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They're so very young when they meet up, seemingly the definition of wide-eyed idealists; Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe run into each other on a street corner in New York in 1967, both 20 years old. One would go on to reinvent rock music, being hailed as the godmother of punk; the other would become one of the most controversial photographers of the 1970s and 80s. Of course, they didn't know that then; they just knew they had to express... something.

Patti Smith's memoir begins and ends with Robert Mapplethorpe's death in AIDS in 1988, and is as much the story of Robert as it is of Patti, at least during the 10 years they spent as off-and-on lovers, friends, and collaborators before their careers took off for real and they went their separate ways (their actual careers are barely mentioned). But it's not just your typical "I'm a celebrity, here's my life" story; it's very much a part of Patti Smith's ongoing work. There was always something transcendent about her writing, both as a songwriter and a poet; she wears her influences on her sleeve (Dylan, Rimbaud, Morrison, Ginsberg, Richards, Blake, Coltrane - for a supposed punk rocker, she was never so much a radical destroyer as a fundamentalist rebuilder) but she treats them not just as influences but as mythic writing to be ground up, mixed up and used to spell out herself. Just listen to her debut album Horses, with lyrics that freewheel dervish-like from poetry to r'n'b to prose to punk to religious visions, picking it all apart and putting it together in a brand new way that somehow makes them one.

When we got to the part where we had to improvise an argument in a poetic language, I got cold feet. “I can’t do this,” I said. “I don’t know what to say.” “Say anything,” [Sam Shepard] said. “You can’t make a mistake when you improvise.”
“What if I mess it up? What if I screw up the rhythm?”
“You can’t,” he said. “It’s like drumming. If you miss a beat, you create another.”

She's become more linear and slightly less intuitive with age, but that intensity and lateral thinking still remains. So in Just Kids we get the story, of course; Robert and Patti coming into their own both personally, artistically and sexually (Robert, as would become clear, is gay but raised so strictly it took him years to come to terms with it). But you also get the how and the why; the constant search for something that they can catch but never hold, flitting from idea to idea, from artform to artform, immersing themselves in one idea after another until they find their own voice to say what they need. And the way they depend on each other. And then he's gone.

Why can’t I write something that would awake the dead?

As Robert Mapplethorpe lies dying, he asks her "Did art get us?" He became a famous artist, he found his voice, he died barely 40 years old. Art makes promises of immortality, and in one way she can do that by writing the book, but in another he's still very much dead. Just Kids is a memoir by a rock star; it's an ecstatic exploration of what art is, should be, can't be; but at its heart, it's a very intimate story about two kids who, in various ways, loved each other. And as all of the above, it's one of the best memoirs I've read recently.

There's something about the New York subway that's mythical, more idea than perceived reality. Hell, to someone who grew up only learning about the city from books, movies and songs, the whole thing is mythical, but especially the subway. It's what runs underneath, connects without being seen. Its underground. For instance, since I always tend to approach books from music, the Velvet Underground become the Velvet Underground for real in one of the early demos, when John Cale (an immigrant, of course) tears apart a jaunty acoustical take on "Waiting For The Man" by having his viola suddenly imitate a braking subway train. And yet the album that I keep listening to while reading Lowboy is another quintessential New York album, Television's Marquee Moon.

I fell.
DIDJA FEEL LOW?
No, not at all.
HUH???
I fell right into the arms of Venus de Milo.

I'm not sure why, and I'd better start explaining myself before this becomes a record review. Because it's a review of John Wray's Lowboy, in which the 16-year-old schizophrenic Will "Lowboy" Heller runs away from the mental hospital and hides out in the New York subway system while his mother and a middle-age cop try to sniff him out. And this is important, because the book doesn't just use the subway as a mere location. The story alternates between crowded trains, full of unknown people, and old abandoned stations and dark tunnels where only the rats and the homeless live. And even when Lowboy is all alone (or thinks he is) Wray never lets us forget that there's 8 million people on top of him. There's no relaxing here; the world is going to end, the planet is heating up, people are chasing him, and to top it all off he's off his meds and horny as hell. And, as previously mentioned, insane.

