At 10:35 on an early summer's morning, John Lanchester sat down at his study desk, switched on his new Dell computer, opened up the word processing programme that the computer had come with and began

yeah I like yr reading thomp. it's just hard to maintain that rarified possibility in your head when actually conducting intellectual transaction with the clodhopping lanchester-brain prose.

in fact I started coming round to that pov while not actually reading the book. then I started reading it again and realised it was too persistently incompetent for any sort of subtlety of interpretation, even as a way of maintaining interest.

"Smitty wasn't sure whether what he felt was sadness or foreboding"

^this sort of innocuous shite really pisses me off. drilling right down there, John.

I've got to do a thing on his list sentences as well. he uses then all the time and is really bad at them. (Great list writers - Kipling? there are others.)

Pynchon.

Rabelais / Urquhart

Oh yeah, that Urquhart translation is great. There's a couple of others floating round in my head as well.

Swift, Flann O'Brien good listers.

the policeman, who appeared earlier, and for whom NV had such high hopes, has been gone for some time.

A+ thread

mark my words the policeman will be back at the end to arrest Lanchester in a Blazing Saddles-style fourth wall breaker.

has tom wolfe been, like, rehabilitated while i wasn't looking

what's the consensus on wolfe on ilx?

did Fizzles finish this novel?

dipping slowly between other things. yesterday was reading it with the dimbulb tolerance that comes of a soporific early morning commute, even at one point thinking "maybe it's not so bad really, heart's in the right place" (a fine critical benchmark for a work of art!)

It quickly woke me out of my stupor tho, each new chapter's narrator bringing forth an exclamation of "oh god, not you again" and on one occasion a mystified "who the hell are you?". (Turned out to be "Smitty"'s sacked assistant - sorry I have to put that name in quotes - holidaying in the Cotswolds.)

Still no sign of the policeman who appeared for one chapter. The tempo of the book is really extraordinary - as bad as any other element. Will report back properly soon.

The Sengalese footballer Freddy Kamo's getting his first start for the wealthy West London club that has bought him.

'Good luck today,' the owner said in his slow, clear English. 'Be fast!'
'Yes sir. Thank you. I will try my best.'
'More than try!' said the owner. 'Do!' He was laughing; this was a great joke. He turned to the manager. 'Do!' The manager joined in his employer's laughter. Still laughing and nodding, the owner moved on. Freddy sat back down. Across the room he caught the eye of the club's longest-serving player, a central defender who had come up through the the club's youth system nearly twenty years ago, and never left. He winked at Freddy.

He was laughing; this was a great joke.

If I were writing a football book, it'd definitely be based around a John Terry type. He'd be an absolute dream for fiction, like Gordon Brown. I'd make more of him than that though.

Oh, also, once the mirth from that had subsided, I read an excerpt from Lionel Asbo in the Telegraph. It was a pastiche of a newspaper profile/interview. But the tone was slightly off. A bit like Lanchester, you got too much of the sense that Amis was accurately observing what he'd imagined in his head, here in the pastiched prose manner as much as the content. That said, it was a v brief excerpt - I mean, I don't expect it to be any good - but maybe it will be more bad in an interesting, possibly even spectacular way.

Well that's the thing Ismael. That's the only bit. There's not even anything of what Freddy Kamo (ffs) thinks about him, what he looks like, anything. JT great substitute for Amis Lionel Asbo in fact.

And yes, ciderpress, Lanchester seems to have some sort of Bond villain in his head at this point.

oh and Freddy Kamo gets his leg badly broken by a mistimed tackle within a few minutes of starting that match. I would say 'spoilers' or something, but I called it about two pages after FK was introduced at the beginning of the book so doubt anyone else is going to greet the actual event with anything other than embarrassment/irritation/weariness/sense of author demeaning superiority.

Who does the legbreaking? There should be rich universes within that little subplot, done right.

roman a clef this ain't, but here are the clues... oh, wait, I'd forgotten this bit:

this was a match day, which meant there were always plenty of opposing fans around - shout abuse, flick V-signs, call out player-specific insults (poof, black bastard, arse bandit, sheep-shagger, fat yid, paedo goatfucker, shit-eating towelhead, Catholic nonce, French poof, black French queer bastard, etc. etc.) and, once, take down their trousers and moon the coach. Despite the almost entirely unlikely insults and the mooning, my favourite bit here is the phrase 'player-specific insults'. Because 'insults' by itself would have been uninterpretable, presumably, so he manages to produce a phrase that makes the following list evening funnier as you try to put names to insults. Think 'Catholic nonce' might be my favourite, but obv there's close competition. Lanchester's writing's like a bull in a china shop.

