick and the antithesis of Denison are never brought together, so there’s never a synthesis. In other words, Denison and Meyrick never meet, so the reader never gets to see how two men with the same face and opposite personalities react to each other. Why didn’t Bagley synthesize and bring the two men together? I don’t know. It’s such an obvious thing to do and if it had been done well, it would’ve improved the book a lot.

Cruder but compellinger: a 1970s cover for the book

In fact, he seems to have deliberately removed any chance of Denison meeting Meyrick, because he kills Meyrick off without letting him appear on-stage at all. Perhaps Bagley doubted his own ability to adequately describe a meeting between the two men. If so, perhaps he was right. Desmond Bagley wasn’t good at prose, but he came up with some excellent ideas and sometimes managed to transcend his genre. If you try The Tightrope Men, I can’t guarantee that you’ll make it to the end or that you’ll remember what happens if you do. But I can guarantee that you’ll never forget the first three chapters.

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Spare on a Me-String

Spare, Prince Harry (Penguin 2023)

“Try walking in my shoes,” as the Mighty ’Mode once put it. “You’d stumble in my footsteps,” they continued. Those wise words are worth bearing in mind if you happen to read the autobiography of Prince Harry, second son of Charles and Diana. He was a spare to the heir, Charles’ and Diana’s first son, Prince William. Hence the title of the book. I didn’t seek it out, but when it recently crossed my path I gave it a go. And I enjoyed it despite the clichés and the clumsiness. You get an insider’s account of what it’s like to be a member of the royal family, although it’s obvious that Prince Harry didn’t write it.

And what is it like to be a member of the royal family? Not fun, despite the luxury and the privilege. Prince Harry is a nobody who became a somebody by accident of birth. As a somebody, he’s been very interesting to the British media and the paparazzi they employ, in all their slime and deplorability. Understandably, he blames the paps for his mother’s death and despises them for the way they behaved as she lay dying. When Harry finally asks to see photos of the car-crash that killed his mother, this is what he discovers:

At last I came to the photos of Mummy. There were lights around her, auras, almost halos. How strange. The colour of the lights was the same colour as her hair – golden. I didn’t know what the lights were, I couldn’t imagine, though I came up with all sorts of supernatural explanations.

As I realized their true origin, my stomach clenched.

Flashes. They were flashes. And within some of them were ghostly visages, and half visages, paps and reflected paps and refracted paps on all the smooth metal surfaces and glass windscreens. Those men who’d chased her… they’d never stopped shooting her while she lay between the seats, unconscious or semiconscious, and in their frenzy they’d sometimes accidentally photographed each other. Not one of them was checking on her, offering her help, not even comforting her. They were just shooting, shooting, shooting. […] I hadn’t been aware, before this moment, that the last thing Mummy saw on this earth was a flashbulb. – chapter 52

Harry had hated cameras and the paparazzi who wielded them long before he saw those photos of his dying mother. It’s impossible to blame him. Again and again, the media have spied on him and lied about him and caused the break-up of his relationships. Unfortunately, you can blame him for using the book to do more than just explain himself and allow outsiders to understand the difficulties of his life and his attempts to overcome them. This book plays a plaintive air on a me-string. There’s too much self-pity and auto-exculpation, too little regard for the privacy of his own family, and some outright bitchiness. The book opens by describing a meeting Harry had with his father and brother after his grandfather’s funeral. The meeting didn’t go well, although, as usual, Harry doesn’t think he was to blame:

He stood between us, looking at our flushed faces: Please, boys – don’t make my final years a misery.

His voice sounded raspy, fragile. It sounded, if I’m being honest, old. […] I looked at Willy, really looked at him, maybe for the first time since we were boys. I took it all in: his familiar scowl, which had always been his default in his dealings with me; his alarming baldness, more advanced than my own; his famous resemblance to Mummy, which was fading with time. With age. – chapter 1

Miaow! I detected Meghan’s claws again and again in Spare. If Diana’s biggest mistake was marrying Charles, then Harry’s biggest mistake was marrying Meghan. When he attended a fancy-dress party in Nazi uniform, he was foolish. When he played pool in the nude in front of strangers, he was foolish again. When he married Meghan, he went skinny-dipping in a pool of hungry piranhas with raw steak strapped to his buttocks and bollocks. Okay, I yield to no-one in terms of my core commitment to maximal membership of the hardcore anti-racist community. Absolutely no-one. But Meghan’s sacred Blackness should not give her a pass in terms of key issues around toxic troublemaking. She is Black, yes, and I honor and respect her for that. But she’s also an actress and attention-seeker. She likes drama. When she’s wrung all the drama she can out of being married to Harry, she’ll wring some more out of getting divorced from Harry.

