Thrillin’ While We’re Chillin’

Dismal winter weather getting you down? Yes?……….

In lieu of a foreign holiday in exotic climes, I’m pinning my escapist hopes on re-reading some high-octane, pacey thrillers from yesteryear. Central library is packing a bulging display of goodies from the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s including some thriller writing greats: Alistair MacLean, Desmond Bagley, Hammond Innes, Ian Fleming, Gavin Black etc.

So if you see yourself as the resourceful man/woman-alone hero type pitting  your wits against foreign agents and megalomaniacs seeking total world domination, fancy the odd saucy encounter with beautiful, mysterious women/men, want to drive fast cars and visit glamorous locations, head into Popular for your thriller fix. Or failing that you could book a holiday somewhere nice instead, I hear Monte is to die for at this time of year dahling!

 

Lost tales

Tales Before Narnia

I’ve never been a big one for short stories but when perusing the New Titles last month I was struck by this one – Tales Before Narnia – the roots of modern fantasy and science fiction. To be honest I wasn’t sure what to expect but having taken a week off to loaf around home I thought some stories that I could pick up and put down would be a good distraction.

And it was. The tales vary in length immensely but most can be read in a short sitting and were mostly fantasy with a couple of early science fiction stories that could almost be classified as steam-punk now. Many of the stories were first published in the 19th century, one or two even older, and the one that I particularly enjoyed, Undine (1811) had the feeling of almost Arthurian literature. There are tales by Longfellow, Hans Christian Andersen (The Snow Queen), William Morris, Robert Louis Stevenson, Tolkien, Dickens, Kipling and some less well known authors.

Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun

On reading the introduction I discovered that the editor, Douglas A. Anderson, had previously edited a similar book of Tales Before Tolkien, which the library has a copy of at Akaroa library. But that will have to wait because first I have to read the new Tolkien book The Legend of Sigurd & Gudrun. This has just been published and is Tolkien’s version of the Norse sagas of the Volsungs and of the Niflungs, both from the Elder or Poetic Edda. This will be my third version of this story having read it as the Volsung Saga, and also as the 12th century Germanic version The Nibelungenlied – if you want full immersion try Wagner’s Ring Cycle opera, based on the same story.

The new Tolkien version is written as a poem. Translations often lose this element but this is not a translation. These poems, there are two, have never before been published, in fact for a while Tolkien thought he’d lost them. It’s presented with a lot of additional material including the text of a lecture on the Poetic Edda that he gave at Oxford University, a bit of history of the story itself, and commentary.

And if epic heroic poetry interests you let me also recommend Seamus Heaney’s award-winning translation of the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf which we have on CD so you can hear the poet (Heaney) reading his own work.

 

Celebrity to the rescue … or maybe not

I’ve been gleefully devouring Hello magazine since the early 1990s, while simultaneously despising every celebrity sell-my-story sad-sack in there. This dual love/loathing for celebrity culture creates contradictory forces which miraculously, in my case, seem to live in happy co-existence. Yes, I read, actually inhale, New Weekly but I also have “read it, enjoy it but never, ever believe it” etched onto my cortex.

I have long suspected I am not alone in this. For example highly educated and cynical librarians have many hidden shallows; the Central library staff room is groaning under the weight of frothy celebrity mags. Who needs Dostoyevsky when there is an Australian Women’s Weekly to gobble?  But one thing I cannot stomach is celebrity do-gooders, and Celebrity: How entertainers took over the world and why we need an exit strategy explains in a much more coherent and entertaining way than I ever could just exactly why people like that Bono need to shut their yappers and give world peace a wide berth.

Marina Hyde, the author of this rollicking good read, writes a celebrity column for The Guardian called Lost in Showbiz; she also mercilessly parodies celebs in a mock diary column A peek at the diary of… Like the Dr Doolittle of Celebsville, she attempts to decipher celebrity grunts and gobbledygook to find out if their forays into the world outside the movie studio or catwalk have any real meaning or long term benefit.  The resounding answer is no. Hyde then hilariously proceeds to bash celebrity in all its self-serving attempts to “give something back” or use their fame to highlight or bring focus to issues, issues they regularly fail to understand.

