Fantastic Metropolis

I am generally behind the times. Therefore I may only offer a few comments on what I have experienced in 2002, rather than what was actually produced or issued that year. Some of these items are quite old, but they seemed fresh to me and for that I am grateful. It has been an interesting year and I have been privileged to discover work as good as anything I have ever encountered.

Books

The recommendations of friends are frequently the best source of cultural discoveries and I would like to thank: (a) Gabriel Mesa for introducing me to Kelly Link and Jeffrey Ford, (b) Jeff VanderMeer for introducing me to Edward Whittemore, (c) Steve Redwood for introducing me to Juan José Arreola. Mr Redwood is also the author of one of the best unpublished comic fantasies I’ve read, Fisher of Devils, which is due to be released by Prime Books before the end of eternity. Reading good novels in manuscript form is an intriguing pastime. Another one I enjoyed is the occult thriller Scorpion, a collaboration between two new writers, Brian Willis and Chris Poote. Because things like this tend to form loops, Mr Willis tried to introduce me to the His Dark Materials trilogy of Philip Pullman, but it was a vain attempt. I am simply too busy. Limits must be set somewhere.

It’s the same story every year. As always I bought or borrowed more books than I managed to read, increasing my backlog of essential titles to the point where it will never be cleared. Books I purchased but have not even begun include novels by Vikram Seth, André Malraux, Lawrence Durrell, Italo Svevo, Arthur Schnitzler, Arturo Pérez-Reverte, Michel Tournier, Thomas Mann, John Steinbeck, Bertolt Brecht, Carlos Fuentes, Isabel Allende, Amin Maalouf, Ray Bradbury and Jack Vance. I regret I obtained only two non-fiction volumes. A foreword to Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker by Brian Aldiss encouraged me to seek out Winwood Reade’s Martyrdom of Man, and I also secured a copy of The Total Library by Jorge Luis Borges, a selection of essays composed between 1922 and 1986. Precise, profound, puzzling, these pieces cover a vast range of topics. I am still working my way through them but already I suspect that Borges was the greatest essayist of them all.

I once made a promise to read one book every year by Flann O’Brien, Robert Louis Stevenson and Lord Dunsany. My 2001 selection was magical, The Third Policeman, The Ebb-Tide and Don Rodriguez: Chronicles of Shadow Valley, but in 2002 I chose badly. The Hard Life must be the weakest of O’Brien’s novels, breaking out into something special only near the very end. A disappointment, as was Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Unbelievably I hadn’t read this before, though I’ve wanted to since the age of 14. The story was too familiar from films and rumour and I felt slightly annoyed that most of the crucial action takes place off the page. The Dunsany volume was The Last Revolution, a technophobic fantasy about malevolent machines which can replicate themselves but ultimately succumb to rust, a singularly uninspiring message.

I fared much better with my re-reading. John Sladek is always a pleasure and The Complete Roderick is a single volume collection of his two masterful robot novels about the “education of a young machine.” This is science-fiction as it should be written, challenging, clever, witty, disturbing, wise. Sladek deserves a far bigger reputation than the one he has, a reputation as big as that of Kurt Vonnegut or J.G. Ballard, for he is at least their equal in terms of maturity and their superior when it comes to invention. Critics point out the lack of emotional engagement in Sladek, but this is never a problem with The Complete Roderick, which is genuinely moving. Of all those writers who first came to prominence in the 1960s, Sladek is my favourite. I also rate Roger Zelazny highly and I started a second tour of his Chronicles of Amber, a hefty, sometimes jarring plod from breathtaking originality to cloying sentiment to good/bad Hemingway pastiche and back again via deliberate or unconscious manipulation of familiar myth and subtle or clumsy creation of new myth. An astounding, awkward journey, and one I am less than a third through.

Amazingly, 2002 was the year in which I read my first Edgar Rice Burroughs novel. At the Earth’s Core is very entertaining and extremely silly, much more surreal than the average conventional fantasy, filled with demented plot devices such as the scene where the narrator mistakes a telepathic dinosaur for his girlfriend when returning to the surface of the globe. Far more convincing and powerful and not a fraction less exciting, The Well of the Unicorn by Fletcher Pratt concentrates mostly on feelings rather than effects and is stronger for it. Pratt’s powers of invention are limited but his muscular prose more than compensates and the discomforts of his heroes feel real, a refreshing exception to the fantasy norm. This is only the second novel by Pratt I have read. The first was Alien Planet, a pulp adventure in the colourful tradition of Burroughs and Ray Cummings but with greater insights into questions of culture. A sadly neglected story.

