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You go through phases in reading, and fall in and out with particular kinds of books the same way you do with particular kinds of people – but recently I have fallen in with thieves. This month I’ve been re-reading the wise, sad, hilarious dialogues of the scum in George V Higgins’s books. The Rat on Fire is my favourite one of his. Elmore Leonard does a great villain too and my love affair with his creeps is a symptom of a deeper fascination with the dark characters of literature. If the writer knows their stuff, I find that the extremity of their characters and situations can act both as a mirror and a challenge, revealing something to me about my own nature or daring me to deny it. That’s why I love Cormac McCarthy – he writes so well in books like Blood Meridian that you can’t stop reading, and there is so much darkness in there that you have to make a conscious decision as a reader, whether to submit to his vision of humanity, or fight to remember why you prefer your own, perhaps gentler vision. Graham Greene had a gentler vision, a subtle one, but he too was able to articulate it in a very readable way by putting desperate characters into desperate situations. The whisky priest in The Power and the Glory is one of my favourites. Peter Carey’s Ned Kelly in True History of the Kelly Gang is another great desperado, so exciting and so human.
I guess a theme is starting to emerge here. The characters I love in books are the outcast, the dispossessed, the outlaws, the insane. Philip K Dick’s characters are all of the above. John Steinbeck’s work-shy rabbles in Tortilla Flat or Cannery Row are hilarious, and his dustbowl refugees in The Grapes of Wrath are so moving that you can read the book again and again and see more in it each time (while we’re on the subject I defy anyone not to have their vision of life changed by the last two or three pages of that book).
It doesn’t have to be fiction. A couple of true books i’ve read this year have had me completely gripped. Nick Flynn’s story of his alcoholic father in Another Bullshit Night in Suck City opened my eyes and is beautifully written into the bargain. Bernard Hare’s book Urban Grimshaw and the Shed Crew, in which he tells how he befriended a group of glue-sniffing, joy-riding teenagers, has haunted me as much as any novel.
All these books have characters who’ve taken a real hammering – they’re damaged goods, yet somehow they show me a bit about what their writer feels like as a human. Luckily there are some brilliant exceptions, where a very good writer can make an extraordinary story out of ordinary lives. Virginia Woolf did that with Mrs Dalloway, which I read again this year and still think is stunning, and reads as modern as anything published this year. Penelope Lively makes the ordinary thing seem exciting to me too.
Certainly what all these writers have in common is that they respect the reader, by making every page so interesting that it doesn’t feel like a chore to turn to the next one. That is the real honour amongst all these thieves.
Chris Cleave lives in London with his wife and son. His first novel Incendiary was published in 2005. |
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