In Praise of Penguin Books; or How to Build a Private Library

When I think of how and when I first read some of my favourite books; some of my favourite authors, more often than not those initial experiences came through a Penguin Books edition.

Reading Frankenstein in the custard yellow £1 Popular Classics edition. Reading The Raven and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner in 60 pence Penguin mini booklets. The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, bought as a student from a second hand bookshop for £10 of precious food money; the orange spines of the four mouldering volumes bound together in a crisscross of elasticated rubber.

I have an aversion to all kinds of marketing and brand loyalty and yet Penguin Books have probably had a greater influence on my development as an adult than any other corporate entity.

I wasn’t much of a reader as a child. I had phases and obsessions like everyone else, but it never seemed to last very long. I was twenty eight before I even finished The Lord of the Rings, having read The Hobbit at the age of eleven, which was to all intents and purposes the first real book I ever read. An edition borrowed from a neighbouring child, shocked I hadn’t read it. I want to say it was a Penguin or Puffin edition, but I don’t think it was. I don’t really remember.

Partly because of the Hobbit, partly because of that childhood friend, my first real obsession was Choose Your Own Adventure books, especially the Fighting Fantasy series. During the time that I read them, those books were published by Puffin, the children’s wing of Penguin. I collected the first two dozen FF books in the series, as well as the guides and special editions, all of them displayed in a glass fronted bookcase in the same way that adults display commemorative plates. I still have my original copy of House of Hell, having still not completed it after nearly forty years of trying. I was never very good at computer games either.

Into my late teens and early twenties, I read fewer Penguin editions than any time before or since. For a time I was obsessed with horror novelists, reading Pan edition James Herbert novels bought from local market stalls, before progressing to the superior Clive Barker books bought new. The James Herbert novels are since consigned to charity shops. The Barker novels, however, are still an important part of my collection. My Harper Collins paperbacks are in serious state of disrepair. The opening pages in some cases are held together by sellotape, I have read and reread them so many times over the years. Yet they retain a prominent place on my bookshelves.

Having read little as a child, I stared to read more and more as I progressed into adulthood. Moreover, I began to collect (some might say hoard) books. Those custard yellow classics become an important and cheap source of reading material. As well as Frankenstein, I read Edgar Allen Poe, Gulliver’s Travels and Mrs Dalloway in similar volumes. Penguin published a parallel series of poetry books in power blue covers. Through those editions I first read Keats and Blake, as well as the war poets and the romantics.

One December, home from university, I presented my mother with a list of seven or eight Charles Dickens novels I wanted as Christmas presents, expecting her to choose two or three from the list. I received the lot, made up of the custard yellow editions. Not bad for a total outlay of less than I had recently spent on the collected Orwell. Those books stayed with me for years, until they were replaced by my great uncle’s centenary edition of Dickens’s complete works, passed on by relatives who knew I would take care of them.

At university, I developed a true collecting obsession borne out of sentimentality and gratitude. Penguin Modern Classics book were at the time printed with mint green covers. In those editions, I first read all of Orwell’s novels, as well as his trilogy of socialist non-fiction: Down and Out in Paris and London, The Road to Wigan Pier, and Homage to Catalonia. I bought my first copy of Ulysses from a second hand bookshop in Cardiff on the way home from lectures and my first copy of Finnegans Wake brand new from the local Waterstones, both in those mint green editions. I ate up Ulysses in no time, but it would be more than a decade before I finished Finnegans Wake (which still makes it an easier read than House of Hell). 

In those same mint covers, I read Kafka’s The Trail, Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman and The Crucible, and three of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe novels in one volume. Penguin replaced the mint green editions more than twenty years ago, but I still rescue copies from secondhand bookshops, even if I don’t know the book or the author. As such, I have read Collette’s Collected Stories, the Letters and Journals of Katherine Mansfield, and Tadeusz Borowski’s darkly comic holocaust stories, This Way for the Gas Ladies and Gentlemen, when each might have been missed in favour of books and authors more well known to me. Even now, a collection of DH Lawrence’s short stories in mint green sits on one of my many To Read piles.

The silver editions that replaced the mint green Penguin Modern Classics seem less romantic, but it is less to do with aesthetics as it is personal history and the rosy tinted view with which we regard first experiences. Like first love or the particular incarnation by which we are introduced to a film franchise, how we experience anything for the first time leaves a indelible imprint on the imagination. The First Love Fallacy.

