"Hey George - High Five!": Laurie Anderson, Homeland

As promised earlier, a review of Laurie Anderson’s Homeland, which I saw at the Barbican Theatre last Friday. But before the main feature, a support act: a few words on the Barbican itself. My, it’s confusing, isn’t it? Not being completely familiar with the city end of London, a walk from Old Street soon turned into a confusing labyrinth of signs for the Barbican Centre, but all pointing in slightly different directions. This is obviously why they include a map with the tickets. Secondly, once you’ve found it, finding the appropriate entrance seems to be a matter of luck. And finally, once inside, you’re in a cultural centre of mezzanines and staircases designed by M. C. Escher. Finding the right auditorium was easy enough, but I’m sure I walked past the same ticket desk three times on the way to the toilets.

Now for the main event (and, incidentally, cheers to the Barbican/Anderson for a free programme, rather than the £10 gouge for jewellers adverts it usually is nowadays). Homeland, a song cycle on the themes of the ongoing war and national security, is stripped-down Anderson – the multimedia stuff has gone (hell, today Powerpoint makes everyone multimedia), and apart from the instruments, the stage is bare except for a couple of hundred small candles and lightbulbs hanging low from the ceiling, in much the same way as Yukio Ninagawa’s Hamlet in 2004. Typically, Anderson is not interested in rock artist ‘at last, here I am’ posturing; barely after the stage lights come up, she and the three other musicians stride on and get started. And Homeland starts brilliantly; violins competing with the rumbling bass of the groove electronics which, as promised, dominate the performance. And then there’s the voice. She sounds exactly as she does on disc (unsurprising, since apparently Bright Red was recorded with one of the most expensive microphones available), and pretty much looks the same too (no surprises in height here). The opening section, based on Aristophanes’ The Birds, moves between spoken-sung meditations on the birth of memory and a time before there was land, and a floating haunting chorus which she delivers effortlessly. Moving into ‘Bad Man’, here come the politics, the angry references to war and bombings. Anderson's status as an American - a New Yorker, no less - allows her to rip into US foreign policy with a vehemence that might seem like lazy prejudice coming from Europeans. Apparently a group of people walked out during Thursday’s performance – what did they expect? “Hey George – high five!” This is actually rather dark stuff (and as a whole, the work resembles the heavier stuff of Bright Red replayed in the style of Life on a String, in particular the pulsating electronics on “My Compensation” and “One Beautiful Evening”), and one wonders where the humour has gone. Oh, here it is, in “Only an Expert,” familiar now from numerous YouTube appearances and the closest Homeland gets to a lead-off single. But on the whole, this is serious stuff, performed passionately; Anderson really does seem disbelievingly upset at where her country has been and where it's going.

As a collection of Anderson’s new work, Homeland is compelling; as a coherent performance essay on the themes of security, information, and nation, however, it’s slightly less convincing. There are some brilliant lines (eyes "like dead stars, their light trapped in time”; similarly, the reflection that what makes the stars wonderful is that we cannot damage them, although we’re reaching for them nonetheless), and a few clunky ones (some sections of “Only an Expert”). Homeland and other stories might have been a better (if clumsier) title, because the promise of the opening section to offer an intriguing interplay between myth and the current state of the world doesn’t quite come off, although the Birds song’s thematic opposition of sky and land recurs a few times throughout the piece. ‘Heart of a Child,’ seemingly about the death of Anderson’s father (again, back to Bright Red and Life on a String here) is moving, but feels out of place. 'The Underwear Gods' (those huge people on billboards - 'always in their underwear') is funny (and the closest Anderson gets to Philip Larkin) but also seems like a sidestep. The best parts are when Anderson gets back to storytelling, and - yay! - the voice modulation comes out again when the mike gets dropped a few octaves for her to take on a male persona, acting as a kind of chorus. We're never quite sure whether this is another character in a sometimes wayward concept album (someone rueful about his own experiences in the intelligence industry, perhaps), or Anderson herself (there are brief references to working for NASA, an even briefer visual nod to the video for 'O Superman'). But these are some of the best bits, when the intellectual rock concert veneer splits open to reveal the performance art beneath, and lines such as 'Your silence will be considered consent' and 'there's trouble at the mine' gradually take on sinister undertones. There were only two of these interludes; frankly, I would have liked more, because of their potential to knit the whole piece together. But the performance ends almost as well as it begins, with "The Lost Art of Conversation," an analysis of modern alienated relationships (a bit like a pared down version of String's "Broken"), and the encore is wonderful; Anderson alone on stage playing a brief violin piece, weaving between the candles and constantly watching the audience.

