Little Squares of History

I've been reading a book by Jane's Addiction and ex-RHCP guitarist, Dave Navarro and, well, it's a little odd.

Titled 'Don't Try This At Home: A Year in the Life of Dave Navarro', the book follows him, month by month, as he allows unmetered access to his life at a time when he was conducting a unique, artistic experiment. In some down-time between bands, he'd bought an antique phone-booth and made everyone - yes, everyone, including various prostitutes, drug dealers and west-coast layabouts - who entered his house to submit a strip of photos.

The pictures are interspersed in pages of the book, woven around odd little stories and everyday explaination of Navarro's chaotic life: he yo-yo's between rampant and dangerous drug use - at one point, while high, he shoots a hole in the floor with his shotgun - and concerted attempts to get clean without using the traditional routes of rehab or a talented PR person.

Some of this takes place in straight narrative, with the action being fed to us by Neil, the book's co-author. Some more is presented in scripts, written by Navarro, detailing conversations he's had. Others are abstract little pages, snippets from his life.

Even though it gets incredibly far-fetched - on a normal day, Chad Smith comes over and bums around the house in a drugged-up stupor for an entire night before leaving at daybreak - you never doubt that this happened. As well as using the photo booth to document little squares of history, Navarro taped recorders to the undersides of tables and chairs, and secreted cameras in fake clocks and ornaments. None of the visual material that emerged from those recordings is present in the book - he often alludes to an accompanying website which is always being updated. I can only assume that it's now offline. Some of the aural material would have formed the basis of the conversations in the book, certainly. Some of the stuff that isn't in the tome must be dynamite.

I'm nearing the end now, and it's been an odd journey: on one hand, Navarro is constantly unsure of himself and his future: one minute he's optomistic about getting clean and settling down with on/off girlfriend Adria, and the next he's sure that a drugged-up death is but around the corner. Then again, I couldn't help but notice that I had a fair few pages to go, and Navarro seemed to have attacked the documentation project with such a tenacity that you don't believe that something as insignificant as an overdose will stop him completing his annual of oddities.

And he's still alive today, which is something of a clue.

But, rather than giving away the (somewhat inevitable) ending, it fascinates and throws up more questions in equal measure: how on earth did someone survive this and, more importantly, how did Navarro get through it, with the state of mind he had at the time? Or, perhaps, his neurotic behaviour helped. Answers to these questions are, like the man himself for much of the book, something of a mystery.

But it's good to know that it's been unravelled slightly, at least. Maybe I'll stick a webcam on my desk and record everything as a modest tribute. But I daresay that talking about printer reviews, benchmark tests and football gossip won't be nearly as exciting as a constant parade of musicians, movie stars, freaks and dealers.

Ben Elton - Then and Now

It's amazing what 16 years can do. Just ask Ben Elton, for example - as I've just finished reading two of his books, sixteen years apart in publication dates, and the difference is amazing.

Gridlock was Elton's first foray into novels, was written in 1991, and revolves around global warming and climate change. I may not agree with the way this issue is portrayed sometimes in the media today, but there's no denying the forward-thinking plot that Elton put forward - a world clogged by traffic with no end in sight, and a disabled main character who was utterly compelling. It's something you don't often see, and Elton, in some ways, was fifteen years ahead of his time with the issues he tackled, taking on subjects that just seem like they're tacked on for ratings or sales these days.

Despite this, I didn't really enjoy the book. The prose was formulaic, and there wasn't a huge amount of description - which is something that I crave in my books. Grammatically, it seemed to be all over the place, with sentence structure lacking and seemingly basic mistakes being made. I don't know who his editor was.

Leap forward the aforementioned 16 years, and I've finished Elton's latest book, Blind Faith. The plot concerns our society a few decades into the future, after a flood has wiped out most of what is now 'Lake' London, and society has crumbled into a vacuous pit of sex, gossip, blind subservience to a mysterious diety called 'Love' - the modern name for Jesus - and not much else. The story is subversive and follows a disenchanted man called Trafford Sewell as he searches for answers, truth and meaning to his life. It's fantastic, and not just because the grammar problems that seemed to plague Elton in his early career - Popcorn seemed to suffer like this as well - but because he's just developed a huge amount.

The plot is tighter, with more focus given to a smaller group of central characters to concentrate on rather than the constant jumping between peripheral groups of characters in short, sharp chapters. There's still not a huge amount of description, but the world is vivid and alive, full of allusions to things we know and asides that point ot things we recognise from our society that have been magnified by dozens of years of moral decay.

Speaking of pointing things out, Elton has calmed that down, too. I found that in Gridlock he'd step aside from the story when a brief mention of something sparked him off and spend a page or two ranting about a chosen topic. It wouldn't link back to the plot or the characters and felt hugely misplaced. While he still makes points about his moral standing in later books, like Blind Faith, it's with subtlety and is tied into the events of the story, so well sometimes that you don't even notice it happening, certainly not as something that felt so detached from the prose previously.

It's heartening that such an improvement has taken place - taking good books and making them into great ones. Hopefully it'll continue!

Kids are evil.

So, I just finished reading deadkidsongs by Toby Litt. Oh my god. What an unsettling book, I recommend it to everyone who likes feeling nervous, afraid, unsure.

In short, it's about a group of children who, together, are in a gang. Called Gang. At what first starts as playing war by a pond and dissecting animals in untidy, backwood biology classrooms soon twists into something altogether sinister, and that's when the book first begins to get seriously disturbing. It's set out in some parts childhood adventure novel, in other parts military account of operations.

In the last third of the book, I found myself thinking that no, surely, these kids couldn't do that, but they came back and confounded me again and again because they just turned evil. At least, some of them did, and I think it's a really interesting examination of evil itself, and how it manifests itself in different people. One kid is evil because of his home situation and how it moulds him, for example. Another because he's weak (or what, in the book and in the heads of certain people) is perceived as weak) and another because he's easily manipulated.

And now I've read it all the way through, I find myself asking questions and examining issues and incidents in the book that, of course, didn't stand out as much on the first read through, and now I can look at it from a more objective point of view. The kids and their families are all so different, in construction and in philosophy, that it's only a matter of time before they surely fall apart, and fall apart they do. Looking back at it now, it happened to me and my best friend in our early years of secondary school, and it happened as far back as when friends were being chopped and changed in primary school. I do find it unusual, yet commendable, the loyalty that some of the children in the book show to each other. It's the same thing that happened at the end of secondary school, I think, except it was a longer and more protracted process.

The actual writing is great, too. It's written in several different styles, determined by which kid's head you're residing in at the time. The creation and manipulation of unique narrative voices throughout is superb, and you can feel the deterioration of certain minds through the language as well as the content. Sentences become shorter, sharper and you can hear the breathing as panic sets in.

So, I guess, what am I going to say? Read this book. It's macabre, and the quotes on the back suggest that the humour is so dark that it's almost not humour at all. But, as I read, I forgot that there was meant to be humour. When the pranks and adventures are still believable and reminiscent, at the beginning of the book, you can see the funny side of things, the nods to what you did as a child. But, by the end, you're so absorbed and, in turns, horrified, that you can't see the funny side. It's almost as if you become desensitised to whatever the kids have done, to the point that each shocking act they commit is no more shocking than the first: your senses become dull and anesthetised until you close the book and reflect on what's happened, and then deadkidsongs delivers its final punch. And it hits you harder than a model plane jammed into a recently excavated eyeball.