The Secret History

The Secret History by Donna Tartt
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Like if Harry Potter went to Slytherin. Tartt is undeniably a better writer than Rowling – every couple of pages of The Secret History has a dazzling bit of description. But Rowling does a better job of interweaving the mysteries in her plots, where episodes are returned to and reinterpreted in the light of new revelations. Tartt's approach is more linear – new information is introduced about characters and events to explain the latest twist, which feels clumsier. It's forgivable though, expecially as the narration is in first person and the character of Richard may not be as skilled a storyteller as he, or we, would like.

The book is long and as a result occasionally plodding. The sheer extent of it makes deducing its themes difficult – it's about what it's about. The lasting impression it left me with was that the youthful dyonisian urge towards dissolution is universal – and the disturbing rituals the coterie engage in are just a more sinister manifestation of the decadent student experience of parties, drugs and rock music the main characters are so dismissive of. There's just a seductive upper-class veneer applied to their activites– which Richard, an interloper ashamed of his working-class background, cannot but be enchanted by. Wealth and beauty are dazzling but ultimately disguise what is (to put it politely) extremly reprehensible behaviour.

Bunny's character is dwelt on so long partly to set up a contrast with our narrator and protagonist. Bunny cannot afford the trappings of his class, and sponges off the wealth of his friends. Richard almost dies rather than admit his poverty and ask for help. But despite his flaws, Bunny has the capacity to see through the allure of his sophisticated friends, and was on the cusp of exposing their crimes, whereas Richard does everything he can to protect them. The act of writing his secret history may be a form of atonement, a realisation on the part of Richard that Bunny had the right idea in the end, and Richard has to finally burn his bridges with the university friends he loved so much.

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Downfall

Downfall by Inio Asano
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A portrait of a particularly unpleasant artist. Partly this is about the pressure sales and success can apply on creative endeavour (perhaps quite autobiographical given the recognition the author has received with books like Solanin). But Downfall goes a bit deeper than that – Fukazawa is so relentlessly focused on becoming a manga-ka that all his relationships burn up around him. The irony is that his manga is perceived by his audience to be very empathetic and moving, even though the creator of it is incapable of real human connection. Fukazawa is a master of emotional manipulation, in real life and in his work, but he's incapable of actual sympathy. The judgment of an almost mythical cat-eyed teenage girlfriend, that speaks in profundities and absurdities, is devastating, and very, very impactful.

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The Line of Beauty

The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The final tragic parts of the book were the most thrilling to me – when the various secrets and hypocrisies that have built up over the first two languid sections, wrapped up in the twin seductions of love and money, burst out into the open. The protagonist – from an undistinguished middle class background, and gay – ingratiates himself with the well-to-do family of an ambitious Conservative politician, as a lodger and then as a friend. And while Nick Guest (ominous name) is supremely capable of averting the inherent tensions of such an arrangement, eventually it blows up in everyone's faces. The MP, charismatic but vain, is undone by his own sexual and financial profligacy, which contrasts with Nick's own prudent behaviour. Nevertheless, the underlying homophobia of the times (amplified by the press) asserts itself, and Nick finds that his surrogate family will not stand up for him in a time of crisis. Hollinghurst's talents lie in the delicate depiction of the interactions between people, and the evasions and ironies used to sustain relationships, up until the pressures of the outside world break them apart. He's a great writer, and this is a great book.

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The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist

The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist by Adrian Tomine
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

My favourite of the things I've read by Tomine, although I also have two young daughters so that may say more about me than about the work. Much of this volume is taken up with short sketches of the various (sometimes imagined) humiliations Tomine has gone through as a comics obsessive and increasingly successful cartoonist – which are wry and funny and easily digestible. The final section is a bit longer, and documents a typically ridiculous brush with death that nevertheless leads Tomine to write a very moving letter to his children, as well as reflect on the ways his workaholism takes him away from his family and the things that really make him happy. Other readers may find that a trite and obvious endpoint, although as someone very much in the trenches of fatherhood with Tomine it struck particularly true. The final irony of the piece is that the cartooning urge cannot be suppressed – Tomine channels his insight about the importance of a life outside work into yet more work. Perhaps the format of the book – a square-ruled notebook rather than a typical trade paperback – suggests an artist more at ease with his craft, jotting things down as they come rather than locking himself away from the wife and kids to slave over another critically-acclaimed tome. I hope so, for his sake and mine.

