Ten Years in the Tub (41 page)

     
  
The Men Who Stare at Goats
—Jon Ronson

     
  
Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction
—Sue Townsend

     
  
The Wonder Spot
—Melissa Bank

     
  
Stuart: A Life Backwards
—Alexander Masters

The story so far: suddenly sick of my taste in books, I vowed in these pages last month to read something I wouldn't normally pick up. After much deliberation (and the bulk of the otherwise inexplicable Books Bought can be explained by this brief but actually rather exhilarating period), I decided that my friend Harry was right, and that in the normal course of events I'd never read an SF/Fantasy novel in a million years. Now read on, if you can be bothered
.

E
ven buying Iain M. Banks's
Excession
was excruciating. Queuing up behind me at the cash desk was a very attractive young woman clutching some kind of groovy art magazine, and I felt obscurely compelled to tell her that the reason I was buying this purple book with a spacecraft on the cover was because of the
Believer
, and the
Believer
was every bit as groovy as her art
magazine. In a rare moment of maturity, however, I resisted the compulsion. She could, I decided, think whatever the hell she wanted. It wasn't a relationship that was ever going to go anywhere anyway. I'm with someone, she's probably with someone, she was twenty-five years younger than me, and—let's face it—the
Believer
isn't as groovy as all that. If we had got together, that would have been only the first of many disappointing discoveries she'd make.

When I actually tried to read
Excession
, embarrassment was swiftly replaced by trauma. Iain M. Banks is a highly rated Scottish novelist who has written twenty-odd novels, half of them (the non-SF half) under the name Iain Banks, and though I'd never previously read him, everyone I know who is familiar with his work loves him. And nothing in the twenty-odd pages I managed of
Excession
was in any way bad; it's just that I didn't understand a word. I didn't even understand the blurb on the back of the book: “Two and a half millennia ago, the artifact appeared in a remote corner of space, beside a trillion-year-old dying sun from a different universe. It was a perfect black-body sphere, and it did nothing. Then it disappeared. Now it is back.” This is clearly intended to entice us into the novel—that's what blurbs do, right? But this blurb just made me scared. An artifact—that's something you normally find in a museum, isn't it? Well, what's a museum exhibit doing floating around in space? So what if it did nothing? What are museum exhibits supposed to do? And this dying sun—how come it's switched universes? Can dying suns do that?

The urge to weep tears of frustration was already upon me even before I read the short prologue, which seemed to describe some kind of androgynous avatar visiting a woman who has been pregnant for forty years and who lives on her own in the tower of a giant spaceship. (Is this the artifact? Or the dying sun? Can a dying sun be a spaceship? Probably.) By the time I got to the first chapter, which is entitled “Outside Context Problem” and begins “(
CGU Grey Area
signal sequence file #n428857/119),” I was crying so hard that I could no longer see the page in front of my face, at which point I abandoned the entire ill-conceived experiment altogether. I haven't felt so stupid since I stopped attending physics lessons aged fourteen. “It's not
stupidity
,” my friend Harry said when I told him I'd had to pack it in. “Think of all the heavy metal fans who devour this stuff. You think you're dimmer than them?” I know that he was
being rhetorical, but the answer is: Yes, I do. In fact, I'm now pretty sure that I've never really liked metal because I don't understand that properly, either. Maybe that's where I should start. I'll listen to Slayer or someone for a few years, until I've grasped what they're saying, and then I'll have another go at SF. In the meantime, I have come to terms with myself and my limitations, and the books I love have never seemed more attractive to me. Look at them: smart and funny novels, nonfiction books about military intelligence and homeless people… It's a balanced, healthy diet. I wasn't short of any vitamins. I was looking for the literary equivalent of grilled kangaroo, or chocolate-covered ants, not spinach, and as I am never drawn to the kangaroo section of a menu in a restaurant, it's hardly surprising that I couldn't swallow it in book form.

Stupidity has been the theme of the month. There's a lot of it in Jon Ronson's mind-boggling book about U.S. military intelligence,
The Men Who Stare at Goats
; plenty of people (although admittedly none any of us is likely to spend much time with) would describe the behavior of the tragic and berserk Stuart in Alexander Masters's brilliant book as stupid beyond belief. And Sue Townsend's comic anti-hero Adrian Mole, who by his own admission isn't too bright, has unwittingly contributed to the post-
Excession
debate I've been having with myself about my own intelligence.

Adrian Mole is one of the many cultural phenomena that has passed me by until now, but my friend Harry—yes, the same one, and no, I don't have any other friends, thank you for asking—suddenly declared Townsend's creation to be a work of comic genius, and insisted I should read
Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction
immediately. He pointed out helpfully that I'd understand quite a lot of it, too, and as I needed the boost in confidence, I decided to take his advice.

Adrian Mole, who famously began his fictional life aged thirteen and three-quarters, is now thirty-four, penniless, becalmed in an antiquarian bookshop, and devoted to our Prime Minister. One of the many unexpected pleasures of this book was the acerbity of its satire. There is real anger in here, particularly about the war in Iraq, and the way Townsend manages to accommodate her dismay within the tight confines of light comedy is a sort of object lesson in what can be done with mainstream fiction. There's a great running
gag about Blair's ludicrous claim that Saddam could hit Cyprus with some of the nasty missiles at his disposal: Adrian Mole has booked a holiday on that very island, and spends much of the book trying to reclaim his deposit from the travel agent.