Confessions of an English Opium Eater and Other Writings

I couldn't find a picture of my particular copy of this book on Google, so I had to take a picture and upload it. Personally, I think that this cover is much more interesting than many of the other cover designs out there.

This particular edition contains Confessions of an English Opium Eater, Suspiria de Profundis, The English Mail Coach, and three essays: "On Murder Considered as one of the Fine Arts", "On the Knocking on the Gate in Macbeth", and "The Literature of Knowledge, the Literature of Power." It's quite a bit to digest in reading straight through, but taken separately, each section is worth the read.

As might be expected in such a narrative, Confessions of an English Opium Eater has DeQuincey repeatedly emphasizing his station in life, the fact that he is a learned scholar, and that he came to opium for relief of pain only, and resorted to more frequent usage again for pain relief, before the drug finally put its hooks into him. However, despite his occasionally too frequent protestations, this is a very strong section of the work, and well worth revisiting. A criticism frequently leveled at the Confessions are that they glorify and condone the use of opium, that they encourage addiction, but I didn't quite get that; given the subject matter, DeQuincey's praise of opium is less full-throated than I had expected.

Suspiria de Profundis is nominally a sequel to the Confessions, but is a much more abstract work. After an expansion on his childhood and a digression on the human brain, DeQuincey moves into what can only be assumed to be dreams/visions while under the influence of opium. These are, as might be expected, unreal and extravagant. I would recommend "The Dark Interpreter" and "Levana and our Ladies of Sorrow."

The English Mail Coach begins with a very straightforward section, called "The Glory of Motion", extolling the virtues of being a passenger on a Royal Mail Coach. We then have a meditation on sudden death, a retelling of an incident that DeQuincey observed as a passenger on the Mail, and finally, opium dreams about said incident. A very well done essay.

"On Murder" is the highlight of the essays, and is more of a description of some crimes rather than an exaltation of them, which is fine, but a slight disappointment given (again) the author's protestations that this is really a satire, totally, and how could you indict him for it?

Recommended, although more individually than straight through.

Murder City

Murder City isn't quite what I expected. Rather than a sober overview of Mexico's troubles, this is a depressing narrative that skips between scenes and characters, like a bad dream. Murders without motive, seemingly without reason, without explanations, and certainly without consequences for the killers.

Throughout Murder City, Bowden uses jump cuts -- he describes a murder, a threat, an incident, in a paragraph and then flashes to another, and another, before returning (or moving) to a something else. The referenced instances may recur, or may not. One thread that runs through nearly all of them, though, is that witnesses or neighbors saw or noticed nothing, or saw men "dressed as commandos."

Bowden has several people and settings he returns to again and again, but the three most prevalent are the story of a former beauty queen who came to the city to party, was gang-raped for days and lost her mind (Miss Sinaloa), a killer for one of the cartels (Murder Artist), and the intimidation and silencing of the Mexican press by both the cartels and the government (Dead Reporter Driving). These are the only chapters that are titled, others are merely denoted by the page breaks.

Overall, this book doesn't give a sense of perspective on the violence in Ciudad Juarez, but underscores the senselessness of it all. And that is precisely the point.

City of Bohane

Even though Kevin Barry's City of Bohane is set in the 2050s, I wouldn't call this a science fiction novel. For one, it isn't clearly until at least the middle third of the book the time period that it's set in, and for two, even this is clearly post-apocalyptic, there's no tech here -- just nothing digital, and nostalgia for the "Lost Time", where something clearly Very Bad(tm) happened.

City of Bohane is at once cinematic and musical. Cinematic in scope, and musical in dialogue. Scenes are sketched out as though there was a camera panning through them, and we see cuts that are worthy of a screenwriter. Here's one character talking to another in a shady bar-cut-here's a third character plotting-cut-here's someone else stalking the streets. Bang bang bang. Not that there are any guns in Bohane -- technology has definitely reverted. The only photography is with "a medieval Leica", movies are on reels, and there are no motor vehicles.

A strength of Barry's is pacing -- at least at first. He's very good at ratcheting up the tension as a specific event approaches (gang war, festival), but not so much at resolving the situation, and a feeling of anticlimax pervades. There's a lot to like here, but this isn't totally successful.