The mint green editions hold a special place in my heart and yet it was in the silver editions that I first read East of Eden, which remains my favourite Steinbeck novel (and one of my favourite novels of all time). I own most of Steinbeck’s fiction and non-fiction and the books that aren’t in old Pan or Grafton editions are all silver Penguins. See also, the second volume of Philip Marlowe novels. Allen Ginsberg’s Deliberate Prowse. Philip K Dick’s, The Man in the High Castle.

Over the years, I’ve also picked up older Penguin Classics and Modern Penguin Classics from secondhand bookshops across the country. Before mint green, the modern classic novels were grey and white with the only colour coming from the cubist and modernist cover artwork. These were my introduction to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, the second and third volumes of Sartre’s Road to Freedom the trilogy (the first part, The Age of Reason, sits among the mint greens), and Brave New World.

While collecting secondhand books, I began a trend that started out as an accident but has become something of a superstitious habit. One of my favourite authors is Fyodor Dostoyevsky. I own copies of most of his novels, shorter and non-fiction, but I do not own any two books that are published by the same publisher and in the same edition.

Like the modern classics, the regular Penguin classics have changed over the years, so that I have a copy of Notes from the Underground and The Double printed together in a black Penguin Classics edition; a copy of The House of the Dead in the previous black and yellow covers; and several other books in earlier editions.

My copies of The Brothers Karamazov and Demons are published by Oxford University Press, but in subtly different editions. My version of the Idiot is printed by Wordsworth. I also have various other novels and short story collections in paperback and hardback from a hodge podge of publishers. It has become something I take far too seriously. That I cannot obtain a new Dostoyevsky book unless it is from a publisher or in an edition I don’t already own. No reason for it. Just because.

In arranging my books, I organise by publisher first, then edition, then alphabetically from right to left (some weird quirk of being left handed). It is the Penguin editions that occupy the central bookcase in my library, with classic and modern classic box sets sitting on top. I have collected so many Penguin books, there isn’t room for them all on the shelves and they overspill to lie sideways on top of the other rows.

Other publishers are available. Yet the default for any book available from multiple publishers will always be Penguin. I once bought a copy of War and Peace in a Wordsworth edition from a charity shop. However, the text was far too small and the font and paper quality used by Wordsworth always seem to cause me problems. The Count of Monte Cristo in a similar edition took months to get through, forever delaying the reading for something with better quality print. Which is a pity, because The Count of Monte Cristo is a masterpiece.

As such, I replaced the War and Peace Wordsworth with a two volume Penguin edition from a secondhand bookshop. Then I was able to read all 1,666 pages in four days over a long weekend. More impressively, I didn’t get through even a hundred pages on one of those days. More than five hundred pages a day over the other three. A personal record.

Other than Penguin, I have constructed what I consider an impressive library over the years. Books bought brand new and from charity and secondhand bookshops. Some special editions from the likes of Folio Book that cost a lot at the time but which have only accumulated in value over the years. In a charity shop in Sunderland in 2000, I bought a copy of Wide Sargasso Sea for 25p. From what I can tell, the book is part of an early print run of the first edition and worth a couple of hundred pounds.

Such finds are rare and in the Internet Age less likely to be missed by booksellers. But everyone can build a private library for relatively little money, if you know the right places to look. In one place where I lived, there were two places within walking distance that were practically giving books away. Five books for a pound in one charity shop that was only open on certain weekends. I found so many books there I would often throw them money on the way past even when I wasn’t buying anything. There I got a massive French dictionary for 20p. Also, a Penguin classics boxset, including Wuthering Heights, Pride and Prejudice, and Robinson Crusoe that was mine for £1. It sits like a monolith on top of the Penguin bookcase.

The other place was even better (or worse). Essentially a junk shop with boxes of books of which the owner just wanted to get rid. My housemate found it and dragged me there to pan through boxes, looking for gold. I would take a backpack with me to fill up with on Pan Agatha Christie books and come away with change from a £2 coin.

When I used to visit family in Liverpool, I had a walk planned out where I could visit four or five bookshops in a one hour circuit. One of my nine copies Moby Dick (the correct number of Moby Dicks one should own) came from those foraging expeditions. Also, Jason Burke’s excellent history on Al-Qaeda.

One birthday in 2005, I took myself on a trip to Hay-on-Wye. A cold, dark February. Largely deserted. Spending two days wandering around the town’s plethora of bookshops. So many options. So many choices to make. Buying the first Foundation books. Schindler’s Ark. Chandler’s final, unfinished Philip Marlowe novel, Playback. Seeing books like Brenda Maddox’s biography of Nora Joyce that I would buy online many years later.

