Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 - Hunter S. Thompson
As a self-described liberal and progressive, this book depressed me. It is a typical Hunter S. Thompson rollercoaster following the 1972 presidential democratic Primaries and the election contest between George McGovern and Richard Nixon.
It's a classic example of Thompson's 'Gonzo' style of journalism; he involves himself intimately with events, admits to misremembering facts, and reporting them through a drug and alcohol-fuelled haze. He makes no claims to objectivity (indeed, after Nixon is elected in a landslide, there is a chapter where his editor simply printed a verbatim transcript of an interview with him after he became too 'bummed out' to actually finish the chapter on time.)
As a behind-the-scenes look at the dirty realities of a presidential campaign, it's both stimulating and depressing as it draws some uncomfortable parallels with Jeremy Corbyn's current bid to become the next Labour Prime Minister in the UK (Unorthodox left-leaning candidate elected on the back of students and activists but unpopular with the Party machinery fighting against a right-wing incumbent with a strong control over the narrative...)
8/10
High Rise J.G. Ballard
The inhabitants in the eponymous High Rise live a stratified life in a 40-storey block of flats. Although they all hail from the same social circles, the nature of the building divides them by class into (literally) lower, middle and upper classes. The novel follows a resident of each as the wild nightly parties and the minor irritations of high-rise living erode away civilisation until the residents find themselves at war between floors, eventually descending into a squalid tribal existence within the confines of the building.
The descent of the building into anarchy is described wonderfully, as elevators break down, the garbage piles up, rooms are ransacked and excrement clogs the ventilators. The violence is visceral, and clearly inspired by his own experiences in Japanese-occupied Shanghai.
The biggest problem, for me, was the sheer believability of it. Over two-thousand people live in the building, plus all the staff, delivery drivers, visitors, garbage collectors, meter-readers, and yet not one of them raises concerns with the police? Not one of the residents’ colleagues or families are concerned when they stop going into work? The supermarket suppliers and bank operators aren’t worried about their loss of profit? I understand the message that the residents eventually become grateful for the opportunity to live lives as decadent and hedonistic as they please but I struggled to believe that it applied to absolutely everybody who had any dealings with the building.
What this novel needed was an external threat to isolate the high-rise but then it wouldn’t have stayed true to its central conceit about human nature really being feral and brutish. Ballard had the choice of either making it believable or sacrificing his parable. By doing neither, the story ends of feeling a little contrived and the message is confused and hollow.
7/10
The Martian – Andy Weir
A sandstorm hits a Mars exploration mission 6 days into its 6-month mission. When one astronaut is hit and apparently killed by flying debris, the rest of the crew assume he’s dead and leave without him. Having survived the disaster, Mark Watney has to figure out how to McGuiver his way to survival until a plan can be developed to rescue him.
After the bleakness of Ballard and the cynicism of Thompson, I needed something a little lighter. Fortunately, this delivered.
Told mostly through log entries, the novel is carried by the good humour of its central protagonist as he bodges his way through every problem Mars can throw at him. Jury-rigging old probes, recycling shit, and patching holes are just some of the solutions he has to come up with. Weir has done his homework and, not only can you tell, he’s shown his working, without flooding the pages with too much maths.
This isn’t a literary classic, nor does it aspire to be. It’s a fun survival story with an uplifting message. The overly-informal writing style did start to grate by about half-way through, but I can overlook it when there’s so much to like.
7/10