3:AM Magazine

I don’t know how the 30th anniversary of the novel was celebrated in Burgess’ country of birth – all I can remember is that 1992 was the year I read it for the first time. It was something I had never experienced before: the beauty of violence, the power of music, the questions of free will and state control, all brought up (in both senses of the word) by a delinquent hero you felt you should despise but couldn’t help liking. It was fascinating to watch the cogs of that orange grind: Alex and his droogs, starry vecks they beat up and devotchkas they raped, and all that horrorshow. Alas, none of the words which, together with some elements of cockney and Romany, make the book the bold linguistic experiment that it is, came as a novelty to me: they were given their native spelling and mixed with other, equally mundane ones, for the only version I could get my hands on back then, in the post-perestroika Moscow, was Russian. Another ten years later, when I finally picked up an English copy, I felt short-changed: it turned out that we, Your Humble Narrator and her droogies, had been robbed of all the inventions of the original.

Anna Aslanyan reviews the restored edition of Anthony Burgess‘ A Clockwork Orange.

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What gets me is that people never seem to see the very obvious political considerations behind these things. Khomeini used the fatwa to rally weary Iranians after his disastrous war with Saddam. The Tories didn’t want to annoy the regime because at that time we still sent trade delegations there. Religious leaders in the UK used the fatwa to gain influence in public discourse, and to control their own communities. On the first anniversary of a book burning demo in Bradford, its Council of Mosque spokesman said, ‘We cannot let go of this issue. It is crucial to our future.’ The Innocence of Muslims film was distributed by hard right Salafi activists. The furore it caused pushed Assad’s war against Syrians off the front pages – not by coincidence, some Syrian dissidents will tell you. The culture war has to continue. Today a YouTube clip, tomorrow a blasphemous pineapple: all that matters is that the rage keeps flowing, and creates a general climate of low-key terror, what Rushdie calls a ‘footstep-haunted silence’.

Max Dunbar reviews Salman Rushdie‘s Joseph Anton.

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Writing about Plato’s Sophist, Alain Badiou analyses life in terms of five axioms: “being, motion, stillness, sameness, and the other.” For me at least, the core elements of Other Kinds are comparable: a boy, a girl, a place, another place, all separated by space. Close and far, light and dark, wind and sun, warmth and cold: a world. This is why Nice’s depictions of movement through space mean much more than they say. Each is, in its way, an epiphany: one of those moments of world-disclosure we know only once or twice in our lives. Every so often, an everyday scene shifts its aspect, pivoting from the prosaic to the essential. In passing, a single perception embodies the whole of human existence.

David Winters reviews Dylan Nice‘s Other Kinds.

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The libertarian fallacy is to assume such a thing as the pure individual. I hate communitarian thinking. But no one lives in a vacuum. Every day we are assailed by a multitude of competing influences – from peers, family, colleagues, newspapers, radio, new media. Contrary to puritan assumptions, most of us are aware of these influences and assess them critically, but it’s crazy to assume what’s around us won’t have an impact. James Joyce, in Portrait of the Artist, wrote that ‘When the soul of man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.’ Unfortunately, not everyone makes it.

Max Dunbar reviews The Sex Myth: Why Everything We’re Told Is Wrong.

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Stewart Home said ‘there’s a need to upset the bourgeoisie art lover.’ In any context where we quote Home saying this, the meaning of the words in the quotation marks remains stable. Claims that this is not the case over-generate, can’t account for indirect disquotational reports using quotations, can’t guarantee the truth of a strong disquotational schema for quotation ( eg ‘Rebecca Gayheart Sits in a Jacuzzi, naked, While Smoking and Talking With Her Husband, Eric Dane, and Former Miss United States Teen Kari Ann Peniche’ in English is true if and only if Rebecca Gayheart sits in a jacuzzi, naked, while smoking and talking with her husband, Eric Dane, and former Miss United States Teen Kari Ann Peniche), and various other things.

Richard Marshall reviews Jarett Kobek‘s If You Won’t Read, Then Why Should I Write?