A strange trip. Getting the train to Hereford. Sat reading the introduction to the Cambridge Press edition of Hamlet in a café, waiting for one of the handful of buses a day that go to Hay-on-Wye. Filled to the gills on Full English Breakfasts and my ear talked off by the landlady of the bed and breakfast where I was staying. Meaning to go back some day. A day yet to come.

How many other books have I bought on similar trips? Da Vinci biography from Clos Lucé. Chomsky in Florence. A Griel Marcus book on Dylan from Greenwich Village. Not to mention the many bookshops to be found in Amsterdam.

I remember one place I stumbled upon, which consisted mainly of Dutch language books. However, there was one lone bookshelf of English language editions. One shelf was almost entirely filled with Paul Auster novels. I was distraught. I wanted them all, but only had limited space in my backpack. I had to make do with a sole copy of Leviathan.

In Amsterdam’s American Book Exchange, many an American edition can be found. American and Canadian backpackers bring them with them from across the Atlantic and swap them out for newer books from the same shop. A treasure trove of secondhand books, replete with basement repository of science fiction and horror novels. One of my favourite places to idle away an afternoon, racked with indecision and guilt for those I leave behind.

Of course, the Mecca of European bookshops is the Parisian Shakespeare and Company, opposite Notre Dame cathedral. Not the original Shakespeare and Company, but baring the same name as Sylvia Beech’s shop that stood on the rue de l’Odéon until it was closed in 1941 following the Nazi invasion of France.

From that original location, Ulysses was first published, Beech financing its printing and publication. Not only a bookshop, but a lending library, Beech’s Shakespeare and Company was a familiar haunt for many writer’s of the so-called Lost Generation. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, all borrowed books from  Beech with varying levels of diligence about returning them on time. Hemingway was apparently one of the worst.

The original location is now a boutique, but George Whitman opened the current Shakespeare and Company in 1951 and continued to run it until his death in 2011. Part of the ritual of a transaction is to receive a Shakespeare and Company stamp on the flyleaf of the book you have bought. I have a few such books, but my copy of Campbell and Robinson’s A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake takes pride of place.

As well as physical bookshops, there are many places that sell books online. Although Abe Books is unfortunately owned by Amazon billionaire, Jeff Bezos, it is undoubtedly a valuable source for finding rare books that are otherwise out of print. As a reader and amateur scholar of James Joyce, I have found many reference books via Abe Books that I couldn’t have found anywhere else. I own three glossaries of the Gaelic, German, and Scandinavian words in Finnegan Wake, each of which are former library books and which had over the decades been borrowed a total of eight times between them before being withdrawn and put up for sale. I have also been able to find cheap, well preserved copies of most of the standard academic texts on Finnegans Wake from the same site.

My father was a great reader, though our tastes are somewhat divergent. He had a large collection of books on the kings and queens of England and was an avid collector of books on Horatio Nelson. Still, I did inherit from him my first copies of the collected Shakespeare and Oscar Wilde, as well as two copies of the collected Sherlock Holmes stories.

Many of his books were given to his local model building society after he died, but a few remained. Among these was a handful of Time Life Seafarers books that had stood on the bookshelves since the late 70s. Large black hardbacks, filled with glossy pictures. I often flipped through those books as a kid, enjoying the books on pirates and Vikings the most, like any boy with a vivid imagination. At some point I set out to actually read those books. Being more than forty years old, the veracity of the text has slipped somewhat, if it was ever very accurate to begin with.

Still, they are enjoyable for what they are and I wondered how many more there were in the series other than the ten we owned. A little research revealed a total of twenty two volumes. With the help of Abe Books, I set out to complete the set. Most were bought for a few pence plus postage and packaging from places like Tallahassee Public Library. All in remarkably good condition. Books that I will probably never read again, but like collecting mint green Penguin Modern Classic editions, the endeavour was done for entirely sentimental reasons. If nothing else, they serve as ballast at the bottom of one of my myriad bookcases.

I dislike brand loyalty and yet more of the books on my shelves are Penguin than of any other publisher. I drink out of a Bonjour Trieste cup. I have a cupboard full of similar Penguin Books mugs. I have boxes of postcards displaying Penguin covers that are affixed to the exposed sides of my bookcases.

Penguin were the first company in the UK to print cheap paperback editions of the classics and make them accessible to mainstream audiences. In 1960 they dared the wrath of the UK censors by publishing Lady Chatterley’s Lover and went to court to defend the public’s right to read it.

British and international readers owe Penguin an enormous debt of gratitude, not only for printing all kinds of paperback novels, but for filling the secondhand bookshops of the world with books that are in constant state of recycling. For hoarders like me, who are not rich and yet want to read and display the books twe have read, Penguin are an invaluable resource. As such, anyone can build a private library on a budget, should they so desire. 

