I had a productive month's reading in July - the only low point being The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson. This book tells the joint stories of HH Holmes, a serial killer active during the Chicago World's Fair at the end of the nineteenth century, and Daniel Burnham, the man who was a key player in the fair's creation. In the same tradition as In Cold Blood and Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, the book tries to provide a semi-fictional narrative of true events, but the facts of the case worked to its detriment. An early chapter recounts an incident from Holmes' own autobiography but suggests that it played out differently, and far more sinisterly, than Holmes' description. There is no evidence for Larson's version; no reason why his version should be the case as it has no bearing on later events. The reader feels frustration rather than intrigue.
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| HH Holmes |
I think that the book also suffered from its subject matter. True, there are interesting parallels between the lives of Holmes and Burnham. Unfortunately, there is no literary or dramatic tension in a business deal, even an important one regarding a large event like the Chicago Fair - particularly as the reader knows that it went through. Of course, the reader knows from the early chapters that Holmes will have committed murders by the end of the book and Larson still manages to retain some suspense - but conventional taste finds stories about murder interesting and exciting - it works as a narrative device in a way that a business deal does not.
This was, as I say, a lone example this month. I read two other books which had a connection to true crime: Jaycee Duggard's A Stolen Life, which shocked me in how much more candid it was than Natascha Kampusch's biography of her similar experience - and Jon Ronson's The Psychopath Test. This latter book was an entertaining look at the way that Ameri-English culture treats madness. It rather reminded me of Adam Curtis' documentary The Trap, in his discussion of the idea that there is a checklist of symptoms that can be used to judge a person abnormal, and the subsequent dangers of such a list existing. This is no great surprise, as Ronson and Curtis are friends - Curtis is even interviewed in part of the book. Entertaining and thought-provoking, The Psychopath Test extends its discussion to many people people who don't fit with usual ideas of normal behaviour.
A particularly interesting chapter is written on the awful case of Colin Stagg, the original suspect in the Rachel Nickell murder case. Stagg was notoriously the target of a sting operation by the police over a period of several months, who used a female police officer to attract his attention and try to draw out his violent fantasies, in the hope that he would confess to her that he killed Nickell. He was eventually arrested - although he hadn't confessed - and the case reached the Old Bailey, upon which the judge threw the case out on the grounds that the police had used "deceptive conduct of the grossest kind" to entrap Stagg. It was a horrible case, perhaps loosely reminiscent of the Stefan Kiszko fiasco in the 1970s - for both Stagg and Kiszko were both arrested on loose evidence, chiefly because they fit the image of a murderer: Stagg was a pagan, interested in BDSM; Kiszko was an overweight recluse. A study on the case wasn't really what I was expecting when I picked the book up, but Ronson retold the story well, interviewing some of the key players in the investigation - and it certainly was an enlightening way of looking at the dangers of being too critical of people who appear to behave abnormally.
More journalism. More Awkward Situations for Men by Danny Wallace was a quick, comic read. Steinbeck's Travels With Charley took longer but was correspondingly far more brilliant: Steinbeck goes on the road, travelling across America in the 1960s and taking his French poodle, Charley, with him - following "the American tendency in travel. One goes, not to much to see but to tell afterward." My experience of Steinbeck had been limited to Of Mice and Men and East of Eden, and so this was an unexpected delight. It struck me as reading a book by a new and talented friend - rather shy in some places, deflecting attention onto Charley, but with many interesting stories to tell, and an earnest desire to be liked, without being sugary.
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| Steinbeck with Charley |
The Bill Bryson style of travel-writing is still very fashionable these days and, as entertaining as it is, I came away from Travels With Charley feeling deeply acquainted with Steinbeck. And the book is funny: there's an excellent part where Steinbeck stays at a motel and acts as detective in trying to glean information about his room's previous occupant. He christens him Lonesome Harry, recreating his evening in a passage that is funny and insightful: Harry's letter to his wife, his evening with a date, his troublesome stomach, his loneliness. The final paragraph is particularly wonderful:
Three things haunted me about Lonesome Harry. First, I don’t think he had any fun; second I think he was really lonesome, maybe in a chronic state; and third, he didn’t do a single thing that couldn’t be predicted - didn’t break a glass or a mirror, committed no outrages, left no physical evidence of joy. I had been hobbling around with one boot off finding out about Harry. I even looked under the bed and in the closet. He hadn’t even forgotten a tie. I felt sad about Harry.
What a book.
Hi-De-Ho: The Life of Cab Calloway by Alyn Shipton was well- researched and for the most part interesting. I thought that it was rather top-heavy - a great deal is written on his life up until the mid-1940s, with the final fifty years being relegated to two chapters at the end. This struck me as rather odd - for if there was any 1930s personality who still had a thriving career in the second half of the twentieth century, it was Calloway - but perhaps Shipton had less of an interest in his later life. Certainly Calloway's great period of creativity was in the '30s. At any rate, Shipton's book is a far better example of a well-written biography than Stefan Kanfer's biography of Bogart, which I found so abhorrent a few months ago.
So I read several good books - some of them very good - throughout July. The best one, however, was one that I didn't like at all, initially: Ford Madox Ford's
The Good Soldier. It's a simple story, of a man who discovers that his wife and his friend were having a long affair - written in a way that goes backwards and forwards over the story. And for the first twenty pages I found it very slow-going - I didn't like that it wasn't clear what had happened; I didn't like John Dowell's impressionistic version of events. Then something happened - I'm not sure what - but something
clicked. Everything that I had disliked up until that point made sense, and
The Good Soldier became one of the most realistic books I've read. Every time Dowell revisited an event, each time with a slightly different perspective on the subject - I understood it the better, for isn't that how all events are filtered through our memories, changing with each mood and with each new bit of information? Although Dowell admits that he's biased and that it's hard to give a complete version of the truth - isn't that the point of the book?
Beyond that, I can't offer much more - other than to say that Dowell's wife, Florence, must be one of the most unlikeable characters in English literature. But it was a book I loved, was sad to finish, and cannot imagine improving. I can't think of anything constructive to say about it - nothing that isn't immediately obvious, anyway. Not that I wouldn't enjoy reading an essay on The Good Soldier - but it's a book upon which impressed me so thoroughly that my only response can be applause.