Ultimately, Homeland is a superb collection of stories, but a ropey novel; the music is often fantastic, the performance compelling, but there's little sense of progression over the ninety minutes. This may, of course, be because in performance you only get to see it once, and Anderson's work is usually best appreciated after a few listenings. It's going to be released as an album next year (again, a measure of her difference from everybody else in HMV - who else would even consider touring a whole year before a release, taunting the bootleg gods?), and it'll be interesting to see if the whole thing survives as a double-disc bonanza, or if a more coherent, edited performance emerges. Either way, I'll be queuing up outside 'Music Solutions' for my copy in 2009.

What's that? You want a star rating out of five? It's not the Radio Times, fercryin' out loud. Oh, OK: ****.

In English, Brainiac

At about this time last year, I wrote a mini-essay on the imminent death of Doctor Who. And, aberrations such as Steven Moffatt's "Blink" aside, the series seems content to wander in time and mediocrity. So far this year, we've had a plot about weight loss pills that was anorexic, a so-so Pompeiian runabout, a rather better but thematically hackneyed slaves in space affair (although some rather nice direction did a lot to raise it above the competent), and last week, Doctor Who and the Narrative Autopilot. Just thinking about it is tedious, so I won't.

Instead, let's consider television for grown-ups. Ah, a new series of House is here. I say new – I’ve actually already seen three episodes as part of the in-flight entertainment on the Continental flight I mentioned a few weeks ago. Without wishing to reinforce lazy gender stereotypes (although clearly here, I do), why do Continental’s film choices have to be so obviously, well, gendered? On the flight out, the choices were Bookclub Romantic Comedy Slush and Childcare Romantic Comedy Slush, while on the way back the options were Boom Boom Smashy Bang and Witless Sports Knockabout. Do they think the US is gradually filling up with the ladies (in Houston?), while antler-locking males are hotfootin’ it to Gatwick? At least someone had the sense to rack up a few episodes of what is one of the few dramas worth watching at the moment, and which also makes it truly laughable that Torchwood is supposed to be for adults. True, the plots are often silly (she had a koala mite in her ear all the time!), but the scripts should make Russell T. Davies weep with sheer inadequacy. After all, you need to be more than competent to make the cantankerous genius model of narrative work nowadays, but House does it.

Channel Five have their mitts on it at the moment, having shaken their sharks and Nazis phase (tonite – when shazis attack), and at the beginning of the year were promoting it with Numbers (sorry, Numb3rs. You know, like Se7en or all ‘Genuine Vi4gra’) as ‘clever television.’ The idea is that both centre around intellectual heroes (and remember, in the world of television the monarch of public intellectuals is Carol Vorderman), but that’s really as far as the similarities go. A telling distinction is that while House refuses to feature a regular character whose function is to scratch his (always his) head and say “In English, brainiac,” Numb3rs is crammed full of expositionary dialogue in which the Byronic genius outlines a vaguely relevant mathematical theory, before using it as an excuse to draw a circle right in the middle of the map the FBI types were all looking at. Of course, genuinely mathematics related-crimes are few and far between, leading the writers to rely on two annoying tropes. The first is the opening sequence's banal speech that "We use math every day..." Maybe, but only in the same sense that we use physics, linguistics, biochemistry, cultural studies - in fact, pretty much anything you like - every day, and they don't get their own glossy cop show. The second is the amazingly flexible definition of mathematics, primarily in the fact that one week our hero will be working with imaginary numbers, the next with turbulent flow, which makes as much sense as J. Hillis Miller, P. I being about Dickens one week and Piers Plowman the next.

