Lunar Park

Hadn’t you once wanted to “see the worst”? the writer asked me. Didn’t you once write that somewhere?

I might have. But I don’t want to anymore.

It’s too late, the writer said.

The internal monologue above provides only the slightest hint at just what a reality-blurring metafiction Bret Easton Ellis conjured up with his fifth novel Lunar Park, published in 2005. The book‘s protagonist is the author himself. Characters from his earlier works pop up regularly (including a certain Mr. Patrick Bateman - more on that in a minute); sometimes he is aware of their fictional nature, sometimes he is not. The opening chapter recaps the author’s life up until that point, blending exaggerated-reality with outright fiction so seamlessly that you get the idea the author was beginning to convince himself of the truth in his fabrications. The result is a thrilling, genuinely terrifying, and - most surprisingly to anyone familiar with Ellis’s work - tender concoction that defies conventions while purposefully straddling them. It sits snugly in a genre all of its own.

“Ellis” is a highly successful, though not very prolific, author who, it’s explained early on, has come out the other side of a drug- and booze-fuelled vortex with a wife and son, whose home he has recently begun inhabiting. His efforts to become a husband and father are not helped when his addictions begin to resurface, and it’s while he is indulging these on the sly during a party in his new house that he notices somebody there who is most definitely not on the guest list - it’s the aforementioned Bateman, and as his drinking and snorting activities increase in the days following he becomes convinced that the antihero of American Psycho, Ellis’s second novel, has unfinished business with him. He starts seeing visions of his dead, estranged father, and his paranoia really kicks into overdrive when his house starts transforming around him. Which would be bad enough except no-one seems to be noticing this phenomenon but him…

On the surface, Lunar Park comes the closest of all of Ellis’s fiction to straight horror. The author himself has stated that it is a homage to Stephen King; indeed, it bears more than a passing resemblance to King’s creation-come-to-life chiller The Dark Half. And it works impressively well on that level (particularly in the final act, when the trademark black comedy gives way entirely to old-fashioned, cinematic frights), and the book even includes three classic horror archetypes: The Haunted House, The Thing in the Woods, and - your favourite and mine! - The Possessed Toy.

But, as ever, Ellis is up to more than it at first appears. Underneath the horrors on show, there is a very clear sense of a man suffering through a number of crises: the mid-life variety, with Ellis obsessing over a 22 year old student who is doing her dissertation on him, and, foremost, a crisis of identity, symbolised through increasing amounts of differing - sometimes physical - manifestations of Ellis’s personality. Pure fiction, we must conclude. However the author is also preoccupied with his earlier work, in particular American Psycho, which is mentioned throughout. He appears particularly concerned with the book’s sickening violence: What drove him to indulge in such graphic imagery? And what are the ramifications, for himself as well as for the book’s readers? One wonders if this is where the real Bret Easton Ellis shows his face.

Ellis is known for drenching his work in satire and we find no exceptions here… except this time his primary target is himself. He is also known for the graphic violence just mentioned. But beneath the satire and the horror there is yet another layer: a wistful, tragic tale of a son trying not to turn into his father while simultaneously struggling to be any kind of father to his own son. The conclusion is guaranteed to choke up anybody who has ever lost either. Which may be the most startling aspect of a very startling novel.

Highly recommended for fans of Ellis, horror, or intelligent, razor-edged fiction of any stripe.

Stephen King

The first piece of "grown-up" fiction I ever read was when I was about eight or nine years old, and it was given to me by my father, Charles Armson. It was The Dead Zone by Stephen King, and a more disturbing introduction to the real world you could not imagine; the main character was tortured - tortured - beyond belief, and most of the secondaries were either neo-Hitlers or slick child-murderers. Yet the thing resonated with a kind of primitive sense of dignity and fundamental self-belief, both within the content and the application, that fascinates me still now (and is beautifully recreated in the David Cronenberg film adaptation, if you're stuck for something to rent one of these cold June nights). I spied him reading it for a day or two and then watched him put it down once finished with a sigh of contentedness that made me have to look into it. I asked him if I could read it and he acquiesced, God bless him. The caveat was that I not tell my mother lest he get in the shit - turns out, me reading books with thin rivulets of blood dripping down the front cover wasn't really going to make much of a difference. (My Dad had talents, but staying out of trouble with my Mom was not one of them.)

