Dead Babies

 

Martin Amis Dead Babies (1975)
I'm still trying to work out who or what the title refers to. So far I have the possibility that these babies are all, like, dead inside, man; or it's Keith Whitehead who, being a chubby dwarf, may be seen to have the appearance of a baby; or it's the emotional neoteny of everybody concerned; or it's something to do with the spunk flying in all directions, not many of which are conducive to procreation - shorthand, I suppose, for wank, inadvertently suggesting that the book reviews itself; or it's all of these. Nobody fucking knows. I seem to recall a couple of actual dead babies and the term is used as a slightly bewildering expletive by a couple of the characters, but that seems too obvious a correlation given these being of no greater consequence than any of the other routinely transgressive occurrences passing along on Brucie's literary conveyor belt without anybody really caring one way or the other.

Dead Babies describes a house full of Hooray Henries and prototype Sloane Rangers, mostly over-moneyed sixties burnouts, getting shitfaced and screwing each other in a variety of increasingly baroque configurations with no clear separation as to how much of it is hallucinatory. They're all irredeemably horrible, with the possible exception of the aforementioned Keith, and much of the novel reminds me of dismal eighties parties where I spent most of the evening trying to avoid the attentions of some speeding fucknugget determined to lecture anyone who would listen about either Jim Morrison or William sodding Blake. Also, there's gratuitous animal abuse for some reason or other.

Of course, it's beautifully written and is as such sort of compelling, but I still have no idea as to what end or what I'm supposed to do with any of this. I can see why the late Simon Morris was a fan to the point that I found myself unconsciously awaiting narrative punctuation from a list of Dr. Hook's ten greatest albums, but it left me as cold as almost all J.G. Ballard I've ever tried to read, and I get the impression ol' Jimmy may have been an influence to some extent. The aforementioned Simon Morris described Amis' London Fields as a pointless narrative that's like a joke without a punchline, while London Fields strikes me as the much better book, like Dead Babies done right, written by someone who wanted to write a book rather than just wave his dobber in your face for a couple of hundred pages. I expect Kenneth Clark would have described Dead Babies as absolutely ghastly - due to that doubtless being Marty's intention - and I'm inclined to share that view. In televisual terms it's Abigail's Party repopulated with the cast of Lindsay Anderson's If… without the nuance of either, the written equivalent of those bloody awful Allen Jones paintings of boobs squozen forth between rubber straps.

The tragedy is that I can't even bring myself to hate it. I've read much, much worse, and Dead Babies is just kind of dull but for the poetry of its composition. I suppose it would be a very boring world if we all liked the same thing.

Perdam Babylonis Nomen

Gregory Bull Perdam Babylonis Nomen (2013)
It means something about waging war on Babylon, in this case referring to the existence and purpose of someone whose eyes were opened to the perfidy of society by the wonders of punk rock and the opportunity it afforded some for a life outside that society, or if not entirely outside, then at least right on the edge inhabited by Crass, CND, the animal rights movement and others. The detail of the story is autobiographical to the point of placing the reader directly inside the thoughts, only vaguely ordered, of the protagonist, as he considers the innumerable ills of the world and tries to stay alive. It's a delirious stream of variable consciousness taking the form of what may as well be considered a hundred page epic modernist poem, so it's not an easy read by any description, but what fleeting flashes of clarity come through keep it interesting, at least enough to get us through to the last page without succumbing to the fatigue of undifferentiated information overload; and the imagery is very vivid, and there's a point of focus right at the end which makes sense of it all, and ultimately there's a point to reading the thing. As accounts of growing up punk go, I probably prefer Ted Curtis's Darkening Light, but this is noteworthy for its ambition, invoking an experience of its subject matter with all the intensity of a religious vision, albeit a religious vision somehow involving Special Brew and the music of Antisect.

I picked this up mainly out of curiosity, having enjoyed a couple of anthologies edited by Bull; and on the strength of this one, I'd probably liken Bull to a modern William Blake were I more of a tool than I probably am; except I'd be basing such a proposition on what is only a very vague impression of Blake's work because I've never actually read any of it and - in all honesty - I'm unlikely to start now.