There are also consequences for narrative. It seems that mathematics and detective fiction should naturally go together; there are tempting connections to be made between investigative paradigms, the solving of problems. In practice, however, the marriage is often a misjudgement of Liza Minelli proportions. The mathematician narrator of John Dickson Carr's The Hollow Man never really shows us his analytic stuff; Guillermo Martinez's The Oxford Murders is fairly dire (and, christ on a pedalo, they've made it into a film), offering us a supposed mathematical genius who is stumped by a child's puzzle and, bizarrely, no real reason for why this mayhem should be happening in Oxford and not, say, Nuneaton. The good news is that the novel is full of ciphers; the bad news, they're the main characters. Ultimately, this all comes down to the fact that while maths and detection look good together, behind closed doors they have marital arguments of, well, Liza Minelli proportions. Modern crime fiction insists on focusing on the psychology of crime, its individuality. Critics of the genre are rapidly growing tired of all the Foucauldian disciplinary pessimism and returning to the genre's embrace of the romanticist troubled soul as the root of criminal mystery. This isn't to reinstate some tired argument that science doesn't capture the mysteries of human consciousness, just to say that crime fiction and determinism don't get along, because if criminals turn out to be so predictable, then pursuing them is simply dull. And this is where Numb3rs is behind the game; whenever Charlie suddenly realises that the criminal's movements can be determined and - the real kicker - predicted, as if the psycho were a variable rather than an actual person, then it's time to turn off. Who needs psychology or depth of character when you have graph paper?

Terminal disease

Calm down, doughnutfans - I mean dis-ease, but I thought the cute use of punctuation in the title to undermine conventional meaning might be just too nauseatingly deconstructionist for the more delicate of you. I refer, of course, to the current Spencerian (Frank, not Herbert) management at Heathrow Terminal 5, and British Airways more generally. Whether it's losing the luggage of an entire small town, getting tangled up with caterers who sack their staff by megaphone, fixing prices or having their pilots go on strike, British Airways are rapidly becoming the Norman Wisdom of the skies. The world's favourite airline - if you like to point and laugh.

One of the effects of the embarrassment over Terminal 5 has been to entrench even more deeply a widespread scorn of Heathrow in general, one which I've always found rather unfair. In fact, I rather like airports. The first sentence of Douglas Adams' The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul suggests that "It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression 'As pretty as an airport,'" which is witty enough, but also misses the point. Airports are never going to be architectural white knuckle rides, for two reasons (conveniently enough, arrivals and departures). Arrivals: no tourist economy is going to survive a situation whereby the airport is more fantastically exciting than the country outside (hence, no log flume at LAX or Quasar at Gatwick, notwithstanding the immediate appeal of thirty people lumbering around a smoky room with their hand luggage). Departures: let's not forget that the anodyne aesthetics of the airport are really a prelude to what remains the spectacular experience of actually taking off (hardened travellers with their nerves cauterised by enough air miles to take them to the moon might consider times when the plane has lurched unexpectedly when 'scaping the surly bonds of earth to punch god on the nose) and being a stupid height above the ground. In fact, it's at the airport ends when flight becomes most interesting, when the pedestrian view of the landscape suddenly unfolds into panoptic mode, when it turns from a postcard into a map.

The other accusations are that airports are boring and uniform. But, with the exception of seven hours in Chicago O'Hare (a reflection on the sheer mass of time waiting, not on O'Hare itself, although they generally need better bookshops), I can't remember ever being bored in an airport. This may be down to the fact that I've usually got something to read, but I prefer to think that it's the influence of a steady and ambient tension. How boring can a place be when there are people walking around with guns? And, furthermore, walking around with guns because there may be other people with guns, or something more devastating? In his recent (and rather controversial) collection The Second Plane, Martin Amis makes the observation that global terrorism really led to a rise in its opposite - global tedium, as we all spend longer waiting in the same lines to be asked the same questions, those thirty or so seconds replicated around the world thousands of times and adding up to whole years of boredom. The irony is funny, but at the same time there's an undertone that security should really just be for the tanned and turbanned. It's the annoyance of guys who look a bit like Peter Ackroyd at having to take their shoes off at Heathrow for less than a minute - what now? I don't believe this - and their luggage innumerate wives (I love the social precision of the announcements that make it quite explicit that "a lady's handbag" constitutes one item). They see the strict division of airport space (before and after security) as an encroachment of the police state, without realising that all public spaces (and a good few private ones) are already pretty much parcelled out for various types of social utility. That's the good thing about the use of space in airports; the honesty is refreshing. Incidentally, on the pre- and post-security divide, why is it always a strikingly nicer environment after security? They've got you by then - at this point, you're either ending your visit in a plane, a van, or a bag. You wouldn't have thought they'd have bothered by then, but seemingly without fail it's lighter, more open, and generally less of a scrum.