However, of all the books I read in 2002, five in particular stand out. Here they are:

1. City of Saints and Madmen, by Jeff VanderMeer

This remarkable volume glows with future classic status. Its design is not only beautiful but contributes to the reading experience as a whole in a fashion not dissimilar to some of Alasdair Gray’s best books. But VanderMeer goes further than Gray, for everything is part of the complex reading adventure, including the cover, author notes and bibliography. I have been reading and enjoying VanderMeer’s amazing fantasy tales for a number of years now, but I never suspected or even hoped they might fit together in a manner so seamless. The result is a profound story-cycle and a work of which I am savagely envious.

2. Maqroll El Gaviero, by Alvaro Mutis

A collection of three novellas which steam so tangibly and thickly that reading them is akin to taking a sauna with a fever. Maqroll is a rogue and adventurer adrift in a modern world which seems to be peppered with regions which are reverting to something more primitive or which never evolved in the first place. Hardly a healthy role model, he contrives to be charming and admirable. His sensual partner, Ilona, devises the best business proposition for a brothel I have encountered, one which should probably be set up for real. Gabriel Mesa quietly confided to me that he thought Mutis to be an even better champion of Colombian literature than Márquez. I equally quietly agree.

3. Perfume, by Patrick Süskind

This novel was given to me as a gift, which is perhaps the nicest way to discover a writer. Italo Calvino once wrote a short story entitled “The Name, The Nose” about the delights of unlikely erotic odours and Süskind has constructed an historical novel on a similar pattern. Redefining his life through smell, the narrator experiments with the aromas of anything he can fix his nostrils to, a habit which leads into increasingly weird and extreme realms. Adherents of this work tend to be enthusiastic about exploring this world for themselves. I was invited to sniff the back of the neck of a woman I barely knew almost immediately after we discovered we had both read it. I did. Honey, apricots, milk.

4. História de uma Bela Sereia, by Caroline Moreira

I have a special fondness for this rare book, which claims to have been washed up on a South Wales beach in manuscript form, the papers rolled tightly in an empty bottle of rum. Caroline is a mermaid but she spends most of her time on land studying Psychology at the Federal University of Paraná in Curitiba, Brazil. In many ways she is a normal student. She drinks coffee and wine, eats sushi and chocolate, goes dancing, flirts with admiring men and practises Tantric yoga, but at the weekends she travels down to the coast and takes to the waves and the secret world beneath them. There are coral palaces and nightclubs for dolphins. The surprising thing is that I believe all this. It’s really true.

5. The Ascetic of Desire, by Sudhir Kakar

There is no greater literary delight than being given an erotic novel by a beautiful woman. My friend Reshmi Mukherjee bought this book in India and I sensed there was something different about it before I even turned the first page. The cover somehow glowed. When I did start reading it, I was charmed by the languorous prose, which also glows, sometimes darkly, if such a thing is possible. The tale concerns the legendary Vatsyayana, author of the Kamasutra, and his hesitant journey into sexual awakening. The erotic episodes, of which there are many, range from very tender to perverse, but are all composed with that almost mystical tension, threat of unspecified danger and truth which is crucial to any genuinely erotic prose, and which only a few writers, such as Bataille and Réage, capture successfully. Kakar is one of those.

Music

Consuming music is much easier than consuming books, because it tends to go along on its own, in the background if necessary, and can be indulged with closed eyes. Although I feel burned out by all the reading I did, I am still hungry for music. I discovered a phenomenal amount of brilliant material in 2002 and I despair of naming it all here. This year was also one in which I played the piano in public for the first time, badly as a matter of fact. I saw fewer live bands than I should have liked but two local groups fired my imagination. The Rag Foundation, who are more used to playing in exotic locations around the world, performed a handful of Swansea gigs with their usual skill and verve. And the Kingsway Cowboys continued to experiment with surf music, one improbable highlight being a version of Motörhead’s Ace of Spades sung in a Norwegian accent with trumpet and bongos as backing.