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Le Rayon-Vert

Time-Life Seafarer Series

 

Le Rayon-Vert

History, as historian, Howard Zinn, noted, is an infinite series of events. In order to tell any story, real or imagined, one must cherry pick from those individual moments to form a coherent narrative. How one decides which events to depict and which to omit is ultimately a choice based on demographics and the background noise of commonly held mythologies in which our tribe is placed at the very centre of things. There are no objective voices. All of human existence and experience is subjective. Or as Zinn reflected in the title of his memoir: You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train.

Yet as Douglas Adams remind us in one of his typical aphorisms masquerading as comic wit: if life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.  Or perspective. In a chaotic, non-deterministic world, it takes a sentient mind to find patterns amongst the randomness. We create meaning in the meaningless. We find shapes in signal noise like faces seen in clouds.

Such cherry picking can bring purpose or it can send us chasing shadows of conspiracy. All of us at some time lose our sense of proportion and our sense of perspective. It can be humiliating and disheartening when a long held belief is shown to be erroneous: When the fleeting cloud face deforms into a new shape, or the grotesque in the shadows resolves into something benign and mundane: To realise that the Universe never thinks about us and will neither mourn or even notice our passing. Our relevance is limited to the time in which we exist. It is fleeting and when it is over it quickly fades, like an afterimage of the sun.

Yet what can we do? We must find meaning in order to thrive; in order to survive. The following history (apt, given the double meaning of histoire in French) is of no significance or importance to anyone but me. Which is exactly the thing that gives it meaning.

I grew up on naval estates. Eight of the first twelve years of my life were spent living in and around Helensburgh in the west of Scotland, down the coast from the Faslaine Naval Base where my father was stationed. We lived there on three separate occasions, as well as stints in Plymouth, Birmingham and Barrow in Furness, where my brother was born. 

Helensburgh

I began my life in this area, born in the Vale of Leven hospital in Alexandria by the banks of Loch Lomond. Year later in Balloch, next to Alexandria, we would take our dog, Boomer, for long walks in the park where he could tire himself out. And, inevitably, throw himself into the waters of the loch at every opportunity.

This is where many of my formative experiences took place. I first read the Hobbit here. I first heard Queen here. Owned my first computer here (a Spectrum 48k+). Here I watched Live Aid. I watched Raiders of the Lost Ark at one friend’s house and saw pirated copies of Ghostbusters and Gremlins at another’s. I learned about new films from watching Film ’84, Film ’85 and all of its subsequent incarnations.

At the beginning of 1986, my father left the Navy after more than twenty years and we found ourselves in Eastbourne, on the south west coast of England. More formative experiences. Sea Cadets. Sailing. Visiting Herstmonceux Observatory with Astronomy Club. Seeing the Hobbit play at the local theatre. Discovering the Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy for the first time. Also discovering Jules Verne.

It happened because of watching Film ’86 or Film ’87. Barry Norman’s review for a film called, Le Rayon Vert. The film came out in 1986, but it might not have been released in the UK until the following year. The film itself was of little interest to me. What did interest me was the background details. The film was named after the Jules Verne novel of the same name.

The title was what fascinated me. Le Rayon Vert. Translated as, The Green Ray, it refers to the very final particles of light that radiate out from the sun at sunset. The phenomenon is rare and can only be seen under certain conditions and in certain parts of the world. On very calm stretches of ocean or incredibly flat stretches of desert. From high and dry mountain planes or in fight with no cloud cover obscuring the view.

There is an old legend that anyone who sees the green ray will start to make sense of their life. The idea beguiled me. I went to the library to try and find a copy of the book, but it is not regarded as a major work from the dozens Jules Verne wrote and our small, local library was unlikely to carry a copy. What I did find was a copy of Five Weeks in a Ballon, which I withdrew and took home.

Jules Verne has been with me from that time until now. I don’t remember if I even finished Five Weeks in a Balloon that first time. The text was small and in a book that fitted easily in my squat palm. I remember struggling through it and the memory is clouded as to whether I finished it or not. I think it’s likely that I kept renewing the loan period in the hope of completing it, but gave up at some point and returned it to the library in favour of something less challenging.

What I did have was a collection of abridged versions of the classics, cut down for adolescent readers. The Old Curiosity Shop. Tom Brown’s School Days. Ivanhoe. There were many others, as well as what are perhaps Jules Verne’s three most famous novels: 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Journey to the Centre of the Earth and Around the World in Eighty Days.