As for airports being uniform... I've seen enough American ones to pick out the differences. Sacramento's two terminals seem to be embodying some kind of historical tension, one of them a typical NorCal hippy child of the sixties, the other all chrome and glass. The McNamara terminal at Detroit Fort Wayne offers the rare experience of standing at one end of a room and not being able to see the other; it's about 1.3 miles long, a gigantic parody of a baronial banquet hall (it's disappointing to get to the other side and find there isn't a huge pig on a spit, revolving in front of the plate glass, although the salt could easily be passed by the internal monorail). Passport control at San Francisco is weirdly quiet; Las Vegas, inevitably, has slot machines at departures and the huge windows on the desert just seem like cinema. As for the UK, this is where I stick up for Heathrow again, as opposed to its less well-to-do sibling Gatwick. My experiences of Heathrow (admittedly, mostly limited to Terminal 3) have all been pretty fair. Gatwick, if you want to get psychogeographical about it, seems to be at some confluence of bad juju and worse weather (flying into there in January, we descended right into the middle of a storm so bad that planes on the ground were refusing to take off , leaving us to make numerous futile, bumpy and vomitous approaches for half an hour). Heathrow, by both M4 and underground, acts as the gateway to London; Gatwick seems to be simultaneously in the middle of nowhere and handy for Croydon. The shuttle buses are a spectacular rip off, even for airport transport; my wife and I once paid £5 to be taken around a corner before disembarking at a hotel from which we could quite clearly see our original bus stop. We walked back the next day, one area in which Gatwick scores over the siege mentality of Heathrow - they'd still let the trojan horse in, though, because it was on wheels. What Gatwick need to do now (as if there were any real competition between the two) is capitalise on the terminal 5 debacle, which they've already started with their South Terminal redevelopment. If enough of us ask, they'll put in Quasar.

The Californian Bookselling Massacre

Bad news this week, bibliophiles (at least, those of you in Northern California). A paltry week or so after adding the link for Woodland's Next Chapter bookshop over there to your left, comes the news that the shop is to close. Read all (or rather, in internet friendly newschunk format) about it here, thanks to the Sacramento Bee:

http://www.sacbee.com/101/story/775661.html

All right - but we'll still be able to go to Bogey's Books in nearby Davis for second hand literary goodies, yes? Well, no:

http://www.sacbee.com/101/story/487057.html

Thanks again Sacramento Bee, bringer of depressing news, although it's also nice to see that this counts as news, rather than the minutiae of football that constitutes important information over here. I suppose the BBC might have covered this, but only if they had a programme about it to publicise. And I thought the licence fee was there for a reason, i.e. to avoid incessant corporate advertising and rip-offs of ITV talent shows. Ah well.

But this is beside the immediate point. Naturally (since I wouldn't be writing about it otherwise), these closures are saddening, since these two shops in particular formed a large part of my time in Yolo county (also: apricot pie from Raley's, though not their fried chicken, which is of British standards; cobbler from the Memorial Union at UC Davis; and In-n-Out. Honestly, I'm only overweight by the smallest medically defined amount). The Next Chapter in particular will be missed, since my wife and I lived a few blocks away from it, and it contributed a good many of my memories of Northern California. For instance, finally finding a copy of Georges Perec's A Void (all right Oulipo purists, La Disparition) there. Or just English amazement at being able to go second hand book shopping at eight in the evening (once you get back here, opening hours seem somehow prudish, and late night opening once a week before Christmas is no longer the glimpse of stocking it once might have been). And the smell of the place, a combination of books, coffee and, just to stop that being a hackneyed combination, American wood. It did, after all, use to be a hardware store. And yes, American wood smells different, as does the slightly differently sized paper. Hell, the whole country has a hint of cinnamon about it, especially the airports. As for the bookshop, I always intended to pop back once I'd got a proper academic job and pick up that set of E. W. Hornung they had ($15 a volume is pretty good, but not quite on a graduate student salary). For now I'll just have to get round to reading the copy of Roy Vickers' The Department of Dead Ends I got for $2.50.