So of course on it went from there. I started at the beginning, as anybody with an awakening desire to tell stories would: first of course was Carrie and all its angst and brutality (of the physical kind, yes, but more emphatically the mental: High School is Hell, indeed). Then Salem's Lot, a book which in an almost casual fashion displays vampires as they are meant to be displayed - as truly terrifying, in case you were wondering, Meyer - while also managing to be a commentary on small-town Americana, young and doomed love, and writer's block. Not bad for a one-dimensional "hack", as some of King's more effort adverse critics still call him.

Then of course there is The Shining. Thanks to Kubrick's version of the film, a cultural phenomenon, and rightly so - the director's madcap cahoots with Jack Nicholson, and terrorising of Shelley Duvall, created an astounding piece of film literature, cold to the touch and brimming with malevolence. But Nicholson - as Jack Torrance - is not playing the same character as the one spelt out in the book. Torrance in Stephen King's original text is not this obviously insane person with the manic grin - the guy you wouldn't trust with your lawnmower, let alone the keys to your hotel for six months. In the book, he's a decent man, who's got problems, most explicitly his alcoholism - in King's words, "it's the hotel that bends him back and forth until he breaks," and Lloyd the barman is sent specifically to tap that up. In the film it just looks like an obvious progression.

Anyway. I'm losing focus and time is running short. After these three novels I have just talked about (plus The Dead Zone of course, which was published not long after) I was sold, is what you need to know. And no, it's not just about the gore and the grime, though, sure, that has a lot do with it. No it's about the beauty of the man's endearing, almost welcoming, prose, and his poise. And what he means, in this world of shit. Often when I get into one of his stories - and it doesn't happen all the time - I get to thinking about my Dad. There's unspeakable things happening, and I'm thinking "I bet Pops would get a kick out of this."

I can't think of a better commendation.

The Wire: A Quick Thought

There's an aspect of The Wire that is difficult to fathom, but attempt to do so I shall. I'll fail, I'm sure. But... Within all worthwhile drama is a simple degree of measurement that has to do with identification, even if we ourselves don't immediately identify it. Ebeneezer knows, and so does Mr. Bateman. So do we, but not on top, not where we live. We pay money to solidify, as we do with everything that doesn't involve just lying there. (Which most of the time involves paying rent, so that costs anyway, but I'm horribly digressing right now and aim to push on.) And push on I must, but not for long.

This odd netherworld of The Wire, with its strangely flat (a)morals. In it there are victims, casualties, no real heroes and no victors. And so, the drama - or whatever - is culled from something very akin to normality. It's not like The Sopranos, where despite the grit and agreeable conclusion glamour seeps from every shiny Ba-Da-Bing nipple and cocked pistol, or The West Wing, where we all get to think that maybe everything would be OK if only he was in charge.

Did I just refer to The Wire arena as a netherworld? It's not. It's a sustained vitriolic habitat unlike anything that's ever come before or since, where the word "truth" is a ridiculous, overpriced joke. It's something that holds its hand up, in the distance, as you warily hold up yours. It's Tommy Lee Jones saying, "OK... I'll be part of this world."

Oh, Australia

The first-choice England bowlers were supposed to struggle with the Australian Kookaburra ball, never mind the back-up. So it was with even greater satisfaction - if that was possible - that we watched first reserve Chris Tremlett (17 wickets at 23.35) find Michael Beer's inside edge to end the innings, the match, the bloody Ashes, with England victorious and Australian faces ground into the dirt in a way that no-one, not even the England team's most fervent cheerleaders, aka The Barmy Army, could possibly have envisaged two months ago without spending a night in the Arizona desert tripping their nuts off on some feverishly good peyote.

Nobody said anything about dignity.

