“Ghostwritten”

Date: 22.06.09
Journey: Finsbury Park to Oxford St
Reader: Retro Modern Secretary With A Jane Austen Fetish
Title: Ghostwritten
Author: David Mitchell

I don’t travel on the same underground as most people. A born anti-9to5-er, I travel when the tube is pleasant and trains are laid on almost exclusively for my own circumnavigation. So to get a job editing in Soho for a week for a series of online shows about the Ashes was a bit of a shock reminder. The good – the cricket. The bad – the lack of material to cut together. The ugly – the underground at rush hour.

Although to be honest, that’s not really fair. For the underground at rush hour isn’t ugly, rather, strangely beautiful.

It is the only place you’ll see so many people so intimately entwined outside of an orgy, and the only reason they’re all bumping on grinding on the train is because of the train, not any sexual desire. If you travel on the tube during off-peak hours, there’s always the remembrance of that advert that gets copied every now and again for a new generation whereby two youngsters eye each other up on the escalators. But at rush hour, crammed in close to some stranger’s armpit as you are methodically pushed from behind again and again, there is nothing sexual. That particular button has been turned off, and you are in the only place where you combine interpersonal intimacy and confined and considered emotion. There is nowhere else other than public transport where you can see the transformation of normally rambunctious human beings into pliant and quiet statues. Maybe that’s what dead statues was all about. Teaching us how to ride on the tube.

Anyway. Whilst trying to keep my face out of said pit, I noticed a book beyond it and began to read. Maybe it was the name ‘David Mitchell’ on the front cover that attracted me, even though I knew it wouldn’t be TV’s David Mitchell but the other one, the one who probably manages to go to properly posh parties where he doesn’t have to keep telling people he’s not that one, he’s the other one, you know, the one who writes really good novels that everyone thinks the TV one has written. That one. Or it might just have been a desire to keep out of the pit.

I managed to read from Finsbury Park to Euston, whereupon the real reader sat down on a newly available seat. A voracious reader, she did everything at double speed it seemed. Whilst reading she was listening to music on her iPod. She had two bags, one canvas, one patent pink leather, that went well with her dark purple tights. Scanning the words fast through modern retro plastic glasses that gave her a 1950s secretary air, her shirt had the frills that screamed for the desire to get lost on the moors, or at least the heath, to get wet and pneumatic (not totally certain that’s the right word for catching pneumonia, in fact, it isn’t, but maybe it should, for both involve air, even if only one involves the lack of phone calls), to be found by a tall dark handsome man riding out of the mist. Either that or the frills looked nice that morning. It was sunny out, after all.

Although not down here. And not in that book either. The post-apocalyptic plot was interesting – in that I couldn’t discern one. Granted, I was only able to read the left-hand pages from around 402-410 due to the way our Retro Modern Secretary held her book from Finsbury Park to Euston (and even if I had been able to see both pages, she was reading at double the speed of me. I count myself a fast reader. Perhaps less fast when reading through the gap between pit and arm but not so less fast as to be lapped on every page), but even so, the bit I was reading seemed to mainly consist of lots of dialogue between a man who claimed to be a freelance zookeeper, who may also have been a radio DJ on Nightwatch FM, and someone of far less interest, who really just had to sit there and listen to this guy give a barrage of pop culture references like he’d just watched that remake of Open Your Eyes with Tom Cruise and the mole on Penelope Cruz’s breasts. We swiftly moved from Tiberius and Ancient Rome to Roosevelt and the Stones or the Beatles, I forget which ones, it didn’t mention the hair, and back into the present, which seemed to be a post-apocalyptic world of war and stuff. Possibly. Like I say, it was jumping all over to give you reference points – which, at the closing stages of the book, seemed unnecessary and like something great had been lost in a vain attempt to tie what went before together into a huge meaningful whole. Much like the end of Vanilla Sky, indeed.

I wasn’t impressed. But I don’t want to leave the reader here feeling like this is me telling you not to bother reading a highly rated book on the basis of four or five left-hand pages. So I’ve done my research and scanned the reviews of it on Amazon and come to this conclusion. Don’t read the bit I read. Nobody has a good thing to say about it, whilst they rave about the previous 400 pages. When you get to 401, stop. Imagine the rest. You’ll do a better job of it. Like if you close the book before the last two chapters of Captain Corelli, or the last two chapters of The Time Traveller’s Wife. This one isn’t about love, but it still seems like the author got bored, which is a shame, because what happens before is apparently really good. I shall be looking out for it again, next time I’m on the 8.30(ish) from Finsbury Park to Oxford St.

