Riding the Iron Rooster, by Paul Theroux
Paul Theroux is your old-fashioned sort of travel writer. Not only does he travel by train - the way real travel writers get around - but he makes a point of finding ordinary people and asking them direct questions. Someone doing this in the UK would be considered incredibly rude, but in China no-one seems to mind. They like his directness, they respond to it with direct answers. In a crowded society like theirs, values of rudeness are very different.
At almost 500 pages, this book is long and did start to drag a bit in the middle. Theroux makes a point of describing every train, and every fellow traveller, in extraordinary detail. There are things that occur often on the different journeys - people spitting in public, awful food being served (which Theroux just gets on with and eats), astounding scenery to describe. After a few of these encounters, the stories get a little repetitive.
But there’s some repetition to treasure. Theroux remarks that the Chinese often laugh, but the way they laugh means something specific. Every laugh he gets is translated into English, often hilariously:
His face became very thin with a chattering laugh that meant: “You have just asked me a tactless question but nevertheless I shall answer it.”
And there’s a lot to learn. China, being so huge, has remarkable climate variations. I didn’t know there were parts of the country that suffered such remarkable low temperatures. Theroux endures endless weeks of cold trains, cold hotels with no hot running water, cold meals served up in cold restaurant cars. He’s cold more than he’s warm.
The repetition is broken in the final chapter, in which Theroux travels to Lhasa, the capital of Chinese-occupied Tibet, in a car - because at the time there was no rail line that went there (that’s all changed now). His nervous driver, Mr Fu, causes the car to crash spectacularly in the snowy Tibetan plains, miles from anything or anyone. Theroux’s description of the crash and its aftermath, followed by his adventures in Lhasa, make for a fascinating and very different end to the book.
Labels: books
Here come the Limbersnigs marching along
I can't remember where my copy of The Limbersnigs came from, but it's been on my bookshelves since I was a very little boy.
Beautifully illustrated, it tells the story of the eponymous island race and their plucky hero, Prince Kebole, born a tiny baby and only saved from certain death by the dodgy-sounding dietary remedies of mysterious apothecary Gogo.
Having saved the Prince's life, Gogo promptly decides that the young Prince is nothing but trouble and needs to be bumped off. The rest of the story is all about Gogo's various plots and the cunning ways Kebole avoids them.
I loved this story when I was little. I spent hours pouring over the incredibly detailed drawings, themselves packed with slapstick humour and gags. At the front there's a cross-section of the Limbersnig king's castle; at the back, a fantastic map of Limbersnig island and its capital city, Sigficil.
The map is filled with amusing notes and captions: "The vasty ocean"; "No gold or gems found here"; "No fishing here, nothing but nasty octopus". It's just a joy to read. I'll be reading it to my son very soon.
I found out this evening that this is a very rare book indeed, and if mine is a first edition (I think it is), it could be worth as much as £120. Blimey.
Not that I'm thinking of selling it. Barney deserves to enjoy it; and I'm looking forward to enjoying it with him.
Notes on "Isambard Kingdom Brunel: A graphic biography" by Simon Gurr and Eugene Byrne
It's Brunel's 200th birthday this year, and Bristol is celebrating. The city owes much to the short little engineer, whose masterpieces still dominate much of the local architecture and transport infrastructure.
As part of the celebrations, and to teach the young 'uns about the great man, a graphic biography of his life was commissioned. Someone thought it would be a great idea to print off 130,000 copies of it and distribute them for free in libraries across the south west. I picked one up.
What a great book. Yes, it's aimed at 11-year-olds but I learned a great deal from it, and enjoyed the read as I went along. Everyone knows that Brunel built great things like bridges and ships and tunnels and railway lines, but I didn't previously know about his acts of almost insane bravery (rescuing trapped workers from the flooded tunnel under the Thames, for example), or any detail about his family life.
This is not your average freebie from the local library; it's professionally written and drawn, professionally printed. They could have flogged it for six or seven quid, and it would still have been a bargain. Chances are that unless you're passing a library in or around the south west-ish sort of part of the UK, you might find it hard to get your hands on a copy of this. You should try, though.
Labels: books
Notes on "Vote for ... who?" by Jonathan Maitland
It's not often that I throw a book down in disgust - in fact, I can't remember the last time it happened - but this is one of those books.
I picked it up in our local library in the hope that it might indeed be what was promised in the blurb on the back cover; an informal romp through modern British politics. But it's not that. It's the adolescent ramblings of a middle-aged man trying to sound like he's "one of the boys".
