A Book Review/Confession of Sin.

As much as the next person, I hate being asked what my "favourite" is. It is a puerile and unhelpful pastime that serves only to highlight ones unfamiliarity with the subject in question. In having "a favourite", we damn with faint praise those we profess to adore whilst calmly dismissing with narrow minded abandon the best efforts of others not as "almost as good" - a worthy of consideration in its own right - but simply as "not good enough". Artistic favouritism is a homophobia of the tastes, an aesthetic racism: "This is my favourite, nothing else is as good as it, because it isn't". I don't have a favourite band. I don't have a favourite film. I don't have a favourite person.

I have a dirty secret: I do have a favourite book.

It started when I was little. I read a lot as a kid (like, a metric shitton), but I found that despite the huge number of books I had (and still have), there were certain books that I read again and again and again - books that I would continually return to and enjoy with the same fresh excitement and glee as the first reading brought about. I came to realise these were my very favourite books. Through repeated readings and a refinement of choice balanced against the new books I read, I managed to narrow the competition for my "favourite" book down to just one or two. At the age of nine, I could (in aid of the fact that I would) tell you that some books were unequivocally the best. Despite growing up (a bit) and studying literature at University, I can still tell you what my favourite books are: The Hounds of the Morrigan by Pat O'Shea and Philip Reeve's colossal, magnificent Hungry Cities Chronicles (the finale of which has not once failed to reduce me to tears).

I list two works here because I have never been able to choose between the two. I tell myself it's because, as an individual book, The Hounds of the Morrigan is a better piece than any of Philip Reeve's books, but that, as a work very much more than the sum of its parts, The Hungry Cities series is in its entirety quite simply better than The Hounds of the Morrigan. What is a more likely explanation is that I read The Hounds when I was about ten, and Mortal Engines when I was like fourteen or fifteen, and that these books meant very different things to very different mes (and continue to do so). I seriously doubt that this will be read by either author, but if they do: thankyou both, in ways that the word thankyou simply fails to convey*.

So, the eagle-eyed among you will notice that both of the above books are children's fiction. In just over a month I will be a twenty two year old student of English literature. I've always been okay with this - I think adult fiction is limited by an expectation that adult fiction must be "adult" in events and themes; there is a degree of pretension towards maturity, both aesthetically and thematically, that prevents adult literature from doing whatever the fuck the author wants it to**. Children's fiction is limited only by the imagination of the author and the leniancy of the publishing company towards sex, guns and popular culture. This has always been my explanation as to why my categorical absolutes in literature have never progressed beyond "young adult". Some novels have come close - Flann O'Brien's At-Swim-Two-Birds is an awesome novel, but falls short in this context as it's basically a children's novel for functioning alcoholics (when I first read it I was an alcoholic, not a child). I loved Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle, but I refuse to acknowledge it as "my favourite" because I didn't understand it. Red Storm Rising by Tom Clancy gets a nod, because it's probably the scariest book ever written, but suffers in that it's essentially a book for big children. I never seem to be able to finish Catch-22 (even though it's ace) and let's face it, The Lord of the Rings is actually shit, we all just love the films. I really want to like Faulk's Birdsong, but after the great first one hundred or so pages that are full of fuck scenes so bad it would make D.H Laurence cry, it just turns into yet another book about lovers seperated by the First World War. Kafka's The Trial struck a real chord with me but, as might become apparent later on, that's not necessarily a good thing. I think it might be morally wrong to say that Maus by Spiegelman is my favourite book, so I won't. Same for Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. Essentially though, for the last six to seven years of my life, I have come to accept and to preach that the two best books ever written are two children's novels; The Hounds of the Morrigan and The Hungry Cities Chronicles. Until now***.

First of all, I hate literary critics. My copy of The Hounds of the Morrigan has a Guardian quote on the front: "If you loved Harry Potter, try this book" - a travesty so great that if I ever find out who wrote it, I will ritually crucify them and turn photos of their death into the most inane internet meme conceivable. My new favourite novel suffers a similar fate. Like turd slugs on a stained glass window, the cover of this book has been similarly mollested by the masturbatory witticisms of those who claim to have understood it: "Utterly compelling and always funny", writes Doug Johnstone of the Independent on Sunday. Well, fuck you Doug Johnstone. Fuck you and that shit, holier-than-thou, leftwing-circle-jerk, marathon-session-of-buggery-of-the-soul, dross Sunday publication that qualifies you to rape art. Same-or-similar also to Time Out 'Book of the Week' magazine ("Irresistible"), The Scotsman ("A vital narrative voice, inventive, freewheeling and scabrously funny"), The Financial Times ("Exhilirating... truly potent" - what the fuck does the The Financial Times even have to do with books?) and an extra special fuck you to Alan Warner of The Guardian, whose bullshit waxed criminal in praising the book's collation of killing irony in a review whose failure was to be killingly ironic in its failure to correctly appreciate this book.

