Reviewing this particular graphic novel is tough.  It’s so famous and acclaimed that a lot of reviews, essays and poorly spelled praises have already been written about it.  There are also the rules that surround it.

1. When reading Watchmen, restrict to one chapter a night.

2. When telling someone who hasn’t read Watchmen about it, you can’t give away any real information.

I overlooked this seminal text because all I’d heard was ‘it’s a superhero novel, but it’s *really* not’ and that didn’t sound very exciting.  When I did get around to it I was blown away.  Alan Moore is one of the genius writers currently working in the world, and this is his masterpiece.  Rorschack is one of the best rounded and defined characters in any graphic novel.  Moore is never afraid to get ugly and Watchmen is doubly powerful because he doesn’t pull the punches or cut the corners.  I could go on.

To say how good this is without giving anything away, let’s look to the film…

Scheduled to release in March 09, the script has been under more scrutiny than the Akira live-action that has been kicked around for a decade but no one dares to actually film.  Akira was the first anime film to break into the western film market.  Watchmen revolutionised a genre and got a solid nod from The Times, whom are rather difficult to please.  The film is going to be roughly 3 hours long, and not due to special-effects-piled-high fight scenes are fight scenes to justify the vertical admission price and the cost of making it, but because it has to be.  Like Lord of the Rings, it really isn’t about the fights.  In fact, there is very little in the way of physical conflict in the film.  It opens with a murder and at the end, well, it’ll be interesting to see it filmed.

The story is interjected with pieces of prose not directly linked but crucially relevant to the main, and allegedly these are to be filmed and released on DVD before the film premiers.  They really are doing this right.

Film adaptations are never as good as the book.  Given how much lavish time and care is being spent on this to get it right, how good do you reckon the book is?

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It’s Sunday the 29th of June and I’m only a quarter of the way through this book, but I’ve got to start this review now. Palahniuk is a writer who’s just too good to be legal. He’s very much a scrapbook writer, taking bits of stories from annecdotes and events across his life and letting them percolate until they dribble out in snippets at opportune moments across his books. This is habit I’m fast falling into as I cultivate it. I admire this man to the extent where I wish to remove the top of my skull and rub his magic writing hands onto the oily surface of my brain. There’s a quirk I have about writer’s hands, but that’s a story for another time.

I see Palahniuk as a mad scientist of a writer, who starts a novel in the form of a big beaker of bubbling liquid on a tripod over a Bunsen burner. Behind him in his mental laboratory are shelves upon shelves of test tubes filled with clear liquid, labeled with writing too small to read. He takes from this array of ideas and observations with a pipet, adding single drops to the beaker and watching it flash and smoke. After weeks of adding, boiling and mixing, he pours the contents into a sheep’s stomach, staples a bow onto it and presents it in a book shop.

Haggis is lovely, by the way. The majority of the best food in the world looks foul.

So, Rant then.

*

Like all of Palahniuk’s novels it’s misleading as to what the plot’s actually about, doing something of a M. Night Shyamlan in the last quarter (only far less crap) and picking up plot threads that have been woven in all along but didn’t seem of that much significance to begin with.

Rant is the story of an extradordinary and faintly grotesque lad who almost starts a rabies pandemic.  It’s told entirely from character’s points of view in an almost interview style, and you piece together the story from all these titbits.  There’s a sport in it called Party Crashing, where people organise themselves into having a symbol on their car during a certain window of time and then smash into each other to get off on the shock and giddy thrill of impact.  This all turns out to be a much bigger deal than some quirky subplot towards the end when Palahnuik starts exploring different theories of time, pitching them so convincingly and with such carefully chosen real-world examples that you think that what happens in the book really could happen.

Palahniuk likes to become a bit of an expert on things before he writes about them.  Here it’s anatomy, crash theory and concepts of time, and what should be dry explanations are compelling.  He also becomes self-referential about his genre of prose, transgression, by looking into themes of the carnivalesque and the inversion of social boundaries.  This made the student in me rather chuffed, to be honest.

Don’t read the first thirty pages of this book whilst you’re eating.  I started Rant in an Italian restaurant with pasta, crayfish tails and a creamy sauce.  This was a mistake as I was reading in detail about ’sex storms’, where the wind knocks over the bins and tears away condoms, tampons and sanitary towels and leaves them fluttering on barbed wire fences.  Interesting stuff.

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I got hooked onto Wilkinson through his first book of short stories, Memoirs of the Messed Up Minds, so when I found that his next book was to deviate from his dark sense of humour and somewhat taboo subject matter, I was a touch worried. This was, however, to be an autobiographical account of his struggle with arthritis from a young age and there was something I could relate to in this.

It was confirmed a few years ago that I don’t have arthritis and it’s still not known about 8 years of tests and a bought of exploratory surgery what’s wrong with my wrists that causes daily pain. I took excessive painkillers daily for years, overdosing frequently around school exams or when it was so bad I couldn’t lift a kettle or tip a saucepan. Manual tin openers were just out of the question, and it’s incredibly unfortunate that I’m not at all ambidextrous. Not that it would help massively. Though nowhere near as bad as my right wrist, my left still has its problems.