And perhaps it's there, and obviously this is a completely personal thing, that I stumble upon Television; Tom Verlaine's breathless vocals and almost pathological wordplay about self-deception and -destruction, the way it seems to explore an other New York ("Broadway/Looks so medieval"), the free-jazz-inspired guitar solo on the title track that spends several minutes searching for something and then when it finds it chases it into a corner and beats it to a pulp. And the way it sounds both tough and vulnerable, all nervous skin and bone; as if what's killing it is sustaining it. F-R-I-C-T-I-O-N.

The train fit into the tunnel perfectly. It slipped into the tunnel like a hand into a pocket and closed over Lowboy’s body and held him still. He kept his right cheek pressed against the glass and felt the air and guttered bedrock passing. (...) Lowboy listened to the sound of the wheels, to the squealing of the housings at the railheads and the bends, to the train’s manifold and particulate elements functioning effortlessly in concert. Welcoming, familiar, almost sentimental sounds. His thoughts fell slackly into place. Even his cramped and claustrophobic brain felt a measure of affection for the tunnel. It was his skull that held him captive, after all, not the tunnel or the passengers or the train. I’m a prisoner of my own brainpan, he thought.

By telling half the story from Lowboy's point of view, we're dragged into his world as he explores New York and the people he meets on this, the last day on Earth, trying to unite the ideas in his head with the world. Because he knows the world is ending, and only he can stop it. Intercut with this is the story of the search for Lowboy by an African-American detective and Lowboy's Austria-born mother - two people who both have secret identities of a sort, both strangers here; the detective (born Rufus White, renamed Ali Lateef by his activist father in the 60s) has his issues, the mother (who's raised Lowboy) has hers. So as they travel around NYC looking for clues, they soon start looking for clues about each other as well. Oh, and then there's Lowboy's ex-girlfriend and doctor who get brought into the mess as well.

Prove it!
Just the facts!
The confidential.
This case that I've been working on so long, so long.

Yes, of course this is a detective story, and of course the detective story has been used in this way before - to understand not just how we find criminals and bring them in, but as a picture of how we learn about the world and interpret the clues it hands us to create a picture of ourselves which may or may not be true. By having two separate but connected mysteries, with at least four protagonists - at least one of which has a different view of the world, to say the least - Wray puts a lot of the work at the feet of the reader; who can we trust here, how do we interpret the story? Is the answer the important bit, or the method by which we get there? Yet he never lets that overpower the story; gradually, he cranks up the action until the story barrels through New York, the storylines past and present start aligning until they're all on the same track; just because it's well done doesn't mean it's not a thriller. And unlike, say, Mark Haddon, Wray doesn't use his protagonist's mental problems to make his own job easier; in Lowboy, he creates a believable, intelligent character (villain? hero? victim?) without shying away from a realistic depiction of his illness and how it makes him figure out the world.

Just then the uptown B arrived and saved him. Its ghost blew into the station first, a tunnelshaped clot of air the exact length of the train behind it, hot from its own great compression and speed, whipping the litter up into a cloud. He opened his mouth to taste it on the air. The cigarette wrapper spiraled upward, fluttering like a startled bird, and for the first time he noticed the zebra-striped sign mounted over his bench. He knew what the sign was for and he said its name proudly: the indication board. His voice was clear in his ears now, serene and assured, because he knew what was going to happen next.

It's easy to like Lowboy; what keeps me from loving it unconditionally is a little more difficult to explain. Part of it is the little things; one or two dream scenes too many, one or two situations too many where I felt like Wray was keeping something from the reader just to keep the mystery alive, a resolution that feels like he could have done more with it. Also, and again perfectly personal, I really don't care for Catcher In The Rye and there's a little too much Holden Caulfield in Lowboy. Nevermind; it's still one of those novels that will both hold your interest throughout and stay with you afterwards.

This case is closed.

The best thing about Anathem is the worst thing about Anathem. It's that moment around page 800 or so when you realise that all the stuff he's set up is now going to pay off over the last 200 pages of... by comparison non-stop action, that it's going to pay off well, and that it's going to make it a pretty clever novel.