Ordinarily, describing something as "post-apocalyptic" would send me screaming for the exits, but City of Bohane is interesting enough to keep me engaged. That said, I'm not sure there's a there here -- it's readable, but this almost reads like a prologue to something that never gets going.

A Clockwork Orange

Anthony Burgess seemed to think that his seminal novel A Clockwork Orange wouldn't be as remembered if it weren't for Stanley Kubrick's acclaimed film version. According to Burgess, his best-known work is a simple morality tale, and he was less than thrilled that a) the American publisher omitted his final chapter, and b) that his work was the basis for a film that appears to glorify sex and violence. Although Burgess would prefer his work to have been presented unbowdlerized, he's not enamored with it: "I should myself be glad to disown it for various reasons" and that the work is "too didactic to be artistic", he says in the introduction.

I don't think that Burgess' American publisher was wrong in thinking the twenty-first chapter was a sellout. Burgess himself admits that there was no hint of change in the previous chapter, nor in the rest of the proceeding book. So while the author may contend that the twenty-first chapter is necessary symbolically, morally, and from a storytelling perspective, it certainly feels tacked on as it's a massive change in direction from the remainder of the novel, particularly a novel that is broken into three sections. So on the one hand, I'm not particularly satisfied with the final chapter, due to its stark difference from the rest of the novel. However, as Burgess points out, omitting it leaves something that's less a novel and more a fable.

Overall, I'm glad to finally tick this off my list, but I can't say that this is something I much enjoyed.

On the Road

Jack Kerouac's On the Road is one of those novels that I'd assumed would be assigned to me at some point in English class. It wasn't, and I've managed to put it off until now. I'd expected this to be a tedious read; this impression was due to being aware that Kerouac had originally typed the novel on one continuous scroll. Knowing this, I (erroneously) concluded that On the Road was a drug-induced frenzy of a novel, with exclamations galore, vague transitions, and endless hallucinatory passages. On this note, I was very mistaken; the novel is a pleasure to read, and Kerouac's occasional exuberance and general tone is, if not conversational, easy to digest.

Another way On the Road threw me was the fumbling towards adulthood of the characters, the growth shown by the Kerouac figure, in contrast with Dean Moriarty, who Kerouac begins obsessed with, before finally abandoning. Again, I'd thought the novel was about indulgence in hedonism and restlessness, rather than growing towards responsibility as one aged.

Overall, On the Road was like nothing I had expected, given what I'd thought of it, and was an enjoyable and worthwhile read, a worthy slice of Americana, &c &c

Ninety-Two in the Shade

I've seen Thomas McGuane's Ninety-Two in the Shade described as "written on drugs", which may be a fair description, but it's a funny, worthwhile novel. A story of going crazy, family issues, lost potential, certain death, fishing, love affairs, dropping acid, rodents eating cake, living in a bomber fuselage, relatives running whorehouses, women with shopping compulsions, bonefish, rubes from the Midwest, told through bursts of literary pyrotechnics.

I don't have much else to add here. The prose can occasionally become overwrought, and the characters maddening. The plot (described in another review as "ephemeral as a cocaine high") moves swiftly and inevitably, and the ending is, if not satisfying, then worth a smirk. I plan to re-read this at some point, just for the fireworks.

Gun, With Occasional Music

Jonathan Lethem's Gun, With Occasional Music has a fun, if not entirely original, premise -- it's a detective story set in a not-quite-dystopian future. The premise succeeds, in that the story is entertaining, depressing, and featuring a whodunit where the perpetrator is not immediately obvious. Our protagonist is a hard-boiled private eye in the classic mold, and the dialog is quite snappy. As a pastiche, it works fine. However, that's not all that's going on here.

Sci-fi writers often seem to make choices solely to set up a cheap gag or to make an obvious point. However, much of Lethem's choices (the drug 'make', the evolution therapy allowing 'babyheads' and speaking animals, the role of the secret police) both advance the plot and allow for commentary -- the world post-Metcalf's wakeup is very different from the (messy) world he previously inhabited.

I'm glad someone finally wrote a novel with a kangaroo as a villain.