That’s my prediction, anyway. Either way, Harry was stupid to marry her and stupid to allow her to influence this book for the worse. I think the real author, someone called J.R. Moehringer, was already intent on exploiting Harry for his own ends, but Meghan added some extra spite. Harry will regret Spare big-time one day and I hope his family can forgive him for it. Like most other people, if I’d tried walking in Harry’s shoes, I’d’ve done worse in some ways and better in others. I’m very glad I never had to try. And although I could’ve read more important books or done more useful things with the time I’ve given to Spare, here’s some auto-exculpation of my own. I started this review with the Mighty ’Mode; I’ll end it with the Titanic Terence: Homo sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto.

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Angst in Acky

The Boy with the Perpetual Nervousness: A Memoir of an Adolescence, Graham Caveney (Picador 2017)

Headpress CEO Kegsy Korpesku once told me about how he had deceived someone with a bit of verbal equivocation. Kegsy added: “Bloody Catholic upbringing!” It was his Catholic upbringing that had taught him to be dishonest like that, you see. Auberon Waugh has a similar story about equivocating with his mother Evelyn. He too comments that he learned his dishonesty from his Catholic upbringing. I’ve seen the same kind of thing in other people and noticed the way that being brought up Catholic tends to encourage slime-sniffing, scopophilia and spying.

As Kegsy Korpesku also says: “You don’t shake a Catholic upbringing!” I’m glad I didn’t have one. And I’m particularly glad I didn’t have one like Graham Caveney’s. His Catholic upbringing in the 1970s didn’t make him adept at dishonesty and deceit. Instead, it drove him to drink and depression. As an adolescent, he was sexually abused by a Catholic priest and he’s never got over it. This autobiography describes the who and the how and the where. It also attempts to explain the why. Caveney wants to know why the priest picked on him. Well, he already knows some of why. He was young and intelligent and bookish and vulnerable. And the priest was charismatic and respected. Caveney’s parents never suspected what was going on. They were positively eager for their son to spend time with the priest, both in their home-town of Accrington and elsewhere, because they thought it was an honor and a privilege for him to take so much interest in their son and offer him help with his education. He was a bright boy, after all, and he’d be able to do what they had never done: go to university and enter the wider world.

When he did that, he realized what a small world Accrington was, but part of the interest of this book is not autobiographical but anthropological. Or rather, it’s anthropology through autobiography, because Caveney can describe Accrington and its culture with both an insider’s insight and an outsider’s eye. He talks about the Lancashire saying “It’ll be reet” and the way it was used to console and cure both the minor and the major misfortunes of life. But he couldn’t use it to console and cure himself: after the abuse started, nothing was ever “reet” again. And it never has been, he says. He was fucked up by being fucked at the wrong age by the wrong person of the wrong sex. He was trying to lead a normal adolescence while abnormal things were happening to him. I felt sorry for him and wish that he’d been able to get over what he went through. After all, people have been through much worse and coped with it much better. But that’s easy for me to say and I think I would have coped less well than Caveney if the same things had happened to me.

I’m glad they didn’t. And I’m glad I didn’t have a Catholic upbringing. But am I glad to have read this book and learned more about what it’s to have experiences like those and go through an upbringing like that? No, because “glad” isn’t the right word. Instead, I’d say I’m grateful. I’m also grateful that The Boy with the Perpetual Nervousness is well-written and intelligent. It has deserved the success it’s had and I hope that Graham Caveney one day finds the consolation and the cure he’s been seeking.

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Previously Pre-Posted on Papyrocentric Performativity…

• Caveat Lector — Auberon Waugh and the effects of his Catholic upbringing

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Wrecks & Drugs & Rock & Roll

Bodies: Life and Death in Music, Ian Winwood (Faber 2022)

An interesting and eye-opening book. If you’re in a band, you’ll find it much easier to become a mental and physical wreck than to become a millionaire. Indeed, you’ll find it easier to become a mental and physical wreck than to earn a living. Ian Curtis, Kurt Cobain and Amy Winehouse weren’t the average when they died so young and with so much promise unfulfilled, but they weren’t anomalies either. There is a lot of mental illness among rock musicians. And among rock journalists too. Ian Winwood has seen addiction from the inside. He’s drunk too much, snorted too much and chased sensation too much.

That’s why he tried to kill himself and ended up in a mental hospital. So when he writes about rock musicians who’ve trodden the same perilous path, he knows some of what they’re going through. But he doesn’t know performance from the inside and he admits his own complicity, as a journo, in wanting to hear and write stories about bad behavior and difficult lives. Maybe music attracts vulnerable people before piling the pressure on them. Or maybe music makes people vulnerable. The high of being on stage only lasts while you’re on stage. That must be part of why musicians pursue other highs when they’re off-stage.