It's the best thing because it works, and because you realise he had to set up the first 800 pages to get it to work.

It's the worst thing because it doesn't make the first 800 pages of alternate-universe science monks discussing Socrates any less of a drudge.

One of the most lop-sided novels I've read. Glad I read it. Glad I don't have to read it again.

Full review, three stars

Ah yes, Stephen King, the horror writer who supposedly has mellowed a bit in his old age and tried to become a "proper" writer who doesn't need monsters and ghosts to tell a story. And sure enough, of the four stories in Full Dark, No Stars, only one has any real supernatural element (though the narrators might beg to differ). But that doesn't mean this is King the good-natured baseball fan who wrote Stand By Me; the old guy is firmly in horror mode, though the focus is more clearly on the evil that men do.

Make no mistake, this is a violent, dark piece of work. The one story that does rely on the supernatural - "Fair Extension", a rather brilliant little twist on the old sell-your-soul-to-the-Devil plot - is the only one where King lets loose his sense of humour, and even then, it's just to hammer home the idea that in the early 21st century of religious fanatism, war as entertainment and celebrity worship, human souls have become so worthless that even Satan prefers cash. The rest of the stories are (to varying degrees of success) depressingly realistic; spousal abuse, rape, murder - and, saddest of all, our tendency to not want to see it. "1922" is probably the most successful story, a mixture of Steinbeck and Poe set in rural Nebraska in the years before the great depression, where a local farmer decides to murder his wife and make his son a co-conspirator. Which would have worked out fine, if not for the rats...

At the same time, despite all the despair and violence, it's not a Richard Bachman book. That's the name King uses when he just wants to get brutal. Here he has a point to make, a question he tackles from different angles in all four stories and is about as subtle about as King can be: the ripple effects of violence, the responsibilities not only of those who perpetrate it but those who let it happen - who don't see, who don't want to see, who willingly or not help to cover it up because it's just easier to live with yourself that way. The result, like I said, varies; especially "Big Driver", King's take on the rape-revenge story, ends up about as blunt and just a tiny bit too pleased with itself as most rape stories written by men. But overall it's a fine outing for the increasingly just-adequate King; a book that doesn't just say there are dark sides to humanity, but actually lets supposedly good people explore them.

Political dystopias found their form in the first half of the 20th century, with books like Zamyatin's We, Huxley's Brave New World and Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four as the big three. Karin Boye's Kallocain (1940) deserves to be mentioned in the same context. It's certainly at least as good, and its central message - that fear, hatred and paranoia demands a conscious effort, which cannot be sustained forever - certainly more hopeful, as bleak as the novel and its author's untimely end is.

The setting will be familiar to anyone who's read either of the others; a totalitarian state (officially named The World State, even though there are hints that there are other states and occasional wars), "sometime in the 21st century", where the government controls everything. Children are raised by the state and separated from their parents for good when they hit puberty, every aspect of life is rationalised, standardised and specialised with no free will at all, everyone is taught that they exist solely to serve the state, and it goes without saying that the police have spy cameras and microphones everywhere.

Except in people's minds, obviously.

That is, until the chemist Leo Kall stumbles across a new chemical compound, which he names after himself and which proves to be a perfect truth serum. Kallocain works a little like alcohol, he speculates (alcohol, of course, was banned several generations ago); rather than force people to tell the truth, it simply makes them want to stop lying. Shoot them up and they relax, smile and tell you everything that they've been trying to keep hidden. Perfect for convicting criminals, he thinks - except pretty soon it becomes obvious that it can do so much more. Suddenly the state can prosecute people for their thoughts, and Kall is expected to help - but what if it turns out that the worst threat to a totalitarian government isn't a few isolated pockets of convinced political dissidents, but simply people being people, telling stories and listening to music you can't even march to? And what does it mean for his own marriage to a wife he can't help but suspect of being disloyal to him (in itself of course a crime, since they're both supposed to be loyal only to the state)? What is this word "soul" he keeps hearing the suspects mention, which doesn't seem to serve any purpose at all...?

