Nobody Move
by Denis Johnson (Picador)

After the 2007 publication of Tree of Smoke, his stupendous 600-page Vietnam-war epic, Denis Johnson might well have wanted to kick back and let off a little steam. He does so in grand style here. Nobody Move is a terse little hardboiled entertainment that originally ran last year as a four-part serial in Playboy magazine. Relatively speaking, the author may be slumming it, but he can’t help slathering the story’s pages in his usual idiosyncratic brilliance. It’s a story of small-time gamblers, crooks and gangsters in the contemporary American west, which opens on a scene of insouciant incongruity. Our hero, Jimmy Luntz, is singing on stage in a barbershop chorus competition. Two pages later he is in a car with a melancholic villain, Gambol, sent by the guy to whom Jimmy owes money. Four pages after that, Jimmy has shot him. Unfortunately, Gambol survives. He and his boss will come after Jimmy hard. Continued →

It’s when I have two men and a dog happily balanced on the undulating form of my giant quadrupedal anthropomorphic caterpillar and then eat a house that I realise this is either one of the most important videogames of recent years, or somehow not a videogame at all. What is this crazy thing called Noby Noby Boy? Continued →

Can a videogame be like a poem? Well, back in the 1980s, Tir Na Nog and Dun Darach raided the mythology of the Celtic sagas; and Lara Croft has just finished doing the same for Norse mythology. Perhaps the Metal Gear Solid series updates the medieval allegory Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, replacing the Green Knight with nuclear-armed giant robots, which is obviously an improvement. The Zelda saga rehearses the epic, episodic romance quest narrative of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. Maybe cracking a particularly tough battle in Advance Wars sparks a dopamine rush akin to that furnished by one of William Empson’s anfractuous, hyper-dense poems, and Killzone 2 is the digital equivalent of the comforting ditties of Pam Ayres. Continued →

The Housekeeper and the Professor
by Yoko Ogawa, translated by Stephen Snyder (Harvill Secker)

Number theory — what Gauss called “the queen of mathematics”, devoted to the study of numbers and their arcane interrelationships — does not perhaps sound like the most fruitful basis for a poignant domestic drama. And yet this novel, with its skilful admixture of tender atmospherics and stealthy education, has sold more than four million copies in its native Japan. Its unnamed characters suggest archetype or myth; its rapturous concentration on the details of weather and cooking provide a satisfyingly textured foundation. Continued →

The Immortals: A Novel
by Amit Chaudhuri (Picador)

A fifth of the way through this novel, one of its characters, a serious-minded teenage boy called Nirmalya, has a presentiment that he is about to figure in a narrative with a particular theme:

It was as if [...] he was now to be caught up, if not as a player then as bystander, in a story of ambition; he wasn’t sure whose — perhaps his own, but if not his entirely, then his parents’, or other people’s, or could it be even the city’s itself?

Indeed, it could be. The city in question is Bombay, whose ambition is visualized, over the book’s chronological span of several years in the 1980s, in passages that observe new building on land reclaimed from the sea, or luxury apartment blocks sprouting incongruously in the middle of treeless wastelands. Continued →

With all the guff surrounding the coming of President Barack Obama, it was easy to overlook one thing: that he had declared war on videogames. “The time has come,” he said in his inauguration address, “to set aside childish things.” He then outlined a vast programme of console destruction, with videogames to be replaced by enforced listening to Brahms, and communal readings of the Federalist Papers and Goethe. America needed to grow up, because playing with virtual soldiers on your Xbox inevitably makes you want to play with real soldiers and send them en masse to attack far-off countries — which had been, after all, one of the many lamentably childish habits of the outgoing administration. Dick Cheney, watching from his wheelchair, muttered “Go fuck yourself”, and then tilted the giant calcified potato of his head back downwards to continue his game of Advance Wars. (Cheney is a particular fan of levels involving Fog of War, and hallucinates unseen weapons of mass destruction in every obscured square.) Continued →

As everyone knows, the two best podcasts on the planet are BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time and Resonance.fm’s One Life Left. You can imagine how thrilled I was this week to appear as a guest on the final episode of OLL’s current season. Or, instead of just imagining it, you can actually listen to the show, here or on iTunes.

The Decisive Moment: How the Brain Makes Up Its Mind
by Jonah Lehrer (Canongate)
The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything
by Ken Robinson with Lou Aronica (Allen Lane)

A great self-help current of philosophy, from the Stoics to Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, conveys one simple message: you cannot change the world, but if you understand the bad habits of your thinking you can change how you react to the world, and that way lies wisdom. Modern popular neuroscience often holds out the same promise: armed with the knowledge of what scientists have learned from magnetic imaging of the brain, the reader will end up master of his own mind. If you know how that muscle inside your head works, you can exploit it better. Continued →

Cyburbia: The Dangerous Idea that’s Changing How We Live and Who We Are
by James Harkin (Little, Brown)

When you’re just a node on the network, no one can hear you scream. James Harkins’s dystopian essay portrays users of Facebook et al as people staring out of their windows on a suburban street, signalling to one another by flashing lamps on and off. The only winner is the disembodied “system”, which passes information around itself to no scrutable purpose, using us as its automata.

But at least we feel that we are “in the loop”. We feel important, too, if asked to provide “feedback”. Harkin’s book is at its best in its enjoyable excavation of such metaphors. He traces them back to the birth of “cybernetics”, when a mathematician named Norbert Wiener tried to improve the performance of anti-aircraft gunners during the second world war. Wiener took the engineering concept of “feedback” — in which information at the output of a system is plugged back into the input — and applied it to living organisms. So an anti-aircraft gun, the gunner, and the enemy plane constituted a single system whose performance was to be optimized. Now, Harkin argues, the inhabitants of “Cyburbia” happily volunteer to become mere cogs in a smoothly functioning global machine. Continued →

In the snowy early days of 2009, I am setting my metronome and practising fingering studies on my beautiful new guitar. Every few days or so, I find I can bump the tempo up a notch, getting a satisfying confirmation of my improvement; and then I will allow myself to plug into Guitar Rig and lay down some punishing heavy-metal nonsense. All told, it’s much more fun than a videogame.

Knowing this, friends often ask me what I think about Guitar Hero and Rock Band. Well, from a few casual plays, I have developed no interest in learning to play an oversimplified imitation of my axe. But for a musician to express contempt towards the game, and insist that Guitar Hero fans should dump it and go learn to play a real guitar, would be a harshly purist view of how one should spend one’s dwindling stock of hours on Earth. It would also be a little like saying to a Tomb Raider fan: Why don’t you just go outside and climb some rocks and shoot some bears for real? Sure, it would be more challenging, and maybe even more fun, but the game is not intended as a perfect simulation of the real thing. Continued →