Reminds me I must do something on Lanchester's lists (the way that last example, for instance, is presumably supposed to be humourously exaggerated).

Right, anyway, clues - I thought the opposing team's quality was referred to at one point, but I can't find it right now. (Arsenal is mentioned right at the beginning of the book, but for the rest of it, it's like one of those computer games that hasn't managed to get rights to all the team names, hence 'wealthy West London club' despite there being nothing even libellous, or even descriptive come to think of it, about the club in question.)

Um, can't find anything other than its a 'big' central defender. Um, 'slightly reckless tackle but without ill intent'. (Big touch for a nice man?) Nothing there I'm afraid. That's the story of this book more generally of course.

Sir, the youth used an, ah, person-specific insult.

Argh. Lanchester's got this knack for writing phrases whose meaninglessness worms away in your head for hours.

I did read a great literary tackle once. Sadly I don't recall where, but it went something like: narrator's a workmanlike player having a frustrating game; gets particularly annoyed at being repeatedly sonned by a tricky opponent; when the trickster is on a dribble near the end of the game, narrator goes to take it out on him; launches in recklessly with a reducer, cut the bastard off at the ankles; but at that moment the trickster pivots and he ends up just brushing off him, tackling thin air instead; after the whistle they shake hands, and the narrator apologises for going in too hard at the end there, he could've done some damage; but the trickster genuinely doesn't know what he's talking about, to him it was just another challenge that he'd factored out before it happened.

I seem to recall the trickster being a prisoner, maybe it was a David Conn social piece or something. Anyway, that's drama.

Lionel Asbo looks like car-crash awfulness. And I used to love Amis.

Rohinka slid around the table, attending to their breakfast plates so briskly and efficiently she might have been a Hindu goddess with more than one set of arms, clearing and stacking and sweeping and racking, and then bumping the dishwasher door closed with her hip before setting it going.

gets in a bit of a pickle with his simile there does our John, somehow suggesting that there isn't a Hindu goddess with more than one set of arms.

Then the sentence rattles, presumably semi-intentionally (but why?) off into Night Mail territory.

I don't think he can have intended the rhyme. that's very distracting.

Even though the big car was full of his family, he felt a sense of the bigger city around him as they struggled past the amazing size and variety of London, the feeling that everything had a history, and the press of the present too: roadworks, billboards, a small accident where a white van had driven into the back of a milk float and the police had closed a lane, as well as that good old favourite, 'sheer weight of traffic'. Sheer weight - how much of life was sheer weight of something?

1. Even though the big car/he felt a sense of the bigger city around him - not really an opposition, but I guess this just about passes (we assume since he is driving he has a sense of the city around him tho - weird).

2. 'struggled past the amazing size and variety of London' - size an external characteristic, variety internal. You can struggle through the variety, just about, I suppose - tho none of this sentence really makes sense. This character is English-Pakistan, but there has hitherto been no sign of Lanchester ribbing him for subtle errors of expression. FAIL.

3. OK Lanchester, this fuckin list expressive of 'the press of the present'.

3a. roadworks - well ok, tho infrastructure maintenance common across recent history, and probably more generally beyond.

3b. billboards - ok again, though it's weird to have the Americanism instead of hoarding/advertising hoarding, billboard more or less naturalised admittedly, just pointing it out as another example for Lanchester to unerringly hit a jarring tone.

3c. 'a small accident where a white van had driven into the back of a milk float and the police had closed a lane'. The fuck. Are we still on 'the press of the present' here? Possibly he's forgotten. Anyway - 'a small accident where a white van had driven into the back of a milk float'. No it hadn't. 'and the police had closed a lane'. No they didn't. Aren't many milk floats around really any more, certainly not in London. They are around early on quiet roads very occasionally. White vans tend not to be around at this time, not as much as just after rush hour anyway - that's the biggest time of construction traffic. Milk float? Probably suburban back street. They tend to have a lot of parking and are quite slow roads even if they don't have traffic calming. Unlikely a white van is going to crash into the back of a milk float. Not impossible, obviously, just not likely. My guess is that Lanchester was thinking 'white van man hitting something slow'. Anyway, the police didn't close a lane, not unless this was happening on a dual carriageway - again you do occasionally see petrol milk floats on dual carriageways... dear friends, I can't continue this.

The thing is, I wouldn't normally do it, but this ^ is the stuff, the matter of the book. It's what it consists of. The fucking kibble of John Lanchesters unversed mind.

'How much of life was sheer weight of something?'

How much indeed, John. How much indeed.

