Not a Toilet Book

‘How I Escaped My Certain Fate: The Life and Deaths of a Stand-Up Comedian’ by Stewart Lee

Faber, £12.99

‘How I Escaped My Certain Fate’ is brilliant. Brilliant. It is part memoir, part comedy history lesson, and includes the transcripts for three of his shows. I laughed loudly and in public. I quoted bits to my family, and then quoted bits at them. This book has made me want to seek out some of the comedians he mentions and watch the fantastic documentary ‘The Aristocrats’ again. But as it’s the tenth most-reviewed book in the newspapers this week, according to ‘The Bookseller’, I thought I would share my perspective as a bookseller instead of simply writing a review.
I was amused to see that ‘How I Escaped My Certain Fate’ is published by Faber. It’s an interesting direction for the house, which is of course better known for publishing writers like Samuel Beckett and Sylvia Plath than stand-up comedians. But it fits, because Lee’s ambitions put his work into the realm of art. Characterised by its intricate structure and repetition, I have often thought that like Walter Pater’s description of the Mona Lisa, Lee’s stand-up might just work as verse. And although the three transcripts are in prose, we do get verse in ‘How I Escaped My Certain Fate’, in the long narrative poem “I’ll Only Go If You Throw Glass”, included in the appendices. This was apparently rejected for ‘Sit Down Comedy’, a book of writing by various comedians, until Lee took out the commas and resubmitted it as prose, but Faber are evidently less worried about putting off potential buyers.
Faber have produced some stunning books in recent years, including Thomas Levenson’s ‘Newton and the Counterfeiter’ and ‘Samuel Johnson: A Life’ by David Nokes and Chris Daunt. With the growing popularity of the ebook, there seems to be a new focus on the book as an object in itself, which has been really interesting to see. ‘How I Escaped My Certain Fate’ is both an embodiment of the new book beautiful and a step in a different direction. The well-designed but restrained cover of the B-format paperback distances the book from the rather more conventional presentation of comedians' books, with their bright shiny covers and large colour photographs (see Richard Herring’s ‘How Not Grow Up’) or indeed the sort of celebrity memoir Lee has made merry sport with (And Lee might be gratified to know about the 20+ copies of the latest Clarkson book at my bookshop that haven’t sold since we got them in for Christmas, and won’t be able to shift since it’s now out in paperback. But then it’s not exactly the right sort of market).
A publisher at Faber mentioned at an event held by the Society of Young Publishers mentioned that authors will often accept lower advances as the Faber name carries such prestige, and the house hasn’t the reputation for the marketing muscle of its larger rivals. But it looks as though the relationship between author and publisher is a symbiotic one. Although Lee mentions in occasional asides that he does not expect the book to be a commercial success, one can’t help but think that this is not one of Faber’s most risky ventures, given Lee’s BBC television show, his loyal fanbase and the amount of coverage the book has generated. I hope it does well.

‘Room’ by Emma Donoghue

Picador, £12.99.

‘Room’, one of the highest profile acquisitions of 2009, is finally published this week. Already longlisted for the 2010 Man Booker prize and lauded by critics and other authors, I wanted to keep my reading of the novel as separate from these raised expectations as possible.
Five-year-old Jack has lived his whole life with his mother in a twelve by twelve foot room, held prisoner by a man they call Old Nick. This name turns out to be a macabre joke, as Jack confuses him with Santa because he occasionally comes into the room to bring them things. Inanimate objects in the room are proper nouns, capitalised and given genders, because apart from his mother, they are his only companions. Despite the presence of a television set, Jack is wholly unaware of the existence a world beyond Room’s soundproof walls until his mother enlightens him and then tells him that he is their only means of escape. It’s a bold idea, but Donoghue has the skill to pull it off. Jack’s voice is more or less believable as that of a young child who has had plenty of opportunity to build an unusually wide vocabulary (we see him parroting voices on the television) but has only had to make himself understood by one person. He doesn’t use correct verb forms but instead has developed an internal grammar with its own rules. Although at times this was annoying, it felt quite credible and never became so distracting as to be off-putting. There is a sort of duality to reading ‘Room’ as the reader fills in the gaps and mistakes in Jacks understanding of the world. Donoghue uses this dynamic masterfully, with Jack’s lack of awareness of the dangers he faces adding to the tension of an already suspenseful plot.
Because Jack does not yet understand the scale of the world, he cannot grasp the concept of fame, which is what awaits them when they emerge. Through snatches of conversation Donoghue effectively conveys the rabid media attention, which is almost as troubling as the original crime. Jack overhears people on television talking about him as a kind of noble savage, or a spectator of culture’s shadows flickering on the walls of Plato’s cave. This is perhaps a swipe at literary overanalysis, but could also be read as underscoring the place of fiction. ‘Room’ raises important questions, but this scene forces us to question our right to treat the real suffering of other people as some kind of thought-experiment.
The relationship between Jack and his mother is perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the book. Although at times he unwittingly hurts her because he is so ignorant about the world, he has been the main purpose in her life since his birth. Because he is so young, he has a complete lack of empathy with the people around him, even his mother, and at times has moments of pure selfishness. He tells Ma that she should have asked Old Nick for candles rather than the painkillers for her teeth, because it is only her who needs them, which fills her with shock and horror. Through Jack’s eyes a portrait of this woman gradually emerges: determined, resourceful, and devoted to her son. From the naive nineteen year old student she was at the time of her kidnapping, she has become an adult woman. Still, she has been deprived of a normal existence for seven years, and has emerged to find her contemporaries at another stage in their lives. While she is simply “Ma” to Jack (we never find out her given name, which would presumably be as recognisable as that of Natascha Kampusch or Elisabeth Fritzl), we see her struggling to reconcile her multiple identities as the student she used to be, the woman and mother she became and the sudden celebrity that she has been turned into.
I thought the novel’s ending was fantastic, almost perfect in its inevitability. Although the subject matter is exceedingly bleak, Donoghue closes on a hopeful note, moving without being saccharine.

