altutt

“Foolish enough to have been a poet.”

Recently the Guardian published a list of what it considered the best 100 novels: you can see them here…

The 100 best novels of all time | Fiction | The Guardian

I thought the list a bit stodgy, a little conservative & old-fashioned, so produced my own list, which I thought might be more entertaining & a bit culturally broader in scope. Here they are, in no particular order. Yes, they inc Children’s books, Fantasy & Sc-fi, some series & some borderline, but, hey, it’s my list…

1 Hideo Yokoyama – Six Four

2 Laure Lee – As I Walked out one Midsummer Morning

3 Knut Hamsun – Hunger

4 Alain Fournier – Le Grand Meaulnes

5 Iain Sinclair – Edge of the Orison

6 Hans Fallada – Alone in Berlin

7 Georges Simenon – The Stain in the Snow

8 Michel Houellebecq – Annihilation

9 Philip K Dick – Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep

10 Christopher Priest – The Affirmation

11 JG Ballard – Concrete Island

12 Haruki Murakami – The Wind-up Bird Chronicle

13 Paul Auster -The New York Trilogy

14 Jack Kerouac – On the Road

15 Paul Bowles – The Spider’s House

16 Iain Banks – The Wasp Factory

17 Herman Hesse – Steppenwolf

18 Ken Kesey – One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest

19 Michel Tournier – The Url King

20 Truman Capote – In Cold Blood

21 Robert A Heinlein – Stranger in a Strange Land

22 Walter Mosley – White Butterfly

23 Carlos Casteneda – The Teachings of Don Juan

24 Richard Brautigan – In Watermelon Sugar

25 Albert Camus – The Outsider

26 Karl Ove Knausgaard – Boyhood Island

27 Jean Paul Sartre – The Roads to Freedom

28 John Kennedy Toole – A Confederacy of Dunces

29 JD Salinger – A Catcher in the Rye

30 BS Johnson – The Unfortunates

31 Raymond Chandler – The Big Sleep

32 Peter Ackroyd – Hawksmoor

33 David Keenan – This is Memorial Device

34 Jerome K Jerome – Three Men in a Boat

35 JRR Tolkien – Lord of The Rings

36 JP Donleavy – The Ginger Man

37 William Gibson – Neuromancer

38 Tom Wolfe – The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

39 Derek Raymond – He Died with his Eyes Open

40 David Peace – Red Riding Quartet

41 Maj Sjöwall & Per Wahlöö – The Story of a Crime

42 Seicho Matsumoto – Tokyo Express

43 Henry Miller – The Colossus of Maroussi

44 Sayaka Murata – Convenience Store Woman

45 Jonathan Rendall – This Bloody Mary is the Last Thing I Own

46 William Burroughs – Naked Lunch

47 Patrick Hamilton – Hangover Square

48 Anthony Burgess – A Clockwork Orange

49 HG Wells – The Island of Dr Moreau

50 HE Bates – Darling Buds of May

51 Kenneth Graham – The Wind in the Willows

52 RL Stevenson – Treasure Island

53 Daniel Defoe – Robinson Crusoe

54 Sylvia Plath – The Bell Jar

55 Chris Petit – Robinson

56 RM Ballantyne – The Coral Island

57 Aldous Huxley – The Doors of Perception

58 Jonathan Swift – Gulliver’s Travels

59 Alexander Solzhenitsyn – One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

60 Alan Warner – Morvern Callar

61 Hunter S Thompson – Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas

62 Jerzy Kosinski – The Painted Bird

63 Stanislas Lem – Solaris

64 Mervyn Peake – The Gormenghast Trilogy

65 Richard Adams – Watership Down

66 Patrick Süskind – Perfume

67 Yukio Mishima – The Sea of Fertility

68 Robert Pirsig – Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

69 Alexander Trocchi – Cain’s Book

70 Arthur Machen – The Great God Pan

71 Alexander Baron – From the City, From the Plough

72 Jim Thompson – Killer Inside Me

73 Peter Handke – The Goalkeeper’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick

74 Geoffrey Household – Rogue Male

75 Elmore Leonard – 52 Pick-up

76 Milan Kundera – The Unbearable Lightness of Being

77 Irvine Welsh – Trainspotting

78 Irwin Shaw – The Young Lions

79 Lawrence Durrell – The Alexandria Quartet

80 Norman Mailer – The Naked & the Dead

81 Flaubert – Salambo

82 Jeff VanderMeer – The Southern Reach Trilogy

83 Colin Wilson – The Outsider

84 Malcolm Lowry – Under the Volcano

85 Graham Swift – Waterland

86 William Wharton – A Midnight Clear

87 John Le Carre – The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

88 William Golding – The Inheritors