It's obvious that I rate this book highly, so why am I so adverse to its receiving praise? Well, quite frankly, all praise falls short of just how good this book actually is. This isn't a book that you like, it's not a book that you get or a book whose beauty you admire. No, nothing so slutty - so common - as its being a good book.This book is not a best seller, nor a prize winner nor a lifetime achievement nor a masterpiece of the medium. No, this book represents the very pinnacle of what literature is capable of accomplishing, it represents the stellar objective of the paradigm, God's own all-she-wrote. This is the Ark of the Covenant of books (the Holy Grail can eat shit). This book is the kind of book that happens once in your lifetime because it is, in fact, a matter of your lifetime: the experience of reading this book is not one of enjoyment or appreciation but of feeling understood. It is a book that understands its reader. This is a book that syncronises so perfectly with your own life, a book that recognises you, a book that identifies you, that educates you about things you already knew about yourself - where every character, every place, every emotion, theme, sentiment, action and word describes you and only you - that you are simultaneously overjoyed and destroyed by the knowledge that you are the only one in the world that knows this book in its knowing you and that you and this book share a relationship that you will never have with anyone else. This book cannot be praised, and neither can it be criticised because to suggest an understanding of it is either to misunderstand it or to appraise the author for something she did not intend to do (for how could they?). To offer your opinion on this book is to offer an opinion on your own existence.

Now, I recognise the cutting hypocrisy of saying this in a written review, but bear with me - I'm working with the very limits of my grasp of language here. Allow me to try and illustrate what I mean with an analogy: I once found myself in a "love triangle" (of the kind the cliche of which stains the very soul) with two people I am very close with (specifically, I was on the "losing" side of the triangle) and one night I found myself having a very fraught conversation with my friend - my "rival" - in this sad affair. I don't know what possessed me to do so but I was feeling pretty vindictive and self-destructive, so I asked my friend "Ok, so why do you love her?". The following conversation went something a little like this:

Friend: "Oh man, don't ask that!"
Me, emboldened by a cocktail of despair and massive idiocy: "No - come on really, why?"
Friend: "..."
Me: (something I still have Vietnam flashbacks about): "I love her because she's just so much fun; I have a lot of fun around her" (which for some reason I thought was a pretty grown up and clever thing to say).
My friend then stopped, looked at me, and responded: "Look, I can't put it into words - it's not something I can really describe - I just do and that's it."
Whoosh.
It was at this moment I realised that what I had said was in fact incredibly lame, and really quite twee and unimpressive. I also realised that my friends answer was, of course, the only possible answer to such a stupid question, and that, even in his retreat from answering the question, I think I understood what he was trying to say. I realised as well  that what I had said sullied and dirtied with its unimportance the beauty and scale of the feeling that my friend was trying to articulate - that in trying to describe it, even positively, I had ruined it.

It is for this same reason that I dislike the attempts at praise on the cover of my new favourite book: these philistines didn't really understand this book - they didn't really appreciate its immaculate perfection, and worse still, they don't understand just what it is to me - what this book means to me. And in praising it, they do it a great disservice - a blasphemy, a heresy; they make it just a little bit worse, a little bit uglier, a little bit less than everything it really is.

So, "what is this magnificent book?", I hear you ask. "What is this Olympian feat of literature? Your new very best book ever written? Who is it by? What is it about? Tell me everything!"

I'm sorry, but I'm not going to tell you. I'm not going to tell you. I'm not going to tell you because if you have to ask, you are not good enough to read it. If you have to ask what this book is, you will never have it. Sound elitist? Sound snobby? Well good, because this book is elitist.This book is so elitist.

