A challenging enterprise

It’s six months since I started this year-long challenge, and I’ve come up five books short at the halfway mark. It doesn’t sound like much, but it’s actually around a fortnight behind schedule and, despite a big effort in June while I was on holiday, I’m starting to get a little concerned about reaching my target come the year end.

That said, I could have made things easier on myself. I have deliberately been selecting some difficult books, and I’m not exaggerating when I say that I reckon I could have read around 10 standard-length ‘thriller’ books in the same time it took me to summon the energy to get through David Peace’s Tokyo Year Zero and Occupied City.

But that would be missing the point of the challenge, which is to read authors and books I might have otherwise ignored, and I feel better for the decisions I’ve taken. Even the one to finish Divorced and Deadly.

Earlier this month, the Friend of the Wench, with whom I have a bit of a ‘friendly’ competition going on (I’ve added the quotation marks because he thinks it’s a lot more friendly than I do), wrote eloquently about the nature of the challenges upon which we have embarked, about writing his own blog, and the enjoyment he’s taken from speaking to others about the challenge and literature in general.

Despite our differences, I couldn’t agree more. The irregular conversations between the two of us, my pride at his acknowledging a book I recommended to him is his favourite of the first six months, chatting to the Old Boy about Graham Greene in a New York bar while watching the US being knocked out the World Cup, kindly being bought books for my birthday by friends, finally following up on recommendations of authors from years ago, revisiting a library (about which I’ll write later), and making connections between everyday life and literature which I might otherwise have overlooked have been real highlights so far this year.

I was therefore unsurprised (although initially a little bewildered) when earlier this week I received a flood of emails from a work colleague of the Wench, an avid reader, recommending around two pages’ worth of her all-time favourite books and the best ones she has read this year. With passionate readers, you come to expect that sort of thing...

I hope all of the above has been conveyed by this blog, and I reached a decision earlier this week to actively tell people about these pages. That’s not to say it’s been a secret, but I didn’t start the challenge or the blog to seek attention and it’s largely been a personal undertaking for no one else’s pleasure but mine.

The other factor was a modicum of self-doubt whether I would have the time to carry on throughout the year. But while on holiday the Wench told me I was being foolish not to let people know about it because they might be interested, so, if you’re reading this, now you know. I hope it provides at least some fleeting fascination.

The Friend of the Wench (if he’s finished boasting about reaching 50 books ahead of schedule – and ahead of me!) is inviting people to take up their own challenge in the final six months – a 50-book challenge, if you will. Again, I couldn’t agree more – I hope it brings others as much enjoyment as I’ve had in the first six months.

#44 Occupied City, by David Peace (Faber and Faber Limited)

I was planning to read Tokyo Year Zero and Occupied City, the second novel in David Peace's Tokyo trilogy, back to back, but found myself so drained by the first instalment that I needed some light relief - a role PG Wodehouse fulfilled perfectly.

I enjoyed Occupied City more than Tokyo Year Zero, but many of the comments I made in that review apply once more. There is significantly less repetition, less use of the stylised prose which Peace favours, in favour of interwoven sentences which see entire chapters use italics and CAPITAL LETTERS to convey three disparate strands. As before, it's extremely complex and hard to follow, and the overall effect is that the mind focuses on the sensory impact of the words more than the story itself.

Rereading my review of Tokyo Year Zero, it struck me that I should have given an example of the complicated sentence structure Peace commonly uses, so here's a quick excerpt, taken completely at random, from Occupied City:

"Beneath the Black Gate, in its upper chamber, in the candle-light, no plague-light; white light, hospital-white, laboratory-white, then grey, an overcast-skin-grey then open vein blue, blue and now green, a culture-grown-green then yellow, yellow, thick-caught-spittle-yellow, streaked sticking-string-red, then black;
black-black, drop-drop, black-black
step-step, in the plague-light
drop-drop, step-step,
in the plague-
light-"

And there's just short of 300 pages of that (which is less than Tokyo Year Zero, admittedly).

The plot is also better, by the way. We've moved on a couple of years in post-Second World War occupied Tokyo and now police are investigating a bank robbery in which 12 people were murdered (poisoned). As usual, it's based on a true story and an author's note later reveals an appeal to clear the supposedly guilty party's name continues to this day, posthumously.

Interestingly, Peace has borrowed the Rashomon format, whereby the same event is revisited and retold by several different protaganists, shedding new light on events in the process. This is set against another investigation being carried out into Japan's biological warfare operation.

Each chapter is different. We are treated to the transcript of a detective's notebook, the recollections of a journalist, the testimony of a survivor and ultimately an account by the man who confessed to the crime. It's hugely varied and powerful, and if you want a book to really challenge you, start here.

So, rating time:

#44 Occupied City, by David Peace (Faber and Faber Limited) - 7/10

Next up: Shutter Island, by Dennis Lehane (Harper Collins)

Click here for the full list of books so far, and their rating