In which Netty hangs out with Alex’s gang of droogs and ponders the concept of ultra-violence …

There are certain books you should read when you are a teenager – Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye is the obvious one; I reckon Kerouac’s On The Road is another. And after finishing Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange – which I reckon has been gathering dust on my bookshelf since the late-1980s (insert embarrassed emoticon here) – I’d say it also belongs in that category.  

Indeed, it is difficult, in 2013, to really comprehend the impact A Clockwork Orange must have made when it was first published in 1962 – more than 50 years ago now. Burgess’s best-known work was repeatedly banned and censored in the US for two decades after its release; the controversial 1971 film, directed by Stanley Kubrick, was also subjected to condemnation, censorship and a lengthy withdrawal in Britain.

Personally, I’d be rather interested to know what my teenage self would have thought of it; because as an adult (supposedly …) I certainly found it dated and its depictions of “ultra-violence” a little ho-hum. Which might be because I have lived through two Iraq wars and an incredibly dubious ‘war on terror’, televised to saturation point across the various modes of media; have read Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (without a shadow of a doubt the most difficult book I have ever read in terms of the near-pornographic depictions of absolute violence contained within); and encounter a steady diet of human atrocities in my daily working life. You learn to develop a reasonably thick skin and to sometimes turn a blind eye in the interests of self-preservation; you also live with the knowledge that your own first-world problems pale in the face of true turmoil and tumult.

While I wouldn’t say I necessarily enjoyed A Clockwork Orange, I am nonetheless pleased that I have finally gotten around to reading it. There is no doubt it is a period piece now, but that certainly doesn’t make it a less worthy read. Its central themes of morality and the choice between good and evil – and what compels and drives humans to make that choice – are timeless. And there is a reason it is widely considered one of the best novels of the 20^th century – and that is because it is extraordinarily well written, plotted and characterised. I am not at all familiar with Burgess’s other work – turns out he’s a fairly pre-eminent British writer, turning out 30-odd novels over a 40-year career.  But he did not look favourably upon this novel in his later years, dismissing it in 1985 as a “jeu d’esprit knocked off for money in three weeks” and adding that the filmed version had made it easy for readers to “misunderstand what it was about”.

This is what it’s about: classical music-loving 15-year-old Alex and his friends (or ‘droogs’ in the novel’s argot Nadsat – a mixture of Slav and Cockney rhyming slang that is surprisingly easy to follow and also eases the emotional impact and toil of the heinous events unfolding) Georgie, Dim and Pete spend their evenings engaged in orgiastic sprees of inebriated “ultra-violence” – mindless thuggery and theft; random, unprovoked beatings; and brutal rapes. In one night alone the well-dressed (“in the heighth of fashion”) quartet – who’ve already secured their alibis by buying the elderly women in a local pub several rounds of drinks and their eternal gratitude – bash and strip a middle-aged man walking home, deliberately destroying the books he is toting; rob a corner store and beat up the husband-and-wife storeowners; batter a defenceless homeless man; trade blows with another gang, whose members come off the worse for wear; steal a car to go joyriding; and break into a couple’s home, beating up the husband, gang-raping his wife and then trashing the house.  

But there are frictions in Alex’s gang – particularly from Georgie, who challenges the leadership, and Dim, who chafes against his maltreatment – and these push Alex, against his better judgment, to burgle a wealthy elderly woman’s home. The farcical but ultimately fatal consequences land Alex in jail. Then, two years into his sentence, Alex is blamed for the death of a cellmate, which leads to a decision – partly politically motivated – to try out a controversial aversion therapy known as Ludovico’s Technique on the teenager in an attempt to “cure” him of his violent tendencies. The intensive fortnight of unorthodox – to say the least – treatment achieves its aim, before Alex is released back into society and into pivotal meetings with both his old friends and victims, all of whom have long memories and relish the opportunity to even the karmic ledger.

But the “removal” of Alex’s desire for violence paradoxically sets in motion a chain of events that conspires to thrust him back into an incarnation of his former existence, for which he soon discovers, ironically enough, that he no longer has much appetite. In the final chapter – which was initially removed from the American imprint, and which as a result plays no role in Kubrick’s film – Alex muses that in outgrowing his previous excesses he might have finally grown up, leading him to look forward to a much different future.

Burgess was in his mid-40s, with seven novels already under his belt and having spent much of the previous decade in first Malaysia, then Brunei, when A Clockwork Orange was first published. He had returned to a Britain where teenage delinquency was on the rise and considered an increasing social problem; in that context it is not hard to see the novel as a comment on the times. And, as they say, the more things change, the more they stay the same – more or less.

Coincidentally, Andy – who did not know I was reading A Clockwork Orange as my April book – toddled off to the theatre this month to see Action To The Word’s stage production, the author’s own adaptation. Probably should have gone myself, all things considering. Instead, I will have to content myself with Kubrick’s film which, characteristically, I am still yet to see, but I’m sure I will viddy with my glazzies all horrorshow. Right, Alex?

The Member of the Wedding – Andy most respectfully points out that the word “queer” appears on the first page

Everybody’s read The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, right? Who hasn’t? I’ve read it two, three times.It’s an wonderful book. And The Member of the Wedding has been sitting on my bookshelf for years. And somehow or other I never got around to reading it. Until last weekend.

Sorry, Carson.

It’s been a few years since I last read The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, so I can’t really compare the two books. But with Member fresh in my mind, I have to wonder if Heart makes muster. I’m sure it does. It’s probably better. But The Member of the Wedding is so, so good, it’s hard to imagine that a writer could produce two works of such genius in five or six years. In between Carson McCullers wrote Reflections in A Golden Eye. I guess I’m going to have to get around to finding out how good that is pretty soon. And The Ballad of the Sad Cafe.

For my own nefarious reasons I’m going to focus on a particular interpretation of this novel. Very obviously, and very beautifully, and also very humorously, it’s a coming of age novel, a rites of passage yarn. Frankie, twelve years old, a tomboy, friendless, motherless, her father kind of detached, tries to come to terms with her older brother’s impending marriage. And decides, in the way of children who do not quite grasp how the world of adults works, that she will become the third partner in her brother’s union, and in so doing escape the town she has come to despise. And she discusses this, and much else, with her family’s black housekeeper Berenice and her six-year-old cousin John Henry. Over the three phases of the novel Frankie goes from being referred to by the narrative voice – and herself – as Frankie, to  F. Jasmine, to Frances.

Yes, it can certainly be regarded as a rites of passage novel. But it can be regarded as something else, too.

There’s a lot going on in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, but at its heart (boom boom) it can, arguably, be regarded as a gay love story. If anything. The Member of the Wedding might just be queerer. And not just because its main character is a tomboy (a tomboy, Mick Kelly, is a major character in Heart as well). The most obvious signpost to this is young John Henry, who has a rather astonishing penchant for lady’s clothing and high heels. But Berenice, the black maid, has a thing or two to contribute as well. “I have heard of many a queer thing,” Berenice says, and then tells F. Jasmine and John Henry that she “knew boys to take it into their heads to fall in love with other boys”. She tells them about Lily Mae Jenkins – whose male name we are not given, curiously enough – a man who “fell in love with a man name Juney Jones. A man, mind you.” Yes, thanks Berenice. I think we got that. “And Lily Mae turned into a girl. He changed his nature and his sex and turned into a girl.” John Henry seems beguiled by this; F. Jasmine is disbelieving. The language McCullers uses, and its suggestion that identity is plastic, is fascinating.

MCCullers arguably pushes some envelopes in her exploration of Frankie’s sexuality. The 12-year-old (“precocious” is a cliche, but it’s the sort of cliche that might just about apply to this character) has some sexual experience – a gross, guilt-ridden grope with a male neighbour; seeing a male tenant having a “fit”. These are events that occurred before the novel’s action; during the novel she encounters a drunken young soldier, who mistakes the lanky tween for a much older girl and thinks she’s fair game. Frankie’s reaction to this situation is exactly what you’d expect from a 12-year-old girl, but it also adds another layer to the novel’s exploration of identity, sexual and otherwise.

McCullers – who apparently was bisexual, along with her husband = is not exclusively concerned with sexual identity. Berenice dreams of a day when the re will be no difference between black and white; Frankie – like so many girls of her age – obsesses about the cliques that she may once have been a part of, or could be a part of now if she so chose. But as the novel closes Frankie – or Frances, as she is now identified – is awaiting the arrival of a new female friend, a relationship Berenice seems to find worthy of suspicion. The Memberr of the Wedding is certainly a coming of age novel. But scratch a little deeper and it’s quite a bit more than that.

In which Netty goes looking for Atonement, makes an unscheduled trip to Amsterdam, and discovers her new favourite author …

When Andy and I first canvassed the idea of tackling unread books from our own shelves for this year’s Reading Challenge, I put together my list more or less on the spot. I knew pretty much exactly which books I had overlooked, for one reason or another, for years (and sometimes years and years). The list I scribbled down in the Raccoon Bar in Preston that afternoon (not a bad drinking establishment, despite the sometimes-unnerving proliferation of taxidermy around the joint; you should check it out sometime, Melbourne peeps) – and that I still have – lists Ian McEwan’s Atonement somewhere near the bottom.

Problem is, I don’t actually own Atonement. Hunting through my bookshelves – an onerous task at the best of times – revealed that the McEwan book I do have in my possession is Amsterdam, his 1998 Booker Prize winner (he’s been nominated six times). Well, it’s an easy mistake to make, y’all …

I’m not really sure when I bought Amsterdam; my copy is a 2005 reprint, so I guess it was sometime around then. I seem to recall it was purchased as part of a three-for-two type of deal. Obviously I know of McEwan by reputation – he has long been part of that lengthy list of authors on my ‘to-do’ list; a list that never really shortens, because for every book read, there is always another to add to the pile.

OK, enough of the preamble, let’s just cut to the chase – on the strength of Amsterdam, I think I have waited way too long to become acquainted with McEwan, an English writer widely considered one of the modern-day’s best. After finishing the book in one gulp (it’s a slip of a thing, clocking in at a mere 178 pages), I wanted to go down to my local bookshop (yeah, yeah, I’m old school) and buy EVERYTHING HE’S EVER WRITTEN and then call my boss and say that I NEED TO TAKE ABOUT A MONTH OFF WORK RIGHT NOW THIS VERY SECOND in order to read them all. McEwan has penned a dozen novels (along with a couple of short-story collections, children’s books and screenplays), so a month would do just nicely – that would also give me time to do other important things, like eat, and sleep, maybe have an occasional shower …

McEwan is that rare blend of literary and popularist; it’s a very, very fine tightrope to walk, and few writers successfully make it to the other side of the wire. Amsterdam is extremely accessible, a very enjoyable read, an irresistible page-turner that gallops along at a 1200m-like clip. There’s not much at all to fault here – the characters are perfectly composed; finely, intricately drawn portraits of all-too-realistic, flawed human beings – the reader can relate and empathise with them. The plot is original, the story-telling compelling; it strikes just the right balance throughout, masterfully building the suspense to the final denouement. The writing is absolutely exquisite, with nary a word gone to waste. The novel’s two main protagonists are a composer and a newspaper editor, respectively; while I can’t comment too much (or at all, really) on the world of classical music, I am pretty familiar with that of print journalism – and McEwan absolutely nails it. I looked up the 1998 Booker short-list – McEwan beat out Julian Barnes (another very worthy recent discovery of mine) and Beryl Bainbridge, along with three other writers I’d never heard of, that year. Maybe I should closely check out who he didn’t beat in his five unsuccessful nominations – those must be some hella good books …

I’m not going to be saying a whole lot about Amsterdam’s plot – no spoilers here! – although I must commend whoever wrote the back-cover liner notes on my copy for perfectly summing up the contents whilst giving pretty much nothing at all away. As the novel, set in London in the mid-1990s, opens, two old friends – Clive Linley and Vernon Halliday – are attending the funeral of Molly Lane. Lane, the former lover of both men, was a 46-year-old restaurant critic who had quickly succumbed to an unnamed disease that robbed her of her mobility, speech and dignity.

Both in their late 40s, Linley is a successful modern classical composer struggling to complete the millennial symphony he envisions as his masterpiece, while Halliday is the beleaguered editor of The Judge, a broadsheet struggling to stay relevant amidst rapidly declining circulation. Neither man has much time for Molly’s wealthy widower George Lane, who owns one and a half per cent of Halliday’s paper, nor for the Foreign Secretary Julian Garmony, a right-wing politician eyeing off the prime ministership – and, crucially, another of Molly’s ex-lovers.  

Feeling vulnerable after Molly’s death, the two men – whose friendship spans 25-odd years – make a pact. Then George Lane offers Halliday a professional opportunity too good to refuse, with an accompanying moral dilemma, while Linley heads to the Lake District in an attempt to break his writer’s block, but inadvertently stumbles on a situation that he unwisely chooses to overlook. The consequences of both – and an ensuing unravelling of their friendship – ultimately lead the men to their date with destiny in Amsterdam, where Linley is set to unveil his symphony.

Several of McEwan’s books have been turned into successful films; I’m quite surprised Amsterdam – which is ripe for cinematic adaptation – is not among them. Maybe one day …

Anyways, that’s about the size of it. I’m off to my local bookshop with my credit card … oh, hold on. I’m not. It’s almost midnight, and the bookshop is closed. What’s that, you say? I can order books on the internet and they’ll be here tomorrow? Or I can download them on to an e-reader and enjoy them immediately? Oh, you weird and whacky kids, you …

The Blood of Flowers – Andy pays a visit to 17th century Iran

2013′s Bookshelf Challenge (or whatever Netty’s calling it) has a number of advantages. It’s allowed me to read something Netty had already read – Sylvia Plath’s Collected Poems. It’s allowed me to read The Year of the Flood, by Margaret Atwood, a writer Netty and I are bot familiar with and therefore unlikely to make the cut for the “main” challenge. And it allows me to read something like The Blood of Flowers, a book I’ve pushed for a couple of times – at least partly because it was already on my bookshelf – and which Netty has shown something roughly akin to zero interest in reading.

So now I’ve read it.

Anita Amirrezvani – Tehran born, San Francisco raised – took nine years to write The Blood of Flowers – an impressive commitment. She visited Iran three times to do research. The noughties can’t have been an easy time for an Iranian-born American woman to visit the land of her birth. I wouldn’t have thought so, at least, unless of course the image of Iran we’re fed by the mainstream media is in fact a bit skewed but oh look, the likelihood of that is, what…? Anyway, Amirrezvani’s achievement is laudable. Nine years, visits to Iran… And a terrific novel as the end product.

The Blood of Flowers opens with a nameless narrator, living in an isolated Iranian village, entering the year in which her parents will arrange her marriage. She’s 14, and excited by the prospects her future offers. But a comet offers ill omens, and sure enough her father’s death plunges her and her mother into poverty and desperation. They are forced into a life of service in the house of her father’s half-brother, where the narrator demonstrates a talent for carpet weaving that suggests a brighter future than she and her mother had foreseen. But a sudden and regrettable change of circumstances finds the 14-year-old forced into agreeing to a short-term “marriage” for financial reasons. She manages to make this work, to some extent, in her and her mother’s favour, but ultimately has to make some tough calls about what is best for her and her future.

On the off-chance someone decides they want to read this I won’t say any more. I was genuinely intrigued throughout about where it would all end, and while the conclusion is perhaps a little predictable, the circumstances around it are not. Seventeenth century Iran might not be the most obvious setting for a novel with a vibrantly independent female narrator, but it happens to work spectacularly well.  And it’s made more convincing by making the narrator no political revolutionary – she is someone in desperate circumstances who uses whatever she has at her disposal to keep herself and her mother alive. She seems to have some limited religious belief but it doesn’t dominate her life and, in fact, she seems to find it a bit of a drag. Certainly she is not impressed by the burqa-like garment she’s expected to wear in the capital – dress codes in her village were a lot more relaxed.

In fact one of the more fascinating aspects of the novel is the lack of religion – it’s there, and there are occasional elements that bring to mind the religious elements of My Name is Red. But for the most part Isfahan is presented as an essentially secular city in which class and wealth make more difference than religious observance. The rich drink wine, the rich take short-term lovers, the rich wear outrageously ostentatious garments and eat magnificently while the poor starve in their rags. And, having read My Name is Red’s depiction of illustrators in Istanbul only a few years earlier, it’s great to read about Iran’s carpet makers. They are very, very different novels – Amirrezvani doesn’t have Pamuk’s postmodernist trappings, and that arguably makes her novel superior.

While the narrator isn’t overtly political the novel certainly has political aspects, and early misgivings on my part that I was reading chick lit (albeit extremely well written) gave way son enough to the realisation that The Blood of Flowers is in fact a strongly feminist text. I doubt it will come to be the highlight of my reading year, but it will I suspect be right up there.

In which Netty has a not-so-lucky encounter with Lucky Jim …

I’ve recently embarked on a bit of a physical cull of my abode – an autumn clean, if you will – involving clearing, decluttering and getting rid of the things that I don’t want, don’t need, that take up too much space, etc. It is mostly inspired by a lack of space, but rammed home by a quote I came across recently, from William Morris: “Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful”.  I’ve personally never been a fan of tossing out books, but with six packed-to-the-brim cases, the time is high nigh.

And a few of these have been titles from previous years’ Reading Challenges – books that I downright despised (Updike’s Rabbit Run, Marquez’s Memories of Melancholy Whores), books that were downright disappointing (Malouf’s Johnno) or just plain and simply ‘meh’ (Litt’s I Play The Drums In A Band Called Okay, Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Down).  And the latest inclusion on the pile? Why, none other than Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim.

It doesn’t fall into the despised category – instead it’s stationed somewhere between disappointing and meh. I didn’t go into it with high expectations, a la Malouf, but as a long-time fan of the work of Kingsley’s son Martin, if I’d thought about it at any length beforehand, I certainly would have expected more. To be honest, if I didn’t HAVE to have finished this book, I would have probably tossed it aside around about page 100, never to return – and not particularly caring, either (and while I know plenty of peeps who will happily close a book if it’s not doing it for them, I hardly ever do so myself). I think it also speaks volumes that Lucky Jim was our February book, and here I am posting about it at the end of March (dodgy home PC issues aside). Indeed, it took me a long time to get around to actually finishing it – hell, one day I even cleaned my shower in preference to continuing the plough through its pages, and I HATE cleaning the shower.

So why was it such a chore, and such a slog? Well, mostly because I had zero attachment to any of the characters, or the plot. I felt Amis suffered a bit from the same thing I noticed reading The Black Prince by Iris Murdoch (same country of origin, same demographic, same era) in a Reading Challenge of yesteryear – the book could have benefitted from having great swathes of unnecessary detail cut from its pages. (And I enjoyed The Black Prince; to wit, it is still happily nestled on my bookshelf, where it is perfectly safe in the knowledge that it will remain). Problem is, if you cut great swathes from Lucky Jim’s 265 pages, you’d be left with, well, not much at all …

This is my first foray into Kingsley’s Amis’s output. Lucky Jim was Amis’s third novel, first published in 1954; this very distinguished English man of letters (that’s Sir Kingsley, CBE) went on to author 20-odd novels, a memoir, several volumes of poetry, short stories, TV and radio scripts and literary criticism. He is considered one of the finest English writers ever. But sometimes – like Malouf, Updike and Marquez – it takes just one bad egg to spoil the entire omelet. Will I ever dip into Amis’s oeuvre again? Quite frankly, I can’t see it happening. There might be – I’m sure there are – gems aplenty to be found in it, but at the end of the day, well, life is just too short and there are too many books, and authors, out there, who warrant my attention. That’s just the way the cookie crumbles …

So, what’s it all about, then? Well, I’ll try and describe it without falling into a bored stupor or nodding off mid-sentence. It’s the very early 1950s. We’re in a university in the English midlands. There’s this medieval history lecturer, James (Jim) Dixon, who desperately wants to secure tenure at said uni, even though he can’t stand it, or his department head Professor Welch (there is a mildly amusing passage, during one of the Professor’s monologues, where he imagines stuffing Welch into a toilet bowl in the staff restrooms), some of his colleagues and most of his students. His colleague and sort-of-girlfriend Margaret (whose “green paisley frock” and “quasi-velvet shoes” he despises) is recovering from a suicide attempt after a knock-back from another suitor (this is actually much funnier than it reads here).  His attempts to prepare for his “special” subject for the following academic year (“Merrie England”) – and thus ensure his continuing employment – are thwarted by his own procrastination, not to mention his love for a pint or seven.

After a trip to stay with Professor Welch and his wife, he becomes embroiled in a bizarre threeway-of-sorts with the couple’s pompous would-be painter son Bertrand and his young, blonde, pretty girlfriend Christine (she seems to have no other redeeming features than her looks, if we are to believe the author – who generally doesn’t appear to have a high opinion of women throughout these pages). And then … seriously, if this had been a DVD, I would have fast-forwarded the rest of the way through. In fact, I only made myself finish the book because if I hadn’t, Andy would have hunted me down and dug out my eyeballs with red-hot pokers. Um, that’s a metaphor of sorts, obves …

Speaking of which, if you’ve read my blogging partner-in-crime’s dissection (see below if you haven’t), it may appear to you that we have read two completely different books. In fact, in the sixth year of Reading Challenge I don’t recall a book that we have been this poles apart on. I will stress, again, however, that I didn’t loathe it; I just found it completely and utterly surplus to my literary requirements. As well as taking away a few hours of my life that I will never get back.

Off to the Salvos with you, then, Lucky Jim …

Lucky Jim – Andy finally gets around to the other Amis

… and is very pleasantly surprised.

My lit lecturer (one of them) hated Kingsley Amis. Also Patrick White. Loved, however, Martin Amis and Tim Winton. Martin is obviously the son of Kingsley, and some may argue that Tim’s obsessions with the land and spirituality make him one of Patrick’s literary heirs. My lecturer was right about Martin and Tim (although both disappointed with the last things of theirs that I read) but he was wrong about Patrick and, on the basis of Lucky Jim, he was wrong about Kingsley, too.

Lucky Jim is a thoroughly enjoyable novel. I’m not sure that it’s “about” much more than being a disengaged, unfulfilled young person in a hateful job that results in nothing but the desire to be drunk and chase skirt. Although that’s possibly a pretty good range of stuff for a novel to be “about”. Dissatisfaction with the vagaries of existence, with the lack of fulfillment life seems to offer, with the inability to connect with most if not all of the people around us? Yup. That’s probably a bit for a novel to be about.

But before Lucky Jim is a novel “about” stuff, it’s a comedy. And it is funny. It is very, very funny. The devil may well be in the detail but so are the laughs. Amis writes about medieval recorder music and he makes it funny. He writes about the machinations of a third-rate university and he makes it funny. He makes the subtleties of mid-century English middle-class snobbery funny. He makes cultural snobbery funny. He makes drunkenness funny. He makes being horny funny. Some of these things are easier than others to make funny. Amis makes all of them funny, sometimes a handful of them all at the same time.

The titular Lucky Jim – Jim Dixon – is a terrific creation. Perhaps not great, perhaps not a creation of genius, but certainly huge fun. Scornful, sarcastic, self-destructive; randy, realistic, rancid. Like most insecure people he’s also hugely arrogant; and like many people in unrewarding relationships he quite swiftly finds someone else to pique his interest.

There’s plenty about this novel that is utterly convincing, and Dixon’s seesawing self-confidence and self-loathing  lie at its centre. Unfortunately Amis loses control of his material a little towards the end. For most of its length this novel has a level of suspense to strengthen it as well; will Jim fall on his feet or will he meet the fate Evelyn Waugh, perhaps, might’ve doled out for him? Amis’s conclusion is ultimately a little twee and a little contrived; also, it’s outrageously sexist, which is a pity because for the most part Amis, to my thinking anyway, avoided the sexist pitfalls some of his contemporaries fell for. The book’s rewards are undermined by the shortcuts ethical and narrative, that Amis takes to get to his rather too snappy conclusion.

But I might be stretching for that criticism. Overall Lucky Jim is engrossing and wildly amusing. And even if Jim’s not a terribly nice person, or even all that sympathetic, his range of facial expressions will probably see you practising in the mirror. Seriously.

In which Netty meets an alchemist and, nine years later, finally gets around to reading The Alchemist …

In early 2004 my ex and I went to the States for the SXSW music festival. We flew into California and had about a fortnight before we were due to fly out to Austin, so we decided to do a meandering drive up Pacific Highway 1 and give ourselves a couple of days to return to LA via the interstates.

On the return leg we stopped for the night in a small town called Redding, chosen because it was getting late and we had to stop somewhere. After dinner we went to a bar where we got talking to a couple of guys and a chick. While the chick spent most of the time trying to crack on to my ex, I talked in particular and at length to one of the guys, James. James was a pot-smoking painter who paid the bills by waiting tables; he claimed to be illiterate but said he could do his job because he had memorised the menu. While my ex got drunk and tried to fend off the aforementioned chick, James raced back to his to get some samples of his work. Long story short – my ex woke up the next day with a hangover and I woke up with several small, abstract squares of James’ oil on canvas for which I paid $US60 (“You’re getting a bargain,” he told me). When I got home I had three of them framed; they hang on my loungeroom wall to this day.

What has all this got to do with Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist, you might be wondering (if indeed you’ve gotten this far, having thought you may have stumbled into the wrong blog). Well, James also mentioned that his favourite book of all time was … you guessed it. He said he would have people – mostly girls, I’m surmising – read it to him. It’s a mere 163 pages long, so I guess that is conceivable as well as achievable.

So I picked up a copy of the book – on April 6 that year, from a bookstore that no longer exists, according to the receipt I found tucked away inside its pages when I went to revisit it almost a decade later. That it sat on my bookshelf for so long may have something to do with reading another Coelho book – The Zahir – the following year, and finding it such a stultifyingly, ego-laden pile of drivel that I was loath to seek out his earlier and most famous work.

Coelho has an interesting enough back story. Born in Brazil in 1947, he harboured ambitions of becoming a writer from a very young age; his parents responded by having him committed to a mental institution when he was 16. He dropped out of law school in the late 1960s and hit the drug-laden American/European hippie trail. After returning to his birthplace he pursued a career as a lyricist, but never abandoned his dream of writing books. After several initial endeavours, he finally hit paydirt with The Alchemist, published in Portuguese in 1988 and as an English-language version in 1993. It has since sold 65 million copies and been translated into 71 languages.  

Of course, just because something is popular doesn’t mean it’s any good. And based on my previous – and admittedly, sole – experience of Coehlo’s work, I approached The Alchemist with a great deal of trepidation indeed. My copy is the 10^th anniversary edition with a forward by the author and multitudes of platitudes from critics and famous fans (hello, Madonna!) alike. It’s been compared to De Saint Exupery’s The Little Prince and Gibran’s The Prophet (the former of which I read at about 10 and the latter at about 20) – and certainly if you like those books, along with Carlos Castanada, M. Scott Peck, the Illuminati and Dr Phil, then this is probably right up your alley, too.

If I was being kind, I would say that The Alchemist is a parable, a fable, a rich meditation on the importance of staying true to one’s lifelong spiritual quest. If I was being mean, I would say that it is a predictable mish-mash of quasi-mystical mumbo-jumbo and Oprah-style self-help maxims. In truth it’s probably somewhere in between, this tale of the young Andalusian shepherd Santiago and his life-changing journey from his native Spain to northern Africa. Along the way he encounters a gypsy who foretells his fortune and treasure; the unlikely “King of Salem”, Melchizadek, who teaches him about his Personal Legend (capitals are the author’s), encourages him to follow it and bestows upon him two stones for his journey; and finally the Alchemist of the novel’s title, his physical and spiritual guide who takes him from an oasis in the desert to the Pyramids of Egypt. Oh, and in between there’s weighty concepts such as the Soul of the World, the Universal Language and the Master Work – not to mention the Emerald Tablet, the Philosopher’s Stone (so that’s where J.K. Rowling got it from!) and the Elixir of Life – to navigate and negotiate …

Look, if you’re into this sort of thing, then you’ll probably adore The Alchemist – and good luck to you. It’s no more or less real than religion in all its myriad forms. And who’s to say what’s right or what’s wrong. At the end of the day, it’s whatever floats your boat. For me, I didn’t love it, I didn’t hate it; it made me roll my eyes a lot, very occasionally it made me take pause – and then, right at the very end, it made me laugh out loud. Which ultimately, I suppose, made it worth the couple of hours that it took to read.

As for James, well, who knows? I’d like to think he made a real fist of his art – he was certainly talented enough to have done so – and is not still bunkered down in Redding, waiting tables, reciting a menu learned by rote, getting wasted and drifting off to the sound of a female voice wading through the pages of The Alchemist.