Notes from Underground

Fyodor Dostoyevsky Notes from Underground (1864)
I didn't really get on with Crime and Punishment, and I bought this on the grounds of having heard of it and that Dostoyevsky must have written something to deserve all that reputation. It turns out that Notes from Underground is actually pretty slim, so it's fairly common to find it collected with other material as is the case here, and which presented the additonal appeal of containing shorter and hopefully snappier examples of whatever the fuck he was trying to say.

I got a little more out of it than Crime and Punishment, but otherwise I think I've learned my lesson. Here we have four tales from different periods of Dostoyevsky's life serving to illustrate an almost autobiographical narrative. Specifically, Dostoyevsky was subjected to a mock execution by tsarist authorities who regarded him as a subversive in 1849, then sent off to the stripey hole for the next eight years, all of which somewhat soured his view of humanity and his own initial idealism. We are afforded insight into the views of the young Dostoyevsky in White Nights, then his time in prison in selections from the autobiographical The House of the Dead, then Notes itself, concluding with The Dream of a Ridiculous Man which charts his descent into something resembling misanthropy.

The excerpts from The House of the Dead seem the most illuminating, and I found the most interesting, mostly consisting of straightforward reportage of the lives and crimes of those with whom Dostoyevsky shared a prison lavatory. The accounts are conversational, sober, and the crimes detailed are allowed to speak for themselves without any wringing of hands or pulling of faces, which is what spoils the rest of this material for me. It's nothing like so cloying or sentimental as Dickens, and the narrative often seems to actively resist the possibility with its focus on ugliness, contradiction, and self-loathing, its continuous refutation of idealism; but in the absence of light relief, it all becomes a little exhausting after a while. I suppose our man may have been attempting to communicate some purity of vision, albeit through grey-tinted spectacles, in encouraging us to dislike him as much as he seemingly disliked himself, but I found the effect unconvincing. White Nights was written prior to the author's time in prison, before the disillusionment had properly settled in, and strives to build drama from simpering acquaintances who wouldst be lovers but for something dull to do with somebody's grandmama, or maybe a fancy cake or some purloined napkins, that kind of thing. Anyway, the point is that White Nights is excruciatingly precious and juvenile, and after reading it I couldn't keep myself from seeing Dostoyevsky as an overly earnest upper class art student who follows you around quoting William Blake or snatches of Jim Morrison lyrics whilst trying his hardest to smoulder in a generally meaningful way; which is a shame because The House of the Dead at least seems to be worth a look, judging by what we have here. As a collection, this is not without merit, but it's a little chewy in places, and Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea takes us to more or less the same destination in a much better book.

Funnily enough, perhaps in obediance to some obscure cosmic principle, last time I read Dostoyevsky I found myself toggling between Crime and Punishment and the first volume of Danny Baker's memoirs for the sake of light relief; and having picked up this one, the universe has somehow conspired to furnish me with a copy of Going Off Alarming (2014) just as I really needed to read something which wasn't a nineteenth century Russian bloke punching himself in the face for two-hundred pages. I only noticed the coincidence once I'd finished Notes. Maybe there is such a thing as the anti-Dostoyevsky and it's Danny Baker, a man who doesn't do dark and whom it may be useful to regard as the human analogy of Bugs Bunny, for the sake of argument. As with Going to Sea in a Sieve, Baker's narrative style is very much rooted in the spoken form, seeming occasionally uncomfortable on the printed page with infrequent swerves into footballer's autobiography territory when I opened the door and who should be stood there but my famous friend, Ray Reardon, the snooker champion…

 

Complaining about this would define me as an idiot, so I won't. The great strengths of Going Off Alarming - aside from it not being written by Dostoyevsky - are that it's erudite, funny as fuck, and stuffed with all manner of unexpected and peculiarly tender insights, notably those pertaining to Paul Gascoine - which probably say more about the human condition than anything in Notes. It also makes me quite nostalgic for Deptford and the company of dockyard types.