Printhead

I love my job; I wouldn’t exactly say that I love work per se, but I do love my job. It is rewarding and an honour to be paid for what I love doing. It wasn’t always this way; fifteen years ago I’d do almost anything to stop more than the merest fraction of my mind being occupied by what I was paid to do, as I felt resentful giving any of my mind’s capacity away, but as I’m a devotee of Philip Larkin, it seems that as I’ve grown older, I’ve unconsciously replicated the emotional journey he made between “Toads” and its successor companion piece “Toads Revisited.” While I’m not yet ready for Cemetery Road, I find that the older I get, the greater the amount of energy work takes out of me and consequently my stated interests / hobbies /obsessions (Real Ale, literature, obscure Indie music, non-league football and loony left politics) are being squeezed by the sheer amount of effort it takes to keep body and soul together by doing my job. Clearly, something has to give and while football is obviously sacrosanct (Monday 27 August: Team Northumbria v Hebburn Town, Bedlington Terriers v Ashington, Tuesday 28 August: Birtley Town v Chester Le Street, Wednesday 29 August: Whitley Bay A v Percy Main Amateurs, Thursday 30 August: Newcastle United v Atromitos, Friday 31 August: Team Northumbria v Newcastle Benfield, Saturday 1 September: Whitley Bay v Bedlington Terriers, Sunday 2 September: Newcastle United v Aston Villa, Monday 3 September: Team Northumbria v Penrith, Tuesday 4 September: Whitley Bay v Sunderland RCA), this is why I take September and January off the drink each year to allow my head to recover, why I’ve already decided to pass up the opportunity of seeing gigs by Patti Smith, Plainsong and Allo Darlin in early September, why I’ll not be at the 20th October Coalition of Resistance demo in London and why, sadly, I feel unable to read a book for personal pleasure from New Year to Whitsuntide each year.

I must read, at a rough guess, 250,000 words a week when I’m at work (which means term time and all holidays, bar the Christmas break); the level of concentration and critical awareness needed to plough through that amount of prosodic verbiage and still come up with cogent and evaluative comments for each chunk digested is not an onerous task, but still is one that requires a responsible, sentient response. After so much reading for profit, I find that reading for pleasure needs to be unchallenging in the main; metonymic moaning about Newcastle United and banal cyber chatter will do for me in autumn, winter and spring. Consequently, I park books at my bedside until the last week of May each year and as the students wrestle with exams, I relish the chance of finally being able to read what I want until September arrives.
Actually, that’s not strictly true; I’m so polite, I can’t turn down books proffered with the usual, predictable insistence that “you must read this; you’ll love it.” I point out I’ll not be able to return it until June, but often that works in my favour as my rusty critical faculties and tired eyes are knocked in to shape by these literary equivalents of pre-season friendlies, as I feel beholden to get these books out the way before I start on what I really want to read. So, what was on the Cusack bedside cabinet this summer?

First up was Brian Kennedy’s exhaustive tome on League of Ireland football, “Just Follow the Floodlights.” I’d borrowed this from my mate John McQuaid, having to get it read so as I could take it back to him on 31 May when I flew over for the first of my 2012 Irish pilgrimages. Kennedy’s book is useful; indeed I found its existence profoundly irritating as it knocked my idea for my proposed second book on the head. However, Kennedy’s book falls between two stools in that it is neither a detailed account of a season, even though all the games took place in 2011 and he visits every League of Ireland ground, nor is it a scholarly historical account of the game of football in Ireland, either from the late 19th Century or post Partition, depending on the defining political and geographical compass of the book. Kennedy doesn’t touch on the game in the Six Counties, other than describing the quality of hot dogs in the Brandywell and the idea of discussing any links between sport, politics and cultural traditions in the whole island of Ireland is way beyond his remit. Perhaps this subject is the book on football / soccer in (the Republic of / Northern) Ireland that needs to be written in the future.

Also related to Ireland was a novel loaned to me by my friend Ceri; “The Cove Shivering Club” by Michael Curtin, who was a name unknown to me prior to early June. Frankly, I’ll not be searching out any more of his stuff. Suffering from bad editing and a surfeit of minor characters, picaresque interpolations of little interest to the reader or relevance to the plot and a damp squib of an ending, it was part nostalgic Bildungsroman, with the emphasis on “dung,” and part dull examination of gender politics in Celtic Tiger Ireland. Curtin’s book appears to have disappeared without trace after an initial printing; I hope he has learned to write with more discipline in the interim, as I see he has other books out there, which I don’t intend to read.

