What Is Dave Doing?!? – Part 2

Welcome back, my Sneaky friends, to the review column that never ends. Uh…because I’m always doing stuff and reading stuff and, you know, like that.

Anyway, after that verbal dexterity, let’s see WHAT DAVE IS DOING?!?

READING: Anthony Trollope’s The Kellys and the O’Kellys

Yes, my Trollope marathon continues with his second published book and the second book drawn from his experiences while working as a postal surveyor’s clerk in rural Ireland. Unlike the first book, which I have described as “Irish Gothic”, this book is more humorous with a lighter touch and less editorializing about conditions in Ireland – rather, incorporating those observations into the story itself.

This is one of the few Trollope novels I’ve never read so I simultaneously read it on my e-reader and read the paperback as well. (I don’t want to have a book on my shelves I’ve never read.) The book was quite helpful actually. The appendix describes in great detail the historical events occurring while the novel takes place. Ireland was going through a lot of turmoil at that time as the Irish began to chafe under British rule and activists, called “Repealers”, demanded Irish autonomy from England. However, this turbulent background doesn’t have much to do with the actual story. Trollope uses it to establish a time and a place: Ireland pre-Potato Famine.

The book has a fantastic villain – an absolutely base rogue – and another character, who, while not necessarily a villain, is a great cad. They are paired off against a couple of decent, though flawed, fellows: an Irish lord and his friend, a well-to-do tenant farmer. Trollope, who loved to hunt, provides us with a description of an Irish hunt that is exciting and full of picturesque description. I love when Trollope writes about fox hunts and, because he was an enthusiastic hunter, there are a number of them in his books. (I’m particularly looking forward to re-reading the hunt scene in Can You Forgive Her? – although that book is still twelve novels away.) Actually, horses have played a large part in the novel thus far with a few of the characters closely involved in horseracing (or “the turf”). His description of taking the Ballinasloe canal-boat is priceless too – a twenty-hour ride of tedium that because of the condition of the boat cannot be relieved by “reading, sleeping, or thinking”. It’s almost as great as his hilarious description of the sea voyage at the beginning of  North America.

Like all good Victorian novels, The Kellys and the O’Kellys is full of romantic entanglements that in the Victorian era were difficult to untangle. Unlike now, Fanny Wyndham can’t just text her jilted lover Lord Ballandine and say “lets hook up ;)” – such things weren’t done! A lady had to think of her honour!

This was Trollope’s first great novel. Too bad it was completely ignored when it was originally published. In fact, it lost money!

READING: Lee Child’s Killing Floor

This is a favourite series of books for my wife. She has read them all and some of them a couple of times. Like all good Reacher fans, she eagerly awaited the Tom Cruise movie so she could hate it.

This is the second one I’ve read because I didn’t think the first one I read was that great, but I wanted to give the series a chance. It’s always fun to find some light reading that’s a pleasure to plow through. I remember my wife and I tearing through a bunch of Dick Francis novels years back and those were fun – horses! – and could always be found in thrift shops while you were travelling.

I have to say I’m not a huge fan of these books though. Reacher, in case you didn’t know, is a huge, ex-military policeman who travels around America and through a bizarre streak of bad luck always ends up unwillingly helping people in life-threatening situations. This gives him plenty of opportunity to maul, beat and murder people in a gory fashion and have sex with beautiful women. Oh, and be ponderous. (As the Flintstones bird says, “It’s a livin’.”) To me, the Reacher character is a big, boring lout and, because he’s the narrator, the story is told in a dull style with no wit to enliven the stolid, unconvincing action.

To be fair, I believe the first book I read, Bad Luck and Trouble, was not a first-person narrative; on the other hand, it was still boring.

