The Fearful Void

(March 2025)

There's a moment where Geoffrey Moorhouse, on the first leg of an arduous journey across the Sahara the ill-advised latitudinal way, discusses the thought process that got him into this mess, and now prevents him from getting out of it.

"I was, simply, very afraid that I might become like these people... so my haunted imagination told me as it strove to delay the loss of self."

These ruminations being precipitated by taking a dump in a dune. Such mixing of the mystic and the coarsely material is something that Moorhouse leads us through repeatedly across a fascinated and fascinating book. 

Moorhouse's account of his alarmingly swift physical deterioration on the journey seems a salient lesson in any number of things. Blurb by Susan Hill refers to "courage, endurance, and triumph", which last adjective seems to discount the unfinished journey, the hallucinatory sickness, the "raw and weeping patches of flesh", to say nothing of a strongly-hinted-at imminent marital breakdown.

Such suffering seems at times not a noble achievement but an unnecessary one. A little hardship may be that grain of sand in the oyster of the soul, but Moorhouse's privations seem, at their worst, a kind of martyrdom, "beautifully written" though it is, at its best. His prose throws up more than occasional thrills of scale: at one point he and his current companion and their camels are "insects creeping forward to a rim of the world that might never be revealed, across pure and unbounded space..." The madman dragging himself across a desert of the mind, teetering "close to a brink of a revelation... But not quite" put me in mind of a tormented HP Lovecraft narrator, desperately scrawling their fleeting apprehensions of some vast exterior truth hinted at periodically in and on the distant hills.

To this reader in 2025, terrific though the book was, there was certainly something alien and peculiar in the scope of the project, with the British journalist moved to take up the journey because it's there, spied from the window of a passenger jet. The overt spiritual quest metaphor jostles alongside sociocultural and post-colonial allegory implied in the entire concept. The aptly-named imprint Paladin had a line in publishing similar accounts of post-war exploration and sixties ego-dislocation taken to literal extremes by (white European) hiking types. So, knight-errant Woodhouse tests his ideals of conquest and comes up short, left with a grasp at something numinous among the shifting sands of the desert. Or it could be he's merely poking at the remains of a rumination. Like the matter in the life-saving water he sips gratefully at one point, sometimes perhaps it's best not to look too closely.

Paper Towns

 (Read this one in March 2025)

Another bit of a "quick read", picked up I think from a supermarket charity shelf. I didn't realise John Green was the Fault In Our Stars John Green until talking about it after, and I haven't read that so won't say anything else about it.

My initial note (four or five pages in) was "first person American quirky, Wes Anderson vibes". By this I mean earlier Wes Anderson, recognisably Americana-ish, Salinger eccentrics vibes. Talky high schoolers in unusual situations? John Hughes another flavor note.

 

The book is from 2008 and does a lot of pre-ubiquitous-internet internet references, that sort of date it and sort of create a weird nostalgia snare: combined with the bookish self-consciousness of the rest of the novel, it evokes a now possibly wholly-dissolved membrane between digital mediation and analogue solidity, which perhaps is me retrofitting an ill-considered cultural notional something more to the book than might have been intended.

 

As the book itself seems to suggest, maybe now we're processing things differently (he drafted into a phone) we lack something that used to be offered by well-thumbed page corners turned down, highlighted connections and margin notes. Stuff literally hidden in doorways. Maybe those memories are as simultaneously there-and-not-there as the title conceit.

As a novel, though, it's deeply novelish - a manic pixie American dream girl (Margo) is quest object for the massively square Quentin, in a slightly old-fashioned (even for 2008) follow-the-clues road trip romance, complete with tokenistic support ensemble (also: too much dialogue). It seemed particularly frustrating to have a support ensemble that then just evaporates for the denouement, even as the now squarer-than-square narrator foregrounds them, and the "real" life they represent, as part of his justification for avoiding any sort of commitment to the joyful abandon signified by Margo.

Thusly, the Narrator wades squarely through Whitman, Woody Guthrie and various modes of wanderlust 'til he finally recognises his shadowy anima... and walks away from it? An apparent acceptance of enduring alienation, from true-but-too-eccentric love, or self, or something, seems yet another dumb decision made with all the dumb, square certainties of youth. 

 

Which, of course, resonated. Probably I would have loved this in my late teens/early 20s, though would even then have compared it unfavourably to early Douglas Coupland. 

 

What I got most from it now was a reminder of what it was like to find depth and power in books, music, and those cross-references that mattered more than everything else when that age, in that age. 

The Paris Notebooks

"We'll always have Paris."

"...as long as you have a notebook with the word Paris in it, right?"

My Holidays Are Short

Last posts here were a moment ago... busy, busy. This was written in half term break, October 2024.