89 Donna Tartt – The Secret History

90 DM Thomas – The White Hotel

91 John Fowles – The Magus

92 Homer – The Iliad & the Odyssey

93 Joceleyn Brooke – The Image of a Drawn Sword

94 Charles Bukowski – Post Office

95 Douglas Coupland – Generation X

96 Brett Easton Ellis – Less Than Zero

97 John Healy – The Grass Arena

98 Luke Rheinhart – The Dice Man

99 Ray Bradbury – Fahrenheit 451

100 Victor Headley – Yardie

As an exercise I excluded any Guardian choices though there are about ten I would have included, (plus I only picked one book per author). ie Orwell, Kakfa, Highsmith, Conrad, Sebald, Heller & Dostoevsky…

Now reading Michel Houellebecq’s last novel, Annihilation, which when I finish it will mean another author of which I have ‘done’ his entire ouvre. He’s the same age as me…. mundane.

The novel mixes espionage and politics, mystery and romanticism. ^] It envisions the years of 2026 and 2027 where France is in a period of decline. However, France shows some signs of revival and is without labour strikes but “the gap between the ruling classes and the populace has reached unprecedented levels”. The country nonetheless remains in a state of moral decay with high levels of unemployment and rural poverty,

At over 700 pages, Annihilation is unusual for its slow pace and its tone, which is characterised more by compassion than irony. The stroke of their father presents an opportunity for siblings Cécile, Aurélien and Paul to repair their relationship. The narrative explores themes of faith and love. The narrative could be described as a “Houellebecq somewhere between nihilism and romanticism”. Pavlenko said, “You might think this is a sinister and pessimistic Houellebecq. But no. Many of the characters are searching for goodness and the message of the book could be: “Love saves”.

It’s coming…The Shaman – new cover, published by Here Hare Press but still searching for wider distribution… The painting is by Rebecca Lusher.

One of my favourite authors bit the dust last year – Christopher Priest. I realised I had been remiss in not reading three of his last four novels …

An American Story.
Expect Me Tomorrow.
Airside.

…so I have rectified that. They are all very good. An American Story retells the events of ‘9-11’, touching on some of the conspiracies associated with the event – so much so that the book was not published in the US of A, the land of the free. Expect Me Tomorrow is his most Sci-fi orientated novel in a long while & is about climate change & our ignorance of what is happening before our eyes, told through one of Priest’s favourite tropes, twins, indeed two pair of twins. To quote from the book…

“…we have left it far too late to restrict or halt the destruction of our environment, to remove somehow the 600 parts per million of carbon dioxide from the air, to abolish forever the use of fossil fuels, to reverse the global flooding by the sea, to restore to the world of nature the hundreds and thousands of bird, animal and insect species made extinct by our way of life, to clear our seas of toxic levels of waste plastic, to eradicate the endless new strains of mutated viral infection. There is nothing we can do, except wait for the end…”

…but as with all that CP writes, that is not the whole story.

And his final hurrah, Airside, a mystery wrapped in a conundrum, inside an enigma.

I will miss this great writer as much as I miss Mark Edward Smith. There will never be another of either.

Currently having a splurge of Japanese authors. It started with Murakami (see below) but I’ve moved on. Best of the bunch so far, the four works by Hideo Yokoyama. 6-4 has to be the best crime novel I’ve read since the halcyon days of Georges Simenon, Patricia Highsmith, Derek Raymond, and Maj Sjöwall/Per Wahlöö. I like the way it includes a diagram to assist the reader in understanding the complexities of the criminal, press & admin police departments. David Peace, a big fan, conducts an interview with Yokoyama at the end, which says it all really. The North Light (an architectural mystery), Seventeen (about the worst air crash in aviation history) & Prefecture D, four linked stories in one, are not far behind it, all again by Yokoyama.