As he had that thought, Smitty had another one. It came unbidden and he couldn't have said how exactly he knew what he knew, but even as he had the idea Smitty felt certain that he was right: that he knew who was the person behind We Want What You Have.

because 'who the person behind We Want What You Have was' sounds too weird? Surely not weirder than what he went with. How did he... How did no one...

On Sunday morning at his flat, Usman opened up his laptop and took out his 3G mobile to do a bit of net-surfing.

this is not a joke.

i am surprised to learn that lanchester used to be an editor.

Okay, I'm actually intrigued now. Because I saw what that passage meant instantly, but it took me a long time to go back and untangle it. And when I did, it was indeed exactly as I thought.

And the Banksy type spending his time pondering someone else's secret identity is quite nice.

Besides, he had Sky Sports. The tackle which smashed Freddy's leg was shown, in the usual way, about ten times.

RONG.

Also, I don't understand Lanchester's methodology around nouns and proper nouns.

Okay, I'm actually intrigued now. Because I saw what that passage meant instantly, but it took me a long time to go back and untangle it. And when I did, it was indeed exactly as I thought.

posts that effortlessly sum up the spirit of John Lanchester's Capital.

incidentally, that whole 3G/laptop thing is to do with Internet tethering, something that JL laboriously explains two pages too late to prevent you being uncertain what exactly is going on.

Looking at or downloading Al Qaeda training manuals, for instance, was a criminal offence. Usman had no wish to go that far, even in the privacy of his own head.

eh?

http://www.sffaudio.com/images11/Neuromancer565.jpg

Now there's a book I'd like to revisit. Sure, the style as I recall was a bit Chandler-by-numbers, but I don't remember it mattering. At least it all made sense.

it's the unintentionality of Capital that gets me. Or maybe I shd say apparent unintentionality, just to cover myself. Even at this late stage I'm expecting athe confession of a vast literary prank or chapter of vertiginous revelation where Lanchester aligns all of the apparent faults into to some vehicle of profound meaning and insight.

I dunno, 'even in the privacy of his own head' seems alright to me, for the distinction between what you think as a consciously good person and what your inner dajjal might be leading you with your own semiconscious consent. There's a bit of 1984 about it.

Usman had no wish to go as far as downloading or looking at al Qaeda manuals in the privacy of his own head?

It's a little like that sentence you highlighted - I mean, yes, I know what he means, but the sense doesn't make sense. for me anyway - but I have developed a heightened awareness of LANCHESTERISM. May be leading me to pick on things that i'd let go with others.

I'm trying to be kind I guess; in the way you'd give an unruly pupil a bit more leeway. But yeah, it's come to something when this is how we're treating an acclaimed, successful novelist writing one of the books of the year.

Fizzles is right, you can't download something in the privacy of your own head.

Well done Fizzles, keeping it up here.

I don't think I've posted to ILB for months.

net-surfing, net-surfing, net-surfing.

sometimes i wake up with some of these phrases just toiling away in my head.

Does Usman not have broadband? Or does he just prefer to net-surf via a tethered mobile?

(Masochistic question. I imagine that L gives an explanation, and that it's quite boring.)

Sorry, woof, you asked for it.

Usman wouldn't have minded having a look at some clips of Freddy in his prime, but this particular technique for surfing the net was too slow for that. He had broadband, obviously, but there were some things he didn't like to do over his own internet connection. Usman was, always had been, careful about stuff like that. A neighbour had until recently had an unencrypted wireless connection which he used for his own surfing when he wanted to do something that couldn't be traced, but the neighbour - he didn't know who but guessed it was the flat in the basement - had wised up and gone to WPA encryption about three months ago. So now Usman used a pay-as-you-go 3G mobile phone which he'd bought for cash and was therefore untraceable, and tethered it to his laptop. He ran the browser with all its privacy settings on, via an anonymising service. An electronic spy or eavesdropper would have no way of knowing who he was.

It's the graceful economy of style that seduces you in the end. As I say this explanation comes a page or so after the intial laptop/mobile/3g conundrum part of your brain spends a small amount of time asking 'Does usman not have broadband? Or does he just prefer to net-surf via a tethered mobile?'

anonymising service.

'so part of your brain'

quis custodiet etc

What's he doing that he doesn't want to be traced for? Reading the Daily Mail?

thank you.

perhaps a cyberthriller next time out John, you have obvs mastered the lingo.

net-surfing radical islamic forums. xpost

that actually seems fairly reasonable, maybe slightly paranoid or overly convulted - wouldn't an anonymising proxy over broadband be sufficient? reading it all definitely hurts though.