But the more you chase chemical highs, the more you invite psychological lows. Winwood looks at that truism playing out with everyone from Metallica to Frank Turner. He has interesting stories to tell about them and interesting stories to tell about himself. Unfortunately, I found his prose tough at times. I was reminded of what Frank Zappa once said: “Rock journalism is people who can’t write, interviewing people who can’t talk, in order to provide articles for people who can’t read.” Winwood can write well sometimes, but he admits in the credits that he has “an occasionally distant relationship with the rules of grammar.” He’s thanking a copy-editor for saving him from himself when he says that, but there are still some spectacular hanging participles in the published book. This was the best, or worst, of them: “Amy [Winehouse] was taken from her place of death to a post-mortem at St Pancras Coroner’s Court. Required by Jewish law to be buried after three days, the gang at the morgue got a wriggle on.”

Pity the poor gang at the morgue, rushing to finish their work before they get popped in the ground. Alas, Winwood’s bad writing isn’t an anomaly in rock journalism either. A few journos like Alex Petridis write consistently well, but the pretentious Guardianista dreck at the Quietus is closer to the average. And Winwood is closer to the Quietus than to Petridis. Plus, Bodies doesn’t have an index. I read all of it and I learned a lot from it, but it could have been a lot better.

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In the Bland of the Blind

An Unexplained Death: The True Story of a Body at the Belvedere, Mikita Brottman (Canongate 2018)

This is the second Mikita-Brottman book I’ve tried and the second Mikita-Brottman book I’ve failed to finish. It’s a much better book than Crossing to Kill (2003), but that doesn’t make it any good. The title is uninspired and so is the book. If Mikita is as bland in person as she is in print, I’m not surprised by her complaint that she’s “invisible” to many people. They meet her, then fail to recognize her when they meet her again. Understandably, Mikita doesn’t like this, but there are worse things to suffer in life.

I spotted some of those worse things as I read the book. Or rather: I failed to spot them. Yes, there’s a deep unacknowledged irony at the heart of An Unexplained Death, because even as Mikita was complaining about her own invisibility and the erasure of her personhood, she was invisibilizing others and erasing their personhood.

And unlike privileged white Mikita, those invisibilized others lead genuinely difficult lives and suffer from genuine injustice. This book is about Mikita’s life in the luxurious Belvedere Hotel in an American city called Baltimore. Maybe you’ve heard of Baltimore? Ah, you have heard of it. And what does Baltimore mean to you? That’s right: Baltimore is world-famous both for the rich, vibrant culture of its Black community and for the suffering of that community, whose Black bodies are under 24/7/52 assault by the hegemonic forces of white racism and white supremacy.

Mikita Brottman has lived in the Black-majority city of Baltimore for over ten years. She has been surrounded by both the rich, vibrant culture of the Black community and the suffering of the Black community for every second of those more-than-ten-years – that’s more than 315,360,000 seconds. But does she deign to notice the slightest crumb of that Black culture or the slightest tear-drop of that Black suffering in this book about her more-than-ten-years in Baltimore? You guessed it: she doesn’t. Or at least, not that I saw in what I read of An Unexplained Death. I didn’t see her reference the Black community once. Not once. So one thing is for certain: she did not center the Black community in her book about Baltimore, as she would have done if she had any decency and compassion.

Instead, Mikita Brottman centered herself and her tony world of white privilege. It’s true that, yes, the “Unexplained Death” of the title references a Hispanic male, Rey O. Rivera, who died by falling from the roof of the Belvedere. But Rivera was a rich, white-adjacent Hispanic businessman. What about the many, many Black victims of “unexplained death” in Baltimore? Mikita obviously doesn’t care about them. She doesn’t identify with them and she can’t use them as a mirror for her own neuroses and self-obsessions. So can you wonder that I felt sickened to my stomach, repeatedly, as I read the book? I kept thinking to myself: “You ain’t a Mikita, baby: you’re a go’damn Karen.”

But even if I hadn’t been sickened by the book and its white-centered self-obsession, I wouldn’t have found it any easier to read. The main story, of Brottman’s search for the truth about Rivera’s death, just wasn’t interesting. Not to me, anyway. I found myself skipping forward to the digressions Brottman sprinkles through the book. She talks about everything from vultures and their unsavory thermoregulation techniques to how a mouse can survive a fall that would shatter a human being or liquefy a horse. Those were the best bits, for me, but they didn’t last long enough to rescue the book from its white-centeredness or redeem Brottman’s sickening invisibilization of Baltimore’s Black community.

