One reason I gave up my Dockers membership…

Twice I told them about their spelling my name wrong. Fat lot of good it did. So I’m watching the game on TV this year…

The Kingdom of Four Rivers to be published by Equilibrium Books

Yep, this is my exciting news. My novel The Kingdom of Four Rivers has been picked up by WA publisher Equilibrium Books. The release is tentatively set for May of this year, which is just three months away. Hopefully I will be able to arrange a book launch here in Northam. The novel will be available for purchase at the Equilibrium Books website, and at selected bookstores (i.e. the ones I convince to stock it). Initially this will be only bookstores in the Avon Valley area, but I’m hoping to branch out into Perth and Melbourne, if only in some small degree.  Don’t believe me yet? Here’s the cover:

I’m stoked with the cover, as it depicts two of the most important images in the novel: the jungle and one of the shields covering the remaining cities. In the next couple of months, I will be setting my own web space, probably guysalvidge.com, which will have information about the book, links to various booksellers, and hopefully an extract too. I just need to work out the legalities of this. So there – I’m excited!

Guy Salvidge’s blog turns 1

Well, a year of this blog has come and gone, and I’ve been pretty pleased with how things have travelled. I’ve written a fairly insane number of book reviews (at least 50) on here, as well as various other things. I scored free books from Simon Haynes and J. J. DeCeglie.  Strangely, the most popular post is my review of Ma Jian’s Beijing Coma, which seems to be mostly because I included the famous ‘tank man’ image in my review. That’s right – if you type ‘man vs tank’ into Google you’ll wind up here. Apparently.

I’ve got some fairly exciting news on the writing front, but I think I’ll hold onto that one just for now. Thanks to everyone who has read or  commented on this blog over the past twelve months. Watch this space!

Book Review – The Road by Cormac McCarthy

This is the kind of book that sticks in the mind long after you’ve finished reading it. I know this because I first read it nearly a year ago, and it’s still fresh in my mind now on the second reading. It’s not often I feel the urge to re-read a book within a year either. My admiration for this immensely popular novel – The Road by Cormac McCarthy – can partly be explained by my morbid love for tales of the post-apocalypse, but there’s more to it than that. This is simply the most searingly bleak novel I’ve ever read, and among the most gripping. There it is in a nutshell – reading The Road is a singular experience, uniquely toxic and unremittingly bleak.

I found this impossible to review after the first reading, and I feel I’m going to struggle here on the second. Let’s start with what this doesn’t have. The Road doesn’t have many characters at all. The main protagonists, a man and his son, remain nameless throughout the text. There isn’t much of a world to write about either. After some nameless apocalypse, the environment seems to be in a state of terminal decline. It reads somewhat like a tale of a nuclear winter, but it’s not that. If I were to guess, I’d say the catastrophe were some illness in the sun itself or the earth’s orbit. Whatever. It’s terminal. I can’t emphasise this enough. This is the bleakest setting in fiction, ever. The Road doesn’t have a complex plot, and nor is it arranged in chapters or sections. What we have is a series of shortish sections, some as brief as a couple of lines, describing (for the most part) the minute to minute trials of the two survivors.
There’s something else The Road doesn’t have much of at all:  punctuation. ‘Don’t’ is written as ‘dont’ etc and there are precious few commas. No speech marks. At first I found this pretentious, grating, but you do get used to it. Whether this is a McCarthy trademark I can’t say. I suspect it is. The book doesn’t have much in the way of literary style either. It’s mostly written in clipped, Hemingway-esque prose. This seems appropriate given the bleak subject matter. But, oddly, McCarthy throws in a number of difficult words (like ‘granitic’ on page 1). If I were a more diligent reader, I’d surely have been reaching for the dictionary on several occasions.

I just mentioned that McCarthy doesn’t seem to me to be a literary writer. This is an important point, for what The Road does do extremely well is describe the minutae of this journey across a mostly frozen, ashen landscape. I get the idea that the author knows a lot about hiking, camping, fishing etc. A lot about survival. He deploys this knowledge very convincingly here. A different author might have been more concerned with image, with philosophy, given this subject matter, by McCarthy keeps us very definitely rooted to the ground. This is a massive strength, as the novel becomes one of the most visceral reading experiences imaginable. There’s little wonder that Hollywood has rushed to turn this into a film: it’s virtually a film already. It just needs shooting. The sensory experience of reading this novel is a wonderful thing.