So, here’s a writer who got struck with something ongoing that just hurt when he was young and fell back before he came forward again. The book is incredibly honest, from the ways he tried to hide his condition from work to the self-pitying thoughts and feelings that I know only too well. More than once over the years I’ve had to remind myself that although some days I can’t use a toothbrush with my preferred hand, I don’t have cancer nor am I indeed dying in any other but the usual aging way. It’s a hard thing to admit the ‘why me?’ moans, and incredibly heartening to see someone you respect say it without the handicap of still meaning it. At the time, yes you do, but looking back, at the worst times I’ve been lucky. It often takes someone else’s account to make you feel grateful for what you do have of your health.
One of Wilkinson’s strengths is that he never excludes the reader through complex tropes and ambivalent sentences. He just lays his thoughts down cleanly, frequently with a touch of humour. At times this looks too simple - he is ‘telling’ where he should just be ’showing’, but this is a minor nitpick within the book. The other one is more down to personal feelings I have towards exclamation marks, specifically that I have very little time for them. In sentences where you feel you need one of these horrible symbols, it would most likely look and read stronger without it. Within dialogue is a different matter, as a character may actually ‘exclaim’ something and ‘help!’ reads better than ‘help’. Outside of quotations, however, it feels kind of tacky.
But those are the two complaints I have, and they’re not even that big.
Still, I sincerely hope to see Wilkinson getting back to his old, twisted stomping grounds in his next writerly endeavor.

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… by reporting on his own murders.

The journalist, Vlado Taneski, is accused of raping, torturing and killing three elderly women in the south-western town of Kicevo.

Macedonian police began to suspect him after he included details in his reports that they had not made public.

Clever little sod.  Sick and desperate, but clever.

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This is from the author of Atomised, which is apparently slap yourself stupid fantastic.  Where I can, I try to read the book after the one that made an author famous as I am interested in new writers but I have an allergy to hype.  I refused Firefly and Battlestar Galactica for months/years because of how hyped-up they were, coming around to them in my own time and finding that the hype was well warranted in the end.

So, Houellebecq.  He’s clever, I’ll give him that, and has a style that very much speaks of an intellectual scrap-booker as he pulls in insightful little thoughts and titbits from all corners.  The story here is about a stand-up comedian who is sort of reincarnated in a dystopia future where his only friend is a cloned dog, and he hates the sound of laughing.  I expected it to be searing and brilliant.  What I found was that it was almost impenetrable with a character that couldn’t be emotionally latched onto.  I forced myself through a few chapters a night and, shamefully, gave up up on it entirely after 70 pages.

I haven’t given up on many books, but I simply wasn’t getting anything out of this aside from frustration that I wasn’t reading something else.

Nevermind.  They can’t all be winners.

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Harvey, the headstrong and very ‘teenage’ labradoodle, has now had three dog training lessons now and just now we had a bit of a break through.  He’s managed to connect two commands, come and heel, into one fantastic response where he comes, turns on his own and sits close at your left side, facing the right way.  This is the same dog that refuses every command aside from sit and runs amok.  We are so very, very pleased with him.

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In further tasteless news, we have this:

A street-sweeping truck has sucked a dog up through its bristles on a New York street, leaving its horrified owner holding nothing but the lead.

“It spun me around, and as it spun me around, I caught a last glimpse of her.

I was devastated. I was completely dumbfounded and shocked. I mean, I just witnessed my dog sucked up into a street sweeper.”

I have dogs and I love them to pieces, and this is a sad story, but at the same time… it’s quite funny. How this scene hasn’t turned up in a book or a film before it happened in real life is quite beyond me.

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 A mother who was intoxicated during her labor at a Polish hospital gave birth to a baby girl who was almost 15 times over the country’s adult drunk-driving limit.

That is one drunk baby.

Isn’t our world a special, special place?

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Unknown artist, but found along with many others, here.

I’ve ended up writing the wrong thing this summer.  I wanted to write about my brother and got about 2k into it before it sort of fizzled out, then I started on a new transgressive piece that revolved around 3 housemates and got further, but again with the fizzeling.  Gabe started talking over everything else, so I started listening.  Have got a decent wedge of the sequel to Dolls now and a solid idea about how the book is going to be shaped.  I’m enjoying it to boot.

I wish I was still writing short stories, as I keep finding pictures like the one above that just cry plot and characters, but between multiple jobs and writing Gabe, there just isn’t time.  I’m going to demo a chapter tomorrow night at the Open Reading in Slaks (if you’re in Cheltenham, do come along - an awesome time is guaranteed) and see how it gets on.

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Photo by Luis Vasconcelos

The caption says, “An indigenous woman holds her child while trying to resist the advance of Amazonas state policemen who were expelling the woman and some 200 other members of the Landless Movement from a privately-owned tract of land on the outskirts of Manaus, in the heart of the Brazilian Amazon March 11, 2008. The landless peasants tried in vain to resist the eviction with bows and arrows against police using tear gas and trained dogs. REUTERS/Luiz Vasconcelos-A Critica/AE (BRAZIL)”.

Images of heavy-handed oppression really don’t come much better than this - defenceless, screaming woman clutching naked child is shoved and beaten by faceless, armoured authority.Source.

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