TOP 100 BOOK SITES
| |||
|
| |||
| |||
|
| |||
| Assassin's Creed Renaissance: play the game, then read the book Cross-platform convergence is something games makers are getting very excited about, and it's easy to see whyCross-platform convergence is something games makers are getting increasingly excited about, and it's easy to see why; release a song, game, action figure set, movie or television series all at once all under the same branding and you can just sit back and watch the money roll in.The novel based on a video game, however, is something of a strange beast. Literature ties in less well with gaming culture than other mediums – and a brief inspection of this Wikipedia list of books based on games shows that, for the most part, game fiction has been aimed solely at the science fiction and childrens genres. Ubisoft and Penguin books hope to buck this trend with the release of Assassin's Creed Renaissance, a novel based on the popular slash-em-up series – an exclusive extract from which we'll be putting up on the Games blog tomorrow. The book will hope to tap into the ever-expanding Dan Brown historical fiction market, as well as add an extra touch of legitimacy to the Assassin's Creed universe. Combined with the Lineage set of short films released under the franchise, such projects could well be the tip of the iceberg for related projects across different media.As you can see above, we've also got our hands on a new trailer for the game itself, to be released on 20 November – with the book following a week after. The first game received mixed reviews so hopefully the developer will have put as much effort into improving Assassin's Creed's gameplay as they have getting people talking about it.GamesJack Arnottguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Morocco bound On the 10th anniversary of Paul Bowles's death, Paul Theroux remembers the writer and traveller who set him on his wayThe Sheltering Sky was Paul Bowles's first novel and, although he honed his art almost to his dying day – novels, poems, stories, translations, as well as musical scores – it was this strange, uneven and somewhat hallucinatory novel, and a handful of disturbing short stories written around the same time, that seemed to locate his fictional vision for good in the minds of his readers. So at the age of 38 he was defined, and that definition dogged him for the rest of his life. Even in his 80s he was pestered about details in the novel. I know this to be true because I was one of the people pestering him when he was that great age.I found him sitting on the floor of a back room in a large, chilly apartment in a grey building on a back street in Tangier. It was October, and clammy cold. To drive the dampness away Bowles had a sort of superior blow-torch going, a fizzing blue flame heating the curtained-off cubicle where he was seated like a hawker in a bazaar, on a mat, back straight, legs out, because of a leg infection. Around him was a litter of small objects, notebooks, pens, medicine bottles; everything within reach, a teapot, a cup, spoons, matches, as well as shelves with books and papers, some of them musical scores. A metronome sat on a low table nearby, among bottles of capsules and tubes of ointment, and cassette tapes and a tin of Nesquik and cough drops and a partly eaten candy bar and a note folded and jammed into an envelope scribbled "Paul Bowles, Tanger, Maroc", a vague address but it had obviously found him, as I had, with little more information than that.With a pad in his hand, he was translating a novel from Spanish. His illness and his age gave him a strangely sculpted and skeletal dignity. He seemed sure of himself, and (as a chronic vacillator myself) I admired him for being uncompromising.Because I did not want to inhibit his talk by taking notes of our conversation, I stopped in a café, the Negresco, on the way back to my hotel, and described this meeting in my notebook. I wanted to make it an episode for the end of my Mediterranean journey, the book I was to call The Pillars of Hercules. I wrote: "He seems to me a man who masks all feelings; he has a glittering eye but a cold gaze. He seems at once preoccupied, knowledgeable, worldly, remote, detached, vain, sceptical, eccentric, self-sufficient, indestructible, fragile, egomaniacal, frank, and hospitable to praise. He is like almost every other writer I have known in my life." Seeing me scribbling, a Moroccan sitting nearby asked if I happened to be a writer. His name was Mohamed Choukri. He knew Bowles. He disparaged him in a genial way then said, "He is a nihilist.""Everyone is always leaving tomorrow," Bowles had said to me when I told him I was taking the ferry back to Spain the next day. But Bowles never left. His was the classic case of the person who detaches himself and swims away from the mainstream, to go far away to pursue anonymity – no phone, no name on the house – and discovers that the world beats a path to his door. (B Traven in Mexico and JD Salinger in New Hampshire are two other examples of this paradox.) Bowles had first visited Tangier with Aaron Copland at the bidding of (so he told me) Gertrude