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Disco Elysium

I want another 50 games like Disco Elysium. This takes the writing-first approach of Planescape: Torment and removes all the combat elements so that everything is about your character's interactions with the world, and the different bits of it you can unlock with your skills and choices. At times it feels like an adventure game, where you are collecting items and asking questions until you tick your tasks off the list. That may sound linear and boring, but thankfully the game's story, characters and universe are so rich that I was compelled to explore as much as possible, sinking a glorious 50+ hours following every lead I could find.

Even if the gameplay is limited, there is enough of it to be satisfying when your build allows you to pass a check. Die-rolls govern your every interaction, modified by your skills and prior actions. There's always a chance to succeed or fail – at the first big climax of the game, where your amnesiac detective examines a dead body, I managed to pass a 3% chance perception check which massively upends your assumptions about the cause of death, and I felt a huge surge of elation even though it was just a piece of (amost literally) blind luck.

There's a pleasing ludo-narrative consonance to developing your skills. You wake up not knowing anything and are tasked with investigating a murder. But as you tick off bits and bobs in pursuing the case, you gain experience points, which allow you to level up your skills and slowly learn, or re-learn, how to be a cop.

Even better, your skills can talk to you – giving you tips and dialogue options that can push you in the right direction. But not always – sometimes their advice works against your interests. This was the second revelatory moment in the game for me. In a conversation with a femme fatale character I passed a volition check which made me realise that all my other skills, particularly the one helping me detect lies, were being hoodwinked. My character was being seduced, almost mesmerised, by the figure he was talking to, to the point where my thoughts and impulses were betraying me.

If skills are a bit like companions, chipping in here and there with advice, the game adapts the standard RPG alignment system to give you options to explore and subscribe to different cop personalities (sorry cop, superstar cop, honour cop) and political philosophies. The latter are more well developed, and in the final cut version of the game include specific 'vision quests' revealing the implications of your political allegiances. In my playthrough I picked the boring moralist (or centrist) option, which I thought went furthest to minimise harm. But in this world, the moralintern are the ascendent power, and the game makes clear the damage caused by keeping things as they are.

The game's reflections on politics are commendably nuanced. The representative of the libertarian faction (a negotiator for a shipping conglomerate) is personable and helpful, but the organisation she works for is sinister and dangerous. The representative of the dockers union is unpleasant, slippery and corrupt, treating you as a means to advance his own ends. But ultimately those ends are more noble than they at first appear. Generally, the game is ambiguous about whether the sacrifices required for liberation are worth the price in blood, sweat and tears. A moralist abandons dreams of a better world for the crushing, unfair reality of today. But realising those dreams risks unleashing horrors that are far worse than the status quo.

The game's final comment on these alignment options might lie in the character of the killer – an old revolutionary that remains committed to a dead cause, with a psyche so poisoned and curdled by ideology that it starts unleashing random death on the neighbourhood. Committment to a grand project is suspect, the game appears to suggest. A better avenue for your energies is the limited good you can do in your interactions with people.

The one discordant note for me came towards the end, where the game inserts a kind of deus ex machina in the form of an alien creature imparting wisdom on our player character, whose bender is at root inspired by a break-up he never got over. The Insulidian Phasmid urges you to let her go: "Turn and go forward. Do it for the working class". The implication is that being hung up on a lost love is preventing you from reconnecting with the world and the downtrodden people in it (it's not for nothing that the only essential skill check to pass in the game is a Shivers one – it's the skill that plugs you into the rhythms of the city). But the following line puts a sour twist on that laudible sentiment: "She was middle class. It doesn't take a three-metre stick insect to tell you that". The tone is resentful, and implies that any inter-class relationship is inherently tainted and unworkable, which is a gross idea to latch onto one of the final climaxes of the game.

That's a small exception that proves the general rule, which is that Disco Elysium is written with great thoughtfullness and tenderness for its large cast of characters. It is also very funny, and has a knowing sense of its own inherent ridiculousness. But even in a playthrough committed to exploring its most farcical elements, the creators ultimately pull the player towards the great sadness haunting the setting – the threat of existential nothingness that warps every attempt at progress. The poetry of the game is inescapable, and is its most impressive and unique feature. It's a great novel disguised as a roleplaying game, a new milestone in interactive narrative. And I want a lot more of it.