These books I did complete. There was a sponsored reading week or fortnight in which they formed the core of the books I read in that time. It was a struggle. I was not a natural reader at that time. Amazing when you consider that as an adult I read between one and two hundred books a year across a breadth of genres. But if any writer laid the foundations on that long journey from faltering to accomplished reader, it was Jules Verne.

Verne was for a long time considered a children’s writer in the English speaking world. This is mainly the fault of terrible translations from the French in which he wrote. Yet if one considers for instance, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, there is much scientific detail included. It doesn’t quite go to the extent of Moby Dick, where Melville was essentially copying out, verbatim, oceanic and biological passages from textbooks, but it’s not far off. The abridged, children’s edition that I read in Eastbourne obviously excised much of these technical passages. Which is probably for the best. They’re hard enough to understand as an adult.

I guess the light soon faded on my interest in Jules Verne, as do all such fleeting childhood obsessions. It was only as an adult, inspired by Michael Palin’s Around the World in Eighty Days, that I returned to Jules Verne. Yet by this point in my life, I had become a literary magpie, fascinated by every new shiny object. Graham Greene novels. George Orwell’s fiction and non-fiction. Maya Anjou autobiography. Frankenstein. His Dark Materials. Jane Eyre. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy books read again and again and again.

As such, my re-acquaintance and deep dive into Jules Verne’s novels has been slow. I reread 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Journey to the Centre of the Earth and Around the World in Eighty Days in their unabridged versions. I read From Earth to Moon and Around the Moon in a single edition. I struggled through the overlong The Mysterious Island. But there wasn’t much else to choose from. Despite writing many novels during his lifetime, very few are commonly available in English translation. Even once popular books like Une Ville Flottante, or A Floating City, are these days hard to find. So I did the only thing I could do. I turned to versions in their original French.

Actually, it was the other way around. My French has always been middling, despite studying it on and off since Eastbourne. But I had started trying to read more in French, having hoarded second hand Folio editions since university. Satre. Camus. Zola. All far above my level, but you can’t expect to go any higher unless you’re prepared to climb. So I read them. And reread them. And looked up the words I didn’t know. Which in the modern world, with access to resources like Wiktionary, is easier than ever.

In the meantime, I acquired other French language editions. Flaubert. Simone de Beauvoir. More Zola (I love Zola). A translation of Ulysses (difficulty level: God) brought back for me from France. I found online resources. I recommend ebooksgrauit.com, which has open source copies of many copyright expired books, including Verne, Zola, George Sand, Alexander Dumas and many others in a number of different formats.

Somewhere online I found a download of more than fifty Jules Verne novels and short stories and dove in. At the beginning I decided to go though hem in order of publication. Which meant the first book on the list was, ironically, Cinq Semaines en Ballon, or Five Weeks in a Balloon. Nearly twenty five years later, I finally finished reading it.

Along with the next book in the series, Voyages et Adventures du Capitaine Hatteras, you find a key feature of Verne’s writing in Cinq Semaines en Ballon. As much as his novels are about the adventure or voyage being depicted, they are also about the history of adventure and exploration. Cinq Semaines en Ballon is about travelling across Africa in a balloon, but it is about the history of European exploration in Africa (with the destructive consequences of colonial exploration glossed over with depressing predictability).  Voyages et Adventures du Capitaine Hatteras is about the journey to reach the North Pole, but is also about Arctic and Antarctic exploration in general.

I soon abandoned the chronological reading order. Many of Verne’s earlier novels were serialised in magazine form and are long books as a result. My French remains middling and I need shorter books to retain the concentration levels. So I read some of his shorter novels in between Madame Bovary and Le Deuxième Sexe and a couple of books by Senegalese writer, Fatou Diome. At some point I remembered Le Rayon Vert and routed through the download folder but couldn’t find it. It is such a minor story that it wasn’t even included with fifty nine others freely available for download.

Yet Le Rayon Vert is out there. I found a .pdf copy of the book and downloaded it. I knew I would get around to it, but opened the file to check it wasn’t corrupted. And what did I find on the very first page, but reference to Helensburgh! The damned book that stared my interest in Jules Verne, that paved the way to my love of reading, takes place in the place where I began.

Why I didn’t abandon everything I was doing and read the book there and then, I don’t know. I was reading too much as it was. I was probably already reading something else by Jules Verne. So I closed the file down and forgot about it for a year or two.

When I did read it, a week ago as I write, the book featured so much more than Helensburgh. The bulk of the story takes places in and around Oban and the Hebrides. Yet it opens and ends on the outskirts of Helensburgh, close to Faslaine. But more than that, Verne makes reference to Leven, when I was born, and Balloch, where we took Boomer to run himself ragged. Clearly Verne visited the area. People living in Glasgow, twenty miles away, are barely aware of these places. To think that Jules Verne came to these places and was inspired to write a novel, even a minor one, is of great significance to me, even, and because, it means so little to anyone else.