In fact, "Elitist" fails to qualify the exclusivity and grandeur of this book.This book isn't like a fine wine - you don't savour it, mull over it and take notes and make senseless observations about it. It's not even like those wines which are so good, so exclusive, so expensive that you have to be invited to drink them. You don't smell it, delicately taste it and then compare it to other wines, and it doesn't matter what fucking glass you drink it from or which fucking cheese accompanies it - No! This a wine that you just know is the best - the wine that when you first tasted wine you hoped "wine" would taste like - all you understood of the possibilities of wine brought together with all you dreamed wine could be in a transcendent synthesis of  the kind considered to be impossible by the greatest thinkers the world has known - this is your wine, at your moment. For that is what you realise - this is not just a wine, that this is a moment - a concatenation of all possible variables of that instance into the ultimate symbiosis of feeling - the god of the Romantics. This, this is the kind of wine that you glug down and crash through as fast as you can because you have to know more, because you have to finish before the beginning has ended, you have to continue this adventure into your very soul, to continue this perfect interraction of the self and the external - and, as this wine attends to its final journey (for it will never be this wine again!), you proceed knowing that this is it - your final adventure, the point at which you meet God - that you will never again know this wine, at this moment, and you will never again have it so good; that it never gets better than this... for all the while, this wine, this highest of wines, has been continuing its final journey in its intoxication of you, and as you drink of it, it drinks also of you. And when you wake up the next day, with one less shoe and the kind of hangover that divine intervention itself could not prevent and now cannot cure, you understand only too well that this very best of wines is also a poison - a curse. For, whilst the hangover might clear, you are cursed to know that never again will you have that wine, at that moment, and never again will you feel that way - you realise that at that moment when you dropped the empty bottle over someone's garden wall, you would never again find that bottle of wine. My new favorite book is this kind of wine - the highest possible achievement of human experience, but a dangerous one also. For having burned through it in a dionysian orgy of fufilment and desire, I knew upon finishing this book that no matter how I tried to read it again, or any other other book, I would never again be struck by the same perfect instance as I was by this book. Even if I found another book I felt was as good as this one - another bottle of that wine - I would never again experience that perfect, harmonious moment of the aesthetic and emotional satiation of the self.

Maybe this is due to somekind of loss of the childhood innocence that was able to return me to my "favourite" books again and again and again. Or, perhaps it comes down to some kind of maturation of my artistic understanding, the same kind of change of mind (puberty) that stops cardboard boxes from being pirate ships but also stops us from thinking that pushing lego men into the plug sockets is a good idea. However, I find that I can still excitedly return to those books I loved from my childhood - that whatever it was that prevents me from feeling the same way about this book again has not prevented me from feeling the same way about my old favourites. In light of this, I am gripped more by the idea that your very favourite thing is something which happens to you just once in your life which you spend the rest of days trying to find again - the moment of climax during a one night stand with the worlds most attractive person, or the rush of adrenaline from that time you decided to play paintball with real guns - that the experience of your very very favourite is knowing that this is as good as it gets, it will never get better than this.

Perhaps now you are getting some idea of just how good this book is. Perhaps, finally, at last, you are beginning to understand what I am trying to say when I say that this is the very best book ever written. But unfortunately, you are not. What you are reading here is a failure - a mere review, just like those insects that died on the cover of my copy as it came to me. I write this from the standpoint of one who is hollow, empty - from one who has read the greatest book ever and is now desperately trying to remember - to conjur - the experience of absolute perfection. Indeed, this is not even the first time I have written about this book. The night after I finished reading the best book ever written I sat in bed, drunk, alone, suicidally wallowing in a mire of anger, despair and raw, unrequited emotion, and wrote in my head a review for this book that was nearly perfect - a review nearly worthy of this book. Of course, when I woke up the next day, I could not remember what it was that I wanted to write, and so in this piece I have instead tried my very outmost to recount how that review would have looked had I tried to write as it happened****.

So, what now? Some of the more savvy readers may be able to work out what book it was I read from this review, and if they do so, I congratulate them - but I also fear that in doing so, they may have misunderstood me. Some might question whether or not there actually was a book, or if I'm just writing about some hypothetical book in order to wax lyrical a Wittgenstinian philosophy of language. Of course, I don't know if you've understood my review the way I intended it, and neither do you (though this is largely irrelevent), but there is very little I can do about that at this junction, except to hope that you too enjoy reading the very best book ever. I am going to smoke now, because that seems appropriate.


* Pat O'Shea died in 2007. Thank fuck she didn't finish the sequel.
** Of course there are exceptions to this; Terry Pratchet's 'Discworld', Philip Pullman's 'His Dark Materials' spring to mind immediately here. Note how though these are often marketed not just as adult fiction but children's too. I find this telling. Some 'adult' authors do seem to jump this great wall of maturity: Stephen King, Aldous Huxley (perhaps), anyone who writes about Zombies (God bless them, amen).
***Sorry, I hate dramatic stops too - but breaking it up like this means you won't just bang through it. I want you to stop and think carefully about what I say.
**** The plebian explanation: this is not the review of the greastest book in the world, this is just a tribute.


Listening to: All of Bowling for Soup, "Something I can never have" by Nine Inch Nails (on repeat till the bastard ends), Lifter Puller.