A Room With A View

It's almost that time of year again when I should at least try to pull a list together of places I'll be heading out to... I could swear I used to have a Road Trip calendar online here somewhere but I seem to have hidden it from public view. I didn't mean to, so I'll drag that back out shortly from whatever hole I swept it into.

I'm back in Florence in three weeks or so to do some work out there - I'm also getting tattooed over the weekend which is neat - but there's also some time available to investigate some new things. I'm wondering what I should do other than sit around eating pizza and wonder where all the genius-like people went. 

Coincidentally, we all took an evening off last week and went to see Inferno. I like Dan Brown. He does what he's supposed to with his books. It's not his best book by any means and neither is the film. The thing everybody was most impressed with - despite a reasonably arty jaunt around Florence - was the scene in which Langdon and Sienna are able to hire a car by tapping a credit card against the windscreen. Go figure.

I could do that I guess but somehow, it seems to miss the point.

Digging around a little however, I find that if I talk to someone nicely, it's entirely possible to gain access to a secret room under the Medici Chapel in which Michelangelo hid himself away for three months to avoid being torn apart by horses (or some equally gruesome fate) during a rebel uprising. With nothing to do but sit it out, he apparently took to rustling up some 'sketches' for the walls. The usual kind of thing really: Christ... a self portrait or two... some copies of his own stuff that he did on something called the Sistine Chapel. Nothing too out of the ordinary.

I'm pretty intrigued by this because nobody found the room until 1976, so not that many people are likely to have been in there, Certainly not as many as if it had been public knowledge for the last 500 years. Here's a few samples of things I could find online - if I can add more to the collection, I will. 

You should have put that in your book, Mr Brown.

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On the subject of which... the whole world seems to have been so wrapped up in Inferno being released at the movies that it's missed a new novel coming out. It should be out already but appears to have been delayed. It's called Origin and was due out on 26 September, I'm saying nothing. I know as well as anybody how your stuff can get derailed no matter how well you plan it. A quick look at his site doesn't even hint what it's about either - and I like that.

The critics will no doubt come for you with hammers and lead pipes, But We Love You Dan Brown! 

Would you look at that! One lousy dollar in exchange for so much life. If you pressed me on which of these three people had given me the most pleasure across my time on earth so far, I would have to say that Mr Schultz said everything the other two had to say and a whole lot more besides.

If he had hidden in a secret room for three months and knocked up a fresco or two down there, we'd really be onto a winner.

The Inferno of Dan Brown and his Code

Those of us who have read The Da Vinci Code - which is a fair few of us judging by the sales figures - can be split easily and neatly into two groups. There are those who picked it up and absorbed the story by osmosis over the period of a couple of days because that's what they always do when a new thriller comes out and there are those who read it once the hype had begun and then felt compelled to comment. If I can navigate my thoughts, this is an article about stories and what lies at their heart. Then again, it's very possible that I might get sidetracked by all manner of rubbish.

In all my years as a reader on the planet, I have either had cause or been made to read the following classics: The Return of the Native, Oliver Twist and Little Women. I consider myself lucky that the list stopped there, but I also think I speak for many when I make the sweeping statement that they are all exceptionally tedious. I didn't enjoy reading them one iota. Conversely, around the same time, I chose to read both Carrie and The Shining. As far as some are concerned, Stephen King is the ultimate in low brow literature experiences, but based on the premise that millions of readers the world over choose to invest their time and money in him, how does that make it low brow?  He has a good command of the English language. His stories are about people we care about or can at least identify with on some level and there's always more than a fair share of surprises along the way. All of which really goes to prove nothing except that Stephen King knows how to tell a story. Put back to back with Hardy's Return of the Native - which tells a 60 second story in a very long winded fashion - I'd say that was OK.

In a nutshell, King appeals to the primeval part of us. The part of the soul that's still gathered around a campfire listening to tales from the forest. 'Classic' authors however - I don't get, at least in the way that they have come to be defined. It's the literary equivalent of listening to a couple of very elderly neighbours talking over the garden fence about the way things used to be - about people you've never heard of and have even less desire to know them. At an educated guess, I think this is not because they are awful writers but because they're not dealing with 'my time'. We can't be interested in every era throughout history. Can we?

I can take a certain amount of snobbery when it comes to music and sports, but not books. The DaVinci Code is an outstanding example of the literary snob. Dan Brown never set out to change the world. It's well publicised that the concept itself wasn't new but really, all anybody needed to do was read Angels & Demons to know it was nothing more than the next book in the sequence. Having said that, he might have made an absolute fortune but when the pressure was on to deliver the next, that didn't shape up quite so well. It might have sold in its millions, but did anybody recommend The Lost Symbol to their friends in the same amounts? I don't think so. I suspect Inferno will be much better now that expectation has come back down to a reasonable level.