Bogey's wasn't quite so central to my Californian life, but still pretty important (and useful for picking up some John Dickson Carr as well).For some reason, the memory of walking there one evening after a day spent in the library at UC Davis in December 2005 has particularly stuck in my mind, like a Wordsworthian 'spot of time' but with slightly better weather. I even sold them a few books as well, but not very good ones (I suspect my copy of Mick Jackson's Five Boys was still there at the end), so maybe I should feel a little complicit in the closure. Or we could just blame Borders around the corner. Yeah, let's.

They're American planes, made in America.

The last couple of months have seen me take a couple of technological strides (well, shuffles) forward. Earlier this month, on a research trip to the British Library, I finally got myself an Oyster card. Like anybody else new to this system, I spent the next few days in a fug of self-satisfaction at saving money, perfecting my Oyster Slap (the nonchalant yet forceful placing of the wallet against the yellow pad when passing through the gate) and guffawing inwardly at those still fumbling with their card tickets, waiting all that time for the barrier to take the card and spit it out again. I was, of course, aware that real life Lunnoners were similarly guffawing at me last year, and will indeed miss the cardboard Underground ticket (its dimensions making it somehow perfectly suited for bookmark duty), but as with any other popular technology, there's a pervasive sense of "How could I have been so arse rippingly stupid as to carry on with the old stuff?" Paper tickets, VHS, portable CD players... bringing me to the second (or, chronologically, first) technological leap - the MP3 player, which I adopted in December. For the moderately frequent flyer, this constitutes a whole revolution in carry-on luggage. No more stuffing the seat pocket in front of me with a CD player and a couple of fabric clams containing the best prog-, art- and classic rock the 1970s has to offer (you try Bach on a plane), leaving no room for one's knees, and even then forcing one to have already taken out the superfluous magazines and duty-free brochures already in the pouch, and putting them in your neighbour's pouch before he or she arrives (then feigning ignorance when they pull out the in-flight film guide and seven copies of Sky Mall tumble out as well). No more juggling all that stuff - just a tiny silver thing that fits in the pocket. And so it was that one of the best moments of last year (after getting married, 'f course) came right at the end, flying to Oklahoma City on New Year's Eve. Having scored the holy grail of economy seating (exit row, window seat) thanks to the quite superb Continental check-in staff at Gatwick (muffins all round), the final approach into US airspace was undertaken to the equally dramatic soundtrack of Led Zeppelin's "Kashmir" in its compressed digital glory. It was difficult to be precise, but I'm fairly sure that we entered the US just as the track ended and as I had semi-intended (look, it can get boring up there). That was good. What was better, however, and which came as a rather more unintended surprise (as surprises tend to be), was that the next track, immediately after entering the States, was Laurie Anderson, "From the Air."