A borrowed book I loved was “Rip It Up: Post Punk 78-84” by Simon Reynolds, which talked to me in minute detail about the bands  who meant so much to me in my formative musical years and who, as I approach 50, still dominate my Ipod. The Gang of Four, Wire, The Mekons, The Raincoats, Cabaret Voltaire, The Fall, Pere Ubu and a litany of others on Rough Trade, Fast Product and Postcard were the soundtrack to Reynolds’s upbringing and while he doesn’t include himself in the narrative, I can imagine he’s talking on behalf of thousands of teenage, pseudo-intellectual wannabe intellectual artistes who listened fervently to John Peel on transistors underneath pillows in darkened bedrooms as the Winter of Discontent ground on in the real world. This book is definitely highly recommended; cheers to Knaggsy (High Heaton’s Number 1 Killing Joke and Dancing Lessons fan) for lending it to me.

The final borrowed book was the touching and incredibly important “As If,” by Blake Morrison, which examines the James Bulger case and subsequent trial of Jon Venables and Robert Thompson. It is a tough read, but a rewarding one; Morrison manages to be sympathetic and outraged, without being vengeful in his prose. Published back in the mid-1990s, one can almost sense the mantra “tough on crime; tough on the causes of crime” seeping through each paragraph. However, we live in less tolerant times and the concept of rehabilitation for offenders seems to be as immoral in the eyes of the press and media commentators as revenge was after the Bulger case. Perhaps it is time for Morrison to revisit this subject for his elegant prose will certainly prove that society would benefit from understanding more and condemning less.

So, as June moved towards July, it was time for me to reduce the pile of unread books from years gone by that had gathered dust on the bedside cabinet. Firstly “Twenty Years of the Nobel Prize for Literature,” given to me by a departing student, Wendy, in 2009, was tackled. Surprisingly, I found it intriguing and rewarding; Harold Pinter’s “Art, Truth and Politics” was as inspiring a read as I had all summer, though I also found myself touched by the words of Imre Kertesz, VS Naipaul, Gao Xingjian, Wislawa Szymborska, Nadine Gordimer, Joseph Brodsky and Wole Soyinka. It is a book I shall use in my teaching and one that humbled me to read.

I’d had Andrew Marr’s “A History of Modern Britain” since 2008, but the size of it and the freshness of the TV programme (and many of the events mentioned in it) in my memory put me off, not to mention the fact my dad and I were devotees of the programme and discussed it in detail each week. However, when my son Ben announced it was on his A Level History reading list, I knew I had to get to grips with it. If you don’t mind Marr’s voice, which leaps out from every line, and his cynical libertarian politics with their streak of intolerance for state interventionism, then it is a rattling good read. Is his analysis of post war Britain the correct one? I take as my text Xhou Enlai’s 1971 response to the question whether the French Revolution had been a success; “it’s too soon to tell.”

It was not too soon to finally read Tim Parks’s superb account of “travels around Italy in search of illusion, national character and goals,” which is how he subtitled his book “A Season with Verona,” that minutely and magnificently analyses the club’s ultimately successful fight against relegation in 2000-2001. I’ve not been to Italy and pay only scant attention to Serie A, but this book had me gripped from the start to the finish; perhaps what Parks has that Brian Kennedy and Michael Curtin lack, is the true author’s ability to manipulate words to portray and describe situations, characters and their significance. “A Season with Verona” is a glorious book, as is Anthony Cronin’s “Dead as Doornails,” which I bought myself as a treat in Dublin in August. It is an account of the 1960s Dublin literary scene; Behan, Kavanagh, Brian O’Nolan and a cavalcade of minor talents drink, snipe, brawl and ponce their way through a decade of wasted promise. Cronin, who is still alive aged 84, laments the dissipation of talent and the squandering of energy in the wrong fashion, while offering lucid literary analysis of the work of people who were his best friends, but who were all dead as doornails by the end of the 1960s. This is another book I’d recommend.

