or: The Terrible Writing of Jonathan Coe.

It has been a long time since I read an author I didn’t already know about or have recommended to me by a mate. I actually ended up picking up this book by Jonathan Coe entirely by accident as I thought it was a writer I knew and liked already and it turned out I’d gotten their name wrong. Point being, no-one I know would recommend The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim.
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Maxwell Sim is an ageing, lonely salesman whose wife has recently left him and, taking their daughter with her, moved to a town in the north of England – an event that sends him into a spiral of depression. He’s then asked to go on a business trip to the Shetland Islands, which turns into a journey of self-discovery (surprise!) and a painfully literal exposition of the dangers of consumer culture (imagine Max as Patrick Bateman but with poorly represented depression instead of psychosis, or Jack Gladney without any semblance of intelligence). The final chapter mirrors the storytelling of Stranger Than Fiction as Max finds he is in fact a character in someone else’s novel. This desperate bid to imbue what is essentially a fuck shit stack with the importance of postmodernism renders everything preceeding utterly superfluous, and comes three chapters too late, leaving the final impression as that of a turd which simply will not flush.

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Written in ugly first person (awkwardly metafictional with painfully shit banter like: ‘I think I’m finally beginning to get the hang of this writing business’) Max’s narrative voice does more to confuse and repel than a ten hour long Jedward concert. Oscillating between infuriating self-ignorance and dark contemplation beyond the faculty of a man like Max, it is impossible to forget that this book was not in fact written by Maxwell Sim, but by a man whose lack of subtlety sees the introduction of wave after wave of tertiary characters to batter his ill-conceived message of anti-consumerism into the reader’s face. Symbols are described as ’symbolic’; the protagonist monologues about what he has learnt; and the final slap in the face is delivered when Max discovers an uncomfortable truth about his father’s sexuality, and decides (a mere two chapters later and with no warning) that he himself is gay. This is storytelling with all the sensitivity of a serial rapist.

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Keeping this sensitivity in mind, there is one word I would use to describe this novel: redundant. I really wanted to like this book, despite early hiccups in the form of that meaningless description ‘a shock of hair’, but when I got to chapter six, and this, my good will hardened into hatred:

I missed her.

Already I missed her.

Poppy had gone fifteen minutes ago and already I missed her dreadfully.

There is no excuse for this sort of writing. More than this, there is no excuse for any editor having left it in. Throughout, I found myself picking up lazy repetitions that should have been cut at first edit but for some reason were left in to stink up the manuscript like a fish going bad behind the couch. After this, there is a section where he uses simple past tense instead of present perfect for a whole paragraph. I know it’s petty, but ….
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‘That’s not really fair, Felice,’ I hear you protest. ‘Maybe it’s deliberate! He’s a boring guy, and the style develops his character as an uneducated, middle class male.’ This is bullshit. Trainspotting was written from the point of view of a gadgie Scottish junkie, but the readability did not suffer for the narrator’s personality.

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What annoys me most is that this book was a digression from my usual reading habits. Although accidental in this case, I have been trying to find new authors outside the clique I formed in university, and outside the recommendations I get from friends who like pretty much the same stuff I do. I wanted to read a new voice and rejuvenate my faith in mainstream literature. This failure is a groundhog’s shadow to me – I will now retreat back to my cave with the alternative and postmodern lit that I’ve read a million times.

We were lying in the fields on an overcast Saturday, 28 degrees, the sugar of iced lollies dribbling down our hands and hoping the sun would bless us for long enough to darken our transparent skin. Beautiful people surrounded us on all sides: impossibly thin; impossibly well dressed in that garage-sale chic kind of way; impossibly camp in their mannerisms. I had decided not to wear a hat and was regretting this when I saw the ocean of varied head adornments riding atop these sculpted hairdos. Then I remembered that I had lost my favourite hat in Edinburgh, and started feeling lonely instead.

I was reading ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’, which made me miss ‘Catch-22’, maybe only because it was about the war. Sentences toppled over me like lego and I was without a building guide. What is this book about? Where are these characters taking me? Is the author talking about a dog, a person, a place, or an idea? I had felt this way before when reading Pynchon. And a glance around told me that this was the general sensibility of our time: a chronological period where the more nonsensical the t-shirt slogan, the greater the cred.

Security through obscurity is a principle used by computing systems. Applied to literature, I am basically talking about the text becoming an insular entity that the author alone can draw meaning from. I know this is an old idea tackled by many literary theorists, but I am seeing a tangible manifestation of it more starkly than before.

Can any text that inspires confusion, deliberately mind, be valuable beyond being comment on the disparate nature of individual existence? If the style moves the readers to pocketed pastiche rather than collective communication, then isn’t this book and others like it just furthering parochial division? Shouldn’t literature be a gateway to further the communication of ideas, more in line with Kerckhoffs’ principle, where ‘it is necessary… that the system be easy to use, requiring neither mental strain nor the knowledge of a long series of rules to observe’? Or would this lead to a stylistic plateau?

There are many pages still ahead of me, and maybe they will hold instructions for how I am meant to build a doorway into this text. Or maybe next time I go to the fields to read a book, I should take a boating hat and surrender myself to these seas.

One Magic Square is a call to action, with the know-how to get started right away. We all have the potential to grow our own food, even if we’re jammed in a terrace house in inner-city anywhere. One Magic Square provides the plot design, food knowledge and seasonal organisation.

The one-square-metre idea is not new, and One Magic Square picks up on much of the environmental urgency the conscientious are already aware of in ‘Part Two: Toward food self-sufficiency’. But this artfully packaged reference guide to the practice of individual self-sufficiency will make it easy for anyone to get a shovel on, no matter the colour of their thumb.

The principles behind One Magic Square are much like those being expounded by citizen journalists in the media industry: large corporations are not considering the long-term interests of the masses, so it is up to the individuals to reappropriate control of the food industry.

Thankfully, One Magic Square doesn’t mince words when acknowledging that individual action is not the whole answer – one square-metre plot will yield approximately ten per cent of your food needs. The idea is to use the first square to plot your expansion. At the very least, if you grow your own corn it won’t be fed to beef cattle or hybrid engines.

Definitely a book to get you started, and one to keep on your shelf and splash with dirt before turning to your tomato-stained cookbooks.

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Published by Wakefield Press
Paperback, 352 PP 200 x 200
9781862547643
$45.00