Which brings me to the subject of this week's (um, month's?) doughnut, Laurie Anderson. Anderson is somewhat prominent in my head at the moment, not only because of her taking a significant chunk of my MP3 player at the moment (incidentally, it's not an Apple, more of a clementine), but also because I've just bought tickets for her new show, Homeland, at the Barbican this May, and am hugely excited, because despite the centrality of performance art to Anderson's career, I've never seen one of her performances. The theme of Homeland is America’s current preoccupation with national security, which at first I though was something of a retread of old concerns, until I actually thought about it and realised it’s not something that crops up in her earlier work (there’s a possible exception in “Night in Baghdad” from Bright Red, perhaps). Rather, the World Trade Center attacks and everything after have been retroactively superimposed over the songs, most obviously the 1982 ha-ha vocoder fest “O Superman,” Anderson’s most famous piece (“Here come the planes. They’re American planes. Made in America”). The 2007 re-issue of Big Science (1982) rams the point home with uncharacteristic bluntness, the back cover showing the twin towers themselves. “From the Air,” the piece that accompanied my aerial entrance in the US, is narrated by the captain of an aircraft which is about "to attempt a... crash landing." There's a silent 'uh' implied before "crash." It's that precise. And humorous too, when the Captain's instructions to the passengers rapidly devolve into a game of Simon Says. But the reason why this song was so perfect as a soundtrack for entering America was not only the plane setting (it is, after all, about a crash, so perfect in the slightly masochistic sense that it re-establishes that the big turbine thing just outside your exit row window seat is also what your entire world relies on), but the album's evocation of America as a whole, a technologically sated society from the cities to the slightly indeterminate out-of-town zones wonderfully evoked in the title track of Big Science. There's more aural precision here: "Big Science" gradually becomes "Big Signs," which puts me in mid of the towering neon to be found on most highway sides in the midwest. So while Anderson hasn’t yet directly tackled the idea of Homeland Security, it’s always been there in the background, since her work has obsessively explored the idea of what it is to be American, or at least be in America. This may be why her last album to date, 2001's Life on a String, got some rather mixed reviews, since it opens out the sound to include influences from the slightly oddly named 'world' music, and some of the tracks move away from Anderson's characteristic concern with postmodern experience to present meditations on the theme of Moby Dick. I actually quite like Life on a String, particularly the emphasis on the violin, although the lyrical flirtation with cliche will have alienated some; 'Dark Angel', with its rather banal observation that maybe material possessions don't really count for much, is better left out altogether in favour of 'My Compensation,' 'Statue of Liberty,' and the beautiful 'Pieces and Parts.' In fact, I was listening to these an awful lot when flying to the US in December 2006. From the air, indeed.

The Doughnuts: End of Year Literary Awards

No Guildhall setting, BBC4 coverage, or public intellectual punditry; but similarly, no forced smiles in defeat, or Richard and Judy. Let's crack on.

Best New Author: Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

A new author to me, anyway (by the way, few if any of these awards are actually going to reflect the white heat of publishing in 2007 - does this look like the website of one who can afford hardbacks that aren't from a remaindered shop?) and still alive, which is the other rule for this category. Last year was a closely run race; first it was going to be Liz Jensen, then D. M. Thomas, then Christopher Priest stole it right at the end of 2006 with The Prestige. Then, in a weird symmetry, Ishiguro shows up three days later with the first novel of 2007 and sets the benchmark for everyone else to not quite meet. Another win, then, for the 'Is it science fiction or not?' subgenre, as Kaz escapes the fame shadow of The Remains of the Day with a near-future tale of growing up in an organ-harvesting facility boarding school (perhaps a bit like Billy Bunter in Logan's Run). It combines a rather moving mournful tone with hot-damn readability, and although the plot resolution is not quite the killer punch it could have been, that's not really the point.

The also-rans:

Matthew Kneale, English Passengers (runner up)
A. S. Byatt, Angels and Insects
David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

Best Neo-Victorian Novel: Michel Faber, The Crimson Petal and the White

A slightly, almost dementedly, specific category, but this kind of thing is my bag. Faber doesn't count for the category above (he won in 2003, after all), but this would have been a strong contender, and now sits at the centre of my module on NeoVictorian fiction. An academic colleague of mine described it as "more intelligent than anything Sarah Waters wrote," which is a little harsh, but then again Faber's recreation of the Victorian novel seems more instinctual and direct than Waters' sometimes self-conscious updating of nineteenth century tropes (the sensation novel in Fingersmith, and Affinity is soooo Foucault, or at least so I would say if in a Berkeley coffee shop). I'm also loath to recommend a book as a mathematical relation of pages involved to reading time, but nine hundred pages have rarely passed so quickly. It wins int he face of some tough competition from the aforementioned Byatt and Kneale, moderate challenge from Caleb Carr's The Alienist, and laughable muppetry from the 1850 sections of Mitchell's Cloud Atlas.

Best Victorian Novel: George Gissing, New Grub Street

Re-reads are disallowed, to prevent Bleak House winning five times a decade, so I'll have to confess to not having read some big Victorian titles (it's OK to do that, they published a hell of a lot). A fantastic portrait of late Victorian publishing which, because this is Gissing, is laced with naturalist misery and privation. Similarly, a startlingly prescient account of post-PhD career paths in the humanities and probably too depressing to read before the interviews start appearing.