Three rubbish non-fiction ones I wouldn’t are now to be discussed. Firstly, Jim McDowell’s banal and exploitative “The Mummy’s Boys: Threats and Menaces from Ulster’s ParaMafia,” in which the notorious lush who edits the NI rag “The Sunday World” retells the Peace Process in the north of Ireland, to suggest his attempts to stagger away from the public bar of “The Duke of York” were the reason why the Loyalist paramilitaries decided to decommission their weapons. Simplistic and narcissistic by turns, it is a colouring book compared to the writings of Peter Taylor on the subject. Another load of rubbish is “Hotel Nirvana” by Melanie McGrath, a formless, shapeless account of travels in New Mexico, Texas and California among New age communities in search of spiritual enlightenment. She doesn’t find it and I only read the book on account of the fact she shares a name with my mate Declan’s wife. Equally awful is “Hang The DJ: The Alternative Book Of Music Lists” by Angus Cargill, whereby he’s asked a whole load of his mates, who wouldn’t even qualify as Z List Celebs, other than David Peace (when the hell is the final episode of the Tokyo trilogy coming out, eh?) to give their all-time Top 10 tracks, providing there’s some spurious premise behind the choice; theme tunes, murder ballads, instrumentals, great guitar solos, whatever. It’s a half decent idea spoiled by a lack of cohesion in the execution, but frankly more suited to a pub discussion than a book.

In the world of fiction, I continued my intermittent appreciation of Iain Banks, with his sadly dated, but superbly structured and compelling “Complicity,” combining unhinged yet deeply moral serial killing with chronic illness for the narrator. Like all Banks’s books, I was drawn in by his taut prose and unexpected plot elements. I should read more of his stuff I know. I read Mike McCormack’s “Crowe’s Requiem,” a tragic love fable set in Galway, because many years ago I’d read his short story collection “Getting It in the Head.” Similar to that book (and Banks in a way), a gallery of young grotesques deal with their doomed existence by paying homage to a trinity of booze, fags and fucking. Crowe’s imminent death at the end had me almost in tears; surely the mark of a good book is one that draws you in. Joseph O’Connor I can take or leave; his detective fiction appeals, while his historical intellectualism bores me rigid. “The Salesman” was a gripping read; a deeply flawed narrator living through terrible personal tragedies, struggles with the concept of revenge and reconciliation with his daughter’s attacker. The fact I knew the setting (O’Connor’s beat is Dalkey to Bray) made it seem so real, I struggled to put it down.

A book I initially struggled to pick up, out of fear of being let down (despite everyone I knew saying it was as great as could possibly be expected and then some more) was “Skagboys.” In the end, Welsh’s brilliant prequel to “Trainspotting,” with the minute personality details explaining that earlier book so much more clearly than on first reading, had me wishing it was longer. I truly hope Welsh returns to the same gallery of characters when they approach their 50s or later; how on earth do they turn out? It is almost too sad that we just don’t know.

The final 5 books I read were all by Cormac McCarthy. Having fallen in love with “No Country for Old Men” and “Blood Meridian,” I needed to read all his works; if I get through “The Border Trilogy,” I will have done. Not all of his work is of the same standard as the first 2 works mentioned, or even “The Road.” In reverse order of quality, “The Sunset Limited” is a fairly formulaic prose drama that examines questions of morality, regarding life and death; it needn’t detain us much. “Outer Dark” has the elements of gothic grotesque that recur in his other novels, but without the narrative force or breath taking turns of phrase we are used to; in effect, it is juvenilia. “The Orchard Keeper” is about a juvenile, but is an interesting account of prohibition in the land of hillbillies, with an utter lack of the grotesque that normally accompanies McCarthy’s descriptive passages.

“Child of God” is grotesque to the point of nausea, but it is also bleakly comic and unerringly crafted. I loved this book, mainly because it was so horrible, but the book I loved most the whole summer was McCarthy’s beautiful, elegiac semi-autobiographical masterpiece “Suttree,” which I’d rate higher than “Blood Meridian” in his personal oeuvre. A simple narrative involving a disenfranchised fisherman, living in Knoxville, Tennessee, who befriends the marginal and the mad, then watches them struggle on before falling by the wayside. Suttree survives, but knows he must move on and, dignified, humble and wise, the book ends as he prepares to do so. This is the finest book I’ve read all summer.

I go back to work next Monday; “The Border Trilogy” is 1,037 pages long, unread and on my bedside table; I’d best make a start.