Stephen King - Joyland

Published: 2013

I love Stephen King books. There, I said it. Yes, the literary establishment may be a tad sniffy about mass-market ‘pulp’ genres like horror, but so what? With one or two exceptions, you don’t sell millions of books without being at least vaguely proficient.

                I’ve been reading King for years. At an age when many teenage boys give up reading fiction altogether, it was staying up late and terrifying myself stupid with The Shining and Pet Sematary that kept me going. Later, at university, members of the writers’ group I joined also had King novels sitting alongside more ‘worthy’ tomes on their bookshelves. It’s no different these days; I have a friend who proudly proclaims that she ‘owns everything Stephen King has ever written.’

                Stephen King novels fit into three broad categories: the good early ones (Carrie, It, The Shining etc), the dodgy, cocaine-fuelled ones (The Tommyknockers, Needful Things) and, er, the new ones. His recent record has been patchy yet sporadically brilliant. Attempts at straight horror compare poorly with the classics: Duma Key was boring and Cell idiotic. Yet 11.22.63 (a time travel adventure centred on the Kennedy assassination) demonstrated how he had matured as an author. So basically, his latest novel, Joyland, has a tossed coin’s chances of being a good ‘un.

                Joyland winds back the clock to 1973, which feels like King’s comfort zone; he always seems most comfortable writing about the old, industrial, blue collar America of his youth. Like the teenage King, the first-person narrator, Devin Jones, is an aspiring author and current student, taking various menial jobs to get himself through college. When an opportunity presents itself to spend the summer working at Joyland, a seaside amusement park, it appears preferable to canteen dishwashing as well as a good way to get over his obviously disintegrating relationship with his girlfriend. Devin arrives as a total outsider (‘greenie’) and must quickly integrate himself into the ways, lore and language of the ‘carnies’.

                Joyland is the kind of park which existed in the States before Disney et al managed to completely monopolise the amusement park business – a glorified travelling fairground with all the associated myth and folklore, complete with resident fortune teller. But King doesn’t play the ‘creepy, old fashioned fairground’ card to the extent you’d expect (or in the way he probably would have done earlier in his career). In fact, the only ghost is – unusually – not witnessed by the main character at all, and there are no nail-biting scenes of supernatural tension of the kind that got me hooked on King’s work as a teenager. So, if you’re expecting a horror yarn, this isn’t it.

                The mystery lurking beneath Joyland’s garish facade is the unsolved murder of a female guest in the darkness of the House of Horror ride. But I would argue that this, at least if you’re a seasoned crime fiction reader, won’t satisfy deep down either. Joyland may be published by pulp crime outfit Hard Case Crime, but no real clues are given to help the reader solve the mystery before the killer is revealed. It’s not just that the ability to do so is an integral part of the crime genre; it’s also that most murder mysteries don’t rely so heavily on a psychic child character to help solve the crime.

                OK, so Joyland doesn’t really make the mark as either a horror story or a crime thriller. But I would recommend it for other reasons. Characterisation is now honed to a fine point, a point which most of King’s contemporaries rarely achieve. Dialogue, too, is handled with King’s hallmark panache. Particularly enjoyable was the believable (although apparently mostly made-up) carnie patter and lore – you can immerse yourself in the details of the place. I usually find it difficult to give a damn about the characters in most horror or crime thrillers, but it’s an area in which King is adept at hitting the high notes. In that regard, I wouldn’t rate this as highly as deeply poignant previous works like Different Seasons, or the underrated Hearts In Atlantis, but King is at least keen to show us he still knows what he’s doing.

                Also to recommend it is its length, or lack of. It has to be said that King is prone on occasion to writing some hugely over-long novels (The Stand, anyone?) but this isn’t one of them. It’s straight and to the point, which books like this need to be. It’s a nice easy weekend read.

                As Garth Marenghi, the fictional horror author in the TV parody Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace boasts, ‘I’m one of the few authors who has written more books than most people have read.’ King has by now produced enough novels to fill the capacious trunk of a Plymouth Fury, and not all of them good. But at least Joyland, whilst not up there with the best, is a minor gem.