The book itself is fine. It contains scattered references to the works of Sir Walter Scott and it seems to be a pastiche of Scott and other early 19^th century romantic novelists. Scott was at one time the most famous novelist in the world, although his influence had declined by the end of the century. He had a huge influence on the likes of Alexander Dumas, who was a contemporary and good friend of Jules Verne.

Le Rayon-Vert is the age old tale of a woman, Helena Campbell, being compelled to marry one man, but the man is a prize tool. She won’t agree to marry him until she has seen the green ray, which is a bit like wanting to find the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. She sets off in the direction of Oban, where conditions might be right to witness the phenomenon. On the journey from Helensburgh, she meets the man who she will actually marry. When the green ray finally appears at the end of the novel, the couple are instead looking at each other, the faint reflection seen in each other’s eyes. They are each other’s green ray, where meaning has been found all by itself.

Le Rayon-Vert is a very different novel from most of the others that Verne wrote (certainly of the ones I have read). Perhaps that’s why it’s not included with his common cannon. There is no race across the world, or balloon ride over Africa, or journey into the bowels of the Earth. There are no futuristic submarines or space rockets shot out of a giant cannon. The journey Helena Campbell makes from Helensburgh to Oban is one that can be made by anyone today. Although Le Rayon-Vert is included in Verne’s Voyages Extraordinaires series, it is as much a romance as it is an adventure novel. The voyage is commonplace rather than being in any way extraordinary.

Moreover, Le Rayon-Vert is rarely mentioned in reference to Helensburgh. The town’s website makes no mention of Jules Verne. Neither does its Wikipedia page. None of the people I know who have lived in Helensburgh or been there had even heard of Le Rayon-Vert until I mentioned it.

Where Le Rayon-Vert is mentioned is in the film of the same name. I did watch it ten years ago when renting it from Love Film during the brief period when receiving DVD rentals through the post was a thing. I watched it again after finishing the novel. 

It’s an odd film. Largely made up of scenes of improvised dialogue. It was apparently shot using a crew of four. In several scenes, the actors are caught glancing at the camera, which is impossible to conceal or style out. I haven’t seen any other films by director, Eric Rohmer’s, but it appears to be typical of his style. Glacial storytelling. Little in the way of scored music but lots of ambient noise. From what little I have read, Rohmer is a love-him-or-hate-him director. Le Rayon-Vert is one of a series of films that he made in the 1980s that are similar, thematically. I’d like to watch the others in the series.

Film and book have little in common narratively speaking, but share some of the same themes. Both feature women as their main characters with Delphine the analogue to Helena Campbell. Yet while Helena is a force of nature, Delphine is introverted and defensive against the efforts by her friends to talk with her. She spends the whole film on her own, even as scuzzy men follow her down the street. At Biarritz train station she meets Jacques,  who’s only marginally less sleazy, but the two end the film sat on a hilltop at sunset, waiting for the green ray. Unlike Helena, she sees the ray for herself (a terrible post-production effect), which suggest Jacques will be a fleeting acquaintance.

I’d forgotten the scene where Delphine happens upon a book club sat on a wall, discussing Verne’s Le Rayon-Vert and the phenomenon in general. She sits on a bench beneath them to listen. It might have even been one of the clips Barry Norman showed on Film ’86 or Film ’87. It’s a patchy film, but somewhat beguiling. Ten years after seeing it for the first time, there was much I remembered and even anticipated. It’s one of those films where you look up the actors on IMDB to see where you know them from and it turns out where you know them from is this film.

I prefer the book to the film, but it’s not a fair contest. The film doesn’t feature even one scene set in Helensburgh. Yet without the film, I would never have arrived at the novel. I would certainly have turned to Jules Verne eventually. I am too much of a sci-fi nerd not to have done so. But Le Rayon-Vert would have been a long way down the line. I might have stumbled upon it eventually, having finished all the other Jules Verne novels. Which would have meant missing a novel that is minor to the world, but more significant than the sum of its parts. The film is an essential link in a chain that leads back to the book and into personal history.

We find meaning in meaninglessness. Find patterns among the randomness. There is nothing mystical about Verne’s Le Rayon-Vert beginning and ending in Helensburgh, nor a chance reference in a Barry Norman program setting me on my literary way. I have seen the green ray in two different incarnations, but nothing has been brought into focus or the meaning of the universe revealed.