Best Novel: Ian McEwan, Saturday

For a while, McEwan has been the David Bowie of literature; famous, influential, interdisciplinary, and with a prodigious output of works characterised by being fantastic except for some annoying flaw, a chapter or plot development that seems out of step, that doesn't quite work (now come on, do you really listen to Heathen from beginning to end? Aren't you slightly annoyed that "Slip Away" is the third track, leaving the rest of the album somewhat anticlimactic?). Saturday, finally, is the McEwan novel without the "yes, but...". I know some people have complained about the penultimate chapter's implication that all it takes to reform criminals is poetry (good liberal humanist thinking there, and accordingly the poet in question is Matthew Arnold), but that scene just somehow works. But what is really nice is the way the reader inhabits the mind - not the brain - of the neurosurgeon Henry Perowne, a committed materialist, so that our very access to his thoughts becomes a kind of challenge to his particular brand of scientific positivism. There's also some marvellous writing (yes, the BT tower is "seedy and municipal" by day) which is stylish but not grandstanding (I think Martin Amis would make this tiresome). Some may find the debate over the Iraq war clunky, but Perowne's ambivalence towards these events makes for an interesting perspective and corrective to auto-outrage. Finally, to those reviewers on amazon.co.uk who found the novel irritatingly smug and middle-class - I'd probably stay away from novels about neurosurgeons who live in Fitzrovia if I were you.

Worst Disappointment: Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere

Quite a packed field, this year. The term 'disappointment' is also crucial; had this been 'worst novel,' then Paul Auster would have run off cackling with award-winning glee thanks to Travels in the Scriptorium. Here, an amnesiac (charmingly called Mr. Blank) wakes up in a bare room to be visited by - you'll like this - characters from Auster's other novels. Is Mr. Blank the figure of the artist? Is it Auster being visited by his own characters, complaining about how they've been treated in much better novels? Is it us, the reader? All these questions and more are- no, it's just dull talking about it. Walks in the Wankery may count as a disappointment in the context of Auster's other novels (and it does have the distinct feel of a writers' block exercise that mistakenly got sent to Faber and Faber), but since another colleague of mine had already warned me about it, it doesn't quite measure up. Similarly, Stephen L. Carter's The Emperor of Ocean Park missed out because I didn't finish it, and I'm not that unfair. A 'thriller' based in the largely ignored by fiction milieu of affluent black Americans, this was a tedious affair undone by a narrative voice that put me in mind of Morgan Freeman doing a really bored narration. There are also some astonishingly crass moments, such as when the central character literally sees red when he thinks of white injustices to the - sigh - 'darker nation,' and chess references that have the subtlety of Jim Davidson swinging a wrecking ball bearing the face of Bernard Manning at a big sign saying 'POLITICAL CORRECTNESS' (talk of white men interfering with the progress of black men, black men blocking other black men...).

But this distracts me from the year's biggest let-down, Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, a novel which has inexplicably received an almost universal adulation, although I suspect most of this comes from goth girls or those who think that Fighting Fantasy books count as literature. I was reading the 'Author's Preferred Text,' which did nothing to excuse some really clumsy sentences, or the fact that even though this story has been through two or three different versions, it seems as if Gaiman is making it up as he goes along (oh yes, there's an angel down here... she's a bad angel... and hell is in there too). Similarly, Richard Mayhew is simply too absent as a central character, and so uselessly bemused it's amazing he isn't killed in the first hundred pages (the fact that he's named - or so I assume - after the Victorian urban explorer Henry Mayhew is the best part of the book, and that's a gag only Victorianists are going to get). But there are two more serious problems with the novel. The first is that Gaiman's idea of London Above (that is, normal, full fat, four star, actual London) is painted in such broad strokes that we don't get a sense of how weird London Below actually is by comparison, or how it might relate to the world we know. It's as if Gaiman wrote a novel about a city with no other experience of it than one of those glossy guidebooks sold at tiny newsagents in the West End (obviously, a friend bought the brochure and sent it to him in, I don't know, Burkino Faso). The second is the political aspect of the narrative. The original television series was based on the idea that the homeless are, effectively, invisible, as we walk past them every day without offering any recognition. This is a potent way of putting it, until you then decide that the homeless are invisible because they live in a world that is actually far more exciting and interesting than the one we live in, where they have super adventures and implicitly despise the humdrum lives of the affluent. Hurrah! Bang! and the social problem is gone! Admittedly, one character towards the end of the novel says to Mayhew that the homeless don't live in a fantasy world - they freeze to death in winter. But that's it - one sentence, potential for a rather darker narrative brushed aside in favour of whizz-bang swordfighting. The review on the back of my copy says that Neverwhere is what Franz Kafka and Terry Pratchett would produce if locked in a cell together. I imagine Kafka went straight to sleep and Pratchett decided to see what he could come up with in fifteen minutes. Before, of course, fashioning a paper-mache head and hollowing out the grille at the back of the cell with a broken-off spoon.