The beginning of the year found me listening to The Klezmatics and other klezmer bands. Jewish music was virtually unknown territory to me before this. Cheeky, funky and demented, klezmer is a music which seems to vibrate every cell in a listener’s body, making them dance at high speed for a mysterious, never revealed purpose. The Klezmatics’ version of Naftule Brandwein’s “Fun Tashlach” is miraculous, full of exuberant and strange loops and swoops, exciting but also melancholy. The sum of life is in this tune. Other klezmer outfits I enjoyed immensely include the Flying Bulgar Klezmer Band, Naftule’s Dream and Di Naye Kapelye, all bursting with energy and enigmas.

I also discovered soukous and Congolese rumba and the great Franco Luambo Makiadi, one of the finest guitarists to ever apply fingers to strings. His jangly, punchy style, with its spiralling notes and lengthy buildups is addictive and utterly satisfying. It is funky, mesmerising, hot. He began his career in the 1950s by importing merengue and related Latin styles from the Caribbean into Africa, reversing the traditional direction of musical trade. I was also impressed by the soukous of Pépé Kallé and his Empire Bakuba. Other African acts, or acts using African elements, I heard for the first time were Kotoja, Baka Beyond and Laura Love, all on the excellent Putumayo label.

Under the influence of my friend Reshmi I discovered the pleasures of bhangra, Bollywood and modern Indian music in general. Acts such as Najma Akhtar, Falguni Pathak and Shazia Manzoor astounded and charmed me with the gorgeousness of their songs. Susheela Raman’s Salt Rain was a revelation, using as its core the musical heritage of South India, which is quite unlike its Northern counterparts, and backing it up with funky guitars and tribal percussion. The Tamil vocals are quite beautiful and Susheela’s intensity is irresistibly alluring. I was also impressed and inspired by the rich Sufi music of the Sabri Brothers and Abida Parween and their complex, entrancing songs.

I finally started to explore modern Arabic electronica. I have been listening to Algerian Raï for a decade, but in 2002 I exposed myself to musical fusions from other regions, including Morocco, Egypt and Syria. A few favourites are Aisha Kandisha’s Jarring Effects, Oojami and the Lebanese trip-hop group Soap Kills, with their warped tango rhythms and sultry vocalist Yasmine Hamdan. Equally spacey and curious, the work of Nicodemus also deserves a favourable mention, especially the evocative track “Desert Dancer” which features the heartrending vocals of Andrea Montiero. There is a wealth of musical excellence here and I anticipate losing myself in it with relish.

Miscellaneous discoveries include the Italian groups Uaragniaun and Ariondela; Päivi ärling from Finland; the fadista Cristina Branco; the amazing Guadalupe Urbina, whose Tropico Azul de Lluvia album is filled with strange and lovely songs from Costa Rica; the Afro-Peruvians Susana Baca and Cecilia Barraza; Manu Chao, Nava, Sidestepper and other Latin dance fusions; and very belatedly the bizarre and incredible experiments of Slapp Happy and Casablanca Moon, an album which contains what surely must be the most perfect love song ever written, “A Little Something”. I also absorbed plenty of new material by old favourites, Natacha Atlas, Daniela Mercury and Timbalada.

However, of all the recordings I heard in 2002, five in particular stand out. Here they are:

1. Jet Society, 18th Street Lounge, Various

I was lying in bed utterly exhausted when I heard this recording on a neighbour’s hi-fi and felt compelled to rouse myself and investigate more closely. I managed to borrow it and I quickly decided it was my album of the year. Slinky, jazzy and aware, this compilation removes the smugness from the concept of the ‘lounge’ without losing the comfort or irony. Starting with the seductive torch song “Lisboa à Noite” it soon progresses to a sequence of hypnotic tracks that are part French jazz, part sultry bossa nova, including works by Nicola Conte, Mo’ Horizons, Reminiscence Quartet, Trio Eletrico and Louise Vertigo. This is music ideal for chilling to, smiling at, being with.

