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I feel this is a good thread.
Here are some under-rated books;
'A Confederate General at Big Sur' by Richard Brautigan
Brautigan may be established as a fully-fledged hero in some quarters, but you’d still have trouble convincing anyone in Waterstones of his existence, and this slim ‘70s paperback set me back £6 second-hand from a shelf marked 'cult / collectable', so yeah, underrated.
This is a staggering, amazing, joyful book in which no particular point is made about anything, nothing much happens and in which the narrative potters about aimlessly for a bit and arbitrarily stops and declares The End at about page 130.
It’s about two irresponsible, drunken losers who go and live in a make-shift cabin on the cliffs at Big Sur and.. do some stuff I guess. In this respect it reminds me of 'Withnail & I', and like 'Withnail & I' it’s very, very funny indeed and some moderately fucked up shit happens. But rather than bleak and depressive, the tone here is sunny and exultant.
I don’t know how to really convey the charm and wit of Brautigan’s writing without directing you to read huge chunks of it, but needless to say; think of the beautiful, free and easy way of life initially dreamt of by the beats and the hippies before malaise and disappointment and reality set in – THAT’S the spirit this book represents, and that’s the glorious, goofy garden Brautigan builds for his characters, and you dear reader, to fleetingly run free in. While you’re reading this book, you will feel good. Recommended in the highest possible terms in which I can recommend anything.
'Random Acts of Senseless Violence' by Jack Womack
I bought a remaindered copy of this with a hideous faux-cyberpunk cover for £1. It’s about 110 pages long. It’s fucking brilliant. It’s basically an imminent-future update of the Diary of Anne Frank, following the plight of a well-to-do Manhattan Jewish family whose financial stability is wiped out, along with many others, in a huge economic collapse. They move to a rough neighbourhood, try and fail to get by, and slowly crack up. Their daughter, the narrator, joins a street gang. There are bread riots and soldiers marching everywhere and nobody giving them orders. The acts of the book’s title start to come into play.
Womack’s books may usually be packaged as pulp sci-fi, but at his best he’s working on the same wavelength as Chandler, Lovecraft and Dick before him – a genre writer who unashamedly subverts and expands his remit to take in challenging themes, solid emotion and blinding prose. Here he tackles the uglier sides of class, race, sexuality, politics, poverty and puberty head on in a way that’s neither contrived nor creepy – he’s got all the compassion and frustrated idealism of Vonnegut tied to a brutally minimalist and effective noir style and a relentlessly fast-paced, catastrophic narrative with that kind of grabs-you-by-the-throat-and-won’t-let-go feeling that speaks of a fine, fine writer who’s honed his art to it’s sharpest point through years of jobbing in the realms of ‘popular’ fiction.
His other books are intermittently great and on the whole recommended, but this one is a masterpiece – a low-key, unpretentious triumph that to me is worth more, and says more, than any number of "the smell of almonds reminds me of unrequited love.." bullshit literary bestsellers.
'Fugue for a Darkening Island' by Christopher Priest
Although it was pretty well regarded when it was published in the ‘70s, this book is rarely sold, read or mentioned these days. This is possibly because from the evidence of the rather misguided title and a brief summary of the plot, it could easily be mistaken for some kind of reactionary anti-immigration scare story. But I know Priest is a good egg, so I read it anyway, and I’m glad I did.
In brief, it goes a bit like this; After a series of ominously ill-defined catastrophes in Africa, an endless succession of rickety ships and barges begin docking all over England’s south coast baring hundreds of thousands of refugees. The right-wing government in power at the time deals with the crisis in the worst way imaginable, establishing virtual concentration camps with no real plan as to what to do, and encouraging the wave of racist attacks that sweep through middle England. Liberal opposition to this policy precipitates a parliamentary crisis, but still neither side know what to do. The Africans, tired of such shoddy and inept treatment, muster their strength as their numbers increase and are soon roaming the Home Counties attacking and occupying villages. Then comes confusion, displacement, civil war, greed and cruelty – stuff we’ve seen on the news a hundred times before, but bringing it back home to England is a chillingly effective device in upturning the reader’s perceptions of it. Like 'Random Acts..', 'Fugue..' is a short, sharp shock and Priest pulls no punches in exploring the nightmare he’s created through the eyes of the cynical, Ballard-esque protagonist as he tries rather haphazardly to protect his family and figure out which way to turn as they find themselves as helplessly stranded as any African refugee.
Obviously Priest doesn’t court xenophobia, but neither does he jump for any of the liberal open goals the plotline might suggest – like 'Heart of Darkness' (which I guess this is kind of an update of in a lot of ways), the book remains non-partisan and offers no heavy-handed political message and no easy answers – the narrative remains cold, simplistic, amoral and brutal as the characters try to stay alive – the violence and betrayals are shocking and harrowing. The basic message - "this is everyone’s fault – we’re all fucked". It' the good old Wyndham-esque English disaster novel turned very, very dark indeed. |
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