Hyde is a little light on answers to the celebrity conundrum: how do we get them back in their box, back to what the famous have always done well- wear sparkly frocks, go to orgies and generally brighten up our drab little lives? Nonetheless this book will make you snicker out loud and roll your eyes at the fatuous arrogance of the celluloid chosen ones. Angelina, Sharon Stone, Richard Gere etc you have been rumbled.

 

Carlos Ruiz Zafon is a god!

While wandering through a bookshop several years ago, a book happened to jump out at me (as they do on frequent occasions).  After reading the blurb my immediate thought was this book was going to be amazing and I wasn’t disappointed.  The book was called The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, a Spanish author whose work had just been translated into English.  It was one of those books that just blew me away and as soon as I opened it I was transported into post-Spanish civil war Barcelona.  The story is centred around a boy, Daniel, whose father takes him to a magical place called The Cemetery of Forgotten Books.  It is here that forgotten books come to rest and he has to choose a book to release back into the world.  He gets completely engrossed in the book and decides he must find out more about the author and so the book follows his journey of discovery with plenty of mystery, passion, books, and murder set in the misty streets of gothic Barcelona.

I got slightly obsessed with this book and when I heard he had written a prequel I couldn’t wait to get my hands on it.  This prequel, which was just released this month is called The Angel’s Game.  I have once again found myself enthralled with the magic of Barcelona and the people and place familiar to me from Shadow of the Wind.

I can’t recommend these books enough and I know I’ll be haunted by the characters  when I come to the end of The Angel’s Game.  If you want to find out more about Carlos Ruiz Zafon or The Angel’s Game have a look at the author’s website.

 

Bloomsday

June 16 is Bloomsday – a day when fans around the world celebrate the the life and works of Irish writer James Joyce, author of the novel Ulysses. The day is named after Leopold Bloom, a central character in Ulysses and the date on which all the events in the novel occur. June 16 was also the date of Joyce’s first outing with his future wife, Nora Barnacle. Love that name – it would fit a great character in a novel!

Ulysses has been surrounded by controversy over the years – it was banned in America from 1921 until 1933. The 1967 film directed by Joseph Strick was controversial in part because of the use of the “f word” and in New Zealand was shown only to gender segregated audiences! (It’s all true folks – I was there as bright eyed varsity student). I seem to have survived unscathed and managed to read my way through both Ulysses and the slighter (in size), but no less linguistically challenging, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Ulysses weighs in at over 600 pages.

The British Board of Film Classification also had problems with the film and demanded 29 cuts to remove the strong language and crude sexual references from Molly’s final soliloquy. Joseph Strick replaced all the offending footage with a blank screen and a high pitched shrieking sound. The Board relented and passed the film intact.

What makes Ulysses a challenge and a reward to read is the stream of consciousness style of writing and the richly complex language – puns, allusions, parodies – you have to keep your wits about you!

Joyce lived an interesting and peripatetic life in Europe and the library has a number of biographies and critical works.

Dublin is the centre of Bloomsday celebrations – in fact they stretch the day out to a week – find out more on the Dublin Tourism website.

 

Southern Comfort

I had one of those wonderful serendipitous moments in the library last week.  It was right near the end of my lunch break and I had about 5 minutes to find a book and it was a desperate moment as I was currently without anything to read -  a situation I find very hard to be in. I was scanning the new titles and the recently returned when I happened on Mindy Friddle’s The garden angel. 

It is every thing I love in a novel – quirky, with memorable characters and set in the South.  I haven’t quite worked out why I love books set down there but any of the books that I have read, or movies I’ve seen seem to talk to my soul and Cajun food feeds it. Mmmmm Gumbo.   At the back of the book it had a website to visit and Mindy has written a second book, so I have been in touch with the book buyers at the libraries and the dears have ordered Mindy’s second offering Secret Keepers.

