Tree of Smoke
by Denis Johnson

There is a moment in this sprawling, magnificent novel set in the Vietnam War when an assassin, who has killed a previous target using a lovingly handcrafted blowpipe, is told by his handler: “It’s a war. Go ahead and use a gun.” The line accomplishes two things at once. It shows us the casually ironic brutality of the handler, and it resonates with other times and places in the novel that see people reminding one another that they are in a war. “Yes, I believe we can furnish you all the weapons you want,” one soldier amusingly assures some new arrivals. “This is a war.” The fact that this is a war becomes a refrain of all-purpose absolution, an excuse for any desired action. Tree of Smoke does not only show that war is hell, though that cliché will always require drilling anew into the heads of those who believe it to be a tool of virtue. But Denis Johnson is also interested in the problem of how to navigate morally when there is always the plea, “It’s a war”, to fall back on. For this novel, war is absolute freedom. In it, men create their own hell. Continued →

Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain
by Oliver Sacks (Picador)

It is a remarkable fact that if I merely type “the Mission: Impossible theme tune” or “Beethoven’s Fifth”, you will probably start humming to yourself. We take it for granted, but how is it possible? What is going on in our brains? Oliver Sacks, the neurologist author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat, here devotes a book to the cognitive miracles of music. “It really is a very odd business,” he muses, “that all of us, to varying degrees, have music in our heads.”

Sacks’s deeply warm and sympathetic study is about pathologies of musical response and what they might teach us about the “normal” faculty of music. It reports on fascinating new findings from anatomy — a musician’s brain is easily distinguishable on a scan from those of others; and the passage from ear to brain is not a one-way conduit but works both ways, the brain being able to tune the ears, as it were. But mostly Musicophilia is about the more mysterious, and currently inexplicable, ways in which music affects the brain, for good or ill. And when it affects the brain, it affects the whole person, as Plato knew, seeking to ban some types of music from his Republic for the health of the citizenry. Shakespeare’s Richard II, meanwhile, could have provided an epigraph to Sacks’s book - the King at one point complains:

This music mads me. Let it sound no more;
For though it have holp madmen to their wits,
In me it seems it will make wise men mad.

Continued →

The Myth of Mars and Venus: Do Men and Women Really Speak Different Languages?
by Deborah Cameron (Oxford)

Men and women, it has long been thought, speak in different ways. But curiously, people can’t quite agree on what the difference is. Deborah Cameron cites a 1777 passage by Lord Chesterfield:

Language is indisputably the more immediate province of the fair sex: there they shine, there they excel. The torrents of their eloquence, especially in the vituperative way, stun all opposition, and bear away, in one promiscuous heap, nouns, verbs, moods and tenses.

The giveaway here is the word “promiscuous”: Chesterfield’s theory of women’s language is informed by his fantasies about their sex lives. Let us note, however, that Shakespeare in As You Like It had Rosalind express the opposite stereotype, that women are incapable of aggressive speech: “Women’s gentle brain / Could not drop forth such giant-rude invention”. Whom to believe? Continued →

The Sentimental Hipsterism of Douglas Coupland

The Gum Thief: A Novel
by Douglas Coupland (Bloomsbury)

What does a geek do when he’s all grown up? He gets serious. Douglas Coupland’s brilliant early novels, such as Generation X (1991) and Microserfs (1995), were authentically zeitgeist-defining comedies of lives saturated in the cultural flood of late modernity. Yet behind the wit and gadget-frippery already lurked a small yearning towards some kind of pseudo-theological transcendence. And as the vivid cataloguing of tech-pop culture eased off in subsequent novels such as Life After God and Girlfriend in a Coma, what was left of the writing was revealed as turgid epiphanic striving. The ebullient geekiness was really always just a cover, it seemed, for cloying morality tales.

