Put out More Flags - Waugh's killer combination

The title page of my lovely old edition

Put out More Flags by Evelyn Waugh (Chapman & Hall : 1942) Between war being declared and things really hotting up, Britain went through a period of "phony war" where things didn't seem all that bad. Waugh takes his set of high society hang overs, led by the irrepressible Basil Seal, and shows their approach to this grand new folly. Driven by a sense of "what's-in-it-for-me", the jape of war has both comic and tragic effect.

At the risk of sounding like a 12-year old school girl, ohmygodohmygodohmygod! DBC Pierre emailed me yesterday. Subject line: Cowabunga. Apprently, "at the sweet end of a piss-up a friend brought your review of my book up on his phone." That's me he's talking about! He liked it. He said he'd raise a drink to me.

That's it. I'm done. I can stop this whole shebang now and die smiling.

What? You don't care who emailed me? It's Sunday morning and you want your weekly GBR review? Oh, OK then you demanding lot, here it is.

I went to the British Museum a couple of weeks ago. The first thing I saw when I walked through the door was an exhibition with a 5,000 year-old pot in it.

Five-freaking-thousand years old. Damn if that's not impressive. And this thing was elaborate. It blew my mind a little. All that time ago, someone made this, spent time on it, drank out of it, and there it was in front of me in a glass case.

A pot that had survived everything.

Whoever JAC Rupert was, he
bought this in '42

That’s how I feel about old books. Anything written in an entirely different circumstance to the one I’m reading it in. Words that someone wrote down a while ago, and there they are in front of me, surviving.

I say all this as it’s pertinent to Put out More Flags (I promise). You guys know I love a bit of Waugh. And so I was always going to love this too. The guy flaunted every aspect of his writing that I enjoy. It was satirical, slap-stick, absurd, flat-out funny, but with a heavy dose of poignancy as well. It was Wodehouse with purpose. And it was typically easy to tread. Waugh writes like he invented language, and knows exactly how it should be used.

So there was all that. Obviously. But there was something else as well. Put out More Flags was published in 1942. I know this because I was very kindly bought this old edition of it for my birthday, and it says 1942 right at the front. 1942 is a time that just plain fascinates me. In the grip of a war that has turned terrible. No idea if we’re going to win or not. Everything up for grabs.

And amongst it all, here’s Waugh with his cartoonish social set. A largely fictional upper class who are tripping from one aspect of the war to another. There’s truth in some of their reactions, albeit highly caricatured. And between the lines (which is where Waugh shines), there’s all this heavy heavy context of a war.

I know we won. And you know we won. But the words on these 70-odd year old pages had no idea. These words and the imagination that delivered them were entirely ignorant of how it would all play out.

The beautiful spine of my edition. Aren't
books great!

That was enough for me. I was sold. The painful contrast of Waugh’s humour with a deep pathos that’s just beneath the surface never stops fascinating me. I saw it first in A Handful of Dust (which was the 2011 GBRBOY by the way…). And here, it blew me away again.

In short, this guy has a killer combination. Funny as heck. A magical and distinct way with words. And the ability to sneak up on you and make you cry with a single phrase.

Now, I just need to figure out how he does it.

9 GBR

Why not 10 after a write up like that, I hear you cry? Honestly, because A Handful of Dust was my first Waugh blow out, and I guess it can never be quite as good as the first time.

Next week, I'm not quite sure as I'm currently trudging through a biggie.

City of Thieves - Game of Thrones meets Leningrad

City of Thieves by David Benioff (2008: Viking) Set in a starving Leningrad during WWII, circumstances put two very different strugglers together as they are sent into the countryside to collect a dozen eggs. Or die.

Sometimes you buy a book after a recommendation. Sometimes you see a good review, recognise the author, get your eye caught by the title. And sometimes you hurriedly grab a book off the shelf at WH Smith because you’re about to get on a plane and you need one more book to put in your bag and this one looks about the right size and it’s been marked down from the original price.

And sometimes that works out, and sometimes it doesn’t.

I may have stumbled on him by accident, but David Benioff is a bigger deal than my first encounter with him suggested. If I’d looked closer, I’d have seen that “David Benioff is a Hollywood screenwriter...” (which is a pretty cool start to a bio. It’s a horrible bio. One that makes me insanely jealous. After the Hollywood screenwriter punch comes, “He lives in Los Angeles and New York City” – he’s shot to the top of my life-swapping wish list). You might also recognise his name from Game of Thrones. He’s the lead writer on many episodes of the big budget HBO success.

David Benioff - "Hollywood screenwriter"

But at the time, I knew none of this. My jealousy didn’t get in the way. I opened this book with zero expectations, a clear mind, and on holiday. That’s the best way to open any book. No distractions, no preconceptions, just a straight and un-muddled connection between Benioff’s words and my imagination. It’s what books deserve - the chance to be experienced on their own merits.

And the merits of City of Thieves are many. It read like a book written by a Hollywood screenwriter. Benioff creates big ballsy stages. Detailed, but not in a granular boring sort of way. More in a glowing, fiery way. He introduces recognisable characters, but with enough held back about each of them to be revealed slowly as the story moves on. You feel like you’re getting to know them, understand the different sides of their personality - all the while with a firm grip of their central, clear, un-shaking motivation. The plot too, the plot feels Hollywood. It’s gritty, shocking, twisting.

