Shelfishness

 I've not read loads lately, but here's a take on most of the books I've dealt with in 2021

At the end of last year, I joked that my main resolution for 2021 was to read less as I was running out of space to store the volume of new books I had still to find room for. Thankfully, Ben, Lucy and Sara came to my rescue at Christmas with a superb new set of bookshelves, thoughtfully assembled for his impractical old fella by my handyman son. Ironically, I have been reading less than last year, where from the moment Lockdown 1 happened, I buried my head in Houellebecq and BS Johnson, to blot out reality.

In 2021, I have eschewed fiction. Instead, I’ve completed my collection of all 51 issues of the Rothman’s Football Yearbook and successor editions, but I’ve not as yet found an author my life has been improved by reading, so the books I’ve devoured this year have been somewhat eclectic in subject matter and, with a nod to future thematic blogging, I’m not going to talk about them all here.

Courtesy of my SAFC supporting Twitter pal Kev over in Ambleside, I was delighted to receive a copy of Winter Journal by Paul Auster; an American writer of avant garde lite of whom I’d only read a single short story about 20 years back in a promotional paperback, including such storied storytellers as Peter Carey, Junot Diaz, Thom Jones and Garrison Keillor, that came free with a box of Caffrey’s unpleasant nitrokeg red ale. The title of the collection was Strong Words, Softly Spoken, which may have been great as a tagline for the beer, but did nothing to encapsulate the mood of the throwaway whimsy Auggie Wren’s Christmas Story. However, it certainly is a more than fitting epithet for the by turns sombre and by others sentimental non-linear memoir that is Winter Journal.

Started on 3 January 2011 and finished exactly a month later on his 64^th birthday, Auster ruminates on his dysfunctional childhood in the exurbs of upstate New York; his artistic mother and distant, dull father, his education, his loves, his travels and the contentment that came with his second marriage, children and a house in Brooklyn that became a home. All the while, there is the sense of time passing and a forensic examination of whether the years have been used or wasted. Reading this book was an unambiguously useful act and I may seek out more of Auster as my own time ticks away.

Somewhat surprisingly, to me at any rate, I found myself compelled at the end of last year to purchase several high-profile titles: This Land by Owen Jones, which I reviewed and farmed out to my mate Stoke Dave straight after, Dan Jackson’s The Northumbrians, which I’ll deal with later, and Fake Law by the Secret Barrister, which must have about the most woke populist title published last year. I tell you what; it’s bloody good. Not having read his eponymous first effort, I was unsure what to expect, but it soon became clear that like any good brief, his argument is lucid, compelling, meticulously researched and guaranteed to provoke an emotional response to the visceral injustices done to the common law by the idiots we’ve had ruining this country for the past decade and a bit. Of course there’s also plenty of pointed, necessary digs at the pricks from the so-called People’s Party who ran the shitshow before that.

This is a portrait of and a guide to the criminal justice system in England and Wales today, not to mention a first-hand account of the personal dilemmas facing someone whose professional life is spent in and out of crown courts, police cells and prisons. It is above all a plea to rescue a justice system that has become utterly broken. What is so compelling about The Secret Barrister’s account is his ability to reveal a picture that is a commentary on society’s mean-spirited and devilish attitudes as a whole, rather than just a litany of legal shortcomings.

The author argues that the dangerous levels of public ignorance about the law, whether this is caused by historical or present day mendacity by the clowns in charge, cause the average Joe to believe and echo a starling number of untruths about how our legal system operates. Witness the repeated, erroneous claim that defendants are prosecuted by the Police. They aren’t; that’s what the CPS does. Also see how those found not guilty are repeatedly described in common parlance as having “got off” with a crime, as if being charged is a presumption of guilt.

The Secret Barrister writes compellingly about issues as varied as the treatment of vulnerable victims in rape trials and the state of sentencing law, but at its deepest level, this book is not about the criminal justice system at all. The Secret Barrister writes about our idea of us as a nation; an England still so confident in its upholding of democracy and justice, when in practice the law is now less of a model for others to aspire to than a dire warning as to what can go wrong.

Rather different in tone is Brix Smith Start’s autobiography The Rise, The Fall and The Rise which is part Valley of the Dolls, part Nil by Mouth and part Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. I’d bought this last year when I was completing my Fall print odyssey and left it to one side, partly because it was so blinking long. However, when taking up the challenge, I found it to be a mostly compelling read, with several heart rending passages that indicated what a lousy time she had of it. The most surprising thing is that Mark E Smith is not the most wholly evil character in the book; that dubious accolade goes to her rotten father, who hasn’t an ounce of decency in him. He is mainly to blame for Brix’s peripatetic, cash rich, emotion poor childhood and adolescence. After she drops out of University halfway through, she moves to Boston and within a couple of weeks becomes MES’s partner, replacing Kay Carroll who left the tour bus just days earlier, somewhere in New Jersey.

The book was published in 2016, so the last pathetic days of the squalid drunken demon that was latter day MES were still a thing, so his physical and psychological torture, during both her stints in Das Gruppe is soft pedalled, to spare him further obloquy. I’m not keen to repeat any of the abuse Smith inflicted on his wife, but it is a shameful tale. Brix’s subsequent dalliance with Nigel Kennedy doesn’t paint the rosiest of romantic pictures either. Kennedy seems to be a self-obsessed narcissist man child, though at least he keeps his hands to himself and cock in his strides.

As for the remainder of the book, which is filled with self-congratulatory homilies to her rich and boring husband Phillip Start, whose business successes in high end fashion from a parade of shops in Hoxton, allow them to bathe in money and her to engage in her twin obsessions of breeding pugs and playing in Brix and the Extricated with the infinitely more talented, as writers and musicians, Hanley Brothers. I am glad I read this book; because it is genuinely encouraging to see someone who has transcended the abuse doled out by MES and made a happy life. Well done Brix.

Without question, last autumn’s Small Axe season by British director Steve McQueen was the television highlight of 2020. The penultimate instalment was an eponymous biographical film about Black British YA author Alex Wheatle. At Christmas, Laura gave me 5 books by Wheatle, but the only one I’ve read so far is his most recent one; Cane Warriors. The book is a moving tribute to the 1760 Tacky Rebellion in Jamaica, when plantation slaves rose up to confront their oppressors.  Cane Warriors’ narrator is 14-year-old Moa, who retells the story in an unapologetic and matter of fact style. We are informed how the effects of slavery have destroyed his family’s physical strength, though not their indomitable spirit. His mother, a cook, lives in terror of abuse from the lady of the house, for the tiniest of errors. His father suffered a life-changing work accident, but still has to work, where his blood still stains the machinery that he uses every day. The book tells of others dying from exhaustion in the field, and being buried where they fall, with no mourning allowed, depicted without emotion, as are the brutal attacks and scars that the workers endure from the inhumane overseers and plantation owners.

What Wheatle gets across in this captivating story, is that while the cane warriors only had the agricultural tools that they worked with, they kept their anger in check and worked in an organised military fashion to outmanoeuvre the English for many months. Part of this was to do with the mountainous Jamaican landscape, that neither the British, nor the Spanish before them, were able to completely control. However, it is not solely a story of strategy; it is one of emotion. At the heart of the book is Moa’s belief and dream of a better life. Many of Tacky’s descendants still wait for such.