and the manuscript he sent me has already been bought by Harcourt Brace in the United States, Penguin in the UK, Guanda in Italy, and so on. You won’t be able to read his book until next year, but when you see the reviews, you’ll be reminded that you heard about it here first—which is, after all, how you usually hear about most things, apart from sports results.
We’re in Trouble is, for the most part, a book about death—quite often, about how death affects the young. “In the Event” takes place over the course of a few hours: it begins in the early morning, just after a car crash that has killed the parents of a three-year-old boy, and ends shortly before the boy wakes up to face his terrible new world. In between times, the child’s youthful and untogether godfather, who will raise the child, has a very long and very dark night of the soul. In the collection’s title story, death casts a shadow over three relationships, at various stages of maturity, and with increasing directness. Sometimes, when you’re reading the stories, you forget to breathe, which probably means that you read them with more speed than the writer intended. Are they literary? They’re beautifully written, and they have bottom, but they’re never dull, and they all contain striking and dramatic narrative ideas. And Coake never draws attention to his own art and language; he wants you to look at his people, not listen to his voice. So they’re literary in the sense that they’re serious, and will probably be nominated for prizes, but they’re unliterary in the sense that they could end up mattering to people.
Patrick Hamilton, who died in 1962, is my new best friend. I read his most famous book, Hangover Square, a couple of months back; now a trilogy of novels, collectively entitled 20,000 Streets Under the Sky, has just been republished here in the UK, and the first of them, The Midnight Bell, seemed to me to be every bit as good as Hangover Square. Usually, books have gone out of print for a reason, and that reason is they’re no good, or, at least, of very marginal interest. (Yeah, yeah, your favorite book of all time is currently out of print, and it’s a scandal. But I’ll bet you any money you like it’s not as good as The Catcher in the Rye, or The Power and the Glory, or anything else still available that was written in the same year.) Hamilton’s books aren’t arcane, or difficult, although they’re dated in the sense that the culture which produced them has changed beyond recognition. Tonally, though, they’re surprisingly modern: they’re gritty, real, tough, and sardonic, and they deal with dissipation. And we love a bit of dissipation, don’t we? We’re always reading books about that. Or at least, someone’s always writing one. Hamilton’s version, admittedly, isn’t very glamorous—people sit in pubs and get pissed. But if you were looking to fly from Dickens to Martin Amis with just one overnight stop, then Hamilton is your man. Or your airport, or whatever.
Doris Lessing called him “a marvellous novelist who’s grossly neglected,” and she felt that he suffered through not belonging to the 1930s Isherwood clique. She also thought, in 1968, that “his novels are true now. You can go into any pub and see it going on.” This, however, is certainly no longer the case—our pub culture here in London is dying. Pubs aren’t pubs any more—not, at least, in the metropolitan center. They’re discos, or sports bars, or gastropubs, and the working- and lower-middle-class men that Hamilton writes about with such appalled and amused fascination don’t go anywhere near them. That needn’t bother you, however. You’re all smart enough to see that the author’s central theme—men are vile and stupid, women are vile and manipulative—is as meaningful today as it ever was. I have only just started to read Nigel Jones’s biography, but I suspect that Hamilton wasn’t the happiest of chaps.
Thank you, dear reader, for your time over these last twelve months, if you have given any. And if you haven’t, then thank you for not complaining in large enough numbers to get me slung out. I reckon I’ve read at least a dozen wonderful books since I began this column. I’ve read Hangover Square, How to Breathe Underwater, David Copperfield, The Fortress of Solitude, George and Sam, True Notebooks, Random Family, Ian Hamilton’s Lowell biography, The Sirens of Titan, Mystic River, Clockers, Moneyball… And there’ll be the same number this coming year, too. More, if I read faster. What have you done twelve times over the last year that was so great, apart from reading books? Fibber.
BOOKS BOUGHT:
BOOKS READ:
