books, page 137 of 140

In 1981, Robert Calvert, the poet who wanted to be a fighter pilot and became, for a while, the figurehead of the spaceship Hawkwind, published his only novel, Hype, about upcoming rock star Tom Mahler and the promotional shenanigans surrounding the release of his make-or-break third album. In 1982, Calvert released an accompanying LP, Hype: Songs of Tom Mahler, featuring the songs referred to in the novel. It’s an excellent record, and one of the more polished and commercially accessible of Calvert’s solo albums, but it created, in me, a feeling that, as Calvert effectively took the part of Mahler (by singing his songs) on the album, he would naturally identify with him in the novel. The novel’s actual protagonist is Tony Cahn, the Mahawat-smoking APR Records exec who sees the success of Tom Mahler as his route to the top.

I’ve loved Calvert’s witty, incisive lyrics for years. The Charisma-era records he did with Hawkwind (Astounding Sounds, Amazing Music, Quark, Strangeness and Charm, PXR5, 25 Years On) contain some of my all-time favourite lyrics, not to mention songs, period: the brooding “Steppenwolf” still gives me the chills whenever I really listen to it, as Calvert’s Hermann Hesse-inspired misanthropic rant achieves such a height of intensity it slips into German, like a darkly religious ecstasy of speaking in tongues. Calvert’s poetry lies in the cool, precise choice of words, and his novel’s prose is no exception. Everything is succinctly and exactly described, leaving you with a feeling that here is a writer who is really seeing the scene he’s describing:

“Cahn moved his chair forward for Sammy to get by as she went to her usual place at the table. She undid and slid out of the green parachute-silk coat and settled it over the back of her chair. Finger by finger she began pulling off her gloves, revealing long vermillion nails which she combed through the glossy black of her hair.”

This sort of crystal-clear description of little details focuses the reader’s imagination. Its commanding, confident tone leaves you in no doubt about the writer’s authority. But its downside is that, if the writer keeps to the same tone, you can end up feeling detached from the characters, as if you’re watching them on a big cinema screen, rather than being (as in the best fiction) transported to a spot just behind their eyes, connected to their feelings as much as their actions. Throughout Hype, although you spend a lot of time in Tony Cahn’s company, and a lesser but still significant amount in Tom Mahler’s, you don’t really get close to either. You never really understand why they’re doing what they’re doing. You can’t quite tell if, for instance, Tony Cahn is nothing but a cynical manipulator simply in it for his own gain, or if Tom Mahler has any substance as an artist beyond a manufactured cultish appeal. (And I think that, in a novel of any length, the main characters need to have a bit more dimension than that.) Another downside is that such monotone prose, beautiful and precise though it is, prevents any variation in pacing. It wasn’t till right near the end that the story started to rear its head towards a climax, and that, interestingly, is when Calvert loosens up and uses (in the last three or four chapters) different narrative styles (an excerpt from Mahler’s ghostwritten autobiography, for instance, which, because it’s brief and close to the end, doesn’t have much of an effect). The most interesting chapter, “The Evolution of Rock’n’Roll” has Calvert sounding most like himself (or, at least, as he sounds in a series of self-interview tapes he made in response to a fan’s questionnaire — available online as Ramblings at Dawn), as he launches into a non-fictional account of how the British chart system (as it existed back then) could be, and most probably was, easily manipulated.

In some interview quotes on Knut Gerwers’ excellent Calvert resource, Calvert says he was aiming, in Hype, for something like P G Wodehouse’s satires on 1920s Hollywood, but my biggest disappointment with the book was just how unsatirical, how unscathing, it was of the characters it portrays, and often how unwitty it is compared to Calvert’s pithy lyrics (“Quark, Strangeness and Charm”, for instance, or “Over My Head” from the Hype album). Mahler comes across as too uninteresting to be the artist-hero crushed by an uncaring recording industry — he contributes too much to his own downfall, and seems to have no real principles, just a fashionable, and quickly lost, for-the-people attitude. Cahn, on the other hand, is built too much into a hero to be the object of satire, coming up trumps in his one fist fight (against a woman, though — there’s a nasty undertone of misogyny throughout the book, particularly in its numerous, rather shoehorned-in sex scenes), but unrealistically winning through on business deals through nothing but mouthy chutzpah.

Aside from these faults, I found it quite a readable book, but perhaps more because I was interested in the man who wrote it than what he was writing. The scenes featuring Mahler’s band rehearsing and recording were the highlights, both because they must have echeod Calvert’s own experience of such situations, and because their portrayal of the sort of micro-politics that come to bear on creative, collaborative situations was spot on.

A while ago I bought The Writer’s Voice by Al Alvarez, hoping for some hints and tips, but really all Alvarez had to say was that, at some vague point, writers find their “voice”, but he has nothing practical to say about (a) how it’s found or (b) what it is, which was a bit disappointing.

The one good thing about the book, which had me chuckling to myself for a while, was this anecdote. It’s not laugh-out-loud, perhaps, but it still gets me. It’s not by Alvarez, but by Edith Wharton, from her book A Backward Glance, and starts with herself and fellow author Henry James in Wharton’s chauffeur-driven car:

James and I chanced to arrive at Windsor long after dark. We must have been driven by a strange chauffeur — perhaps Cook was on a holiday; at any rate, having fallen into the lazy habit of trusting him to know the way, I found myself at a loss to direct his substitute to the King’s Road. While I was hesitating, and peering out into the darkness, James spied an ancient doddering man who had stopped in the rain to gaze at us. “Wait a moment, my dear — I’ll ask where we are”; and leaning out he signalled to the spectator.

“My good man, if you’ll be good enough to come here, please; a little nearer — so,” and as the old man came up: “My friend, to put it to you in two words, this lady and I have just arrived here from Slough; that is to say, to be more strictly accurate, we have recently passed through Slough on our way here, having actually motored to Windsor from Rye, which was our point of departure; and the darkness having overtaken us, we should be much obliged if you would tell us where we now are in relation, say, to the High Street, which, as you of course know, leads to the Castle, after leaving on the left the turn down to the railway station.”

I was not surprised to have this extraordinary appeal met by silence, and a dazed expression on the old wrinkled face at the window; nor to have James go on: “In short” (his invariable prelude to a fresh series of explanatory ramifications), “in short, my good man, what I want to put to you in a word is this: supposing we have already (as I have reason to think we have) driven past the turn down to the railway station (which, in that case, by the way, would probably not have been on our left hand, but on our right), where are we now in relation to…”

“Oh, please,” I interrupted, feeling myself utterly unable to sit through another parenthesis, “do ask him where the King’s Road is.”

“Ah-? The King’s Road? Just so! Quite right! Can you, as a matter of fact, my good man, tell us where, in relation to our present position, the King’s Road exactly is?”

“Ye’re in it,” said the aged face at the window.

I remember feeling rather cheated the first time I realised the writer of the book I was reading was making the plot up as he went along. It may have been Jack of Shadows (which I read because of the excellent Hawkwind song of the same name), but it was definitely Roger Zelazny. Zelazny, for me, has always been a bit of a variable writer, a little too pleased with his own facility to really knuckle down and tell a story properly, though he does occasionally tell a good one. (“Tower of Ice” from Divlish, The Damned, for instance.)

I’ve nothing against writers making their stories up as they go along, it’s when it’s obvious, when they’re just noodling on the page because they don’t know where to take the plot next. The trouble is, in fantasy, it’s all too easy to get away with this by simply throwing a few monsters at the heroes, or, in the case of horror, just providing a scary moment which doesn’t really move the plot along.

But there’s one writer who really can pull off a good bit of noodling, and that’s Haruki Murakami. Murakami seems to write by just starting with an intriguing beginning and following it along till it goes somewhere. If it doesn’t seem to be going anywhere, he doesn’t throw exciting but empty events at the reader in the hope it’ll keep them occupied till he thinks of something. Instead, he sticks with it, paying minute attention to his characters carrying out some quiet but concentrated task, such as preparing spaghetti or building a fire out of driftwood. His is the pressure-cooker approach to writing: he’s content to sit back and write till he, and his reader, are fully adjusted to the tone and pace of his imagination. And then, when that connection is made, something happens. Dance, Dance, Dance is the book where this is most evident — a book he says is his least satisfactory but was the most fun to write, and which I quite enjoyed simply because of that very adjustment to a slower, quieter pace. Murakami’s tales are often about a tense, quirky build-up to a sudden, sometimes violent, event — or sometimes just the suggestion of an event, as in “UFO in Kushiro” (from After the Quake) where, after a rather rambling conversation between a man and a woman, we get, right near the end, and out of pretty much nowhere: “For one split second, Komura realised that he was on the verge of committing an act of overwhelming violence.” And then it’s over, the moment’s past, and after all that tension, there’s a feeling of something frightening and mysterious having been averted, or having happened entirely hidden away in his character’s psyche, just as you get in the best moments with David Lynch.

I think with any sort of creative activity (and that includes reading as well as writing), there’s a transition you have to make from your everyday mode of thinking to that slower, quieter mindset in which things start to flow. Sometimes part of the transition is made actually on the page, but even still there are writers who can carry it off, and writers who can’t.