Tuesday, 30 April 2013

JOHN WENTLEY INVESTIGATES by JFC WESTERMAN


John Wentley Investigates (1939) is the second of three John Wentley tales written by boys' adventure writer, John Francis Cyril Westerman.  I have only read the one.

JFC Westerman is, these days, an unknown story-teller but, looking at the British Library catalogue, he published around 30 books primarily in the 30s and early 1940s and in so doing was for twenty years or so, actively writing at the same time as his father - also a teller of adventures - the more familiar Percy Westerman whose total output was at least five times his son's.

The narrative in this book is linear and trite.  The storyline concerns a global aeroplane-based conspiracy (don't be confused by the racer on the dust wrapper) stealing not only gold and specie but also the 'planes and pilots to undertake this nefarious business. Wentley's former employer has lost a couple of 'planes and their crews and pilot John, accompanied by the somewhat hapless George is sent to sort out the mess. Which he does.

Without spoiling the plot (as if you care), a key element of the criminal gang's success (the gang is called the 'Hovering Eagle', incidentally) is the possession of a device capable of projecting a tractor beam which draws aeroplanes to it.  (The existence of mysterious rays operated by crooks is also a common theme in Percy's books).

I've read a lot of Percy and even from this single incursion into the son's oeuvre I can see two stylistic differences between the pair.  The first is that Percy commonly uses boys or very young men as his central characters - directly associating the target reader with the fiction.  John Wentley, however, is older - mid to late 20s and is, in fact, rather a pale shadow of the younger Biggles.  Unfortunately he's not supported by the cast of characters - Algy, Bertie and Ginger - that WE Johns created.  George, sadly, is just not very interesting and also has an annoying habit of doing himself down despite being an accomplished pilot.

The second difference is in the dialogue.  Where Percy uses (somewhat dated) slang phrases: 'My festive' comes to mind, JFC uses none - at least not in this book - and so there's none of the dashing raffish airman, merely a clever young man sorting things out.

From the number of pages, 256, one would not immediately say John Wentley Investigates is short enough to qualify for this blog.  But the type is large and the line spacing significant so it takes no time to read.




John Wentley Investigates - 256pp.  My copy published by The Children's Press (London and Glasgow).



       

Monday, 29 April 2013

MONSIEUR PAIN by ROBERTO BALAÑO


Even the title of this novel is uncertain if not surreal.  In the author's 'Preliminary Note', Bolaño tells us the following: "Many years ago, in 1981 or 1982, I wrote Monsieur Pain.  Its fate has been haphazard and erratic.  Under the title The Elephant Path it won the Felix Urubayen prize for a short novel awarded by Toledo City Council.  Not long before it had been shortlisted in another provincial competition under a different title."

If this information is true it is at best confusing since, at least to my reading, there is no reason whatsoever why this story set in Paris at the time of the Spanish Civil War but harking back to events 10 or 15 years earlier, should ever have been called The Elephant Path or, indeed The Elephant Track (although this may be a translation issue) which is the title of the so-called 'Epilogue for Voices' which closes the book .

I say "if it is true" without wishing to doubt Bolaño, but he does use three first person characters.  The first, as quoted, presumably his own voice; the second through the main body of the narrative, the eponymous Monsieur Pain a survivor of the First World War horrors of Verdun and an amateur practitioner of 'animal magnetism'; and then an unknown 'I' in the Epilogue who provides brief biographical notes on some of the characters - I'm tempted to call them 'inmates' - of the story.

For example (from the Epilogue) and talking of how, post World War II, Monsieur Pain came to work at a cabaret: "How did Monsieur Pain come to work there? I guess it was after he lost his war veteran's pension at the beginning of the Occupation.  So it must have been in September, October or November of 1940 that he turned up at the House of the Old Companions looking absolutely pitiful, as if he'd gone for a month without eating so much as a mouthful of bread; Gandhi was plump by comparison.  I was fifteen at the time and working as the cabaret's errand boy."

Other reviewers have described Monsieur Pain as containing elements of Poe, Borges and even Chandler.  Borges, certainly, but I failed to find the horrors Poe would have imposed and there is none of the pace nor humour of Chandler in this story of an lone 48 year-old tangentially involved in the death, either by natural causes or as the result of a conspiracy, of Monsieur Vallejo - a poor poet.  Characters shift in an out of vision.  At one point Pierre Pain declares his love for Madame Reynaud, the widow of a man whose life Pain failed to save on his first and only attempt (prior to Vallejo) to use Mesmeric forces to save life in terminal decline. 

But Pain does not declare his love to Madame Reynaud but does so when talking to Monsieur Rivette, an aging sage who may, or may not know what's going on but is certainly not party to the suspicions that Pierre Curie, Marie Curie's husband, was killed by intent rather than by accident when run over by a carriage on the rue Dauphine in 1906.  These are told to Pain by the enigmatic Aloysius Pleumeur-Bodou (a.k.a. Maurice Feval) when talking about a friend, Terzeff, film footage of whom, working in a laboratory, has been grafted into a later movie, Actualité, that Pleumeur-Bodou has seen many times but still includes sections, he says, that he may never understand.    

At its best, Monsieur Pain occupies the interstices between sleeping and waking or between sanity and madness.  Pain dreams frequently and bizarrely; much of the conversation between Pain and Pleumeur-Bodu takes place in a cinema where Actualité is playing and is intercut with descriptions of, and dialogue from, the movie; the Clinique Arago, where Vallejo is dying, is a Escher construction of irrelevant staircases and half-finished rooms with non-sequential numbering; a warehouse where Pain spends the night in near total darkness is an unexplained repository "full of useless junk, but at first I couldn't determine the nature of the objects or the uses they might once have had."  And then we have the two half-described Spaniards who threaten Pain, bribe him (to stop treating Vallejo) and are then relegated to walk-on parts never again fully spotlit. Underlying all this are recurrent themes of drunkeness, rain, darkness and shadows.

The book that this story most strongly brought to my mind is Ishiguro's, The Unconsoled  which itself was, as I recall, described by The Times as a work of either genius or madness.  Exactly.



Monsieur Pain, first published 2010.  2011 UK edition by Picador 134pp.