Nietzsche's Coming to Get You: *Cloud Atlas* continued

Last week (or in the strangely ahistorical world of the internet, about twenty five centimetres below), I criticised David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas for its failure to create a convincingly realised diary from 1850. The fact that I hadn't read the rest of the novel at the time was a bit of a risk, admittedly, and indeed later that day I read the section in which one of the characters suggests that the 1850 section may be a fraud. Perhaps, then, this was leading up to some amazing intertextual twist in the closing pages? Well... no.

Cloud Atlas struggles under the weight of its own tricksy structure, six broken-backed stories arranged symmetrically and which 'follow' each other as characters 'read' the following/preceding sections. The trouble is, the novellas themselves aren't quite interesting enough to exist outside the gimmicky structure; yet that same gimmicky structure isn't quite ingenious enough to justify the content. The idea that characters in one section have read other sections of, gosh darn, the novel that you're reading right now, is now so dated (going back to at least 1860 and Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White, and probably even further back to Laurence Sterne) that it doesn't really count as structural ingenuity any more. Similarly, I was expecting a bit more narrative intertwining than the idea that one man's writing makes for another's reading. As for the novel's theme of historical recurrence and the eternal return (yep, Nietzsche is in there, peeping out from 'Letters from Zedelghem'), it's the kind of thing Peter Ackroyd made a career out of in the eighties, but with more depth and resonance. Admittedly, Ackroyd's novels are also characterised by a certain kind of social conservatism (if the past just keeps coming back, what's the point of change?), something Mitchell is at pains to avoid, but with only moderate success.

So much for the structure. Once past this, the content of the six novellas is somewhat variable. "The Pacific Diary of Adam Ewing" is hamstrung by its clumsy prose, which is at least rather less cringeworthy in the second half (incidentally, that suggestion of fakery never becomes more than a suggestion, and comes across as an insurance policy for Mitchell in case the chapter isn't wholly convincing). "Letters from Zedelghem" is a so-so account of sentimental education; "Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery" starts well, but its second part is something of a let-down (the resolution seems ludicrously hurried, and the Russian doll construction of the novel means that by the time I'd got to the second part, I'd largely forgotten who was who in this section). "The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish" also starts well as comedy, but becomes weirdly inconsequential when the focus moves to Cavendish's escape from the retirement home in which he has become trapped. "An Orison of Sonmi-491" is the most interesting section, but loses focus towards the end (there's a theme developing here). Finally, "Sloosha's Crossin' and Ev'rythin After" is another ostentatious attempt to capture a particular voice; as the only narrative in the novel not to be split in two (being at the centre), it seems to go on for a little too long.

It's not as if the novel is awful - "Luisa Rey," "Timothy Cavendish" and "Sonmi-491" are quite compulsive in style - but this kind of historical scope and structual ambition requires a better pay-off than Ewing's final meditation that the will to power will eventually undo humanity (you think so?). I'm also not sure if the novel's recurrent structure means that we're meant to find Ewing's final optimism for a better future misguided, or if the inherent reactionary politics of the idea of the 'eternal return' simply undoes the novel's critique of the desire for colonial and corporate ascendancy. Although on reflection, that ambiguity may probably be the best thing about the novel.