This morning, I picked up the novel I’ve been reading and just couldn’t bring myself to open it. I’ve committed to three-hundred pages of Peter Carey’s Booker Prize-winning True History of the Kelly Gang and, though I am about seventy pages from the end, I don’t think I care to finish. I chose the book knowing the bare bones of the Kelly legend – how he forged his own armor, fought the law, and lost. I wanted the story of an impassioned, indomitable, heroic will, struggling against poverty and injustice. I expected action and rage and violence – and the novel did not deliver that.
Our hero is an honest man, who wants only to farm, raise horses, and take care of his family. Desperately poor and the constant victim of utterly (almost comically) unscrupulous law enforcement, Ned Kelly is just & sort of & made an outlaw. Aside from his obvious desire to avoid prison, there’s no snap where he just won’t take it anymore, no penetrating self-reflection, no vehement defense of his principles, or protests against injustice. There’s violence, but not much rage behind it. Ned Kelly is supposed to be hailed as a hero to the common people, the Robin Hood of Australia – yet he is treated, predominantly, with either indifference or contempt. His foes are his people (common folk as poor as Ned himself), bad cops, and bad judges. They are weak, petty, cowardly, and/or corrupt. He faces nary a worthy adversary – there was never an enemy or a villain that I cared to see vanquished.
But this issue’s column was not meant to be a review. It’s about what happened next: In my quest for something else to read, suddenly I found myself sorting through almost every book in the apartment. It called to mind my favorite moment in Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, when Rob re-organizes his record collection – not alphabetically or chronologically – but "autobiographically," because it’s "comforting." I can think of no better contemporary homage to collecting than High Fidelity. Sorting through a collection can be very poignant and complex, and it’s a task carefully considered by Benjamin, Montaigne, Jefferson, and more.
I’m just going to say that it’s great for generating ideas both big and small. (For example, it now occurs to me that High Fidelity is a rare instance where I enjoyed the book and the movie equally. Most often, I find that the book is the better bet. An instance where I thought the movie was better than the book? The Ice Storm – book by Rick Moody, film directed by Ang Lee.) I was high and dry for something to write about for this month’s column – had actually considered a series of Top-5 lists – until I turned to my books. (Oddly enough, the list inspiration was brought on by NPR and not High Fidelity, but isn’t that fortuitous?)
The problem with True History of the Kelly Gang was not that it’s a bad book, it just didn’t equal my expectations – not enough action, not enough passion. I wanted nigh on swashbuckling! I wanted the literary equivalent of Mel Gibson on his noble steed, rallying the troops with "They may take our lives, but they shall never take our freedom!" So, I searched, one at a time.
Turns out there’s not much swashbuckling in my library.
But I do have action, perseverance, and violence – Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. It’s one of my all-time favorite books. It’s a slow read, a journey, absolutely beautifully written and haunting. When I start talking about this book, I find it hard to stop. It occurs to me that perhaps my future columns could be book reports.
If I wanted an impassioned hero, of strong will and principle, I could’ve read Any Human Heart (William Boyd) or Winter’s Tale (Mark Helprin) or All the King’s Men (Robert Penn Warren) or The Color of the Sea (John Hamamura). Or anything Homer’s ever written!
For a "good" villain, I love Bertrand Russell’s short story "Satan in the Suburbs, or Horror Manufactured Here," wherein a good man is so intent on vanquishing the villain that he nearly becomes a villain himself. Together, but apart, the villains plot to end all human life. One more time: All. Human. Life. When I read it I have to suppress the urge to do a cartoon villain laugh – mwah ha ha! Fucking evil, and, delightfully, both men talk at length about how evil they are. "I concocted an apparatus which would achieve a new chain reaction by which the sea could be made to boil. Only one thing held my back, and that was that, while men would die of thirst, fishes would die of being boiled. I had nothing against fishes..."
And speaking of nefarious plots, The Secret Agent, Joseph Conrad’s response to an attempt to bomb the Greenwich Observatory, is a novel I return to again and again for its moral ambiguity – there is no single villain, few are innocent. It explores darkness far beyond the pale of my understanding – espionage, terrorism, anarchism – and it always engages me – the seedy underground, the distinctions between terrorists and anarchists, that the book can be subtle while it ruminates on good and evil. And let us not forget SPIES. Who isn’t intrigued by secret agents? Even less-than-exemplary secret agents who peddle pornography and bric-a-brac? Especially less-than-exemplary secret agents who peddle pornography and bric-a-brac?! Thirteen years after the novel’s completion and publication, Conrad penned an author’s note. He remarks, on his efforts to tell such a story, that " and ironic treatment alone would enable me to say all I felt I would have to say in scorn as well as in pity."
(This is another book that I have a lot to say about, so a pile for future book reports is beginning to form.1)
Another item in my library that draws human sympathy from a very dark place: It’s a tiny, softly colorful pamphlet, illustrated by Ronald J. Rege and entitled "An Interview Between Benjamin Ben-Eliezer and Arin Ahmed, Conducted in Israel, June 9, 2002." It’s the story of a young Palestinian woman who intends to carry out a suicide bombing, but changes her mind at the last minute. If you google "Arin Ahmed," you can read a transcript of the original interview, which the pamphlet follows almost exactly.
I put a book by Scott Simon, Pretty Birds, about a teenage girl in Sarajevo who becomes a sniper, in a pile with the two aforementioned titles. I capped it off with Castro’s La Historia Me Absolvera, but I might move that one back to Communist pile.
All these new piles might make me look a little & well & psycho. Let me reassure my reader(s) that I harbor neither extremist views nor Communist sympathies, though I would like to better understand those that do. Don’t we read so that we may better understand something, or feel something? I’m frequently after, in almost everything I read, something felt strongly. Maybe that’s obvious. The passive rarely makes for good storytelling. I’m sure entertainment is in there somewhere (A. M. Holmes!), but as I look at my library, I see that it is driven more by curiosity than a desire to escape, or be entertained.