All of this thoroughly entertained. It kept me gripped and meant I put the book down intent on recommending it to others. It means when I look at it on my bookshelf, I want to read it again.

But then that other side of me kicked in – the side that’s always a little uncomfortable when Hollywood engages with war themes. The side that’s not sure it’s an appropriate topic to mine for entertainment. The side that feels people in war should be shown with more complexity than easily graspable film characters.

Sometimes it’s easy. The ones that glorify war. The ones that hold it out as a great adventure, with absolute good and absolute evil. They’re easier to be sure about, easier to denounce, easier to take the moral high ground against. But Benioff doesn’t do that. There’s no glory here. It has a cinematic quality, but it’s clear Benioff is making a genuine effort to present a bit of realism, put forth the horror without the gloss. It’s a story with relevance for Benioff, and he treats it with respect.

I could write another thousand words of this. It’s a whole thing that I can never make my mind up about. But it’s Sunday morning, and you don’t want to hear about it. Next time we’re around a table and there’s a drink or two coming, let’s chat it through. But not now. Now let’s stick to the book.

And in the GBR spirit, I need to focus on one thing. Not the moral ambiguity of war as entertainment. Not the thin line between lest-we-forget and war-voyeurism. Just enjoyment. Just the was-this-book-a-good-use-of-time scale.

And on that measure, I direct you back to paragraph seven of this review.

8 GBR

I know, I know, three 8s in a row. I was going to give this something else, but it’s a genuine 8. It deserves an 8. It’s not Benioff’s fault there’s been two 8s in the last couple of weeks.

Also, the book I’m reading at the moment is pretty dire. So I think GBR’s recent run of above-average reading may be coming to an end. Might as well stock up on 8s while we can.

One Man’s Justice - a story that stays on its feet

One Man’s Justice by Akira Yoshimra (Canongate books: 2003). A Japanese novel first published in 1978, exploring the aftermath of WWII in Japan. It focuses on an ex-soldier who carried out his orders and did what soldiers do for their countries in times of war. But his side lost, and now he finds himself hunted and judged as the world settles down to peace.  

There are, on my bookshelf, more than a handful of books that have war in the middle of them, or in the background at least. Of them, more than most use WWII in one way or another. I’d wager it’s the same about your bookshelf. It’s difficult to get away from it. War is one of the most terrible and most compelling things in human history. And WWII was filled with pretty much everything. From the larger than history personalities at the top, with their absolute ideologies and good v evil rhetoric, to the heartbreak and ecstasy of the ordinary man and woman, played out millions of different ways.

War, or the possibility of war, is present in more books and films than pretty much any other single thing.

A lot of them leave me a little conflicted. I mean, WWII is a real thing that happened. Real people that fought. Real people that died. It seems a little uncomfortable to be mining those events for what is essentially entertainment. I get the ‘lest we forget’ thing. I get the value of telling and retelling the stories. I get the need to make sure that the memory needs to be kept, and that stories are one of the best ways of doing that.

I don’t know, maybe I’m being too sensitive. I mean, I buy these books and I read them and I enjoy them. But there tends to be a little voice at the back of my head that is driven by the guilt of enjoying reading about war, that says ‘just leave them alone, let them be.’

And just when I’m ready to, I find another take on it, another book that promises a different angle on it all, complete with its very own insights and moral perspective. That’s what I felt when I picked up One Man’s Justice. I’d just finished David Peace’s Tokyo Year Zero (about which we’ll talk another time, I’m sure), and I was looking for something to tell me more about the small side of post-War Japan.

And this was it. Fiction, yes, but a story that came with a big reputation and one that promised to explore some of the uncomfortable truths of victory from the side of the defeated.

And it did all of that. This book could have fallen over so many times. Tripped up on so many things. But it didn’t. It kept its feet.

It could have let melodrama creep into the war guilt of the Japanese. It could have oversimplified the lines of guilt and innocence. It could have demonised the villains and patronised the honest. It could have let the historical events overshadow the personal ones. It could have made the action into Hollywood plastic. It could have wailed about the unfairness of it all.

But it did none of that. It took its starting point and then it told its story simply and naturally. All of the emotion and all of the morality dripped through the words slowly and expertly.

There are (aren’t there always) downsides. Not many to be fair, but they’re there. Some of the cast of characters are a little thin, coming in and out of the pages without much meat to them, leaving you with a sense of a film with a gaggle of one line extras. Also, if I'm honest, I would have preferred a true story to fiction that claims to be rooted in fact. And some of the motivations and opinions are a little under-explained in places (probably in an attempt to avoid some of that melodrama that was always waiting to trip it up).

But bah! Picky much? I was looking for a war book that told a different story and told it genuinely. That’s what this did. I’m sure there are hundreds (probably thousands) of other books that tell the story of Japan’s war survivors, and I’m sure that many of them are brilliant and unsettling and important.

But this is the one I found. And this is the one I read. And it hit home.

8 GBR

Next week, I hope to have (finally) finished the big book that Atkins got me hooked on (damn her).