Honestly, I tried really hard to get into this book but Maitland's constant - and I really mean to use that word - efforts to sound like a bloke's bloke just drove me crazy. He goes to great lengths to make sure that every page has a handful of gags, even though most of them are simply not funny.
I can see what he was trying to do; he wants to make politics more interesting to more people. And in itself, that's an admirable thing to attempt. But the manner in which he does it just makes me gag, I couldn't get though most of his paragraphs without a grimace or a shudder; not because of some horrific fact I'd learned, but because the writing style and the language simply jarred.
Maitland wants to be mates with every bloke in every pub in the land. He tries so hard to sound like everyman, making bad jokes and awful non-funny asides as he goes along. There might even be a handful of people in most pubs who might appreciate what he's trying to do, might even find it funny; but I suspect that everyone else will find this as unreadable as I did.
Labels: books
Notes on "The blue-eyed salaryman" by Niall Murtagh
Niall Murtagh spent most of his 20s travelling round the world and enjoying himself. He worked when he needed to, earning a little extra money to pay for further adventures. Sounds like a wonderful time. He's one of life's free spirits who deliberately shuns the norms, the things society expects you to do like get a career, get married, buy property, and so on.
This book is about what happened when, rather to his own surprise, he finally embraced all those things. But not in his native Ireland; in Japan.
If you've ever had any interest in Japanese culture and lifestyle, you'll find something interesting in this account by an outsider. But you have to keep in mind that, as a salaryman in a huge Japanese corporation, much of Murtagh's account is about life in an office. A bit of a weird office by UK standards, but an office nonetheless.
Given that he makes a pretty good job of keeping office life interesting; making the odd rituals and all-to-familiar office politics the centre of the story. His account of marrying and moving in with a Japanese woman, and later having children with her, is reduced to a sub-plot.
If there'd been too much detail, or too many chapters, this would have ended up something of a struggle to read. But Murtagh keeps it short and his writing style is relaxed and easy. You can get through this book in a couple of evenings with no problem.
Still, it's not a book for everyone, simply because not very much happens. An Irishman goes to work in Japan, spends a lot of time in an office, gets promoted a few times, and starts a family; that's it. He confidently speaks Japanese and understands much of the culture, so this is not a fish-out-of-water story; it's observation from the inside, and all the more enjoyable as a result.
Labels: books
Notes on "Five letters from an Eastern empire" by Alasdair Gray
This tiny book (just 50 pages, readable in an hour or so) is one of the most enjoyable and thrilling stories I have ever read.
It details the adventures of Bohu the poet as he travels to an opulent capital city, part of an obsolete society where bizarre rules of etiquette govern how thick the soles of your shoes are, and therefore how important you are.
Surrounded by his entourage of helpers, Bohu (raised from childhood to write a poem for the emporor) ponders his new surroundings and waits with excitement for the order to write a poem. When it comes, though, it destroys him.
I love the details in this story, the fabulous rich cultural setting that conjours up wonderful scenes in the imagination. It is a tale that both inspires imaginative thinking, and envy of anyone who could imagine such a story in the first place.
Of course the final section twists the story on its head, and the very last page delivers another unexpected turn of events. It made me smile with pleasure, even on the second and third reading.
If you can track down a copy of this book, it comes very highly recommended.
Labels: books
Notes on "The Da Vinci Code" by Dan Brown
Blimey, is this what there was so much fuss about? I picked up a tatty copy of this novel in a charity shop for a pound. We were on holiday and I hadn't brought many books; now that Barney is old enough to play by himself, I found I had more time to read than I'd expected.
But after the first couple of pages - during which our hero woke in a strange hotel room, thought "Where am I?", then examined his own good looks in the mirror - I was convinced I must have made a mistake.
After all, this is the story that has prompted a whole new industry of conspiracy theories, not to mention a Hollywood film. Could something this cheesy, this cliche-ridden, be as good as so many people had said it was?
No; and yes. The novel as a work of literature is plain bloody awful, much of it the kind of stuff I'd expect a teenager to write (and indeed, the kind of stuff I was writing when I was a teenager). But the pace of the action, the depth of historical research, and the way Brown incorporates so many classic mysteries into a single plot, kept me reading.
So I hated this book; but I couldn't put it down. And that must be why its been so popular, and is being made into a movie.
Labels: books