Written by Chris Blaine, y’know one of the Brothers.

 

The Da Vinci Code

Date: 03.07.09
Journey: Traveling to Brixton on the Victoria Line.
Reader: Looked a bit like Paulie from the Sopranos, but orange, balding and unshaven.

Title: The Da Vinci Code
Author: Dan Brown

Review: I was slithering through London’s vile bowels in my unusually smelly train carriage, waiting to be appropriately excreted in Brixton, when confusion slapped me in the face with its all too familiar clammy palm. I had a profound moment of Deja vu.

Sitting there munching sunflower seeds happily from a paper bag, was a heavy set, middle-aged, perma-tanned man reading The Da Vinci Code! Exuding childlike serenity, presumably caught up in Dan Brown’s neck-break prose, he casually let the sunflower husks fall about his person with not a care in the world.

This Underground spectacle angered me for two reasons. Firstly, just who did he think was going to come and clean up after him? Take some responsibility man! Would you do that in your own home?

The second reason is something less direct and more personal, something that the book represents to me. The deja vu I refer to was not the reader himself; thanks be, but the very act of the book’s appearance on the Underground. I remember when it came out in 2004 the damn thing was everywhere! When it was re-released in paperback giant posters adorned the sides of stations, billboards and bus shelters. Then when the dire film version followed the posters came back with a vengeance and there was no escape from Tom Hanks high forehead and odd hairstyle.

Wikipedia says: “It is a worldwide bestseller that had 60.5 million copies in print by May 2006″ [the release date of the film]. A sizeable chunk of Brazilian Rainforest succumbed to the publishing of that book! 60.5 million copies! That’s almost a copy for each of the entire 2006 UK population! Imagine the nightmarish reality where everybody has their faces buried in Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code: on the street, in the pub, at the theatre… That could’ve been the United Kingdom. It doesn’t bear thinking about. I’m sorry I even mentioned it.

The chances are either you’ve read the book or the person next to you has read it… Certainly the person next to them extolling the virtues of an alien anal probe and conjuring conspiracy theories about Michael Jackson has read it! The Truth is out there…

My confusion was namely this: what was this littering Sopranos wannabe doing reading a book that had been so heavily over-exposed for the last half-decade? Surely he must have seen the film, read an article, a review, a damning rebuke, a spin-off, bought the mug, the t-shirt, the collapsible loofah… Surely everyone knows the “secret” by now? How had this man been passed by damn it!? It’s like he was goading me with his nonchalance.

I gritted my teeth as he brushed more sunflower husks into the crevices of his seat and onto the carriage floor.

Now I like to think I’m an individual – in my mind even something of a maverick – but like most people I shop at Tesco, try to pay my bills on time and think someone (else) should really do something about all this horrible poverty and pollution and stuff. But I play by my own rules. Obviously I also play by the various moral, ethical and legal rules that govern our society… and the rules incurring driving and parking violations, you don’t want to mess with them. So as well as those rules, I also play by mine and ‘The Man’ ain’t gonna tell me what to think… or read!

I remember a time in Borders where I was made to pay for a casual comment to a friend. Something along the lines of: “Have you read that Harry Potter thing? Everybody keeps going on about it. Isn’t it a kids book?” As my friend mumbled she hadn’t, a bespectacled girl made a beeline for me with the purpose of an exercet missile.

“It’s not a kids book, you should read it, it’s really good…etc… etc… bloody etc…”

I found myself subjected to a sickening display of public love of Potter or PLOP, to give it an appropriate acronym. The girl was like an aggressive drug dealer pushing the literary Potter Pill, and I wasn’t buying. In fact so demented these Potter-mouths seemed to me, that I actively set out to avoid the books altogether. Subsequently there have been arguments to try and get me to jump on Harry’s bandwagon including a heated exchange about Quidditch. I helpfully informed one child that any team game that can be won outright by catching a secondary ball, regardless of goals scored, time played, spells cast, or whatever, was clearly stupid. The kid called me a “mugglef*ck” and went off to seek the solace of his Xbox. He knew I was right.

