were a number of impressive stone circles just to our right, at least one of which is visible from the road. I asked Alan about the books. He said he’d been meaning to dump them at the Old Aberdeen Bookshop. I could tell Alan was in a bad mood, he was usually more reticent about broadcasting his opinions but that morning he was indulging himself with a torrent of abuse. I guessed, incorrectly as it turned out, that Alan would have preferred Bennachie to Dundee as a destination.
Farina, Alan informed me, was a complete bummer, the worst kind of hip writing you could imagine. Leonard Cohen on downers. The Ballard didn’t have a lot to recommend it either, a late work where every concession was made to outmoded literary motifs such as characterisation. Alan said he’d heard it argued that Cocaine Nights was Ballard’s attempt at camp, the author was simply sending himself up, parodying both his own work and that of more conventional novelists. Alan didn’t buy into this theory. A bad book was a bad book was a bad book. Cocaine Nights bristled with middle-brow clichés including an opening sequence that did little more than establish the narrator as a travel writer. Ironically, the hero swiftly abandons this pursuit and takes up the management of a leisure club. Described baldly, this sounds as if it must be parody but Alan assured me that the words simply fell dead from the page. No wonder the book had been shortlisted for the 1996 Whitbread Novel Award.
Alan was damning about Head Injuries too. He called it reactionary. Conrad Williams was a young writer specialising in what enthusiasts describe as spectral fiction. Basically this meant a horror novel with literary aspirations. Its protagonists were lonely and Williams explores their past and present lives in the kind of tedious detail that could only appeal to retards who appreciate ‘literary depth’ and ‘characterisation’. The book’s primary redeeming feature was the way Williams kept the explanation of what was happening open, so that the reader was forced to make their own choice between a psychological and a supernatural explanation.
Alan was considerably more enthusiastic about Come and Perfumed Head. Both dispensed with a linear plot, which was something Alan always appreciated in a contemporary novel. While experimental fiction had been popular in the 60s and 70s. with a temporary waning of revolutionary contestation and the ongoing conglomeration of the publishing industry, editors had become increasingly conservative and most of those based in the British Isles viewed non-linear fiction with complete disdain. Experimental writing was rarely published, and the few works of this type that did appear inevitably came out on independent presses. Come and Perfumed Head would find their readers over time precisely because they transcended the times at which they were produced.
A ring road looped us around the suburbs of Dundee, then suddenly we were parking on Union Street with the silvery waters of the Tay Estuary almost visible a few hundred yards to the south. Alan had the keys to a flat on the west side of the street. We climbed the stairs and found ourselves inside Pete Horobin’s Data Attic. Horobin was an artist who during the 80s documented every aspect of his life: what time he got up, went out, who he met. He even recorded when he had a shit. The records of this activity were stored in the flat in notebooks and on data sheets. Every day for ten years Horobin had stencilled the date on a sheet of paper and then attached a photograph or some other memento of the hour. Horobin claimed that he was breaking the creative process into its constituent parts but the results actually came across as a Kafkaesque bureaucracy gone mad.
Visiting the flat gave me an inkling of what those who’d discovered the Marie Céleste must have felt on boarding that deserted ship. Horobin had saved everything he’d used during the 80s. The flat was full of worn-out
Farina, Alan informed me, was a complete bummer, the worst kind of hip writing you could imagine. Leonard Cohen on downers. The Ballard didn’t have a lot to recommend it either, a late work where every concession was made to outmoded literary motifs such as characterisation. Alan said he’d heard it argued that Cocaine Nights was Ballard’s attempt at camp, the author was simply sending himself up, parodying both his own work and that of more conventional novelists. Alan didn’t buy into this theory. A bad book was a bad book was a bad book. Cocaine Nights bristled with middle-brow clichés including an opening sequence that did little more than establish the narrator as a travel writer. Ironically, the hero swiftly abandons this pursuit and takes up the management of a leisure club. Described baldly, this sounds as if it must be parody but Alan assured me that the words simply fell dead from the page. No wonder the book had been shortlisted for the 1996 Whitbread Novel Award.
Alan was damning about Head Injuries too. He called it reactionary. Conrad Williams was a young writer specialising in what enthusiasts describe as spectral fiction. Basically this meant a horror novel with literary aspirations. Its protagonists were lonely and Williams explores their past and present lives in the kind of tedious detail that could only appeal to retards who appreciate ‘literary depth’ and ‘characterisation’. The book’s primary redeeming feature was the way Williams kept the explanation of what was happening open, so that the reader was forced to make their own choice between a psychological and a supernatural explanation.
Alan was considerably more enthusiastic about Come and Perfumed Head. Both dispensed with a linear plot, which was something Alan always appreciated in a contemporary novel. While experimental fiction had been popular in the 60s and 70s. with a temporary waning of revolutionary contestation and the ongoing conglomeration of the publishing industry, editors had become increasingly conservative and most of those based in the British Isles viewed non-linear fiction with complete disdain. Experimental writing was rarely published, and the few works of this type that did appear inevitably came out on independent presses. Come and Perfumed Head would find their readers over time precisely because they transcended the times at which they were produced.
A ring road looped us around the suburbs of Dundee, then suddenly we were parking on Union Street with the silvery waters of the Tay Estuary almost visible a few hundred yards to the south. Alan had the keys to a flat on the west side of the street. We climbed the stairs and found ourselves inside Pete Horobin’s Data Attic. Horobin was an artist who during the 80s documented every aspect of his life: what time he got up, went out, who he met. He even recorded when he had a shit. The records of this activity were stored in the flat in notebooks and on data sheets. Every day for ten years Horobin had stencilled the date on a sheet of paper and then attached a photograph or some other memento of the hour. Horobin claimed that he was breaking the creative process into its constituent parts but the results actually came across as a Kafkaesque bureaucracy gone mad.
Visiting the flat gave me an inkling of what those who’d discovered the Marie Céleste must have felt on boarding that deserted ship. Horobin had saved everything he’d used during the 80s. The flat was full of worn-out
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