Zadie Smith - N-W

Published: 2012

THIS IS THE STORY OF A CITY, announces the blurb on the inner jacket of N-W. Right, before we get on to anything else, it isn’t, particularly. Yes, it makes a well-worn point about the interconnected yet isolated nature of life in a city. “Cheek-by-jowl living. Separate worlds.” N-W may be set in and around the eponymous north western area of London – Zadie Smith has, so far, refused to recognise the existence of life in Britain outside of the M25 – yet the story could be taking place virtually anywhere. For a novel named after its geographical setting, this seems odd.

                If this seems like a slightly petulant criticism, that’s because I’m still annoyed at what a disappointment this book turned out to be, from a writer who I (not to mention the Granta list people) hold in high regard. The first novel of hers I came across was the sharp-witted campus novel On Beauty (2008). But it was her debut that really impressed me. White Teeth (2000) is one of those novels that so vividly portrays the era in which it was written that it is almost representative of it. An uplifting, multi-faceted portrait of contemporary multicultural Britain at the turn of the 21^st Century. It also showcased how she was equally adept at getting into the head of a sixty-something white male character as she was with a young, black, female character – all the more impressive, in my eyes, that she only in her twenties when she wrote it.

                N-W is similar to White Teeth in some superficial ways, in the sense that, like that novel, it is made up of several, loosely interwoven stories following characters that have taken very different paths in life. But there the similarity ends. Where White Teeth was poignant and funny, N-W is just depressing. The blurb describes it as a tragi-comic novel, but I couldn’t find much amusement in it. The characters are all either poor and unhappy, rich and unhappy, or happy but doomed to be knifed to death in a pointless street attack (apologies for the spoiler, but like most things in this novel, it really doesn’t have a whole lot of bearing on the story).

                So, we start off with Leah, whose husband wants children but she doesn’t, a conundrum she illicitly solves with the pill and abortions. She also gets taken advantage of by a door-to-door scam, and, it seems, in life generally. She seems like an interesting character, but after spending the first third of the book agonising about various issues and tempting us with a few interesting but un-followed-up storylines, her section is suddenly over and we join Felix: former alcoholic, jack-of-all-trades and current car mechanic.

                Felix grew up on the same estate as Leah (this is the common link throughout the book) and is a likeable, happy-go-lucky type. After some fairly aimless run-ins with his Rastafarian father and fallen aristrocratic mistress, time spent fucking in faded grandeur amid empty vodka bottles, he ends up getting on the wrong side of some local thugs and is knifed to death by some guys who say ‘blud’ a lot. Incidentally, this takes place on Leah’s street; this is the only other link between the two characters. It’s a pity, I was just starting to get to like Felix. It’s also a pity because he’s far more likeable than anyone else appearing in this book.

                Finally there’s Natalie, a black girl from the same estate who’s beaten the odds to become a rich, successful lawyer with a banker husband. Turns out she was childhood friends with Leah – they’re still in touch but now distant and resentful of each others’ existence. As an adult, she spends a lot of time agonising over her racial identity, as well as cheating on her husband with random strangers from an internet dating site for oblique reasons that are never really disclosed. In the end, of course, both Leah and Natalie’s dark secrets come to the attention of their respective partners, which is how Smith contrives to have both of them present at the book’s lukewarm climax, but by this point I didn’t really care what happened to any of them. Smith’s trademark, and usually enjoyable, unconventional literary devices  (not using speech marks, ending chapters mid sentence, etc) doesn’t help, either – here, it tips the balance from playfulness into pretentiousness.

                Maybe I’m missing something here. Maybe N-W really is a profound, “quietly devastating novel “(that blurb again) that cuts to the core of the modern condition of city life. It’s an overwhelmingly bleak novel , I’ll give it that. But whilst White Teeth had, well, teeth, N-W is just toothless. Or maybe Zadie Smith novels adhere to the same pattern that sci-fi fans say Star Trek movies do: one good one followed by one bad one. Well, if that’s the case, as least things bode well for her next work.