I digress. Seeing Paulie painstakingly reading Brown’s novel, brought all that Potter hostility back in that The Da Vinci Code was also a book that was discussed far beyond it’s worth; that it utterly saturated popular culture and that I had endless amounts of people telling me: “You have to read it!”

In short: I got sick of hearing about it.

I wondered how the Da Vinci Boat had sailed Paulie by. Maybe he’d been putting reading it off for a while or… A shudder went through me as the horrific notion that he was re-reading it crossed my mind. I shuffled closer to investigate.

The book looked fairly new and the last third was pristine and unruffled. It wasn’t being re-read. However, like the story itself, the book had a surprise in store: it was written in Spanish. Mi Dios! It was actually “El Codigo Da Vinci.” Paulie suddenly became Paulo and I realized his orange hue was not the result of hours on a low quality sun bed in Speedos.

It suddenly seemed strangely amusing and I sniggered at the thought of Senor Robert tearing around gay Paris looking for clues. Paulo’s head snapped up and, no longer childlike, he gave me a look like he’d happily take me on a one way fishing trip. Thankfully the train stuttered to a halt and I hurried off into the smoldering Brixton melee.

So this is where I confess. I have watched two Harry Potter films. Out of sequence. I didn’t fully get what was happening, but I watched them nonetheless. I have also read “The Da Vinci Code”. I quite enjoyed it too. Sorry. I feel a bit guilty about it all now… Sorry Paulie/Paulo.

Thanks for reading,

Russ

 

“Princess”

Synchronicity may be entirely the product of our bias toward narrative but never the less, as scientifically preposterous a concept as it is, it is a beautiful thing. Chance and fate had nothing to do with the fact that I turned up late for the Shooting People office party trip to see to the pantomime Aladdin. I turned up late because I stayed too long drinking with my brother at our Agent’s Christmas party. Where there is a bountiful supply of free wine you do not need a soothsayer to know that I am going to be delayed. Where the magic comes in is that, quite by chance, whilst buying a beer and waiting for the first half to finish so I could sneak in and enjoy the good natured racism of the second half, I turned to my ever trusty companion the London Review of Books and it fell open on a review of the newly released Penguin classic edition of 1001 Arabian Nights.

Before the applause started upstairs I soon discovered that, to my genuine and open astonishment, all the stories that we know most clearly from the 1001 Nights, Aladdin, Ali Baba, Sinbad, the one with the flying carpet, all have no historical source earlier than Antoine Galland’s original French translation of the late 17th Century. Though versions of all stories exist in Arabic all apparently show clear signs of being back translated from Galland. The framing device which pulls together all the tales of the 1001 Nights, the captured princess telling cliff hanging stories to save her life is quite traditional as are most of the stories Galland translated – but pretty much everything that I thought I knew about the cycle was probably invented by a Frenchman.

This made the second half of Aladdin a surprisingly rich metatexutal adventure. Though thankfully this didn’t detract any from the endless stream of filthy racist homophobic knob gags without which no panto would be complete.

But this synchronous coincidence set me thinking about the entirely fictional allure of the mysterious east, an allure that so appealed to the coffee house culture of 17th Century Paris and which still, clearly, carries an attraction today. A day later and I am once again on the London underground returning home after drinking myself stupid and I see the woman sat next to me is reading a thick black volume entitled simply “Princess”. The cover depicts a pair of beautiful eyes beneath a veil and it’s clear that the allure of the orient is alive and well in romantic fiction.

From the few pages I could read over her shoulder I found that our narrator, Princess, was in an unhappy union with Kareem. As she touches down in Saudi air space (yeah, I know you can’t touch down in air space but I didn’t write it) little does she know how her mother-in-law plots her demise…

Across from us both an Indian man is asleep and next to him an adult who looks all the world like a massive twelve year-old is engrossed in a book which seems ludicrously small in his huge fingers and is called “Sam Bourne”, the back of which declares boldly “Someone is killing good people – why?”