Next up, Tokyo Express by Seicho Matsumoto, An Hitchcockian gem of a page-turner: a fiendishly-plotted crime novel told in crisp, elegant prose. A Quiet Place and the short and sweet, Suspicion, also well worth a go by Seicho. On a completely different level, Sayak Murata’s Convenience Store Woman is a real one off & I can see why it’s now a best seller. Quite short, can almost be read in one or two sessions such is it’s ease of read & quirky, compulsive nature. Now on her Earthlings, equally good & taking a dark turn. Seishi Yokomizo’s The Honjin Murders is a rather more traditional effort but it was published back in 1946 so that is understandable.

Thus like a speeding bullet train, my literary bulletin is over.

Finished writing this novel, The Shaman (aka Shaman & Ray-ban) – maybe there is a publisher out there crazed enough to publish it or an agent willing to take it on….all 350 pages of it…it’s hopefully catching the zeitgest of our Amazonian obsessions. Here’s a precis…

The year is 1987, or thereabouts. This novel examines the cultural context of drug use…medical, nihilistic, redemptive, transformative, recreational, ritualistic.

Loosely speaking it is about a young Englishman, Lacey, who has gained a drug addiction – first from hospitalisation, then as he explores the alluring arenas of sex and drugs & rock ‘n’ roll, leading on to depression. We find him later on an airplane, from LA, to his aunt’s ranch near Belem in northern Brazil, to straighten out, to go ‘cold turkey’.

The plane crashes deep in the Amazon jungle. He is the only survivor, badly injured. He is found by an off-grid indigenous tribe who look after him and integrate him into their lives – as they themselves continue to face the threat of incursions from loggers, miners and tourists.

As he fell from the sky, the tribes regard him as special and after curing him, inculcate him into the ways of Shamanism. This involves the use of psychotropic drugs – now used by westerners who pay highly for the experience to gain ‘enlightenment’. After gruelling initiations, he becomes a Shaman.

The book is, intrinsically, experimental; using different formats including poetry, theatre, confusion, disorientation, hallucination and fantasy to reflect real drug experiences.

What happens to the protagonist? What happens to the tribe?

Take the plunge and find out…

It’d sit nicely with this exhibition at the Sainsbury Centre ,UEA – sadly now over…

Norwich…https://www.sainsburycentre.ac.uk/whats-on/power-plants-intoxicants-stimulants-and-narcotics/

I have been reading the novels of Murakami – Haruki that is, though I did throw in one by Ryu – the darkly expressive, In the Miso Soup. But back to Haruki. I had read Norwegian Wood several years ago but it hadn’t inspired me to read more of his novels, but I chanced upon the fact that Bob Mortimer’s favourite book was The Wind-up Bird Chronicle so it had to be worth a punt. And it was. I swiftly followed that with Colourless Tsukura Tazaki and I was hooked by Haruki. Next up was Wild Sheep Chase & Kafka on the Shore; then Dance, Dance, Dance and After Dark. Re-read Norwegian Wood & this time enjoyed it greatly. I am now approaching the summit; the three volumes of 1Q84….

“…time slowly chips away at life. People don’t just die when their time comes. They gradually die away, from the inside. And finally the day comes when you have to settle accounts. Nobody can escape it. People have to pay the price for what they’ve received. I have only just learned that truth…” 1Q84 Book Three.

But overall, ironically, the near last one I read turned out to be my favourite, Killing Commendatore – a surreal, dark, compelling page-turner based on a pit and a painting that at times sent waves of anxiety to the pit of my stomach. I also read The City & its Uncertain Walls, his very latest & in truth a major disappointment – I think its his only duff novel & seems to be put together from amalgamations of other works; ending up with a mish-mash, a lesser work than any other. Sorry Haruki!

Not too long ago I digested the novels of Glasgow writer, David Keenan. I was, admittedly, late to the feast, but I think the guy is a near-genius. I began with, This is Memorial Device, about the imaginary band of the same name in a mythical music scene in Airdrie. Sound predictable? No, it’s about as far away from the cosy worlds of the likes of Nick Hornby written by a man who lives, eats and breathes music. (He did write for the Wire). I am following on with the strange but beautiful Xstabeth, which is, frankly indescribable & unearthly. Soon the monumental, Monument Maker will be on the agenda. I have to thank my old Irish friend, Jon Dunne, for putting me on to Keenan & for intriguing me by saying I should be suing Keenan for plagiarising my old novel, Shaman & Ray-Bans (any literary agents out there fancy reading it too?). Of course he didn’t – how could that possibly be?

