A sneaky peek up Dame Drama's Skirt

We interrupt normal transmission to bring you a blog I wrote for the Edinburgh International Festival.

Thank you. 

Amsterdam and the curse of the cod

Take a little good advice

Try a trip to paradise

It's not hard to find

You got it on your mind

You can't pretend it wouldn't be nice*

Being a child of the seventies, I grew up with The Goodies.In the episode Lips, or Almighty Cod, Graeme breeds a fish called Brian, and discovers he can be enraged by Max Bygraves' Tulips from Amsterdam. One thing leads to another, and soon there is a giant angry Cod with massive false teeth in relentless pursuit of our heroes.

Some decades after my school-night retreat to goody-goody yum yum paradise, I finally got to Amsterdam. The Beloved is by my side, but it's Max that's in my head.We take a romantic, leisurely stroll walk to a local restaurant. We eat good food and the priorietor has us feeling like valued regulars in minutes.Max Bygraves. The full moon sends caressing ribbons of mercury across the canals rippled surface. Max Bygraves. We visit the dazzling light of Van Gogh's oils. Max Bygraves. We pop into a funky little design shop which not only stocks chic recycled homewares, but also a book on how to make them yourself. Still that sound in my head. Wrong season, so no freaking tulips, but plenty of Bygraves.

No wonder that cod was cross.

It was one of those weekends where you decide not to think about the gas bill, so we were staying in a rather nice hotel on the canal, right in the heart of the 'Negens', a famous shopping precinct framed by the grid of streets crossing the three main Canals, Prinsengracht, Keizerrsgracht and Herengracht. It has to be my favourite ever shopping precinct. That's not a huge statement, as I mostly find shopping depressing, tawdry and soul-destroying**. Here, though, I found myself staring in the window of shop after shop, finding some serious envy-ware in every one. One minute, a totally covetable rug in seemingly infinite shades of blue, in the next a rainbow of Hester Van Eeghen briefcases and shoes. Vintage jewellry. Art. Clothes. Antiques.Tutus. I may have drooled.

I had no actual need for any of it and even less capacity to afford it, but when you're driven to distraction by 70s easy-listening earworms its easy to lose perspective. In the end I settled for a pair of blue suede sneakers.    I'd seen a pair like them in a stolen copy of Monocle about six months earlier. (I got two for the money, in case you were wondering, Elvis.) I am very fond of them, and they also happened to be about the only thing I could afford.

As for the rest, including the desire to spend a romantic weekend with the Beloved without a passion-killing crooner camping in my head:

Like a windmill keeps on turning/That's how my heart keeps on yearning...

* Goodies theme song - I think from Series 2
**Unless its for stationary.

David Peace: Tokyo Year Zero

Occupied City by David Peace
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

In my review of this books predecessor (Tokyo Year Zero, I had a little rant about how much I admired Peace's ability to make crime (and its victims) matter. This book picks up on that theme early, with "The First Candle", written in the collective voice of victims of a mass killing:

"Do we matter to you? Did we ever matter?
Our mouths always screams,
already screams, screams
that mouth:
Your apathy is out disease; your apathy, a plague..." (p.6)

Notice a bit of repetition there? Just a smidge? Well hang on to your hats, people, because there is a lot more where that came from. Peace is not the first to use the technique, and while others have complained (and even satirised)it, until now I have always felt he uses it to good effect. With this one, though, I was cursing the geek who had ever invented the "cut and paste" function.  When I should have been hanging on every word while my head pounded with the rhythm, my eyes were skimming over paragraphs I had read one, two or three times before, thinking "Okay, Dave, okay. I get the point, already."

The book opens with a writer fleeing with an "unfinished book of unsolved crime" and the collective dead telling him that "we are here (...) because of you, our dear sweet, sweet writer dear, because of you..." (p.4). The theme of story telling, truth and lies runs through the book (and lends it a structure), suggesting Peace continues to grapple with the morality and motive of mining the annals of "true crime" for his work.

While these reflections should, in theory, enrich the novel in this case it didn't do it for me. I ended up feeling it was a valiant but ultimately unsatisfying attempt at a very ambitious project.

I can't help thinking that if Peace has come to the conclusion that in bringing the victims back to life the writer is "their wound", "their plague",(p.287) then perhaps the author's own ambivalence about the task is this book's biggest enemy.

View all my reviews