Coupland’s mode is Sentimental Hipsterism, in which formal gamesmanship and sardonic humour frame a comforting, vaguely inspirational take-home message. It’s as though a flashy, edgy conjuror were to produce a fluffy bunny at the end, to make the audience go “Aaah” as it files out through the stalls. This style has had an impressive influence. In a way Coupland is the godfather of all that ingenuous, moist-faced sincerity, clothed in tricky threads, perpetrated by a slew of younger writers such as Dave Eggers and Jonathan Safran Foer. Continued →

Zugzwang
by Ronan Bennett (Bloomsbury)

The chess term “zugzwang” comes from the German for “compulsion to move”.¹ Ronan Bennett might well have felt something of a similar compulsion when it came time to deliver each chapter of this novel: it was originally published in weekly instalments by the Observer last year. Now, however, it has been rewritten for production as a book, so the author has had more time to calculate variations.

If you are in zugzwang, the compulsion to move is necessarily fatal. Your position would be fine if you could just pass, but you must move, and any move you can make loses the game by force. To illustrate this particularly piquant mode of defeat, two characters in the novel play a game of chess (which is based on a game played by British grandmaster Daniel King). Through his narrator, Bennett handles the explanations of strategy with lucidity and drama, though unfortunately near the end the publishers have allowed two of the chess diagrams to become decoupled from the positions stated in the captions, which makes it a bit more of a challenge for readers unaccustomed to analysing endgames in their heads. Luckily, the concept of zugzwang is also, as so much in chess, a potentially rich metaphor for life, and Bennett’s story finishes with a vivid example, after he has choreographed an array of pieces and combinations that initially seems bewildering. Continued →

1. And hence also the title of this piece of music, which I had chosen long ago. ↩

Spook Country
by William Gibson (Viking)

A woman moves through a forest of symbols, peopled by liminal obsessives, gathering clues to a conspiratorial mystery. So might you describe Thomas Pynchon’s diabolically lean and funny The Crying of Lot 49, perhaps the most perfect American novel of its age. Fitting the same description is the new novel by William Gibson, whose own literary trajectory has seen him develop from noir prophet of cyberspace (the word he coined in Neuromancer, 1984) to a kind of wifi’d Pynchon for the ubiquitously sign-drenched present.

The heroine, Hollis, is a former singer for a cult early-1990s indie band, now a journalist. She accepts a commission from an obscure British magazine to interview some LA practitioners of “locative art”: installations in public places that are invisible unless you have a VR headset, in which case the virtual performance is overlaid on physical reality. But the tech genius behind the locative installations is also involved in something weirder: arcane data, encoded into the music on iPods, is being smuggled to Costa Rica and back through an old man who speaks Russian; and much ingenuity is being spent on trying to track a shipping container, flitting from boat to boat at sea for years, whose contents are are unknown. Continued →

Sirens of Baghdad
by Yasmina Khadra, translated by John Cullen

Cities are suspect to the newly converted puritan. This novel begins with a cynical view of Beirut: “Its alleged charisma doesn’t jibe with its qualms; it’s like a silk cloth over an ugly stain.” In Wolf Dreams, the previous novel by Khadra, Algiers was pictured as a whore lifting up its skirts. The sirens of Baghdad, meanwhile, are both air-raid sirens prefiguring bombing raids, and seductive voices, singing first of a life of dissolute pleasure, and then of death. Both novels are stories of conversion, in which a young Muslim turns to violent Islamism. Wolf Dreams was set during the Algerian civil war of the 1990s (”Yasmina Khadra” is the pen name of a former officer of the Algerian army); Sirens of Baghdad is a novel of the current Iraq war. Continued →

The Woman in the Fifth
by Douglas Kennedy (Hutchinson, £12.99)

Consider the curious case of an American penis in Paris. Having caused a ruckus back home in Ohio, the penis flees the country only to find itself consigned to a hotel vase, as its hapless owner relates: “I picked up the vase, pulled out the flowers, tossed them on the floor, pulled down my boxer shorts, placed my penis inside the vase, and let go. The relief was enormous.”

The narrator’s relief in having detached himself from the troublemaking member is understandable, but the reader is left hanging for another 100 pages, wondering as to the fate of the unfortunate penis, left to languish in a vase after its owner leaves the hotel and embarks on adventures of his own. Has it been thrown out with the trash? Taken home as a memento by a chambermaid? Continued →