The best part of this book is when Reacher, who has been accused of murder, is sent with another character to prison. Just so we know how dangerous it is, Reacher tells us about a soft, young man in the army who was sent to prison where he died after repeated anal sex; not only repeated anal sex but also “with a pint of semen in his stomach”. Is that supposed to be scary? Scary, rather than just off-putting and weird because it’s really dumb. What bored coroner extracted the semen from his stomach to measure it? Did he die from the anal sex or the semen? As my wife pointed out, maybe he would have been less popular if he hadn’t swallowed.

(Please note: this is where I got the information I mentioned in Episode 71 about how much paper money is in circulation in America so take it as you please.)

LISTENING: Field Music, Tones of Town

This made my list of “perfect” albums that we discussed in Episode 70 so of course I like this CD. It’s sort of a combination of the retro post-punk sounds of the early-noughties and British art rock with a healthy dose of, believe it or not, progressive rock sounds (notably Yes and Supertramp). Well, that sounds pretty awful, Dave, I hear you saying, but you would be wrong to think that. Wrong, wrong, wrong. This album is actually a perfect little jewel and the last one by the original line up of the multi-instrumentalist brothers, David and Peter Brewlis, with keyboard player Andrew Moore.

I was familiar with the song “Tones of Town” from a MOJO magazine sampler CD so I picked this up on our travels through Great Britain last summer at the HMV in Liverpool and it soundtracked a good part of our trip.

LISTENING: Paul McCartney, RAM

Maybe not a great record in the strictest sense of the word, but a greatly listenable record with some good songs including one of my favourite McCartney songs “Too Many People” – the song that got John Lennon all mad and spurred him to write his ill-natured riposte “How Do You Sleep?” Lennon apparently took umbrage at the lines “Too many people going underground/Too many reaching for a piece of cake/Too many people pulled and pushed around/Too many waiting for that lucky break/That was your first mistake/You took your lucky break and broke it in two”; feeling that the line “Too many people going underground” was directed at him and Yoko and that Paul was suggesting that he, by precipitating the breakup of the Beatles, had “broken” his lucky break.

By the way, Paul was writing about the Lennons in this song! This was Paul’s break up album and if it’s not as in your face as Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band, you can read a lot between the lines. And if you don’t feel like reading between the lines, you can look at the picture of two beetles fucking on the album cover.

I also love the multi-part Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey, which is just pure silliness and was greatly attractive to me as a child.

The version of RAM that I’m listening to also has a disc of McCartney’s strange conceptual art piece Thrillington. When the record originally came out, it was not credited to McCartney, but to a character named Percy “Thrills” Thrillington. (In fact, no one knew McCartney had anything to do with it until 1989!) At the time of its release, McCartney took out ads and placed mentions in the papers about the socialite Percy “Thrills” Thrillington, making him seem like a real person.

The album itself is an instrumental version of RAM, recorded about the same time as the original album, but shelved when WINGS was formed. It’s actually really good with some great British sessions musicians like Herbie Flowers and Clem Cattini and arrangements by Richard Hewson. Some of the songs take on a Brian Wilson-arranged Beach Boys feel, which I really like. Worth a listen at least once, anyway. Terrible cover, though.

READING: Uncut Magazine’s The Beatles: The Uncut Ultimate Music Guide

As a Beatles nut, this is pretty great. A collection of contemporary articles about the Beatles taken from Melody Maker and New Musical Express with new assessments of their complete discography including the collections and live albums. You can agree or disagree with those and that’s part of the fun. It’s great reading the history of the band through the rosy spectacles of the early music writers. It starts with small mentions in the papers of an up-and-coming beat combo; takes you through the years of Beatlemania (with the music writers “embedded” in the tour entourage); the stories and interviews get more intermittent through the “serious” phase of the band, but there are pieces all the way up to the sad and bitter break up. It’s interesting to read the descriptions of the tours and know the writers are glossing over a lot of “bad behaviour” – leaving out the girls and the drinking and the drugs. The Beatles themselves are fascinating in how much they say, how personable they are, but how little they actually reveal about themselves and the band. Saddest of all is the optimism of their enduring friendship when we know the inevitable ending to a wonderful story.

See you next time!