Jack

I came late to this continuum of English men that seems to run through Martin Amis and Ian McEwan, then somehow to connect with Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and into the murky depths of modern “rationalist” movements and “free thinkers.” I worry that if I'd been exposed to it at the right stage of being an angry young man, I'd be more insufferable today.

Putting all that to one side for a minute, McEwan and Amis are both very good at writing pointy stories about horrid men. Money is particularly interesting at the moment because it's hard not to read the protagonist as Trump, isn't it? This man lusts and sweats his way around New York, ugly and moving always in a patina of, if not the reality of: money. The hollow in the middle of the man. His downfall as a result of his own stupidity and the avarice of the wronguns around him. It all has echoes.

The foul, brilliant narration is impressive if exhausting. The inclusion of the author as a character gets a little bit of an eye roll from me but I don't mind it terribly. In the end, I come away wondering quite why these men of dubious intellectual circles are so good at writing these male monsters that want to make you tear your own skin off. And yes, I come away entertained.

This is the first Boyd I've read and I picked it up after listening to an interview the author did, presumably on the press tour for his new spy novel Gabriel's Moon. I learned in that interview that he's known for his spy fiction and after some time poking at other things, he's back on the espionage and it's quite good. I also scratched down the names of the early career-defining titles. I picked up Brazzaville Beach.

It does not spoil the book to tell you that Brazzaville Beach is not a spy novel. You'd be able to figure that out by reading the back, which I usually don't. It's a book that is set amongst a community of experts studying a colony of chimps in the Republic of Congo. Our protagonist is Hope and she's seeing the chimps do things that upset the theories of the lead scientist in the camp, and her benefactor. Hijinks ensue.

This story goes places. It's a great high wire act that is remarkably propulsive and at the same time adept at peeling back the psychological layers of the protagonist through flashbacks. Where it doesn't go is espionage. Hilariously in hindsight, I spent about the first half of the book waiting for somebody to subtly tip their hand as intelligence. All right, enough with the monkeys, who's spying on who, I thought. Nobody, obviously, that's the other ones.

It's strange how the cultural moment say, eight years ago can feel so much more outmoded than two decades back. It's the narcissism of small differences, maybe, that made me recoil in irritation from this book. It's a micro-memoir, it's a piece of gonzo reporting about love and sex in a particular corner of the modern age: Silicon Valley in the years of optimism.

The author is a Googler living in the Bay Area. She finds herself at sea with the evolving landscape of relationships and dating. She asks good questions about where the free love moment has actually landed us. Do we have new, better models to follow in our love lives? Or are we just fucking it up in novel ways?

She goes some way in looking for answers. She looks at dating apps, the production of professional porn, chat girls, something called orgasmic meditation, sex parties, polyamory. She does in-person gonzo reporting. She reflects through the lens of her own relationships. All the while, there's a feeling building in me (no, not that kind), and it culminates in the Burning Man section.

God I hate these people. Yes, self-awareness pours off the page, about being a rich tech worker ruining San Francisco, ditto ruining Burning Man. It failed to inoculate me from the feeling that whatever the answers are to the cultural questions of the moment, I wish this distorted region of the West Coast wasn't treated like the laboratory of society. It's an idea generally in decline, and this book only makes me glad to see the back of the cultural era.

I love books about an intellectual scene and I love books about Fucked Up Little Guys(tm). These two interests often intersect. Other examples include Bright Young People, about the social set that dominated British tabloid headlines in the 30s and were sent up in Evelyn Waugh's fiction and Grand Hotel Abyss, about the lives of the philosophers of the Frankfurt School. They're all messy weirdos who bounced off of another and brilliant to read about. Also you get to sound intellectual whilst basically just reading tabloid gossip.

When We Cease to Understand the World concerns itself with the figures responsible for the rise of quantum physics. Schrödinger, Heisenberg, all the boys are here. What Labatut does that is particularly good is depicting the psychological effect of the discoveries. The scientists finding these irresolvable truths and actually understanding them basically all lose their marbles, and Labatut does a good job at depicting why to an innumerate audience (me).

There's something pruriently exciting too about the intellectual 20th century scene. Heads up, fascism is coming, do your equations and figure it out before the bombs start falling and the camps are built. You can feel the precipitous acceleration towards mechanised society and the nuclear bomb from all the way back to the 1910s, when the secrets of the subatomic are revealing themselves to these neurotic little guys — and freaking the fuck out.

I read The Collector a few years ago, and that was the impression I had of John Fowles. It's a claustrophobic, captive horror story with an antagonist with a twisty, turny psychology. When I started reading The Magus and it opened up on this beautiful Greek island, a setting that's bright and open from sea to sea, I figured if it was going to be a completely different beast.

It's was and it wasn't. It plays out over a much grander stage and time scale, and very gradually walks you from Mediterranean wish fulfilment to a psychological horror that totally unseats your sense of reality.

I love a horror story where the characters make perfectly reasonable and smart moves but still cannot get out of dodge. I can't fault Nicholas, I'm sure I'd end up in just the same bind. His torturer plays on his sense of good manners, his vanity, his desires, and his curiosity. The layers just keep coming and coming.