Outline

Outline by Rachel Cusk
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A kind of experiment in the erasure of the conventional trappings of fiction – plot, suspense, character, identity. Cusk has thought hard about the building blocks of the novel and has tried to pull most of them out. What’s left are outlines of people’s lives, observed and recorded by a narrator whose life and personality are outlined by those other lives and their stories. The book is upfront about its method, and its themes emerge naturally from it – the comparison and contrast between the people in the novel suggest the relational way we think about ourselves, as well as the difficulty of bridging the fundamental difference between individuals (particularly women and men in heterosexual relationships). The book sums this up in its very last lines, where a character confuses “solitude” for “solicitude”, capturing the twin fates we face when trying to understand each other.

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On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Not as compact as the author makes out (he is a storyteller after all), but still very useful not just to aspiring writers but those who wish to understand how novels are put together. King's practices are not universal, but it's still interesting to see the way he approaches the craft – starting with characters and a situation and letting that play out, and not being fixed on the way his stories will resolve. The plots of his books are not overdetermined, but unfold naturally, keeping the author (and he hopes, his readers) guessing. The themes of the book also emerge naturally once the first draft is complete – King steps away from the manuscript, comes back to it with fresh eyes and then tugs the loose ends together to form a satisfying whole. His books are not novels of ideas, in other words. The story always comes first. Then again, King doesn't claim to have a monopoly of wisdom on the subject of writing, and there's an endearing sense of humility to this project. It's a plain-spoken, personal and honest account of the job.

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Favourite music of 2021

Most appreciated shorts:

12. Unknown T feat. Potter Payper (prod. Sean Murdz) - Trenches

I don't have the stomach to really enjoy UK drill, much of which is so relentlessly bleak it becomes a bit monotonous (not to mention terrifying, although that's kind of the point). Grime MCs can be similarly heavy-going, but they are also frequently funny and silly, and drill evaporates all that levity away. That said, Unknown T operates at the poppier end of the drill spectrum, and 'Trenches' is basically a backward-looking straight-up rap track that appeals far more to my sensibilities. It's elevated particularly by a star-making performance by Potter Payper, providing a welcome counterpoint to T's flow by rapping with a booming voice and at a leisurely pace, showing that speed isn't always necessary to maintain energy.

11. Nippa (prod. TobiAitch) - Situation

Imagine 8701-era Usher over a Zaytoven beat, with signifiers straight out of north London. The innovation here is that while this sounds like the silkiest R&B from ages past, lyrically the laydeez are a peripheral concern. Instead Nippa is focused on whether his people will back him up if there's danger on the way. He's a seducer, but he's not after love, he's after recruits. For me, the crooning adds a frisson of homoeroticism to proceedings that makes the track even more special.

10. 5ever - 'Champagne'

This feels like three lockdowns worth of pent up energy released in one minute-and-a-half burst of the sugariest pop punk since Fall Out Boy sat under a cork tree. 5ever write about the years after you're done with school where you're not quite sure when your life will actually start – a situation made all the more relatable by our collective pandemic experience. But the band don't sound indecisive or adrift here, leaping straight into the chorus in a bid to get you singing along as quickly as possible. 'Champagne' recognises how difficult it can be to make an effort when the world is in stasis, and then it gives you a kick up the backside.

9. Facta - 'FM Gamma'

A rainbow road of vibrant melody brushed over a sturdy but understated beat that bounces you along. The joy of this is in the little sound effects littered throughout – a bit of bubbling liquid here, a burst of static there – all adding to the sense of a playful, cheerful mind at work. The title suggests the track is a celebration of the radio, and when those thronging high notes soar towards the end you can almost visualise the frequencies floating across the skyline, merging and harmonising together into a unified sound of the city.

8. Bad Boy Chiller Crew - 'Forget Me'

These lads sounds like a total nightmare to be around – like three Liam Gallaghers in their prime who've added cocaine and MDMA to their lager consumption. They know how to please a crowd though, on record as well as on social media (the crew first found fame doing Jackass-style videos around their native Bradford). This year's Charva Anthems is a big upgrade to the BBCC template – the group could afford to commission slick original hooks from female vocalists, which add a healthy dose of feminine pressure to their standard formula of hyperspeed back-and-forth raps about cars, birds, clothes, drugs and parties. 'Forget Me' has my favourite chorus of the bunch – being slightly mellower than the rest of the EP, although that's not saying much as the whole thing delivers on the promise of its title and is never less than anthemic throughout. If nothing else these boys are a reminder of just how joyous and wonderful baseline house can be, and they've done a service to the world by popularising it outside of its northern strongholds.