As with in English, I have become a magpie of French language novels. I will continue to plough through forty or fifty more Jules Verne stories, in between books by Zola, Sand, Rousseau, Camus, Irène Némirovsky, Stendhal, Dumas and a dozen other authors besides. Perhaps the path was always laid out before me. If it hadn’t been La rue Jules Verne, another route would have led me in the same direction. Yet in a world of such size, we cannot afford to think about roads not taken. This is where we find ourselves. This is where I am. Le Rayon-Vert has been my guiding star.

 

Drive Wheel

This is heaven, she thinks. Flashing lights. Bass pounding in her chest. Several hundred writhing bodies all moving to the beat. Sweat pouring off of her body. Hips moving. Arms flailing. Booty shaking. Everyone cheering in pauses of the relentless rhythm. Who needs the gym when this the only cardio vascular activity you will ever need? This is vital. This is living. This is all there is.

Time loses meaning here. Who cares how she got here? This is where she is. And if you are happy with where you are at any moment, you can’t regret any decision that put you there. It’s the wrong turns that take you to unexpected places. She had always lived for the moment. The moment that seems to last an eternity. Like Sartre’s idea of the perfect moment. Like now.

Worshipping at the church of sound. That’s what someone called it once. And she had bourne witness to the beat all over the world, on every continent, even a party boat off the coast of Antarctica. Now the bright lights have led her here. To the apotheosis of rave culture. Ibiza has nothing on this place. She loves it here. She could stay here forever.

I hate it here. Why am I here? I hate clubs. Clubs are the crystalisation of everything I despise. Enclosed spaces. Bright lights. Noise. Sweaty herberts. Other people’s music. Other people. Not to mention dancing. The sight of people dancing makes my genitalia retreat inside my body. Someone asked me why I wasn’t dancing. Self-awareness, I replied. Dignity. Basic self-control. Take your pick. No-one looks good dancing.

Why am I here? It can’t have been my choice. Too much to drink perhaps. I don’t remember drinking anything, but the aftertaste of lukewarm lager from the half empty plastic pint glass on the sticky table in front of me seems to contradict that memory. Did someone drop something in my drink and drag me here? Don’t remember being in the pub. Last thing I remember, I was driving. Undipped headlights on the road ahead of me. Then nothing. Then here.

So many regrets. So many wrong choices. So many wrong turns. So busy closing myself off to new opportunities; new experiences. And for what? To end up here, sat alone in the worst place I can imagine, while people enjoy their lives all around me. This is sadistic. This is torture. This is hell.

 This is heaven, this is hell.
This is living, this is tale to tell.
This is drive wheel, this is cog.
This is master, this is snarling dog. 

Chumbawamba, Bad Dog, Good Girl

 

Books on Film: Drive My Car

 *spoilers*

Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s 2021 film, Drive My Car, is based on the Haruki Murakami short story of the same name. Actually, the film takes sections from three Murakami stories included in the 2014 collection, Men Without Women (Onna no inai otokotachi). Elements from Scheherazade and Kino complete the triptych.

The original story is no longer than forty pages and yet the film adaptation runs to nearly three hours. So how much of the film is derived from its source material? The short answer is, not much. Yet, as we shall see, what Drive My Car lacks in fidelity of translation, it makes up for by creating a cinematic landscape faithful and familiar to much of Murakami’s writing.

Murakami’s version of Drive my Car can be summarised as follows: Stage actor, Kafuku, is forced to hire a driver to take to and from rehearsals of The Cherry Orchard after being convicted of drunk driving. His driver is 24 year old Misaki Watar. During the journey, Kafuku practices his lines by way of a tape recording and tells Misaki about his wife, who died of cancer many years before.

Kafuku’s wife had had a string of affairs during their marriage. After her death, he befriends her final lover in hope of finding a weakness by which he can emotionally torture the man. Yet he comes to like him and after six months of drinking together in bars, Kafuku breaks off the friendship. Watar tells him that his wife’s affairs probably had nothing to do with her love for him one way or another. The story ends with Kafuku falling asleep on the back seat of the car.

 

The most glaring difference between story and film is that the story takes place almost exclusively in the car. Other than breaking off halfway through to tell in flashback the barroom meetings between Kafuku and Takatsuki, the action is confined to the inside of Kafuku’s Saab. Despite retaining the title of the story, the scenes inside the car are only one small part of the film.

Indeed, it is more than forty five minutes before Misaki makes an appearance. The first act focuses on Kafuku relationship with his wife, Oto, leading up to her demise. The cause of her death is changed. Three quarters of an hour elapse before the opening credits roll (delayed credits are apparently a trend in cinema at the moment). A different rationale is presented for Kafuku being driven to rehearsals, having to do with insurance premiums on the production, of which he is the director. The rehearsal tape playing in the car had been recorded by his late wife.