2. Rough Guide to the Music of Cape Verde

I am a huge fan of the Rough Guides music series, which like the albums of Putumayo, have introduced me to so many great artists from around the world. I have long loved Brazilian samba-canção and Portuguese fado, and the songs of Cape Verde seem to combine these two traditions. They are lilting and smooth, yet imbued with intense, sometimes stark, emotion, but they can also be spiced up with traces of African rhythm. The big name is Cesária Évora, but this album contains exceptional tracks by the Mendes Brothers, the wonderful group Simentera and an insidiously catchy number by Agusto Cego called “Nha Fidjo”. But my favourite track must be Maria Alice’s sinuously graceful “Falso Testemunho”, so saturated with lost love it almost drips tears and the juice of kisses.

3. Point, by Cornelius

Imagine Talking Heads, Brian Eno and Daft Punk spiked together. Imagine the warm melodies of Brazilian music transformed into chilly automatic cyberpop. Add these on top, then imagine Japan, the land not the band. All these imaginings probably won’t conjure up visions of Keigo Oyamada, also known as Cornelius, but they might point in his general direction. Cornelius spends a lot of time on his own and allegedly also designs clothes. His music is peculiar and futuristic in an old-fashioned way. It can be soft or harsh, sometimes both at the same time. It is rarely less than stunning, and even when it isn’t, the noise that remains still utilises studio trickery in a way original enough to fix the attention. Music from a bedroom in outer space.

4. Felt Mountain, by Goldfrapp

This album delivers what Portishead promised a few years ago but never quite achieved. Haunting trance music with sombre and strange harmonies that do something sweet and painful to the heart, locking it in a room on its own perhaps, or leaving it on the ledge of an Alpine peak in the winter. There is an undeniable Germanic flavour to much of Goldfrapp’s songs. They are stylised, creepy, expressionistic, as lovely as anything by the Cocteau Twins but more harrowing. This is sad rather than bleak music, suffused with feeling, rich and quietly intense. It also redeems the tradition of whistling, brought into disrepute by buffoons on buses and orchestral flautists with nothing better to do. Like the Cocteau Twins’ Victorialand, an album made for snowbound landscapes, not that we get those in Wales anymore.

5. O melhor dos encontros

This live recording was given to me by my friend Dulcilene Urbainski and is a fabulous example of tropicalismo. This reunion of Elba Ramalho, Zé Ramalho, Geraldo Azevedo and Alceu Valença is superb, filled with energy and beauty, and many of the songs, such as “Caravana” and “A Terceira Lâmina” are soothing and esoteric, the smoothness frequently punctured with wise or raw folky touches. The main instrumentation is guitars, but there is throbbing, judicious use of a sitar on the sumptuous “Banquete dos Signos”, a tradition started by Baby Consuelo, formerly of seminal group Novos Baianos, and lonely, distant brass on “Bicho de 7 Cabeças”. Tropicalismo is good at combining danceable, upbeat rhythms with gentle, poignant melodies. This juxtaposition should be odd but it works without any awkwardness, I can’t say why. And the album ends with a pure party medley anyway, so the question is academic.

Other

I saw lots of great movies in 2002, the most memorable being Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding; Amenábar’s Abre los ojos, probably the finest SF film ever made; Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Amores perros; and Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie. I also enjoyed Zhang Yimou’s Shanghai Triad, one of the few Gong Li films that had passed me by.

The best piece of theatre I saw was the Royal National Theatre’s production of Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera with the stunningly talented Natasha Lewis as Polly Peachum and Weill’s songs delivered with all the guts and fury they demand.

By far the best fiction magazine to be published was Des Lewis’ Nemonymous, which prints all the stories without names, which are only revealed in the following issue. This honest trick makes the fiction more real. Nemonymous is even superior to The Third Alternative which was my favourite for many years.

My two most treasured websites, or at least the two I’m willing to name, are Fantastic Metropolis and Dusk.

I turned 36 and had three books published, my record so far. I made some close new friendships and developed an irrepressible liking for Blackfriar’s cappuccino flapjacks, events which are unconnected. I began jogging as good exercise but then stopped because of better laziness. I spent two nights sleeping in the open, both in thick fog, one in company on a sand dune, the other alone outside a famous art gallery. I wrote my longest poem and was asked to compile this review. Because I am behind the times it is probably inadequate.

I vowed to stop buying more books than I can read.

It was a vintage year.