I've always been a sucker for a for a great story and what we need to remember is that we've been born into an era outside of the classics. There are many writers out there who, almost on a weekly basis, are stating in print that most writers today have a weak command of language. Whilst I tend to agree with that, it doesn't mean they have a weak grasp on how to spin a yarn. Thus, the ultimate goal for us all, is to decide whether we love stories or literature. We can of course love them both, but the clash comes when the literary critic gets a hold of a blockbuster. These people should be careful what they say because despite the ever advancing digital book world, it's sales from authors like Harlan Coben that are single handedly keeping every single branch of high street bookstores open.

See, it strikes me that the business of publishing and book selling are supported by authors who tell stories that people want to read - and while it's nice to think of a starving author as being noble, that pretty much sucks all round for all concerned. Coming in at it from the other angle, neither do I mind if it takes fools buying 'a Kardashian' (a phrase I am now introducing to the English language to depict lower than low-brow) if it means the kickback means another Andrew Kaufman book finds a home.

My first brush with the high brow versus low brow argument came very young as I moved through The Famous Five, Secret Seven, Five Find Outers and umm, "the ones who had no collective name for their gang but one of them called Jack also had a parrot called Dinah" - I think. (Edit: having done some research on that to refresh my memory, Dinah was actually Jack's sister. His parrot was called Kiki. They appear to be called 'The Adventure Series', but I think that's been added post-watershed as I would have been shit out of luck if I'd gone into a store and asked for them by that name. Do not confuse this series with the Five Find Outers who sported the inimitable Fatty and a small dog called Buster. Fatty was my favourite childhood detective because he taught me how to get out of a locked room - so long as the key was left in the door on the other side. I tried it many times and it worked a treat. Not that I used to get myself locked in the cellar as a kid but still, the skill was there if I needed it).

Later, and very swiftly, I moved onto The Hardy Boys, Alfred Hitchcock's Three Investigators and Willard Price's 'Adventure Series' - which I believe really were called 'The Adventure Series'. The Willard Price series featured Hal and Roger Hunt who were teenage zoologists, which written down sounds like the dullest piece of crap ever created but no - it opened a world of amazingness up to me. A world that up until that moment was quantum locked into nameless British villages and distant relatives that made pies on a Sunday.

As a slight aside - here's some covers I found online that are from the Five Find Outers run being published (I was a Red Dragon reader and proud of it) when I was a kid:

and a selection of the sort of illustrations that were inside:

 

 Now take a look at how they eventually got upgraded at some point in the nineties to include shit such as this:

Seriously? Is that really a man who is somewhat short in the height department pulling a smoke from a packet? Is that supposed to show kids how smoking stunts your growth? Sadly, I think it is.

See. Sidetracked. I've totally forgotten what the point was now... oh yeah - highbrow...

It's not that I wasn't exposed to high culture when I was a kid. Far from it but there was a sensible mix which meant choice. The Water Babies is an incredible book and Kingsley should be mentioned in the same breath as people like Dickens more often. We also had Welsh kids books, the mighty Mabinogion and for some reason, a book of Danish folk tales that had been translated into English that was intriguing to say the least. I had my own comics delivered too. So to paint a very miniature picture of twenty years of history, there was always more than enough to read. Everybody had their own books and nothing was off limits. Not even Lyn Marshall's yoga book, which I mention here simply because it sprang to mind. I never read it, have only recently become interested in yoga, but as a ten year old boy, the idea of women doing yoga in superhero outfits was most attractive. Here's Lyn in her heyday on the front of an album she released. One would assume it had a book with it but then again, when you talk about the seventies you can assume nothing:

I was sad to discover in the process of stealing this picture that Lyn is no longer with us. Shame. My Ma was really into her at the time and is still doing yoga after all these years. That's a legacy for you to hang your hat on.

Way off subject, I know.

Take a look at any book on amazon - absolutely any one at all. Choose your favourite in fact. If you look at the reviews there, there will always be a mixture of shock and awe. For every lover, there will be a hater. People who love excessively want to share with other just how good that book was. People who hate in an equal amount also wish to share their thoughts. My favourites are the people that leave a one star review because it took too long to come in the mail. There really is no hope for some people.

Thus, the whole reviews/commentary process is negated to the point that - as a publisher of my own material - I have figured out that the only way to get a jump start in the world is by word of mouth. How that works in the real world is a subject for another time but basically, people trust people. Book lovers trust other book lovers, but most importantly, great story lovers trust other story lovers. That's how the DaVinci Code sold a galaxy worth of books. That's how Harry Potter took off. Press rewind: that's how Lord of the Rings took off. Fast forward: that's how Jaws went interstellar. It's no great secret. Despite the advances of technology, we're all still human.

Well, apart from the people who leave reviews about the mail service on amazon.

More on this in the next instalment perhaps...