The same tone of naive outrage, so beloved by modern novelists, continues apace next to me in “Princess” where she only just found out that she is Kareem’s second marriage. Much is made of this and there is the heavy suggestion that the first Mrs.Kareem came to a sticky end.

Brilliantly at this point the author, who’s name I genuinely didn’t catch, decides to go for some balance. Having made it quite plain that Saudi Arabia is a satanic playground where dark-eyed innocent girls have no career path beyond being ravished and murdered she then sets out to be fair on the kidnapping rapists who make up the male population. “Although much is written about the misfortune of the women of Saudi Arabia the young men too suffer, though their lives are better they lack stimulation” and have “no cinema”.

It’s the sort of sublime gibberish that can keep me happy for months. That’s right, we can’t be too harsh on the murdering, kidnapping, raping monsters who smooth talk their way into the boudoirs of the west, since the poor buggers don’t have a multiplex between them. See it from their side for once can’t you goddamnit?

Antoine Galland has a lot to answer for.

 

“The Gift Of Years – Regret”

Date: 05.03.09
Journey: London Bridge to West Hampstead
Reader: Elderly lady with vivid purple lipstick and a woolly coat
Title: The Gift Of Years – Regret

It’s been a while since I’ve done an Underground Book Review but what better way to come back into the fold than with a self-help book masked as a novel. I don’t often make the assumption of people’s book choices by their casual appearance but something jarred with the image I was presented with. The lady in question was what one could only politely put as being ‘comfortably eccentric’. She was wearing a bold and jazzy woolly coat on a blisteringly hot day, had hair to rival Vivienne Westwood and seemed to constantly pout as if her life depended on it. What struck me as odd was on the surface she seemed to not need this book that so clearly coached you through regret; she looked as if regret was far from her and she lived life to the full. Lived it to the maximum in her warm woolly coat and lashings of purple lipstick. But evidently not. I suppose she could have shipped her first and only child off to be fostered and had never really recovered. I was ignoring the fact that she could be harbouring sinister thoughts towards an ex Italian lover from days gone by. A mother she’d never quite connected with… A photographer whose name she didn’t catch after liaising behind closed doors… The next door neighbour she didn’t quite own up to stealing his pornography DVDs… It goes to show that we all feel regret but not all of us will buy a book to put on display to all other humans that highlights the fact.

What snatches I did manage to read were direct and over-wrought with solemn ‘life’ questions. It was therapy written down on the page in such a way that you couldn’t read it without forming a triangle with your hands and nodding every so often. “Ask yourself why you feel regret, how does it make you feel?” Yup. One of those books. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure these books bring great relief to many who choose to spend many pennies on them… But c’mon, these are questions we all ask each other everyday down the pub, around the dinner table and most importantly in our own heads. Some people digest things better when they’re written down by an author and there’s been an exchange of money, that I can accept.

“We need to imagine that we’re on the edge of a cliff and happiness is one way and loneliness is the other. Will yourself to walk the right direction and you’ll be at one with inner peace. Regret is an ugly festering mass within oneself and to dissect it we need to have our own space.”

Want me to carry on? Nope, didn’t think so. The last quote maybe slightly embellished but it all means the same thing. Then again there might have been an amazing plot twist coming up and if that’s the case I’ll go out and order one for all of you… A must read!

No, thought not.

 

“Princess”

Date: 18.12.08
Journey: Northern Line from London Bridge to Kings Cross
Time: Late
Title: “Princess”
Author: ?

Synchronicity may be entirely the product of our bias toward narrative but never the less, as scientifically preposterous a concept as it is, it is a beautiful thing. Chance and fate had nothing to do with the fact that I turned up late for the Shooting People office party trip to see to the pantomime Aladdin. I turned up late because I stayed too long drinking with my brother at our Agent’s Christmas party. Where there is a bountiful supply of free wine you do not need a soothsayer to know that I am going to be delayed. Where the magic comes in is that, quite by chance, whilst buying a beer and waiting for the first half to finish so I could sneak in and enjoy the good natured racism of the second half, I turned to my ever trusty companion the London Review of Books and it fell open on a review of the newly released Penguin classic edition of 1001 Arabian Nights.