7. P Money & Silencer - 'Trouble'

Just your standard Silencer riddim – a UK garage-indebted beat sliced up with dramatic strings – and another virtuoso performance from P Money, who is simply the best skippy grime MC ever. 'Trouble' sounds like it could have been on 2009's classic Money Over Everyone except now P's going on about his 'Covid flow' and streaming games on Twitch. I guess we've all developed new hobbies over lockdown. Honestly it's just good to check in on these dudes and see that they're still killing it. That said, I do find P Money's lack of solidarity ("Had a ting putting in work / Left-wing politics meant I had to sack her.") somewhat dispiriting.

6. Tinashe (prod. Stargate) - 'The Chase'

Pushed up because this year's 333 is a great record, trying all kinds of different moods and genres and generally pulling them off. 'The Chase' is the big power pop ballad – booming drums and a soaring chorus designed to be blown out of cars or over rooftops. There's even a hint of a guitar solo squiggling around towards the end to add an extra layer of Guns & Roses grandiosity to the song. It's about getting over a relationship and feeling like you don't need anyone else in the world, and Tinashe makes it sound great.

5. Meridian Dan feat. President T & JME (prod. Sir Spyro) - 'Teachers Pets'

Meridian Dan is an earworm master craftsman. As soon as you come into contact with the hook you'll have it clanging around your skull for the rest of the day. He doesn't even finish it half the time knowing you'll be able to fill in the blanks. Spiro's minimalist beat gives grime legend President T plenty of opportunities to pause for effect (his signature move), but really I'm all about JME protective father energy at the end: "dad now, married and that / yard, garden, garage and that / why you want to war with the vets / especially now I've got more to protect?" You and me both, brother.

4. PinkPantheress - 'I must apologise'

I'll admit to initially being a bit suspicious about the nostalgic bent of this project – PinkPantheress starting out by reworking god-tier UK garage and drum & bass classics 'Flowers' and 'Circles' into vibey, laid-back rollers and finding an audience on TikTok. Her tunes slap though – you can't fault the craft on display. And the very intimate and authentic tenor of the vocals and lyrics do recontextualise these by-now ancient genres as something that can soundtrack the quotidian headphone moments of teenagers working through their feelings. Ultimately though I'm a sucker for this stuff and PinkPantheress does it very well.

3. Skullcrusher - 'Storm In Summer'

Last year's number one entry is back with a longer and less-perfect EP which is nonetheless still magical. The title track is a proper cinematic triumph, the arrangement beefed up with a full band and with its eyes set on being licenced for the credit roll of an epic romantic movie. Having garnered a fair bit of attention with her music, here Helen Ballentine is ambivalent about what has been read into it, and cautious about what more to reveal or obscure. The hesitancy in the lyrics is answered by the blast of the instrumentation. The outro keeps repeating the line "I wish you could see me start this storm". We certainly hear it.

2. Pale Waves - 'Tomorrow'

The Avril Lavigne worship begins with the cover and lasts all the way through the album's runtime. The whole thing is a pitch-perfect imitation, to my mind made all the sweeter by the band being from rainy Manchester. 'Tomorrow' is basically a 2021 version of Jimmy Eat Word's 'The Middle', if anything even more earnest in its lyrics and delivery, to the point where there's a slight anxiety that in their performative solidarity the band haven't accidentally outed the named characters in their various struggles (if he exists, the Ben in "Ben I know that you love a boy!" might be a bit miffed to have the fact included in a pop song). These minor dissonances aside, the song is a glowing feelgood paean for inclusion targeted at all the misfits in the world. Very uncool but hugely heartwarming.

1. Arm's Length  - 'Eve (Household Name)'

Emo in 2021 in rude health judging by this short release – all six tracks are absolute bangers. The Hotelier's Home, Like NoPlace Is There is the foundational influence on these teenagers from Ontario, Canada, who've somehow sharpened their songs into tight packages of soaring hooks and carefully deployed melodic howls despite never actually having played a show. The lyrics are too convoluted for their own good (what does "I'd rather have bad luck than none" actually mean when you think about it?), but it kind of doesn't matter. They're probably just angry at their parents, which is an inexhaustable theme for a young punk band. 'Eve' is faster and poppier than the rest of the songs on the EP, with an intricately lovely opening riff and a collosal sing-along chorus. Life-affirming every time you throw it on, and a testament to the enduring power of guitar-based pop music.

