Review: The Chequer Board by Nevil Shute (1948, 278pp.)

This review is fairly safe to read if you haven't read the book (i.e., it doesn't give away any major plot points or twists in the story) but offers an interpretation for those who have.

Those familiar with Nevil Shute through his more famous books probably won't be surprised to hear that aviation, engineering, and entrepreneurship all feature in The Chequer Board, which nevertheless presents a story told in his usual, accessible style.

Mr Turner is a British war veteran who has lately been having fainting fits. He goes to see a specialist called Mr. Hughes who tells him that there are pieces of shrapnel from an old war injury lodged irretrievably in his brain and that, as a consequence, he doesn't have long to live. He begins to think about what he would like to do with his remaining time and reminisces about the hospital where he initially received treatment for his wound. He remembers the three patients he shared a ward with: two Englishmen — a commando wanted for murder, a snobbish pilot with an unfaithful wife — and an American — a black man who has slit his own throat and also stands accused of rape. When he realises he doesn't know what happened to them he decides to find out and, with the assistance of his somewhat sceptical wife, to see if he might be able to help them in some way. It's a simple premise but one that Shute uses to build a complex narrative of interlocking stories.

The Chequer Board manages to address racial tension, considers and compares Buddhism alongside Christianity, and successfully depicts something of British character, all in under 300 pages. It must have been a somewhat unconventional book upon its publication in 1948.

List: Things Nabokov 'Loathed'

This post is just for "fun", while I make final adjustments to my next review. (By "fun", I mean highbrow "fun".)

A few days ago, I was lucky enough to catch a documentary on Vladimir Nabokov called How Do You Solve A Problem Like Lolita? (At the time of writing, it's still available on BBC iPlayer — allegedly until 24th December.) Its focus is on whether his most notorious work is a 'morality tale' or the 'fantasies of a dirty old man'. Presented by Stephen Smith, an able and likeable arts journalist, it visits some of the places where Nabokov lived and worked and provides a nice introduction to some of his writing, all the while keeping its central question in mind — but also, more importantly, in check. The question is, of course, one that has been answered by many critics before and is answered again in this documentary but, as Smith explains, the public perception of Lolita is still that it is somehow a 'pervy book'.

But never mind all that. D. G. Myers has written a far better appraisal of the book than I could ever hope to. The documentary begins with clips of Nabokov apparently giving a long list of things he loathes — among them 'vulgar movies' and 'such things as jazz'. I wondered if there was a definitive list anywhere and, when I couldn't find one online, I took it upon myself to try and put one together.

Review: The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien (1967, 206pp)

This review is fairly safe to read if you haven't read the book (i.e., it doesn't give away any major plot points or twists in the story).

Although the title of this post gives the publishing date 1967, The Third Policeman was actually written sometime between 1939 and 1940. It was O'Brien's second novel, and after it was rejected by publishers he claimed to have lost the manuscript. It was made available to the public after his death.

The fact that The Third Policeman was written some two decades before the 1960s only makes it seem all the more groundbreaking for its time. It's nonetheless an accessible book, considering. The main story follows the narrator — an unnamed murderer — into an absurd world full of strange characters and odd devices. So far, so Alice in Wonderland.

As he finds himself getting increasingly lost, however, he takes comfort in the equally eccentric ideas of a philosopher named de Selby, with whom he's apparently obsessed. These ideas emerge primarily via footnotes that appear throughout the book. One in particular spans eight pages and outlines in some detail a bitter but amusing rivalry between scholars of de Selby. Long, comic footnotes and endnotes are the much remarked upon trademarks of the more recently deceased David Foster Wallace, yet here was O'Brien using a similar technique back in the Ireland of the 1940s.

Small Boats

This summer gone, I was in Mongolia — the trip itself is another story entirely. But while I was out there, I promised myself that when I returned to England I would do some things to make my life a bit more fulfilling. One thing was to go swimming on a regular basis. Another was to stop drinking, at least until Christmas. And yet another was to stop writing a journal and get on with some real writing. That is, stuff that I'd be comfortable to have other people read.

I've been keeping journals since I was seventeen. They are very personal, private things and most of them are boxed up in storage. However, over the last couple of years I've found that whenever I sat down to work on something, I'd often write about it in my journal before or after. It got to the point recently where I was writing the journal instead of doing the actual work. Spending time in a country that hasn't ever really had an industrial period makes a lot of things back here seem absurd.