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An adventurous dazzling novel that is by turns bizarre, rough, farcical, colloquial, erudite, debauched and downright funny, Rose Alley is a spry satire that gets its kicks out of the boisterous lives behind a multi-faceted failure which a starkly contrasting conceptual piece dissects at the end, like a sobering director’s cut to all the screwball action that the carnivalesque film crew insist on. There is a moral to the story … but that’s for the reader to work out. It’s the kind of novel you go back to, to re-read here and there for its gems of wisdom and wit, glad you stuck to attentive reading and went along with all the initial wayward transitions.

Susana Medina revisits Jeremy M. Davies‘ Rose Alley.

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The book’s climax has all the elements of a socialist agitator’s wet dream. The burden of leading the beleaguered city to socialism falls on the shoulders of the city’s prison population (their prisons’ water systems were extraneous to the municipal works, so they have eluded the plague). These prisoners, conveniently well-versed in the vernacular of Marxian political theory, are a model of cooperation and class consciousness. The book ends with the continent on the cusp of another war, with the new Parisian commune issuing a rallying call to the workers of Europe by radio, urging them to rise up. Reproduced here – for the first time in English translation – in an attractively illustrated hardback, I Burn Paris is perhaps not the kind of book you read for its literary merit. There are few memorable flourishes; the tale is just told as in a film script, with passages occasionally meandering to the point of tedium.

Houman Barekat on Bruno Jasienski‘s I Burn Paris.

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Chandler was a late developer. He began writing seriously in his early forties and wasn’t seriously published until his fifties. This was a place and time when writers did things. Chandler served in the Canadian Highlanders during World War One, then worked as an LA oil executive. Even if you haven’t read a Chandler book, you feel like you have, and recognise his motifs in others – the sizzling streets, constant drinking, smouldering murderesses, the off-key yet somehow timeless similes (my favourite, from The Long Goodbye: ‘A white night for me is as rare as a fat postman.’) But long before he wrote for Black Mask, there was a romantic, even classical sensibility to Chandler’s outlook.

Max Dunbar reviews a new Raymond Chandler biography.

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The novel charts the journey made by modernism in its nearly hundred years: swinging back and forth, chronologically it starts in 1918 – at the end of the Great War, which coincided with the dawn of modernism in England. An umbrella is pronounced to be the essence of petit-bourgeois culture in an early scene (similar accusations must have been aimed at modernism in those days) setting the tone for the book. In it Self returns to his familiar territory, London suburbs with its familiar theme, death – it is spreading across Europe in the form of shells made at Arsenal by Audrey Death, a lathe operator and proto-feminist. The life-and-death circle is drawn in a dotted line: the faulty shells, whose production is supervised by Audrey’s older brother, cause the death of their younger sibling, Stanley. When he finds himself in the afterworld, surrounded by fellow “troglodytes”, it is tempting to think of ‘The North London Book of the Dead’ or How the Dead Live revisited, but the author goes a lot further. What ever happened to modernism, indeed? is the question he not so much asks as makes the reader ponder over. Do its practitioners, like the killed soldiers, huddle in their underground refuge, venturing outside occasionally to save what can still be saved?

Anna Aslanyan reviews Will Self‘s Umbrella.

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The book has multiple narrators, but Thompson’s uniformity of style makes them indistinguishable. The only time Thompson doesn’t write like a UEA teacher’s pet is when he’s doing pastiche. In the story ‘Gallathea’ he does a Chandler pastiche: ‘It was summer: hard summer. The city was chafing in its sweat and had been for weeks now.’ Except this is an ironic Chandler story, which means that it’s not really storytelling; rather the narrative comprises, like so many of Thompson’s stories, a series of random, circling, self-defeating events. The irony of postmodernism is that writing an unironic detective story with a beginning, middle and end involves so much more skill and dexterity. Communion Town is a street hustler’s three card monte.

Max Dunbar reviews Sam Thompson‘s Communion Town.

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