Chill long-players also appreciated:

Lucy Gooch - Rain's Break EP

Proc Fiskal - Siren Spine Sysex

Erika de Casier - Sensational 

Joy Orbison - still slipping vol. 1

Old emo things newly appreciated:

Knuckle Puck - Copacetic

Into It. Over It. - Proper

Pinegrove - Cardinal

Jimmy Eat World - Clarity

My year in lists 2021

There is less to list this year so I've consolidated films, books and games into one big post. Having done these end of year accounts for a while, it looks like I've continued to lose interest in films and books while trying to expand my knowledge of games. The below is ordered roughly by preference.

Films

I did manage a couple of trips to the cinema this year – of which the experience of Dune at an empty screening at my local indie beat the classics I saw at the BFI Southbank and the Prince Charles. The links below go to what I've managed to write about on here, but I've also set up a Letterboxd account where I jot down stray thoughts. The platform has been a good way to find new things I'd want to watch, alongside the weird and wonderful items discussed in the Savage Beast podcast (the best film podcast).

Denis Villeneuve - Dune

John Fawcett - Ginger Snaps [link]

Olivia Wilde - Booksmart [link]

Robert Eggers - The Lighthouse [link]
Anthony Minghella - The Talented Mr Ripley

Michael Mann - Heat [link]

Kathryn Bigelow - Point Break

Rob Reiner - A Few Good Men [link]

Boots Riley - Sorry To Bother You
Akira Kurosawa - Drunken Angel [link]
Kenji Mizogouchi - My Love Has Been Burning [link]
Russell Mulcahy - Highlander 

Books

I got a bit sick of reading science fiction after finishing off Gene Wolfe's 'Solar Cycle' – he's one of my favourite authors but I really needed a break after 12 books. I picked up some contemporary fiction (by women for a change) as a bit of a palate clense, and there was enjoyment to be hand. Having avoided non-fiction for most of the year, I tore through some slim but potent pamplets on politics and culture in the winter months. The links below go to reviews on Goodreads, where I tend to write up most of the things I read even though the site is a bit garbage. I'm poking around Storygraph here, but while I like the data there's less of an emphasis on reviews, so I'm not sure how much I'll persist with it. 

Felipe Pepe (ed.) - The CRPG Book: A Guide to Computer Role-Playing Games [link]

Dan Ozzi - Sellout: The Major-Label Feeding Frenzy That Swept Punk, Emo, and Hardcore (1994–2007) [link]

Kit Mackintosh - Neon Screams: How Drill, Trap and Bashment Made Music New Again [link]

George Orwell - The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius [link]

Roger Scruton - Conservatism: Ideas in Profile [link]
Christopher Bigsby - Viewing America: Twenty-First-Century Television Drama [link]

Mark Bould - The Anthropocene Unconscious: Climate Catastrophe Culture [link]

M. John Harrison - The Course of the Heart [link]
Ursula K. Le Guin - The Left Hand of Darkness [link]
Ursula K. Le Guin - The Tombs of Atuan [link]

Sally Rooney - Conversations With Friends [link]
Anne Carson - The Beauty of the Husband [link]

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - Americanah [link]
John Crowley - Little, Big [link]

Poul Anderson - The Broken Sword [link]

Raymond Chandler - The High Window [link]

Susanna Clarke - Piranesi [link]

Gene Wolfe - The Book of the Short Sun [link] [link] [link]

Dan Schaffer - The Scribbler [link]

Joseph Michael Linsner - Angry Christ Comix [link]

Games

Gaming is still where I'm mostly at though. Last year I exclusively played CRPGs, whereas this year I branched out a bit and tried an adventure game, some puzzle games, an action-platformer and a JRPG for the first time (all on the iPhone). My heart is still set on the CRPGs genre however – the New Vegas playthrough that stretched over the winter months and into spring was in aggregate the most transcendent experience of media I've had in a very long time.

Obsidian Entertainment - Fallout: New Vegas [link]

Larian Studios - Divinity: Original Sin 2 [link]

Firaxis Games - XCOM: Enemy Within

Konami - Castlevania: Symphony of the Night [link]

Valve - Portal / Portal 2

Square - Chrono Trigger [link]

Playdead - Inside

Capybara Games - Grindstone

thatgamecompany - Journey

Double Fine Productions - Day of the Tentacle Remastered [link]

ConcernedApe - Stardew Valley