I don’t think anything could ever redeem that. And inevitably I found myself comparing Miki with Miri. And Miki did not come well out of the comparison. What am I talking about and whom am I comparing with whom? I’m talking about Mikita Brottman and Miriam Stimbers, and I’m comparing the former with the latter. Mikita Brottman and Miriam Stimbers were both bright young Britishers from humble backgrounds who, by dint of sheer cerebral effort and dogged determination, won scholarships to study English Literature at Oxford University. First they did a BA, then they did an MA (probably), then they did a PhD, then they entered the wider world.

And it was now that both Mikita and Miriam faced the same stark and simple choice. Either they could embrace white supremacy, exploit their white privilege, and coast to success in terms of the literary world. Or they could oppose white supremacy, refuse to exploit their white privilege, and achieve success only and entirely on merit. I am afraid to say that Mikita chose the former course. Miriam, in complete contrast, chose the latter.

But it was not the first time that their life-trajectories had divagated in terms of core ethical dilemmas. During her time at Oxford, Mikita had written for Headpress, the journal of strangeness and esoterica overseen by committed counter-culturalist, proud Gypsy and unashamed gargoyle-fan David Kerekes. Miriam, however, had refused to write for Headpress, on the ground that Kezza, although a proud Gypsy and unashamed gargoyle-fan, was nevertheless a dim but devious adolescent voyeur, like a cross between a Daily-Mail reader and a necrophile.

In short, Miriam was prepared to take an ethical stand. Mikita was not. Sad to say, after she wrote for Headpress, Mikita’s embracement of white supremacy and ruthless exploitment of her white privilege came as no surprise to perceptive observers. Having moved to America, the headquarters of white supremacy, Mikita became the life-partner of a rich and successful white writer, acquired a well-connected white literary agent, and began to write acclaimed but underwhelming white-centered books like An Unexplained Death. But when Miriam moved to America, things were very different. In complete contrast to Mikita, Miriam became the life-partner of a member of the Black academic community, the proud Black-African Diasporan Dr Nigel M. Goldbaum, acquired a Black literary agent, Rebecca Rubinberg, and began to write masterpieces like Jane in Blood: Castration, Clitoridolatry and Communal Cannibalism in the Novels of Jane Austen (TransVisceral Books 2021).

But Miriam’s masterpieces have not enjoyed a tenth of the success nor received a hundredth of the exposure of Mikita’s mediocrities. Why not? It’s simple. Miriam is fighting white supremacy and rejecting her white privilege, rather then embracing white supremacy and exploiting the hell out of her white privilege. That’s for why. Mikita’s An Unexplained Death is a case in point. It has an uninspired title and it’s an uninspired book. But it’s been much more successful and been much more extravagantly praised than all of Miriam’s masterpieces put together. In the land of white supremacy, the Karen is Queen.

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Previously Pre-Posted on Papyrocentric Performativity…

• Cannibal HolocAusten — Miriam Stimbers and Rebecca Rubinberg interrogate issues around Jane in Blood: Castration, Clitoridolatry and Communal Cannibalism in the Novels of Jane Austen (2021)

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Chrome Tome

The Secret Lives of Colour, Kassia St Clair (John Murray 2018)

This book is going to be good, I thought when I picked it up. So good that I felt an urge to write a glowing review of it before I’d read it. After all, it was going to combine two of my favorite things: colors and words. Just by flicking through it I could see that. There were sections with titles like “Amaranth” and “Chrome Yellow” and “Magenta” and “Emerald” and “Vantablack”. And each page of a section had a broad stripe of the relevant color down one edge. Colors and words! I was going to enjoy the book a lot and it would be one of the best I’d ever read.

And I did enjoy the book a lot. OK, it wasn’t as good as I hoped it would be, but it easily passed the test I apply to everything I read. Do I want to read it again? Yes, I do. It’s an instructive and entertaining book. The story of color is also the story of culture and clothing. In recent centuries, it’s the story of chemistry too. I’ve found myself looking at classical art in a new way since finishing the book, because Kassia St Clair writes a lot about painters and their search to find and fix new colors on canvas. But there are no illustrations in this book: just black type on white paper and pure strips or spots of color. Well, at the beginning of each chapter, the names of the colors are printed in the colors themselves. It doesn’t look very good or feel very good in the brain. I like the colors and the words to be separate, like flowers and bees. The words should buzz around the colors, sipping their nectar but never exhausting it.

And sometimes words desert a color and buzz off to another: the shifts in color-vocabulary are interesting. But even more interesting are the expansion in color-vocabulary and the different ways different languages divide the spectrum. Color is one of the joys of life and this book is a joy to read.

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