This is a shocking book. There’s nowhere to hide in it, and McCarthy does not spare us the gruesome details of precisely how humanity comes to an end. A number of scenes are so affronting that I had to read them again and again. Without wanting to divulge some of these details, suffice to say that a great number of people die, have died, or continue to exist in the most depraved and hopeless circumstances imaginable. Having said this, McCarthy doesn’t go overboard with the gore either. It is this careful selection of horrific detail that continues to shock this reader as the novel progressed. McCarthy is simply making us aware of just how frail our so-called civilisation really is, how transient and conditional our values. It isn’t a pretty sight.

The Road doesn’t have paragraphs either; I’ve just noticed. What we have are blocks of texts cut with white space. That’s it. There’s almost nothing to drive the narrative forward.  Strangely, the narrative gallops forward at a brisk pace. The only motivation the man has is in trying to protect the life of his son. Despite this, things go from bad to worse in the first half of the novel. Life couldn’t be any worse than this. In this regard, The Road is somewhat reminiscent of Beckett’s novels. It’s the best comparison I can think of. But the difference is that in Beckett, the sterility is in the thinking of the characters and the narrative itself, whereas here it is in the external setting. This is a book that basically reads itself. It’s not easy to put down, and I suspect that a great many people first read it cover to cover, as I did. It’s hard to imagine greater praise for a book than to say it demands to be read. The Road demands to be read.

Book Review – The Lady in the Lake by Raymond Chandler

First published in 1943, The Lady in the Lake is the fourth Philip Marlowe novel, and my fourth overall. Certainly not as famous as The Big Sleep or The Long Goodbye, it nevertheless came highly recommended to me on the basis that J. G. Ballard considered it his favourite Chandler novel. Having read it now, I can’t say I agree.

Chandler creates his own set of norms and stereotypes which, while initially unusual, eventually wear out from use. So in your typical Marlowe detective novel, the following things are certain to occur at some point:

- Marlowe talks to a sassy dame. She comes onto him but he staunchly rebukes her advances.

- The cops try to throw Marlowe off the case by threatening him or calling him a ’shamus.’

- Marlowe pokes his nose into situations he knows he shouldn’t, and gets the crap beaten out of him as a result.

- Marlowe gets threatened with a gun, to which he offers an array of wisecracks in response.

- A chance encounter or situation gives Marlowe a vital clue which can advance the story.

- Someone offers Marlowe a large sum of money, which he refuses.

- And how could I forget, Marlowe drinks a pint of whisky, gets into his car and drives around the streets of L.A.

There’s nothing wrong with any of these events on their own, and they can work in concert too, but I felt with The Lady in the Lake that the pattern was becoming overly apparent to me. Worse, of the various mysteries in the novel, I was able to predict at least two of them, which is unusual for me. The first mystery is given away by the novel’s title (think about it – it’s not The Lady OF the Lake) and the second with an all too obvious plot gimmick in which two women are described as being virtually identical. Even I could tell that this was a set-up for a switcheroo.

So what actually happens in The Lady in the Lake? These novels usually open with Marlowe meeting the client for the first time; here he meets Derace Kingsley, who wants him to find his wife. This may involve driving up to (then) rural Little Fawn Lake. There’s also a guy called Chris Lavery hanging around. Up at Little Fawn Lake, Marlowe meets a country bumpkin with the unlikely name of Bill Chess. Chess almost whacks Marlowe a couple of times, and then he discovers his OWN wife’s body in the lake, in bizarre circumstances. It appears she’s been in there a month or so, since she said she was leaving him. There’s also mention that Kingsley’s wife was at the lake at the same time, and had the same appearance. You got that? SAME time, SAME appearance, DIFFERENT woman. This will be important later.

This novel features an even more bumpkin-like character, Sherrif Patton. He has a sticker on his car that says ‘Voters, Attention!  Keep Jim Patton Constable. He is too old to go to work.’ This got a laugh out of me.  Chess semi confesses to his wife’s murder and is taken away. Marlowe isn’t convinced and does a bit of snooping. There’s always some snooping in Marlowe novels, and it’s all part of the fun. Chandler’s technique is to pile mystery upon mystery, complexity upon complexity. It often works quite well, but not, to my mind, in The Lady in the Lake. By the end the only thing I was certain of was that I had successfully predicted the novel’s major plot twist.

And it ends. I didn’t dislike this novel while reading it, and I got through it in until 24 hours, but on reflection I believe this to be the poorest of the four Marlowe novels I’ve read thus far. The Little Sister is up next.