Kallocain clearly owes a lot to Huxley (it predates Orwell's book by several years), but in a way, it's a very different animal. Boye was first and foremost a poet and that sensibility shows in her SF writing even though the narrator Kall is a pretty cold fish at first. She largely stays away from the big political questions; they're there, definitely, and we find out enough about the world Kall lives in to understand it, but the focus is still on personal politics; about what living under constant pressure to be quiet, lie and serve others does to people. It's tempting, of course, to read it not only in a 1940s context - trapped in a world of totalitarian thinking that created both Stalin and Hitler and the people fighting them, and the big war just starting to gather steam - but also in relation to Boye's personal life; as a lesbian, she faced a very real risk of getting thrown in jail simply for existing, and it's quite likely that that pressure led to her suicide a year after Kallocain came out. But even so, 70 years later, there's something in Kallocain that manages to make it positively uplifting. Because what the smiles on the faces of the victims say as they incriminate themselves is "this is not us. We are human beings, we are fucked up and not always good, but as long as it takes a conscious effort to suppress ourselves, we can never be automatons in the long run."

ETA 160625: Det finns en strålande anpassning för radioteater från 1966 på Sveriges Radios sida. Gunnar Björnstrand! Erland Josephson!

Alberto Manguel's examination of the whats, hows, whys and wheretos of libraries starts with his own private library, constructed from a mediaeval wall in France and filled with everything from ancient tomes to cheap paperbacks, and ends up... well, like a book version of a private library. He divides his book not by strict, Dewey-like categories, but rather by free association, tackling his subject from different angles. The shelves say the library as myth, the library as shadow, the library as memory, the library as home... Like any private book collector, he returns time and again to his favourites, to his favourite topics, to anecdotes he can't shake, to literary figures he relates to - ending up with the rather heartbreaking image of Frankenstein's monster, "disappearing forever in the Arctic ice on the frozen blank page that is Canada, the garbage dump of so many of the world's daydreams."

And yet, of course, he keeps finding new ways out of it, into it, through it, within it. Yes, he covers the basics - why do we have libraries, what is their function, what is their history - and gives us brief glimpses and stories of book collectors, writers, critics and readers through the ages. But the philosophical, poetic view he takes of his subject means that the reader ends up not perhaps with hard, sequential knowledge, but with a great deal of understanding of their meaning, both historically and to Manguel himself; a cosmopolitan, born in Israel, raised in Argentina, working in Canada, living in France, he's built a Borgesian paradise of his own in his library. As, perhaps, all of us do to some extent.

The Library At Night is a curious concoction, part history, part memoir, all love letter; like a well-ordered but chaotic library, you'll glimpse long dusty corridors full of knowledge you'll make mental notes to visit at some point, well-lit ones full of people you've already met. It leaves you pleasantly full and refreshed, just a tiny bit drunk, yet already planning tomorrow's meal. As he notes, the best libraries are round, so you can always imagine that the last page of one book leads directly into the first of the next one.

I'm a bit torn, and no less so after seeing the recent film adaptation (after I finished the book). Yamada does a great job of setting up the story here; a middle-aged man lost after his marriage and family fizzle out once the kid moves out, burying himself in a job he's good but not great at, already being overtaken by a younger generation, suddenly finds himself both in a new relationship and strangely reconnecting to his dead parents.

What did it amount to, anyway, this life I led? Busying myself with random tasks that popped up one after another, enjoying the moments of excitement each little stir brought before it receded into the distance, yet accumulating no lasting store of wisdom from any of it. Each new day went by in much the same way. I never attained maturity, while I found myself growing ever more feeble with age.

There are parts of it that really work; Yamada getting into his narrator's head, forcing him to deal with the box he's built himself into; some really emotional moments with the parents; the gradual change in the character that we still notice even as he maintains he's the same old same old. But yeah, I mentioned fizzling out, and the book kinda does that, turning into a few too many ghost story clichés with no real pay-off as to why it should be a ghost story. Again, Haigh uses the ghost story to zoom out onto society, Yamada mostly drills down and finds... just a middle-aged man with middle-aged man problems.