Before the applause started upstairs I soon discovered that, to my genuine and open astonishment, all the stories that we know most clearly from the 1001 Nights, Aladdin, Ali Baba, Sinbad, the one with the flying carpet, all have no historical source earlier than Antoine Galland’s original French translation of the late 17th Century. Though versions of all stories exist in Arabic all apparently show clear signs of being back translated from Galland. The framing device which pulls together all the tales of the 1001 Nights, the captured princess telling cliff hanging stories to save her life is quite traditional as are most of the stories Galland translated – but pretty much everything that I thought I knew about the cycle was probably invented by a Frenchman.

This made the second half of Aladdin a surprisingly rich metatexutal adventure. Though thankfully this didn’t detract any from the endless stream of filthy racist homophobic knob gags without which no panto would be complete.

But this synchronous coincidence set me thinking about the entirely fictional allure of the mysterious east, an allure that so appealed to the coffee house culture of 17th Century Paris and which still, clearly, carries an attraction today. A day later and I am once again on the London underground returning home after drinking myself stupid and I see the woman sat next to me is reading a thick black volume entitled simply “Princess”. The cover depicts a pair of beautiful eyes beneath a veil and it’s clear that the allure of the orient is alive and well in romantic fiction.

From the few pages I could read over her shoulder I found that our narrator, Princess, was in an unhappy union with Kareem. As she touches down in Saudi air space (yeah, I know you can’t touch down in air space but I didn’t write it) little does she know how her mother-in-law plots her demise…

Across from us both an Indian man is asleep and next to him an adult who looks all the world like a massive twelve year-old is engrossed in a book which seems ludicrously small in his huge fingers and is called “Sam Bourne”, the back of which declares boldly “Someone is killing good people – why?”

The same tone of naive outrage, so beloved by modern novelists, continues apace next to me in “Princess” where she only just found out that she is Kareem’s second marriage. Much is made of this and there is the heavy suggestion that the first Mrs.Kareem came to a sticky end.

Brilliantly at this point the author, who’s name I genuinely didn’t catch, decides to go for some balance. Having made it quite plain that Saudi Arabia is a satanic playground where dark-eyed innocent girls have no career path beyond being ravished and murdered she then sets out to be fair on the kidnapping rapists who make up the male population. “Although much is written about the misfortune of the women of Saudi Arabia the young men too suffer, though their lives are better they lack stimulation” and have “no cinema”.

It’s the sort of sublime gibberish that can keep me happy for months. That’s right, we can’t be too harsh on the murdering, kidnapping, raping monsters who smooth talk their way into the boudoirs of the west, since the poor buggers don’t have a multiplex between them. See it from their side for once can’t you goddamnit?

Antoine Galland has a lot to answer for.

 

Scarpetta and the something or other / Catcher In The Rye

Date: 28.01.09
Journey: Northern Line to Tottenham Court Road
Readers: Stereotypical Goth Girl / Asian American man
Titles: Scarpetta and the something or other / Catcher In The Rye

On the whole people read rubbish on the tube. A glance down the best seller lists will tell you that, on the whole, this is because people read rubbish everywhere but the nature of tube travel is especially conducive to the sort of the book you can read in interrupted fifteen page bursts whilst trying to ignore an argument. As a result many of the reviews here tend to be fairly caustic, of the “look, even over someone’s shoulder you can tell this book is toss” variety. However, whilst this is fun it is nothing compared to the delight of stumbling into someone else’s really good book.

First off though it was business as usual as my tired eyes wandered over the shoulder of the ertzatz Bela Lugoisi who sat down next to me at Camden Town. She was reading a large soft-back novel by Patricia Cornwell. Despite being a fan of detective fiction I’ve never actually read any of Cornwell’s Scarpetta books but I know their reputation for being trendsettingly grisly in their obsession with the awful things that can happen to a human body. Whilst I’m all in favour of authors staring unflinchingly into the horror of the human soul, there does come a point where this detailed blood lust simply turns into an unpleasantly ghoulish obsession.

What really put me off the book though was the layout. This may sound facile but a three or four hundred page novel that achieves this impressive width through large print and two inch margins is surely a waste of paper whatever the literary merits of the words that are included. Moreover the chapter headings were printed in comic sans.

