In an attempt to get the year off to a snappy start, I decided to begin this reading trip with some lighter works rather than launching into frog eating from Day One. (The frog, in this case, is Finnegans Wake and so there is a lot of Kermit-chomping action to go.)
Anyway, I knocked over five books in roughly as many days, which was a pleasant change from some of the, uh, involved tomes of last year. What were they? I’m glad you asked.
The Magician by W. Somerset Maugham.
My rating: three stars.
Before this, I’d never read any Maugham. I’d heard he was worth reading, and I do have plans to more fully explore his longer work, but this short burst of portraiture fuelled by a hatred of Aleister Crowley seemed to be signalling it was very much my kind of thing.
And lord, it was.
As you might know, ole Al was a famed occultist, mountaineer, pants-man, junkie and self-promoting douchebag, styling himself the wickedest man in the world and managing to persuade Thelemites of the power inherent in consuming jizz biscuits. His self-important self-aggrandising behaviour (the two were contemporaries in Paris) obviously rubbed Maugham the wrong way, because this 1908 novel – an early entry in the writer’s canon –is dedicated to ripping piss out of the Great Beast, or, at least, to presenting him as a manipulative dickhead which, look, is completely fair.
Crowley is called Oliver Haddo in the work, and he exists purely to fuck with the relationship between Arthur Burdon, a no-nonsense surgeon, and Margaret Dauncey, his fiancée. Hijinks of a spooky nature ensue, and things unfold in a way that’s predictable but kind of delightful, especially if you’re interested in the esoteric and know a bit about Crowley et al. (There’s a trip to Boleskine and everything, though it’s called Skene in here.)
The story is fairly florid, a failing that Maugham points out in the introduction to the novel, written many years later. I must admit that I found him appealing from the outset. Why? Well.
While still a medical student I had published a novel called Liza of Lambeth which caused a mild sensation, and on the strength of that I rashly decided to abandon doctoring and earn my living as a writer; so, as soon as I was ‘qualified’, I set out for Spain and spent the best part of a year in Seville. I amused myself hugely and wrote a bad novel.
King shit.
Crowley accused Maugham of plagiarism in the work, but it seems obvious that zero fucks were given by the author, whose attitude to the affair (and the man) is best expressed in his own words.
Though Aleister Crowley served, as I have said, as. the model for Oliver Haddo, it is by no means a portrait of him. I made my character more striking in appearance, more sinister and more ruthless than Crowley ever was. I gave him magical powers that Crowley, though he claimed them, certainly never possessed. Crowley, however, recognised himself in the creature of my invention, for such it was, and wrote a full-page review of the novel in Vanity Fair, which he signed ‘Oliver Haddo’. I did not read it and wish now that I had. I daresay it was a pretty piece of vituperation, but probably, like his poems, intolerably verbose.
The Magician is pulpy and has an excitingly bananas finale. There’s spooky action at a distance, endless bitching and a fun sense of being a fly on the wall. I’m pretty sure this is an outlier in Maugham’s work, but it’s certainly a fun place to start.
Before the Coffee Gets Cold, Before the Coffee Gets Cold: Tales From the Café, Before Your Memory Fades and Before We Say Goodbye by Toshikazu Kawaguchi (tr. Geoffrey Trousselot).
My rating: four, three, four and three stars.
I had heard of this series of magical time-travel-via-coffee books through the grapevine, and couldn’t decide whether they’d be too twee to justify themselves, or whether they’d be enchanting.
They’re both. (Sometimes in the space of a single story.)
I’m reviewing all four as one, because there’s a certain extent to which their order is interchangeable. True, the first one introduces our setting (the Funiculi Funicula in Tokyo’s backstreets), and knowledge of the characters does help a little as the series progresses – but the basic premise doesn’t change between installments. (Apart from a trip to a new (but related) café in Hakodate in Before Your Memory Fades, that is.)
The setup is simple: each book contains four stories. Each story describes a series of events in which a character makes a trip to the café to explore rumours that time travel is possible. The person is told that yes, they can travel back in time, but no, they can’t change what’s happened. This rules out killing Baby Hitler, but so does the fact that you can only travel back while ensconced in a particular chair, and only for the brief period of time in which a ghost takes its daily wee. As the titles suggest, they’ve got to come back before the coffee you’ve been poured cools, lest they turn into the chair-warming ghost. Then, the trip back occurs and the emotional backstory of the tripper is poked and prodded as they try to say what it was they’ve been unable to say until now. (Or is it then? I’m not entirely sure.)
The episodic nature of the series contributes to its readability: each book can be knocked over in about an hour, with the stories running to about 40 pages each. They’re variable in quality: some are absolute tearjerkers, while others probably make more sense to an audience more familiar with Japanese mores or behaviour. While the repetition can be a bit of a drag – by the fourth book I know the fucking rules, Toshikazu – it’s still sweet and encourages thought about how best to live, and to spend one’s efforts.
I learned that Kawaguchi had adapted the first novel from a play, which made the structure of the stories (interlinked yet separate scenes with a shared setting) more obvious. It’s very similar to Midnight Diner in that it presents a portrait of locals and drop-ins who each learn something about themselves in bite-size, occasionally syrupy chunks.
How far you’ll get with these is directly linked to whether you can suspend disbelief and enjoy magical realist enterprises, or whether they shit you up the wall. Between the sweet moments and the excellent presentation of a kissaten-cum-TARDIS, I mostly enjoyed my trip to this pair of magic caffs.
Now, to see if the movie’s any chop.
(I have since begun the Joycean frog-eating part of the process, so the next post from me might take a while.)
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If you’d like to buy me some books to review, there’s a wishlist over here.
Yeah nah. 