But back to The garden angel, this is the abridged blurb from the book jacket:

Cutter Johanson is plucky and eccentric, nostalgic about her family’s once-glorious past. In her spare time, she gardens in the family cemetery and knits hair doilies. While writing obits for the local newspaper and waiting tables at the Pancake Palace, she is desperate to ward off potential buyers from her dilapidated ancestral homestead – and goes to extreme and often hilarious lengths to succeed. …Elizabeth Byers rarely ventures outside the brick ranch she shares with her husband, Daniel, a professor at Palmetto University. Agoraphobic and stricken with panic attacks, she fills her days gardening and writing her dissertation on Emily Dickinson. But one day, an anonymous call brings disturbing news that propels her into action…Cutter is losing her house, and Elizabeth is losing her husband. Surrounded by offbeat characters, the women pull together to seek sanctuary, only to plunge into a string of misadventures that will irreparably disrupt their lives – and the lives of others.

So grab a mint julep (always wanted to try one – maybe this summer after the wee rugrat is weaned) and a bowl of gumbo and enjoy!

 

My Man Magnus Mills

The other day I was checking if any of my fave authors have new books out. 

Dan Rhodes? Nope.
Peter Ackroyd? Yes! A big juicy book on Venice.

Venice

Everything is here: the merchants on the Rialto and the Jews in the ghetto; the mosaics of St Mark’s and the glass blowers of Murano; the carnival masks and the sad colonies of lepers; and, the doges and the destitute and the artists with their passion for colour and form – Bellini, Titian, Tintoretto, Tiepolo. There are wars and sieges, scandals and seductions, fountains playing in deserted squares and crowds thronging the markets.

Sounds tasty.

And a new book called Maintenance of the headway by Magnus Mills! Ah Magnus. Thomas Pynchon called him a demented, deadpan comic wonder. And he ain’t wrong. The Mills humour is so dry it’s positively desiccated. His unique style features pithy tales laden with black humour where people are pitted against mad processes. Bureaucracy gone mad.

For a good example of this,  there’s his book  The Scheme for Full Employment. The Independent reviewed it thus:

The story concerns a mythical Scheme whereby people are employed to drive “Univans” around all day, delivering and picking up crates. The narrator is on a circuit of seven depots and spends eight hours a day shuttling back and forth. It’s only about a third of the way through that we discover what’s in the crates: spare parts for the Univans. The work is light, agreeable and well-paid, and everyone’s very thankful to be on the Scheme: “It’s like being in a great big feather bed.”

Much is made of the fact that Brummie born Mills once drove buses for a living (read all about it in the article Why my career is back on route). And find out more about Magnus from his publisher Bloomsbury.

I reckon there’s a shortage of authors writing funny stuff so Magnus is a real catch. Can’t hardly wait to read his newbie.

 

Christopher Fowler

Christopher Fowler started off as the author of horror and fantasy short stories and novels and his imaginative skills made for first rate fiction in a genre that is regarded rather sniffily in the literary world. He turned to mysteries and combined elements of his fantasy work in a series of delightfully zany mysteries featuring two oldish sleuths, Bryant and May, usually operating in wonderfully evoked London and South England landscapes. The books would make a first rate television series but as they don’t involve forensics they will probably never reach the screen.

His very English quality comes from his background as an only – and sometimes lonely – child growing up in a working class area of South London in the early 1960s. His parents are solid decent folk but they don’t have a lot of imagination and they have ended up with a son who has imagination by the truckload. Reading books and comics, making lists (ah, the sign of all of those who had anorak childhoods), movies at the local Odeon, games and kit sets, the ludicrous horror novels of Dennis Wheatley, it’s all here.

Even if your childhood was a New Zealand one, you will recognise a lot of what he is talking about as Kiwis still talked of “home” (i.e. Britain) then and English newspapers and magazines were the staple of every bookshop. Does anyone remember the weekly compilation editions – with the brassy yellow cover – of the Daily Mirror? I loved this book for its nostalgic evocation of the British cinema (the decade before it descended into witless sex comedies featuring Robin Askwith and two decades before it was all country house Merchant Ivory films) when most films were full of character actors who could be relied upon to be much the same in every production. It’s hard to think we will look back on Ray Winstone and co with the same warm fuzzy feeling we had for the likes of Hattie Jacques and the Carry On crew. It’s not all nostalgia, however, as he tempers the book with his adult awareness of some of the sadness of his parent’s life.