I am a fan of fonts and have been ever since I discovered my father’s architectural lettraset stencils when I was a child. So I write as a geek when I say that if ever there was a font designed to highlight sociopathic tendancies then it was comic sans. Any one who uses it is a knuckle whitening psychopath desperately attempting to appear socialised and normal. Its hollow unlaughing joviality is a typographical honey trap for the emotionally stunted. It is the font you would use were you to be crafting a condolence card that needed the phrase “so sorry I cut your dog to bits with a strimmer”. It is the font you would use were you reading Patricia Cornwell’s novels for handy tips. Seeing it there on the page, bold and stupid, made me angry. Was this some awful attempt by her publisher to make the soft-back edition appeal more directly to her obsessional fans?

To be fair nothing I read on the page and a half not obscured by the reader’s black nail varnished hand was especially gruesome, save for some pretty grotesque product placement. Baring in mind that the font was so big and the margins so deep that there were probably only a hundred and fifty words across the two pages, something close to ten percent of the passage consisted entirely of brand names. I presume this is the author’s forensic eye unable to pull out for the bigger picture but the effect was less like reading a book and more like repetitively channel flicking between Silent Witness and QVC.

Just as Scarpetta is using one of the many superb features of her Blackberryª to check her GMailª, an Asian American tourist guy slumps down on the other side of me and, in floury, pulls a slender paperback from his rucksack. I see neither the cover nor the spine and he quickly folds the book in half so he can grip the single side tight. A kid is in a hotel room thinking about ringing home, hoping that if he does his kid sister Phoebe will answer. The prose is clipped, clear and within only a couple of sentences I have the character’s voice speaking loudly in my head. It’s like glancing over and finding you’re talking to someone, like the most astonishing man has sat down next to me and has to tell me something and I can’t help but listen.

He describes Phoebe as “roller skate skinny”. I think that’s such an amazing phrase. In three words that paints a picture not only of the girl but the time and place, the one reinforcing the impact of the other. In three words I feel like I know Phoebe. I have to get off the train and there is nothing else on the page to indicate what book this is but, even though I have to admit I have never read it, the tone is so powerful and creates such a potent impression of time and place that I get off feeling pretty sure that it must be “Catcher In The Rye”. I get home and type “roller skate skinny Phoebe” into a common internet search engine and sure enough this is the book which so obsessed that guy who shot John Lennon and who is doubtless at this very moment typing up his biography in comic sans.

It’s unfair to compare these two books. From what I read of it Scarpetta would be dismal set against the later books about Miffy the Dutch rabbit. What was so startling was that when set against half a page of “Catcher In The Rye” the entire clattering reality of the Northern Line seemed sketchy and unconvincing.

 

“Sick Puppy”

Date: 21.01.09
Journey: Traveling north on the Victoria Line.
Reader: Looked a bit like one of those comedians who appear on panel shows and is quite funny, but not enough to be a name you’d have on the tip of your tongue. Wears glasses? Looks constipated?
Title: “Sick Puppy”
Author: Carl H?a?a?a?sen

Review: You know when you see something and don’t really ‘see’ it, but then do? You observe but don’t take note of the details? A bit like walking past the same washing machine day after day when suddenly you realize there’s a dog in there looking forlorn and covered in soap suds*. Well it was only a bit like that. I must have looked at this guy sitting opposite me a half dozen times between Brixton and Pimlico. I registered a 30-something man in a beige coat, dark trousers; unkempt matted black hair with milk bottle glasses hunched forward. Nothing else. I didn’t pay him any more or less attention than I paid the other passengers until he raised the book on his lap to turn a page. A flash the colour of pea soup puke drew my attention to the paperback’s cover: a revolting neon green affair with the Words “Carl H__?___” (something Scandinavian with too many ‘a’s and ending with ‘sen’), “Sick Puppy” and a blue splodge I later discovered to be the face of the puppy in question.

I remembered this group (our group on facebook) and how I wanted to post a review so I set to work making mental notes. As people have commented, the opportunity to see both cover and content can be limited, but as luck would have it my reader stayed glued to his seat at Victoria leafing through the text. In the commotion I took the seat next to him without any protest, strange looks or knife crimes and then ‘acted casual’. Trying to ignore my new friend’s stale body odor, I leaned as close as I dared to commit my socio-literary [?] crime.