The film extends on the short story by drawing the rehearsal sessions into the action. It is a multi-lingual production, employing actors from China, Korea and Japan, including a Korean actor who speaks only in sign language. Moreover, Oto’s lover is brought into the present day, being cast in the part of Boris. As much as in the story, his inclusion in the production is an act of masochism on the part of Kafuku.

Takatsuki is younger than the Murakami version. More brash and arrogant. He is the one who instigates the drinking sessions with Kafuku, making the scenes more combative than in print. Kafuku is reticent to engage Takatsuki and give him the acting advice he craves. He is more generous with his direction towards others in the production.

Kafuku had walked in on Takatsuki and his wife in bed together, which is the main element taken from the story, Kino. Although unlike Kino, Kafuku leaves without being seen by the lovers and never reveals to his wife what he saw. Later we hear Oto had many affairs, but unlike the story it is unclear whether this is true or whether he tells Takatsuki this to wound the man and reduce the importance of their relationship in his mind.

Takatsuki has his revenge of sorts on Kafuku. Like the woman known only as Scheherazade in the story of the same name, Oto tells her lovers stories during and after sex. One of the final stories she tells to Kafuku is unfinished and almost identical to the main one Scheherazade tells. How Scheherazade broke into the house of a boy she was at school with. How she stole small items from his bedroom and left things like tampons hidden in his drawers.

Oto tells Kafuku she could never finish the story and yet Takatsuki knows how it ends, further highlighting the intensity of her relationship with the latter over the former. Yet the story does not end in the way it does in the book. The denouement is more intense and other worldly. It too is culled from another Murakami book, but at the moment I can’t remember which one.

Meanwhile, the relationship between Kafuku and Misaki evolves throughout the film. Like the story, Misaki is roughly the same age as the daughter Kafuku and Oto had had together but who had died very young and been the cause of their estrangement to one another for many years. Kafuku sees Misaki as a daughter figure. Misaki’s backstory is filled out to give her a character arc that intersects with Kafuku, both of them believing themselves to be responsible for the deaths of loved ones. The film’s final act sees them take a road trip to the remains of the house in which Misaki grew up.

Much of the core of the story is scooped out and refilled for the film, but this is fine. In writing a short story, a writer has to limit themselves as to the scope of what is included. The more complicated the narrative threads, the harder they are to all pull together into a tight weave. Although Murakami’s stories are often ambiguous, there still has to be enough from which the reader can draw their own meaning and conclusions. Drive My Car as a story is self-contained and narrow in scope. This is in contrast to Scheherazade and Kino, which are each opened ended and unresolved.

In extending the story to three hours, the details and stakes of the narrative necessarily have to be changed in order to fill a three hour run time. Therefore much of the detail and minutiae of the plot is altered. Yet that which is introduced is mostly all in keeping with the themes one finds running through Murakami’s fiction.

The only obvious omission is the supernatural elements that are a feature of much of what Murakami writes. There are other worldly threads within the film, but these are restricted to the stories Oto tells her lovers. The action we see is entirely routed in the real world. It is therefore more like Norwegian Wood, which is the only Murakami novel to date which is entirely based in reality.

Kafuku is a markedly different character in the film as compared to the story; more morose and isolated. Yet in many ways he is a more typical Murakami archetype than the Kafuku found in Murakami’s own story. Misaki is also given more pathos than the pencil-drawn outline of the story. Her fleshed out film persona is a combination of the tragic and the self-possessed women found in Murakami’s novels.

The film is, at times, glacially slow. This will inevitably put some people off watching it, coupled with its three hour run time and being, for the most part, subtitled. Personally, I found it a peasant change to watch something shawn of all noticeable special effects. As a sci-fi fan, special effects are fine as long as they are used to advance a narrative rather than replace it. Sadly, too many blockbuster movies these days seem to resemble a video game on demo mode.

Drive My Car is a film for Murakami fans, but it is also a film for readers in general. A film for people who enjoy a story well told. A story revealed through character and the things that are understood but left unspoken. As story where the viewer is left to draw their own conclusions.

Indeed the final scene of the film, like any good Murakami story, is ambiguous (although a little digging helps glean a few details that might be missed by a western audience). The main threads have been pulled together and tied off. Chekhov’s gun has been fired. Yet like Scheherazade’s truncated tales, there is always a little narrative left over for another day.

Read More

Reading Murakami (or What I Think About When I Read Haruki Murakami) 

Books on Film: A Scanner Darkly