And…libraries come out of this very well as young Fowler recognises how much they’d helped him: “the printed page had not imprisoned my thoughts but had given them shape and set them free.” He speaks highly of the East Greenwich Public Library where “I caught glimpses of a world beyond my experience” and was helped by a librarian who inspired his reading. She sounds  just great and not all the dull stereotype we get so sick of. The latter appears in the next book I read, a bloated doorstop thriller, “A simple act of violence” by R.J. Ellory where “the lady at the desk looked like a librarian, sounded like one too.” She speaks in “hushed tones” (of course!) and peers at the detective “over half-rimmed spectacles.” she’s about  as believable as the plot in this ridiculous conspiracy thriller.

 

Between the monster and the saint

Book signing

76 years old and on his 27th book, Richard Holloway nicknamed the “Barmy Bish” has been for me a minor revelation. I can’t say I had massively high hopes, at The Auckland Writer and Readers Festival, of super enjoying an hour listening to an ex-Bishop burble on but hey, as always I was wrong. No burbling, not much religion, tears, laughter and a full-house.

Holloway resigned from the postitons of Bishop of Edinburgh and Primus Of the Scottish Episcopal Church in 2oo0 and now terms himself  an “after-religionist”, a label he prefers over the more loaded title agnostic. He still values the role of religion but is if anything even keener now without his mitre, he threw it in a river, to ponder the big existential questions and explore the nature of humanity both good and bad.

Holloway’s latest title Between the Monster and the Saint: Reflections on the human condition looks to explain and rate the differing responses to the “big questions” and he sees four major categories: those with strong religious conviction, those with a weak religious conviction, after-religionists like Holloway himself and those that just don’t get religion at all or are even hostile towards it. Of course Mr Richard Dawkins does in Holloway’s view fall into the latter category adding that “Dawkins needs to go back on the prozac and chill out a bit”. Holloway does see a role for atheism in combatting false idolatry; likewise he strongly emphasised the importance of writers, artists and general creativity in ridiculing authority figures to expose and temper corruption.

On forgiveness

He talked briefly about his  energetic little dog Daisy and his sadness that the Christian church denies animals souls. He suggested that heaven might in fact be full of  homicidal turkeys, chickens, cows and pigs all looking for revenge, having suffered to make us fat.  Equally unappealing to him is the stereotype heaven with endless masses and choirs of angels.

The overriding message Holloway seeks to share, and he became quite emotional at this point, is the need for pity and the role of imagination in engendering empathy. Encounter with others is an essential part of understanding and with understanding comes a true humanity. At the end of the session  Aotea Centre volunteers had to almost forcibily eject several members of the audience, myself included, who had started impromtu conversations with complete strangers raving about the barmy bish, his courage and kindness.

 

Oldies and goodies

Seeing as we’re getting all nostalgic and historical round here this year, we at the Popular Centre thought it might be fun to dig around in the shelves and stacks and bring out some of those ‘oldies but goodies’ that might not get to see the light of day very often.

You know the ones I mean – the books you read as a kid (under the blankets, with a torch), or the ones you nicked from mum’s bookshelf (Peyton Place – sorry, mum!) when she thought you were reading the Hardy Boys; books read in baches on the West Coast during a rainy holiday; books that made you feel really intelligent when you were reading them (Leon Uris and Dostoyevsky, anyone?), and books that you read guiltily when you really should have been studying for that advanced physics exam.

Over the next few months we plan to bring out some of these old treasures so you too can revisit the past, renew old friendships, and maybe even make some new friends. Look out for retrospective displays of everything from early science fiction to classic 1950’s and 60’s romance (saucy or not), with a good helping of horror/western/adventure and even actual classic Classics for good measure.

Starting early next week, come and visit us on the ground floor at Central, and see what’s on display – we’ll even let you take stuff home. And if there’s anything at all that you’d just LOVE to chase down and reread, please let us know and we’ll see if we can find it for you!