Immediately I was rewarded with this choice line from page 198: ‘McGuinn jumped on the bed and began licking her.’ Or something to that effect.

A few lines later I discovered McGuinn was a dog and that changed the whole context of the scenario I’d been imagining barely seconds before. There’s nothing like a salacious hook to pull you in! Like those brothels in Amsterdam where the hot girls parade in the windows and the ones inside look like soulless smacked up bag ladies. Or so I’m told. Anyway it was affection of a canine nature, which I can only hope was platonic, and the paragraph was promptly cut short by grubby thumb sporting a hangnail. Contrary to popular belief hangnails are more to do with dry skin than vitamin deficiency. Just throwing that one out there.

A double space told me the narrative had jumped through space and time somehow and led me to a section concerning a “Mr. Gash”; who, with such a name, could only be the villain of this piece. Mr. Gash was listening to a compilation album similar to the type that the QVC robots try to flog you as you mistakenly land on their channel searching for something better than 90′s Top Gear on Dave. Only this was no “Buddy Holly’s Greatest Hits”. It transpired Mr. Gash was listening to a compilation of the most horrific 911 emergency calls. So now I could deduce this was a satirical story based in America, one that did not take itself seriously, with a dog called McGuinn and a probable bad guy named Mr. Gash. Regarding plot what followed brought me only questions.

A transcription of the emergency call detailed a concerned 911 dispatcher trying to assist a girl whose brother had stabbed their other brother. She was hiding in their bathroom as the stabbed brother lay bleeding to death in the hallway and the brother with the knife drank a beer in the kitchen. In a satirical example of insane censorship the girls swearing was [bleeped] out but her screams, as the brother with the knife broke through the bathroom door, were not. I donÕt care what some reviews say; I’d rather listen to the latest Killers album over that any day.

It’s such a shame when families can’t get along. Granted Youtube provides endless hours of hilarious dysfunctional families from Springer, Maury and Ricki Lake, but it is a sorry state of affairs. Don’t get me wrong, I like to see idiots smashing chairs over each others heads as much as the next man, but it is all a little bit grubby. I mean I have a brother and we argue, but there’s an unwritten rule about not stabbing one another to death.

Just as the carnage in the excerpt was unfolding, my literary limpet was prised off the hull of this particular reader’s ship [too obscure?]. He hotfooted it out of the carriage at Oxford Circus, shoving the toxic coloured tome into an oversized pocket as he went, with his scarf flapping after him. I realized two things at that moment: One – I didn’t ever want a job as an emergency dispatcher, and two – I didn’t ever want to be stabbed by my brother. As the doors closed behind him I realized a third indisputable thing – I was supposed to have got out at Oxford Circus.

Two pages, that’s all I’ve got on this book, regarding the plot I can’t begin to imagine what McGuinn and Mr.Gash got up to… I just hope the golden rule of any Hollywood disaster movie applied: however inexplicable, the dog must survive.

Thanks for reading.

Russ Booth (via email/Facebook group)

*This actually happened to me when I lived in Madrid; unknown to me at the time Madrid is home to the inventor of the pet-washer. Muy bien.

 

-

Date: 12/11/08
Journey: Northern Line Heading For Camden
Time: 10 am-ish
Title: -
Author: Ken Follet

The Northern Line splits as it enters the city at Camden Town, one branch goes via Charing Cross, the other via Bank. I have never been able to decide if it’s best policy to get the first train that arrives and change at Camden or to wait for a direct route. It always feels like the right option is just to get on the train and go because at least that way you’re moving and yet, everytime I do this, I seem to end up stuck at Camden Town for an age whilst I wait for the right train. On this particular morning I have chosen to let two Charing Cross trains rattle past me and am now safely ensconced and sleeping on the Bank branch, when the large print volume being read next to me attracts my eye.

Annoyingly the publisher has chosen not to reprint the title at the top of each page and I can only see the odd pages so this review is based merely on pages 67 and 69. Equally the author’s name remained mainly obscured but I’m pretty certain it was Ken Follet. My most useful piece of detective work came when the reader shut the book briefly and I saw that the back proudly proclaimed that this novel has been ‘selected by BBC viewers’ .