George R R Martin - A Song of Ice & Fire

 

Reviewed by: Ian Richards

Unless you've spent the last two years patrolling a two hundred foot ice wall on the edge of a haunted forest, the chances are that you have at least heard of George R R Martin's fantasy magnum opus A Song of Ice & Fire, or its television adaptation Game of Thrones.  And I'll be honest: if you really do believe that you've spent the last two years patrolling a two hundred foot ice wall on the edge of a haunted forest, then it's only because you lost all grip on reality in those unforgettable opening moments of Martin's epic tale.

Since the premiere of the TV series in 2011, this saga of a brutal power struggle in the mythical land of Westeros has evolved from a cult hit to become a major cultural touchstone of the decade so far.  Until its popularity wanes, expect many a fancy dress party filled with Dothraki and Bloody Mummers, and maternity wards up and down the country to fill with little Tyrions, Aryas, Brans and Sansas.  But where has this sudden obsession sprung from?  Why are we investing such passion in the travails of fictional figures in a pseudo-medieval world?

Difficult to tell, really.  After all, the driving force of the plot is two irreconcilable forces vying for control of a kingdom.  On the one hand you have House Lannister: a bunch of obscenely wealthy arseholes, constantly hatching despicable plans to increase their own power, and indulging in all manner of sexual perversions behind closed doors.  Yes, that's right; the Lannisters are the Tory Party of Westeros.  In opposition to them are the quintessential Labour voters, House Stark: principally located in the North, clinging to outdated notions of honour and decency, and obsessed with the fact that winter is coming (after all, those fuel bills don't get any cheaper).  As if that wasn't enough, beyond the Wall in the cold northern wastes, hordes of people are determined to be independent from the rest of the kingdoms.

Yes, it's tremendously hard to see what relevance this story could possibly have for people in the UK in 2013.

Of course, there are other dimensions to the great game of thrones.  Up in the land beyond the Wall, the dead are coming back to life (those deep-fried Mars bars may put you in an early grave, but they evidently don't keep you there).  Meanwhile, across the sea, the last princess of the line that once ruled Westeros is making it her life's work to reclaim her family's crown from the Lannisters, the Starks, and the numerous other warring houses (and I for one dearly hope she stays well clear of fast cars and tunnels in Paris).  But though the multiple plot lines that snake through the novels may seem daunting, you experience them from the perspectives of a cast of characters whose own lives and fates are entwined in the wider events; crucially, they're characters you can't help but care about, whether it's because you want them safe or you want them dead.  Some of them are, quite literally, bastards.  Some are decent people trying to do what's right, and more often than not, they're the ones who are made to suffer in an absurdly cruel world.  A work of fantasy it may be, but under that veneer exists a very grim and timeless reality.

Of course, it won't be long before our politicians catch on to the phenomenon of A Song of Ice & Fire, and start making reference to it as part of their never-ending quest to appear cool and relevant to the rest of us.  To be honest, I'd welcome this; for instance, Ed Miliband's leadership of the Labour Party couldn't be any worse for taking some lessons from Eddard Stark, the noble lord of Winterfell.  In fact, the all-new Eddard Miliband may actually inspire some confidence in the nation, once he's grown a beard and started delivering all of his speeches in an irritable growl.  Plus, the policy of personally decapitating those who bring disgrace on the House will make for quite a sight outside party headquarters the next time Ed Balls accidentally tweets his own name.  (Of course, if Eddard Miliband should fail, we could always go to plan B and stick Sean Bean in charge of the Labour Party.  To be honest, I'm already struggling to work out why that isn't plan A.)

If you haven't already embarked on the visceral journey through Martin's world, either by way of the novels or the HBO adaptation, then I strongly urge you to give in to the hype and buckle yourself in for the ride.  As a nation, we have a long history of embracing tales of heroes and monsters, from Beowulf to Bilbo Baggins, and Ice & Fire continues that tradition in fine style.  Until our very own Daenerys Targaryen comes sweeping down from the sky to do something about the Starks and Lannisters in Parliament, have yourself an enjoyable month or two seeing it unfold a world away.