Anyway, I am working on this website to present articles and crosswords I have written, designed, & had published; & to showcase my photographs & poetry. I am currently compiling a weekly Sports crossword for the illustrious Racing Post. The articles have been published in Stamford Living, North Norfolk Living, the Eastern Daily Press and North Norfolk News. My main interests are poetry and local history – I used to work in Stamford Museum in Lincolnshire, before its brutal closure by Tory cuts, hence I wrote about that area. Now I work in Cromer Museum & live in Suffield Park in Cromer, so am learning and writing about Norfolk and its rich past. I used to live in London & hail from Walton/Everton originally.

After rupturing my Achilles tendon in Zakros on Crete, ironically in the Valley of Death, via a visit to Sitia hospital, I returned home to get ‘plastered’ and was confined to the house for months. I did some family research, making it back to the 18th century, then started to go on psycho-geographical walks. The first was to humble Gainsborough, but seeing the Trent was for me just like witnessing the Ganges, the Nile or the Danube, it opened my eyes to the fantastic in the mundane, the large in the small. Later trips took in extraordinary places like Burrough Hill, Castle Rising, Wolferton, Bytham, Avebury, Hull, Spurn Head, Foxton Locks, Thames ten bridges, Birmingham, Warham Camp, Baconsthorpe, Cley-next-the-Sea, Orford Ness and so on. The authors Merlin Coverley, Nick Papadimitriou, and Iain Sinclair loomed large to me.

Other writers that have influenced me at various stages of my life are, Jocelyn Brooke, Michel Houellebecq, Herman Hesse, Knut Hamsun, Jonathan Rendall, Castaneda (!), Laurie Lee, Henry Miller, BS Johnson (not Boris!), Michel Tournier, Paul Auster, Paul Bowles and Patrick Hamilton. The crime writers Georges Simenon, Patricia Highsmith, Derek Raymond, David Peace and the Marxist duo, Maj Sjöwall & Per Wahlöö. Then there are the so-called Sci-fi writers, Christopher Priest, JG Ballard, Philip K Dick and HG Wells – all now long gone.

And I almost forgot Colin Wilson’s The Outsider, which set me off on my existential path back when I was a teenager, before I went to Reading University to study History, Archaeology & Politics, ending up with a 2:1 in Politics a long, long time ago…

Lately, the profound books of Karl Ove Knausgaard have opened up windows into memories of my early years. My desert island book, though, would probably be The Iliad (or The Odyssey, it changes…)

I have fond memories of younger days reading JRR Tolkein, Jerome K Jerome, Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, Richard Jeffries, Henry Treece, AA Milne, Kenneth Graham & ‘BB’.

I mustn’t forget the poets John Clare and Edward Thomas; the lyricists Jim Morrison and Robert Hunter; Mark E Smith and Kevin Coyne (all, of course, now dead); the music of the three Bs; Bardo Pond, The Brian Jonestown Massacre & The Bevis Frond – all great live.

And, of course, the writer of the first novel in the English language… pamphleteer, pioneer, & early psycho-geographer, Daniel Defoe. A pioneer who when put in the stocks for seditious literature, had only flower petals thrown at him, such was the respect of the common people.

His creation of Robinson Crusoe has inspired a fascinating plethora of impressions, riffs, interpretations, art, movies and so on reflecting man alone on a island, sometimes referred to as ‘Robinsonade’. Some of my favourites include Chris Petit’s ‘Robinson’; JG Ballard’s ‘Concrete Island’; Patrick Keiller’s ‘Robinson in Ruins’; Diana Souhami’s ‘Selkirk’s Island’ ‘The Swiss Family Robinson’ by Johann Rudolf Wyss (later made into a film); ‘The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe’, (a 1964 French-German children’s television drama series); ‘The Coral Island: A Tale of the Pacific Ocean’ by R. M. Ballantyne. Defoe lies buried in Bunhill Fields – the dissenter’s cemetery – in Islington, where I once worked on the Holloway Road.

At the end of 2018, Here Hare Here Press published Anglia & Elsewhere – an Odyssey in Poems & Prints by Al Tutt. This signed, limited edition book contains forty of my poems and forty lino-cut B&W prints. It is available via this website, just view the page Anglia & Elsewhere for full details.

But mark the words of punk-philosopher, Dean Rocker, ‘never place a man on a pedestal… for he will let you down….’