This volume was bumped up the pile on the - as it turned out correct - assumption that relentless pulp action would be just the ticket for a brain reset.

Spillane was a master. Not having read any Mike Hammers before, I had a vague notion of plots and preoccupations, and was entirely hooked from the opening pages of I, The Jury onwards. Once started, that foot hit the pedal and it was easy to roar through all three books in about the same number of days. 

These are the first of the Mike Hammer titles, and one gets a feel for the style quite quickly. Solipsistic and simple from the titles in, it's sex-and-death-wish fulfilment with the kicker that no one gets their wishes fulfilled adequately, least of all the first person who rages his way through the tales without a damn given. 

 

One can correctly predict the deaths of most of the characters, mainly broads and hoods, by dint of the fact that literally everyone dies except Hammer, Pat Chambers (his NYPD foil) and Velda (the smokin' hot, also tough-as-lacquered-nails secretary). 

 

Sex and violence, Spillane reasoned, were in combination irresistible, so, well, here you go. There are intriguing contextual ideas of post-war nihilism and self-abuse to consider, but these are not ideas explored in the texts so much as set on fire then stubbed drunkenly with angry fingers into ashtray shreds. It's as unsophisticated and cartoonish as a character called Mike Hammer would suggest. I lined up those triple shots and drank them down in greedy gulps.

Hamster Dam

 Hamster Dam - Quentin S. Crisp

Unsettling is the word that came to mind when making book diary notes for this one, and the nib was hovering above the page for quite some time. Hamster Dam is quite the perspective shifter. 

In the book, Hamster Dam is a sort of Gordon Murray/Oliver Postgate kids' TV series from the 1960s or 1970s, set in a community of anthropomorphic hamsters. Or it is according to the memories of Gary, who is taking leave of absence from psychiatric work. His story is narrated by Brian, a colleague and case worker, and he seems uncertain if Hamster Dam ever existed in reality, and, increasingly, what reality even means for Gary, and him, and everyone else.

The writing has multiple hilarious (to me) moments that leaven a weird horror/science tone. There's nothing like a finely-timed bit of whimsy to take the sourer edges off a sober and fairly intense gaze at modern life. The narrator's uncertainty also provokes a constant sense of discomfort about how events might unfold. 

So, yeah, unsettling.

I don't know much about Quentin S. Crisp other than what I've gleaned from various interviews that have popped up with him, including this super effort from the Kulchur Kat blog, and the other bits and pieces of his work that I've scoured dutifully since reading Hamster Dam and being mighty impressed with it. He's definitely now one of those writers where I'll be 'just getting their stuff'.

Hamster Dam is also among the books that tilted me and a fellow tomehound into doing a podcast, watch this space. Crisp and Hamster Dam will almost certainly feature in the inaugural episode.

Do Humankind's Best Days Lie Ahead?

 Do Humankind's Best Days Lie Ahead?

Steven Pinker, Matt Ridley, Alain de Botton, Malcolm Gladwell

An almost definitionally shallow sixth form debate level exploration of a feeble motion. This transcript from 2015 presents four riff-heavy bigwigs trading sententious barbs, book-ended by a self-important introduction and reflection sections that add nothing.  

The book is a particular snapshot of a particular moment in time where "71% of people view progress as a continuing thing". Such vague  optimism seems particularly anachronistic in 2023. 

I think I might have enjoyed this more if John Gray and Thomas Ligotti had participated.
 

The Night Clock

The Night Clock

Paul Meloy

 Another book picked up at a library sale. I liked the look of it. It seemed to fit in with other stuff I'd been reading or had on the pile. 

Unsettling from the opening, the horror/sci-fi of The Night Clock presents psychological dreamscapes jostling with grimy urban sink estates. Escape hatches between the two shift and clatter. It has several memorable characters and set pieces: the bit where a mobility scooter gets a diabolical chop shop makeover worked especially well. Also, Meloy does a fine line in dry dialogue.

With cosmic automachy, psychopomps and an uber-villain known only as the Junction Creature, it's got a lot of mass beneath the main narrative. This is to its detriment on occasion for me: a fair few "the what now?" moments with back stories, parallel mythologies and new characters. Sometimes it seemed like it was part of a greater whole, but in a kind of sketch-like, unfinished way, where the ideas might have suited a more leisurely unfolding. I can see it working as part of a comic series, for example - it reminded me of something from Vertigo I might have devoured.

Having said that, the dislocated and weird fragmentation aspects are part of the appeal. They suit the dream themes and ideas of fractal mirrorball otherwhens behind the fabric of what we call reality.

Definitely a thumbs up from me, though a volume that has now moved on from the stack.