Stein. Copland went home, Bowles found the place to his liking, and there he thrived, part ascetic, part snob – as he seemed to me; and in his way distinctly rebellious, going against the grain, because the dampness and his rigorous living conditions and the decay of Tangier all seemed to be life-shorteners. But unlike all those others he was a resident, and a traveller, not a tourist."I felt strongly then about my not being a tourist as my protagonist Port did in . . . The Sheltering Sky," he told one of his biographers. He states this early on in the novel, speaking of Port: "He did not think of himself as a tourist; he was a traveller. The difference is partly one of time, he would explain. Whereas the tourist generally hurries back home at the end of a few weeks or months, the traveller, belonging no more to one place than to the next, moves slowly . . . from one part of the earth to another."Bowles started the novel in Fez late in 1948, and after writing 150 pages went to Oran in Algeria and travelled south, manuscript in hand, to Oujda, to Colomb-Béchar, a French garrison, then Taghit, a day's journey by truck, then Béni Abbes and Timimoun, and finally back to Fez. Novelists can be extremely misleading about their methods and motives (Bowles claimed that this book came to him when he was riding a bus up Fifth Avenue), but it seems certain that he wrote the book and gathered these details on his trip through Algeria as, he later explained, "a combination of memory writing and minute description of whatever place I was in at that moment".On his ramble through Algeria, he was writing each morning, elaborating details of places he'd seen. He was also experimenting with drugs, notably hashish and majoun ("cannabis jam"); he claimed that some of the novel was written under the influence. This was quite the opposite of the romantic idea of emotion recollected in tranquillity, much more the insertion of raw experience on to the page, the travelling author creating a picaresque narrative by adding detail to the storyline from his peregrinations: the hot nights, the long rides, the wrong turns, the unreliable locals, the hideous tourists – here the Lyles, mother and son.And the seedy hotels and the bad food. The Grand Hotel in Aïn Krorfa in this novel takes the cake as one of the worst hotels in fiction: the fountain at its entrance contained "a small mountain of reeking garbage" as well as some human infants, naked, their "soft formless bodies troubled with bursting sores ", and inside the "predominating odour was the latrine". Here the travellers "engaged three smelly rooms", one of which has "a jackal skin on the floor . . . the only furnishing". The meals in this hotel and elsewhere are so bad as to be almost comical. Weevils in the soup at the Grand, and later Kit "found patches of fur in her rabbit stew". In the kitchen a knife was stuck into the table and "under the point was a cockroach, its legs still feebly kicking".The note of fascinated disgust that echoes through the novel is struck at the outset, with the three travellers in the seedy café in Oran, studying their maps. The Arabs sit outside, the Americans inside, "cooler but without movement, and it smelled of stale wine and urine".This motif of grotesquerie occurs so frequently that it becomes a dark version of comic awfulness and reminds us that the greatest terror in fiction is often achieved by way of black comedy. Bowles was possessed by the notion of extremes, dramatised in the mounting persecution of the professor in "A Distant Episode", surely one of the most terrifying short stories in any language. Bowles claimed The Sheltering Sky was "really, a working out of the professor's story in 'A Distant Episode' . . . the same story retold".The structure of the novel is episodic and seemingly random. Three Americans set off, going south from Oran. They have different personalities. Port Moresby's name is an intentional joke by Bowles: Port Moresby is, of course, the capital of Papua New Guinea, named in 1873 by Capt John Moresby after his father, Admiral Sir Fairfax Moresby. The Port of the novel is thin, "with a slightly wry, distraught face" and a sense of non-attachment. His wife Kit is a high-strung socialite with a trunk full of evening gowns and make-up – we even see her in a desert outpost wearing a backless number of pale blue satin, for no apparent reason. The third member of this ménage à trois – as it turns out to be – is Tunner, an opportunist, who cuckolds Port and is surprised at one point that it doesn't rain much in the Sahara.They are wanderers. The second world war has ended, and they are now free to travel. Knowing almost nothing about North Africa and ambivalent about it from the outset, why have they chosen this destination? "It was one of the few places they could get boat passage to [from New York]."The Lyles are Australian, offering farcical comedy of shrieking, racist mother and creepy son. For long stretches, as much as 170 pages, they drop out of the story. They add little to the narrative but they are presented with such gusto that they have a point. Tennessee Williams was an early admirer (and reviewer) of the novel, and this mother and son seem like stock figures from his cast of characters.The Americans move south. Many of the places can be found on a modern map – Messad, Tadjmout, El Ga'a, Adrar, and even distant Tessalit, over the Algerian border in Mali.It is in Port's nature to nose around, uncomprehending yet undeterred. He is a searcher – but for what? I suppose, the wish to go to extremes; yet he is chronically restless. When he finds a willing local woman, Marhnia, the whole affair lasts "not more than a quarter of an hour". Later, there are quarrels, misunderstandings; the food gets worse, the weather hotter. "The room was malignant" is one description, and even dawn is tainted: "the pale infected light of daybreak".Port's inwardness and sense of self-destruction are intensified; his illness seems to be an illumination, but then – long before the novel ends – he dies. Bowles's biographer wrote: "[Bowles] told Jane that he meant to kill off his hero halfway through the book. 'He lingers in an agony instead of dying. But I'll get rid of him yet. Once he's gone there'll be only the heroine left to keep things going, and that won't be easy either.'"The novel moves from observation to observation, rather than from incident to incident. The image of the sheltering sky is enlarged in the unfolding narrative, and of course calls attention to itself. "The sky here's very strange [Port says to Kit]. I often have the sensation when I look up at it that it's a solid thing up there, protecting us from what's behind." And he explains: "Nothing, I suppose. Just darkness. Absolute night."Ambiguity is menace for him, leading to death, and when Port dies, the darkness behind the sheltering sky is revealed: "A black star appears, a point of darkness in the night sky's clarity. Point of darkness and gateway to repose. Reach out, pierce the fine fabric of the sheltering sky, take repose." Port's death, "seen from the inside", as Bowles wanted it, is a form of passion. None of the sex or love-making in the book – Port and Mahrnia, Tunner and Kit, Kit and her numerous lovers – is described with the power that Bowles gives to this lingering death.What are we to make of it all? These people are trespassers – not only going too far, but in the wrong place. The desert is described as lifeless, and Bowles writes in one of his grimmer passages, "Now there was a grey, insect-like vegetation everywhere, a tortured scrub of hard shells and stiff hairy spines that covered the earth like an excrescence of hatred." But is it really grim, or is it over-egged horror writing, something out of HP Lovecraft? I think it is both.Kit's ordeal, not erotic in any conventional sense, is sexual sadism – written coldly, rather than (as much erotica is written) in a mood of excitement. For many readers this pitiless woman's journey was the heart of the book, the pretty New York socialite in the desert, rather foolish and ultimately unbalanced, passed from one tribesman to another, subjected to sexual barbarities and ending up in far-off Tessalit. It is she, not Port, who is a version of the professor in "A Distant Episode".Bowles was a poet as well as a novelist and short-story writer; this novel especially highlights his poetic gift. As for its unspiritual essence, it was written at a time when the word existentialism explained a great deal of fiction. It is perhaps one of the important existential texts, many of its effects achieved through ambiguity and vagueness, contrasted with the harsh concreteness of physical description. In this sense it represents a bitter view of life, but it is no more a tragedy than Camus' The Outsider is a tragedy.Yet The Sheltering Sky matters particularly to me – this book and others helped to direct my writing and my travelling life. I was still a student when I read it, along with Bowles's other novels, Up Above the World, The Spider's House, Let It Come Down, and many of the stories. As a traveller, as a writer, I have learned from Bowles's habit of observation, his love of extreme situations, his curiosity about cultures, his love of solitude and, most of all, his patience. I am not sure what this novel adds up to – a meditation on death? A warning to the curious? It is a wilful adventure story, with all the elements of an ordeal. The desert is fatal to strangers. Bowles said he had no message, or rather, "Here's my message. Everything gets worse." But it is obvious that he wanted to give the desert a face and a mood – or moods; he often depicts a landscape in anatomical terms, and he could only do that by describing people somewhat like ourselves crawling around it and becoming its victims.The Sheltering Sky will be reissued next month as a Penguin Modern Classic.guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Different Drummer: The Life of Kenneth MacMillan by Jann Parry | Book review David Jays on a choreographer with a distinctly dark sideAt the end of his life, Kenneth MacMillan was asked to choreograph Carousel – a musical, said the director, about sex and violence. "Well," MacMillan drawled, "that's what I do." True enough, the Scottish-born choreographer (1929-92) tugged ballet towards the dark side of the psyche. A woman pimped by her brother, self-loathing rapists, childhood taunting that ends in death: MacMillan staged them all, often for the Royal Ballet. Jann Parry's scrupulous biography relates the savage work to the artist who produced them – and neither emerges as lovable.These are ballets about outcasts and the people who bully them: the communal scapegoat in The Rite of Spring, Mayerling's needy prince, Romeo and Juliet exiled by love. Their emotional wounds feel fresh – despite the hours MacMillan spent in psychoanalysis, he seems to have remained a stranger to himself. Preparing The Judas Tree, his final ballet, in 1992, he admitted that "There are things in me that are untapped and that have come out in this ballet that I find frightening." That psychosexual material remained available, perhaps, precisely because he hadn't worked through it.Sibling rivalries and parental shame recur in the ballets, which Parry traces to his childhood in Dunfermline and Norfolk. She tentatively speculates about abuse in the family; certainly, MacMillan was a mystery to his war-wounded father, and cosseted by his mother. At each of their funerals, he wrote, "I felt like a stranger", and rarely returned home thereafter. Dance offered self-expression and ballet companies an alternative family – his childhood teacher had "never had a pupil so hungry to learn".Early years of touring sound riotous: cabarets and parties with sinks full of gin, while MacMillan knitted legwarmers for the girls (he was a dab hand with the needles). The carefree larks didn't last. An elegant dancer, pegged for ballet's princes, his performing career was cut short by devastating panic attacks. Choreography offered respite, and ballets poured out of him in the 1950s, often provoked by images from voracious movie-going – Grimm fables, studies of loners, expressionist imagery pushed into psychosexual waters. Parry describes rather than evokes the work, but her accounts of these bristling pieces suggest they deserve revival alongside the plush repertory staples, Romeo, Manon and Mayerling.Meanwhile, anxiety shaded into alcoholic depression – he downed teacups sloshing with whisky and inserted himself into his friends' marriages like an ungainly cuckoo. He craved, according to ballerina Lynn Seymour, the embrace of a substitute family: "[But] I didn't want to be Mummy."The unhappiest periods of his life were also those with greatest responsibility, as director of the Berlin and then the Royal ballets. MacMillan's mulish integrity was temperamentally unsuited to leadership: a stranger to compromise, he scuppered company morale. Berlin was particularly dismal: refusing to learn German, brooding in the kitchen, drinking and burning the fishfingers. Through the meagre snaps in Parry's book, the lean young dancer, a rakish cigarette jutting from his lip, gradually retreats behind dark glasses, moustache and what were, even for the 70s, terrible checked suits. They aren't clothes so much as camouflage: an interviewer found him "one of those large men who look as though they would like to be small".His sexuality too was obscure, or at least well-concealed. There's little dirt dished here, possibly because there was little to report: "I thought I was hideous-looking," he recalled. Friends assumed he was gay or bisexual, and the ballets suggest their creator had problems with girls – his heroines are typically abused, even brutalised. What makes The Invitation, Manon or The Judas Tree so queasy is that the choreographer seems complicit with both victim and abuser, provoking the assaults which pain him.Only in his 40s did MacMillan meet and marry Deborah Williams, the forthright Australian artist who remains a strenuous keeper of the flame. Domestic contentment weaned him off prescription drugs and conquered his fear of flying, but anxieties continued to animate his work. The body is a site of shame, of quisling impulse and murky desire. This tension impels much of his choreography – its grappling lifts and scissoring legs. His muses were often gauche, headstrong dancers who burrowed into these tensions. He created Romeo and Juliet, his most popular work, for Seymour and Christopher Gable, but the 1965 premiere was nabbed by the starry partnership of Fonteyn and Nureyev. Royal Ballet politics trail poisonously throughout this book, but Parry doesn't exonerate MacMillan – cowardice and ambition persuaded him to acquiesce. When making tales of guilt and betrayal, he knew whereof he choreographed.DanceDavid Jaysguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Mystery of detective quirks solved, thanks to 'The Lineup' Otto Penzler, owner of New York's Mysterious Bookshop, asked 22 crime writers how they fleshed out with their detectives. rssfeeds.usatoday.com |
Meet Thursday Next Jasper Fforde, best known for his adventures of literary detective Thursday Next in the surreal Book World and the only slightly less surreal Swindon, talks to Sarah Crown about his new novel, Shades of Grey, and the boundary between utopias and dystopiasSarah CrownAndy Gallagher feeds.guardian.co.uk |