Oops...

This looks familiar, I thought, on first unloading Michael Burleigh’s ‘Moral Combat’ from a tote at work. Wait a minute... Having attended a covers meeting whist on work experience with a publisher, I can tell you that every aspect of cover design is taken very seriously. Are the colours inviting? Does the image convey the warmth and humour of the book? Could we give the paperback a wider appeal if we make it look less literary? Did this book not sell because the colours were dreary? Will this stand out from all the other books on the shelf? So I can only imagine the horror in the HarperCollins and Penguin camps when they realised that they had used exactly the same image for the covers of ‘Moral Combat’ and the paperback edition of Andrew Roberts’ ‘The Storm of War’, published within weeks of each other. I had found the cover of the latter particularly stunning; its moody colour scheme is enhanced by its striped matte and shiny finish, and a pixellated image really cannot do it justice. Unfortunately, side by side it is upstaged by the stark simplicity of the Burleigh book.

I put them on opposite ends of the History table.

‘Eleven’ by Mark Watson

Simon & Schuster, 19 Aug 2010

How does David Mitchell do it, I used to wonder. I see and hear him on television all the time, even in the advert breaks, and he’s an acclaimed writer too? Then I found out there were actually two David Mitchells, which was disappointing and relieving in equal measure. But Mark Watson, who is about to publish his third novel at the intimidatingly young age of thirty, is indeed the comedian Mark Watson. And ‘Eleven’ is really, really good.
As one might expect from a comedian, Watson has an amusing turn of phrase. The book was quirky and fun to read, but you do get the impression that Watson has Something to Say. Although he quite definitely lays down his ideas on the importance of taking responsibility for the people around us, the book sparkles with suggestions of ideas that demand further thought. In Watson’s world, failure to act is portrayed as an active rather than a passive evil, and as such there are consequences. We see what drives the characters to act the way they do, but nothing can stop the relentless chain of events that follows on from the central character Xavier’s failure to intervene when he sees a boy being beaten up. Meanwhile, Xavier gets a cleaner called Pippa, whose forthright ideas clearly mirror Watson’s own. She tells Xavier that his actions matter more than he thinks they do, and that simply passing by when others might need help is an act as significant as any other. A former champion discus thrower forced to abandon her athletic career and work as a cleaner, Pippa has vowed to be the best cleaner ever, and is relentlessly positive and pro-active in her approach to life. I did begin wonder what kind of cleaner Mark Watson would have made had the writing and comedy not worked out.
The panoramic scope of the novel makes it feel like a film, and there are obvious similarities to ‘Love Actually’ in the way it follows a diverse cross section of loosely linked characters. But where Richard Curtis’s film is trite and cloying, Mark Watson’s book does not offer easy reassurances. While Curtis’s antagonists (devil woman trying to tempt Alan Rickman to cheat on his wife being the prime example) seem to have little reason to behave as they do other than to push the plot along, the characters in ‘Eleven’ were much more skilfully drawn, even the least sympathetic. And while Curtis reveals a real streak of nastiness in the way he treats some of his characters (the sister of the Portuguese woman, who falls in love with Colin Firth, fat and still single at the end of the film, obviously should have learned to say no to those biscuits), by contrast Watson casts a compassionate eye on them all, including an estate agent desperate to treat his bad breath and gain the respect of his colleagues, and an obese teenager fruitlessly trying to lose weight.
Watson’s world is a closed system where there is one fixed cause to each event, which neatly goes on to spark another. It’s not the subjunctive, the mood of possibility, that Alan Bennet explores in ‘The History Boys’ ; rarely in real life are cause and consequence so well-defined. But it works, because one can take the novel as the world in microcosm, and Watson seems to be playing with the idea of the author as God. This is his world and he knows the fate of all the characters in it, from the Indian shop keeper who will die in three years, and the neighbour boy who will grow up to make a major medical breakthrough. Within this frame of destiny, the choices the characters do make are of paramount importance. Based on the evidence provided by ‘Eleven’, I think that were we to nominate someone to play God, Watson might do a fair job. There is an endless optimistic move to empathy and responsibility; the unpleasant restaurant owner will eventually come to consider and regret the unfair sacking of the teenager who washed his dishes, while the television personality comes to regret her affairs and value her husband once more. Every character is treated with respect and understanding, and even when a character does something terrible, we understand why. It is this deeply human aspect that makes ‘Eleven’ so appealing.
With the recurrence of fate and destiny in the novel, it comes as no surprise that the narrative loops around and the diverse consequences of his original (in)action eventually come unknowingly back to Xavier. Having fallen in love with Pippa, and faced her contempt for giving advice on late night radio while choosing to ignore the struggles of his neighbours, he is forced once again to make a decision. The ending did come as a shock, visceral enough to make me gasp on a crowded Tube train. Although at times it seems a little simplistic, ‘Eleven’ has a certain lingering quality, and is as unsettling as it is entertaining. As much as I love goofy and endearing Mark Watson the comedian, it is the author who really shines.