Though selected for what I can’t quite imagine. In the two pages I read Agnes gives birth and dies in the howling wind beneath a chesnut tree whilst protected by her husband, Tom. Her dying words are used to reassure Tom that she is still grateful she “gave herself” to him – in their church.

It’s also revealed at this point that Tom’s main ambition is to build a cathedral and I begin to get the general impression that this is supposed to be taking place in the Southern States of America probably at some time before modern advances in maternity care.

Tom digs a grave to keep her bones from the wolves and keep her safe until judgement day and reflects on how he and Albert, his eldest boy, can take comfort in the hard repetitive labour whilst it falls to his daughter Martha to help the newborn suckle milk from its dead mother.

All of this is written from an odd place somewhere between the first and third person. For instance when Agnes thanks Tom for impregnating her in the church, with the suggestion that she accepts her death as a Divine retribution that never-the-less does nothing to tarnish her memory of the act, the author notes writes “…that was good to know” as if it’s he, not Tom, who is drawing comfort from the fact that a careless shag in a vestibule has lead the poor woman to a shivering grave.

Frankly the whole thing sounds mental. Tom won’t cry because he needs to be strong for the remaining children, so instead of crying he gets poor Martha to feed her younger brother from their mother’s dead milk. What? I wanted to reach over and shake the reader and say “You do realise that this is no way to be strong for your kids!”

However it’s at this point that I realise the reader is a Red Indian. OK I know the term is Native American but at the moment I’ve got my head in his book and it feels like that’s what they’d call him. He’s got jet black hair in a pony tail and latin american skin. He is in his early twenties and dress entirely in blue. A blue sweat shirt, blue courdroy trousers and white trainers.

He gets off at Camden and buries the book in a blue ruck sack. He is a bit like a young version of The Chief from “One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest”. Now obviously I’ve no idea if he’s got any native American blood in his veins at all but I like the idea and more I like the idea of my fictional Red Indian enjoying a book which features disasters heaped upon the heads of those who massacred his ancestors. The iterating fantasies encase each other as the train encases me and the idea delights me so much it’s not until I reach Warren Street that I realise that the train must have been re-assigned at Camden Town and I’ve ended up stuck on the Charing Cross branch after all…

 

“Miss McGinty’s Dead”

Date: 06/11/08
Journey: Farringdon to London Bridge
Time: 17:07
Title: “Miss McGinty’s Dead”
Author: Agatha Christie
Reader: Female, approx. 32, long black coat, uncomfortable shoes and a plaid scarf

This review is based on only reading the right hand side page with pretty much of the left side obscured by extremely large female hands (gloved). So all in all I can only base this review on a handful of words.

“Bloody” and “dog” were recurring words on the page. The reader in questions seemed to take great length in reading the words very slowly and spent five minutes gazing at the white pages. I distinguish they were white because this highlights that the book was a new printed edition and not the customary beige rough pages. It did indeed have a snazzy over colourful cover and bore no creases or indentations. This surprised me because she was quite far into the novel and obviously she was accustomed to reading on the train, which anyone using public transport will know, is a harmful arena for books.

From what I can gather “Miss McGinty’s Dead” was about the lady in question dying. (Not that I can be tracked down but just to clarify I mean the character in question and not the reader, I bear no responsibility for any reader’s death whilst reading this publication). It sounds like a traditional whodunnit and don’t worry I won’t spoil the plot. Mostly because I don’t know, but maybe I’ve revealed too much with my two chosen words, “bloody” and “dog”.

Overall Verdict: Go read it for yourself. I only came away thinking of bloody dogs. Bloody dogs. Bloody dogs…

 

Hallo there…

Ever found yourself reading over someone’s shoulder on the tube or the train? Our eyes are drawn to text and there’s nothing wrong with it… as long as you benefit from it. Next time you’re on the receiving end of someone’s carefully chosen reading material feel free to write a review and email it to us at Underground Book Review and we’ll be sure to post it here.

Ben and Chris Blaine are brothers that make films.  They write them and then fret about them and then ultimately make them so everyone can see them.  And they’ve made a fair few.  What a clever pair of chaps they are.  Would you like a cup of tea? The scones are fresh (and warm) out of the oven and we have a vast selection of jams to pick from.  That’s it, sit down and hear us jabber for a bit.