Ten Years in the Tub (15 page)

     
  
How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World
—Francis Wheen

     
  
Liar's Poker
—Michael Lewis

     
  
Some of
Greenmantle
—John Buchan

     
  
How to Give Up Smoking and Stay Stopped for Good
—Gillian Riley

S
o this last month was, as I believe you people say, a bust. I had high hopes for it, too; it was Christmas-time in England, and I was intending to do a little holiday comfort reading—
David Copperfield
and a couple of John Buchan novels, say, while sipping an eggnog and heroically ploughing my way through some enormous animal carcass or other. I've been a father for ten years now, and not once have I been able to sit down and read several hundred pages of Dickens during the Christmas holidays. Why I thought it might be possible this year, now that I have twice as many children, is probably a question best discussed with an analyst: somewhere along the line, I have failed to take something on board. (Hey, great idea: if you have kids, give your partner reading vouchers next Christmas. Each voucher entitles the bearer to two hours' reading-time
while kids are awake
. It might look like a cheapskate present, but parents will appreciate that it costs more in real terms than a Lamborghini.)

If I'm honest, however, it wasn't just snot-nosed children who crawled
between and all over me and Richard Hannay. One of the reasons I wanted to write this column, I think, is because I assumed that the cultural highlight of my month would arrive in book form, and that's true, for probably eleven months of the year. Books are, let's face it, better than everything else. If we played Cultural Fantasy Boxing League, and made books go fifteen rounds in the ring against the best that any other art form had to offer, then books would win pretty much every time. Go on, try it. “The Magic Flute” v.
Middlemarch? Middlemarch
in six. “The Last Supper” v.
Crime and Punishment
? Fyodor on points. See? I mean, I don't know how scientific this is, but it feels like the novels are walking it. You might get the occasional exception—
Blonde on Blonde
might mash up
The Old Curiosity Shop
, say, and I wouldn't give much for
Pale Fire
's chances against
Citizen Kane
. And every now and again you'd get a shock, because that happens in sport, so
Back to the Future III
might land a lucky punch on
Rabbit, Run
; but I'm still backing literature twenty-nine times out of thirty. Even if you love movies and music as much as you do books, it's still, in any given four-week period, way,
way
more likely you'll find a great book you haven't read than a great movie you haven't seen, or a great album you haven't heard: the assiduous consumer will eventually exhaust movies and music. Sure, there will always be gaps and blind spots, but I've been watching and listening for a long time, and I'll never again have the feeling everyone has with literature: that we can't get through the good novels published in the last six months, let alone those published since publishing began. This month, however, the cultural highlight of the month was a rock and roll show—two shows, actually, one of which took place in a pub called the Fiddler's Elbow in Kentish Town, North London. The Fiddler's Elbow is not somewhere you would normally expect to find your most memorable drink of the month, let alone your most memorable spiritual moment, but there you go: God really is everywhere. Anyway, against all the odds, and even though they were fighting above their weight, these shows punched the books to the floor. And they were good books, too.

Five or six years ago, a friend in Philly introduced me to a local band called Marah. Their first album had just come out, on an indie label, and it sounded great to me, like the Pogues reimagined by the E Street Band, full of fire and
tunes and soul and banjos. There was a buzz about it, and they got picked up by Steve Earle's label E-Squared; their next album got noticed by Greil Marcus and Stephen King (who proudly wore a Marah T-shirt in a photo-shoot) and Springsteen himself, and it looked like they were off and away. Writing this down, I can suddenly see the reason why it didn't happen for them, or at least, why it hasn't happened yet. Steve Earle, Stephen King, Greil Marcus, Bruce, me… none of us is under a hundred years old. The band is young, but their referents, the music they love, is getting on a bit, and in an attempt to address this problem, they attempted to alienate their ancient fans with a noisy modern rock album. They succeeded in the alienation, but not in finding a new audience, so they have been forced to retreat and retrench and rethink. At the end of the Fiddler's Elbow show they passed a hat around, which gives you some indication of the level of retrenchment going on. They'll be OK. Their next album will be spectacular, and they'll sell out Madison Square Garden, and you'll all be boasting that you read a column by a guy who saw them in the Fiddler's Elbow.

Anyway, the two shows I saw that week were spectacular, as good as anything I've seen with the possible exception of the Clash in '79, Prince in '85, and Springsteen on the
River
tour. Dave and Serge, the two brothers who are to Marah what the Gallaghers are to Oasis, played the Fiddler's Elbow as if it were Giants Stadium, and even though it was acoustic, they just about blew the place up. They were standing on chairs and lying on the floor, they were funny, they charmed everyone in the pub apart from an old drunk sitting next to the drum kit (a drummer turned up halfway through the evening with his own set, having played a gig elsewhere first), who put his fingers firmly in his ears during Serge's extended harmonica solo. (His mate, meanwhile, rose unsteadily to his feet and started clapping along.) It was utterly bizarre and very moving: most musicians wouldn't have bothered turning up, let alone almost killing themselves. And I was reminded—and this happened the last time I saw them play, too—how rarely one feels included in a live show. Usually you watch, and listen, and drift off, and the band plays well or doesn't and it doesn't matter much either way. It can actually be a very lonely experience. But I felt a part of the music, and a part of the people I'd gone with, and, to cut this short before the encores, I didn't want to read for about a fortnight afterwards. I wanted to
write, but I couldn't because of the holidays, and I wanted to listen to Marah, but I didn't want to read no book. I was too itchy, too energized, and if young people feel like that every night of the week, then, yes, literature's dead as a dodo. (In an attempt to get myself back on course, I bought Bill Ehrhardt's book
Vietnam-Perkasie
, because he comes Marah-endorsed, and provided the inspiration for “Round Eye Blues,” one of their very best songs. I didn't read the thing, though. And their next album is tentatively entitled
20,000 Streets under the Sky
, after a Patrick Hamilton novel—I'm going to order that and not read it, too.)