Book Group: Then We Came to the End

More than a week to go until the book group meeting, and I’ve already had a complaint about the selection.

“It reads like a supplement,” says Jane. I am apprehensive, although some of the best discussions have been about books that most of the group disliked. In February eight people showed up to slaughter Joyce Carol Oates and had a great time. Jane, however, does not come to the meeting to refine her opinion of ‘Then We Came to the End’ as “trite” or “superficial” or “forced”.

A few days later a customer comes in and remarks on the book group flyers. “I recommended that for my book group, it’s one of my favourites,” she enthuses. “Everyone else hated it, though.”

“I hated this,” Carlotta announces proudly at the meeting. Really? “I couldn’t finish it.” What was wrong with it? “I’m a real character person, and I felt that this didn’t go into enough depth.” I do think it’s a bit overwhelming at first, I say, there are so many characters. I think Ferris is trying to evoke starting a new job and that brief period when you’re learn everyone’s names and it’s hard to keep them clear in your mind. But stick with it. I did think the characters were very well drawn, once they emerged from that collective “we”. Carlotta remains unconvinced. “It just didn’t appeal to me.” How far did you get? “Umm, first sixty pages?” Oh. “And the ending. Since we’re talking about it.”

What did everyone else think? Quite liked it, is the general consensus. The bit with the chair was funny, but it’s bit too close to home sometimes...

“I think that’s what I didn’t like about it,” says Carlotta. “It reminded me of my first job. I would check the clock on my computer every thirty seconds or so...time and life ticking away. It made me feel uncomfortable.”

“Doesn’t that make it a success, then?” someone says.

“Yeah, maybe,” ponders Carlotta.

“I thought he did a really good job of creating that workplace atmosphere.” Mary says. “The pettiness, the bureaucracy...”

Where do you work? I ask.

“A publishing house.”

Funny you should say that, actually...

“I suppose it is a book for our times. More poignant now...” says Carlotta.

When was it written? There is a general scramble for the publication information at the front. 2007. Ah, prescient.

“It must always have been harder in America though,” says Carlotta. “Because there’s so much less support over there if you’re unemployed.”

Someone asks if Ferris has written anything else, and I say that I didn’t think ‘The Unnamed’ was anywhere near as good. I did enjoy reading it in that it felt like being in the company of an old friend, but I didn’t really think it was that clever or dazzling. The highlight was a sweet and funny bit with a father and daughter watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Everyone laughs. The ending wasn’t so great, I say. Kind of like the ending to this. I actually really hate it, I confess: “just you and me”. Awful. I think he balances the “we” perspective really well throughout, but to end it like that is just cheesy and gimmicky. I think he might have been aiming for thought-provoking, like, “Who’s you? Who’s me? Who are we all anyway?”, but I can’t even tell. And yet the closing paragraph before the epilogue just gave me chills:

“In the last week of August 2001, and in the first ten days of that September, there were more layoffs than in all the months preceeding them. But by the grace of god, the rest of us hung on, hating each other more than we ever thought possible. Then we came to the end of another bright and tranquil summer.”

It’s the way it anticipates September the 11th and all that followed without directly stating it. This is an era silently drawing to a close. When you look back on America of the late 1990s and very early 2000s there’s a sort of listlessness and an innocence. But maybe that’s because we’ve redefined it after that watershed moment.

“Interesting. But I didn’t even notice that,” says Mary. There is general agreement.

Maybe I’m reading too much into things, I say.

*Names have been changed.