Bookquakes

I moved house recently.

In hindsight... this may have been a better way...

It’s one of those situations; like popping out a child, successfully not crashing on a tricky roundabout, or replacing a bike tyre, which literally thousands of people complete successfully every day – but which makes you,  briefly,  feel like an absolute Don. A God amongst men.  The super-hero(ine) this generation has been crying out for… ‘I did that!’

In my case, moving was always going to be a spectacular hassle. With the brief exception of University, I have spent the better part of my 26 years on this Earth living at one address. I am also, it must be noted, a hoarder. Not on the ‘get the social involved’ level, but not a million miles away, either.

As well as my mountains of ‘objets trouvés’ (see above photo for a small window into the life of a girl who finds My Little Ponies on the street and chooses to display them); there was the small matter of my cassette collection (mainly Boyzone), my sticker collection (mainly bunnies, for some reason) and my stamp collection (a collaborative project with my dad which was aborted early when I discovered that no one foreign wrote to me and there’s only so much interest in first class postage… or, indeed, stamps in general).

But, like the house-moving heroine I now count myself to be, I overcame those challenges. With a mainly rap-metal soundtrack blaring in the background, I tidied, packed, donated, binned and heaved my way into my new flat. Two days later, I helped my boyfriend do the same. Like a Pokémon, I evolved. Meet… Removals Girl!

Like this but with more packing tape

Sadly, a few days later, Removals Girl was brought crashing to earth with the realisation that her old room was still full of books. I should have taken a photo. I didn’t. But I should have. Honestly, it looked like I hadn’t even moved. Because books had been stacked around every available surface, removing the content simply left a table-shaped hole in the book stacks here, a bed-shaped one there…

Help...Me....

The upshot of this is that I have had to make drastic cuts to my book collection. Unlike the stickers, stamps and cassettes, I found this excruciating. It was like a bibliophile’s Sophie’s Choice. If I take one of the first fiction books I ever worked on in an Editorial capacity (Neverland, by Simon Crump), do I then have to leave behind the huge book on Punk music that an ex-boyfriend gave me for Valentine’s Day?

If I take the whole of C.S Lewis’ Narnia series, am I just cutting out a shelf-worth of space I could dedicate to proper ‘grown up’ books?

And, of course, the perennial question: can one have too many Discworld books?

No.

Thankfully my parents, unlike the Nazis in Sophie’s Choice, were willing to negotiate.

In return for frequent tech-support, I retain some shelf-space in my old room. The leaning towers of Puzos, however, had to go. Each individual decision was a struggle. Eventually, I dug out a couple of suitcases and reluctantly filled them with books destined for Oxfam. I had to get my mum to take them. Both my dad and I knew that, given that task, we would have returned with half of our original donation, plus a few ‘extras’.

I'm back from the charity shop!

This, then, is my eulogy to absent friends. Goodbye, GCSE Geography textbook, I hardly knew ye.

There were two silver linings to the whole operation, however. Firstly, my bibliogralarm (books falling on my head when asleep) is no longer a thing. I now set an electronic reminder on my phone, rather than a Graham Greene hardback at a certain angle on the stacks, when I want to wake up at a certain time.

tech.

Secondly, it forced me to really look at my collection. As a result, I spent several hours re-reading books I forgot I had, as well as reminding myself to take another run at books I have set aside.

‘Taking another run’ is a strange concept. When I give recommendations to customers at work, I generally encourage them to take a seat, read ten pages and see if that’s enough to hook them. In the past, I have abandoned books at the wayside after a meagre three or four pages due to complete lack of interest.

Recently, however, I have given a few titles the benefit of the doubt after abortive first attempts. This has paid off, and now my whole philosophy is in a tail spin.

 The Orphan Master’s Son is a good example. When I initially started it, the slow pace of characterisation and utter misery into which the author plunged his characters put me off. Fifty pages in, I felt no empathy towards the lead character. This is never a good start. I abandoned it in favour of a re-reading of The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde.

Suitably refreshed by Fforde’s hysterical romp through a slightly alternate version of Swindon and its even more alternative fictional counterpart (can’t explain… just read it, please), I prepared to read something new.  And then I got ill. With nothing to distract me but the slowly buffering adverts on Channel 4 OD and an out of date copy of Q magazine which insisted on running another glowing feature on Kasabian (overrated), I turned reluctantly back to Adam Johnson’s novel.

Stop. It. You're only encouraging them.

Oh. My. Gosh. It’s brilliant. As before, the first hundred or so pages failed to grab me. But after watching the DFS advert start, buffer and fail on 4OD for the hundredth time that week, I ploughed grimly on. Suddenly, I found I was hooked. The empathy issue dissipates as, in tiny tiny increments, your support for our hero, Pak Jun Do, grows. As we follow his life in the People’s Republic of North Korea; from orphan child to tunnel fighter, kidnapper, spy, prisoner and national hero, Pak reveals the dark, twisted lunacy behind a country that is often represented as a global joke. Watching news reports gently mocking the regime becomes a lot harder after having read this novel.

‘Ah,’ (fictional) detractors may say, ‘but it was written by a westerner. What do they know?’

Yes, ok, fair point. There is only one book that I have read (and one more that I haven’t) which present North Korea from a native’s point of view. Nothing To Envy by Barbara Demick collates interviews with defectors, both willing and unwilling, from the regime. She quizzes them about their lives within the state, their escape stories and their arrival into South Korea, the most high-tech nation in the world. To Westerners, we can only imagine the culture shock by trying to imagine jumping from the 1940s straight to the modern day – Internet, mobiles, space landings… everything.

In terms of authenticity, clearly real life experiences will trump fiction at every turn. But Johnson has done his homework. In an article for The Daily Beast,(click and read!) he writes about his own visit to North Korea, and the bizarre impression which dawned on him there: that no one native of that strange state is the center of their own universe. The state spins a story, and the players adjust their lives to fit the narrative. By devoting some chapters in The Orphan Master’s Son to a propaganda spin on events, Johnson succeeds in letting us glimpse how every action, scripted or not, is woven into the fabric of the ruling dynasty’s narrative. As Marvel or DC sometimes retcon their characters' histories in order to take the stoies to new places, so the giant behemoth that is Korean State media (and any citizen with sense and ambition) takes what is outside of their control and spins it to fit the official canon. The novel succeeds, therefore, in being a thrilling adventure story of one man’s struggle to live his own story, and an exceedingly creepy study of the machinations of totalitarian power.

ha...ha?

In short, I am extremely glad that the combination of sickness and a terrible internet connection drove me to give this novel a second chance. I can’t, however, promise that I’ll be picking up every discarded book and giving it the same treatment. Joyce’s Ulysses  will remain unread beyond paragraph three, and that suits me fine.




And Finally: This.