The bowlers were meant to be one of the team's suspect faculties in this series, they said. Not got the heart nor the know-how to go toe-to-toe with Australia in home conditions, the whispers had it. They've got nothing if it doesn't swing, and the Kookaburra doesn't swing. How do we know? Aw look mate, if it swung we'd have seen our bowlers swing it. Cue semi-pitying eye-roll. Oh, it's funny to think of all that now.

For there is more than a whiff of schadenfreude in the air. It's sweet and sickly and will possibly make you feel a little bit ill once you've indulged, but it's impossible to resist none the less. Just ask Australia themselves. They certainly tucked in when they regained the urn back in 2007 and shoved the over-the-top celebrations of 2005 back in English faces. And why not? I mean, an open-topped parade through London after coming first in a two-sided contest? No matter its sporting or historical significance, that stinks of triumphalism.

On this occasion there will be no such fanfare, though the victory is just as sweet. To win against brave, skilled opponents, as they did in 2005, is one thing. To do it against spoiled, muscle-bound brats is quite another. And so it is difficult to resist the urge to crow, and I'm a fellow who gives in easily to temptation.

Jimmy Anderson, the best bowler in the series, whose abilities to swing the ball when old and new bamboozled the Australian batsmen and taunted their hapless bowlers, was described not long ago as "not tough enough to play against Australia" by Justin Langer - the Australian batting coach. Ouch. Speaking of swing, when the England fast bowling quartet of Jones, Harmison, Hoggard and Flintoff - the "Fab Four" who sadly never played together in the same England team - bowled England to victory in 2005, much of the Australian media decided to laud not these four players, but rather Troy Cooley, the Australian bowling coach who it was claimed had taught the four everything they know about reverse swing and without whom would be sending down the same polite pies that previous England bowlers had served up. So who was sitting in the Aussie dressing room this time, most likely with head in hands, as their bowlers singularly failed to emulate their English counterparts in getting any kind of reverse swing at all? That would be Troy Cooley, of course, lured away from the England set-up soon after the 2005 Ashes and who is now being parcelled off to run the national cricket academy. Incidentally, England's current bowling coach, David Saker, is Australian too - but, no doubt to much Australian chagrin, he has just extended his contract.

Ah, the Australian media. They have had it so good for so long and now - now that the Poms have emphatically, unequivocally relegated them to the second tier of test cricket, where they must be content for the foreseeable future to catch glimpses of the dust left in the wake of India, South Africa and England, never mind spotting the actual teams themselves as they battle it out for supremacy over the years ahead - they have, ever gracious, deigned to focus their attentions not on the strength and character shown by the victors, but the unforgivable shortcomings of the vanquished. Most of these flaws come down to the players not possessing surnames like Warne, McGrath, and Hayden, is the not very hard to find subtext hidden amidst the blood-letting. Of course, this cheerfully ignores the fact that the vast majority of the side are the same group of players who won in South Africa less than two years ago. Phil Hughes was there, scoring centuries and being proclaimed Hayden's natural successor. Mitchell Johnson was certainly there, on his way to being crowned the ICC world player of the year, as were Siddle and Hilfenhaus, bowling Australia to victory and ensuring headlines proclaiming a new generation of greats set to extend the era of Australian dominance. That is until England ruthlessly exposed Hughes's technique (in consecutive Ashes series) and managed to shake Johnson's confidence to the degree that the leader of the attack - when in the team, of course, for he was dropped for the first time in his career in this series - no longer takes the new ball and when it is eventually thrown to him the captain, be it Ponting or Clarke, watches events unfold from behind a metaphorical couch. He's the Australian answer to the Daleks, Mitchell - when playing England, that is. He seems to do all right against other teams, hence that player of the year award. Of course, none of this was mentioned when one national paper proclaimed this "The Worst Australian Side Ever". It is all, as Ian Botham might say, a bit ordinary.

Just a little bit of context goes a long way. India, South Africa, and England - or The Big Three, as they shall now be known - should produce some outstanding contests in the next few years. Watching the battered and bruised Australian team scraping the hubris off their collective face will also be fun. I hope Ricky doesn't retire just yet.