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.
