Saki (H.H.Munro) - The Best of Saki (Picador)

There’s a lot to like about Saki’s extremely short stories.  They juxtapose buttoned up, conventional Edwardian upper-middle class society with unexpected savagery and brutality.  Amusing hi-jinx and practical jokes abound with varying degrees of success but I think most people would find something at least mildly enjoyable in this collection.

Saki creates credible scenes and characters with incredible economy and was obviously a shrewd and critical observer of the society around him.  Tyrannical aunts, busy-body society housewives and put-upon children are all sketched with ease and elan.

After a while, the stories become a bit formulaic.  A lovely, posh, jolly hockey sticks sort of weekend house party, or situation, is disrupted by a reminder of the savage side of life.  Very often, this is an actual animal.  The more ferocious or exotic the better.   The prim and proper veneer of social convention disappears and chaos duly ensues.  Usually, everything is alright in the end and it transpires that a child has got one over on the adults or that a witty man-child like Clovis has played a hilarious practical joke on the stuffy elders.  It's true that not all the stories have a happy ending and some finish with people dead or dying.  However, orders are inverted and conventions overthrown with such regularity that the impact becomes somewhat diminished.

By the end of the book, in spite of the fact that I was bored and found the stories a bit repetitive, it’s undeniable that the best ones were enjoyable and pleasing.  My favorites were ‘The Stake’, about a young gambler who loses access to ready funds and secretly gambles away the family’s cherished cook, and ‘Fate’ about a billiards player who invents a crisis to avoid finishing a game he is about to lose.  All told, I wasn’t a huge fan of Saki.  I really liked a couple of stories but, in the end, his prose style is a bit prim and proper and even though he is sending up the society he lives in, I feel like he does so in a way that’s a bit twee and formulaic.

Marcus Threscothick - Coming Back To Me

This was an interesting book about the psychological difficulties of a cricket obsessive.  Everything about his upbringing is focused on cricket, with his Dad playing a major part in the local club side and his Mum making the teas.  The pinnacle of happiness for him appears to be making a lot of runs and winning a cricket match, followed by beers with the lads down the club.  Teenage seasons are remembered minutely and anything to do with cricket appears to have been recorded in near photographic detail.  The consequences of this incredible focus have clearly been impressive on a professional level.  However, on a personal level, it at least seems possible that it made life problematic.  The first inkling of this comes when we learn about how he met his wife.  While Trescothick might spend several pages, or even a whole chapter, discussing a match or individual innings, meeting the love of his life is recorded in less than half a page.  At this relatively early stage in the book, I thought perhaps he might be reticent about discussing his private life when it had been under such scrutiny in the past.  

However, as the book progressed I formed an image of Trescothick as someone who isn’t much interested in life outside of cricket.  We learn about how he is unwilling to return home from tour in Pakistan after his father-in-law is seriously injured, leaving his wife distressed.  To his credit, this is recognised as a shocking error of judgment with hindsight and he takes full responsibility for his mistake.  In his defence, as vice-captain standing in for the absent Micheal Vaughan, he may have felt a heightened sense of responsibility.  Nonetheless, the incident could be viewed as evidence of a dangerous cricket myopia.  

This total obsession with cricket seems to have been a mixed blessing for Trescothick.  He gets so good that he plays internationally, which means he is touring for extended periods throughout the year. This is a lifestyle that he doesn’t seem constitutionally suited to, with some of his earliest and most traumatic childhood memories related to being separated from home and family life.  Nonetheless, the excitement and desire to play cricket gets him through the endless hours of traveling and being bored in hotel rooms.  Until they don’t.  

Trescothick talking about his mental problems is undoubtedly the highlight of the book.  He has a breakdown while on tour and needs to return home, but wants to keep it hushed up.  Owing to the mystery surrounding the circumstances of his departure, the press becomes very interested in what’s going on.  The most distressing part of the book is when he returns to the UK.  Given that his psychological issues relate to separation from home and family, it seems sensible that he would go straight home.  However, this isn’t possible because of all the paparazzi at his house, so he has to go into hiding in Devon.  It really rams home to me how being a sportsman in the public eye effectively robs you of a private life.  In fairness, Trescothick and his advisors are themselves somewhat to blame for the situation, for not being more forthcoming about the circumstances of his departure from the tour.  

It seems like Trescothick, as a man who really just wants to play cricket and eat sausages, is deeply confused and worried about what’s happening to him.  He doesn’t want to talk about his problems because they might threaten his international cricket career.  He continually hopes that they’ll be a short term problem and go away with the right therapy or medication.  It’s hard to blame him for this kind of wishful thinking.  In the end, as media speculation reaches fever pitch about the reasons for his absence (including rumours that Vaughan is sleeping with his wife - which he flat out denies), his advisors set up a friendly interview with Sky Sports with pre-planned questions and answers so he can reveal his mental struggles and end all the speculation.  Trescothick botches this and doesn’t say his lines about his psychological issues, rendering the whole thing a waste of time.  I feel this shows just how scared and ashamed Trecothick was of what had happened to him.  

Perhaps because of this horrendous experience, Trescothick is very open about what happened to him in the book.  A cricket dressing room, the place Trescothick lived his entire adult life, is probably not the most understanding environment to talk about difficult psychological issues.  His nickname amongst his teammates after his breakdown is ‘Madfish’.  So it’s clear to me how much he’s had to overcome to get to the point of writing a book about the experience.  One of the most positive aspects of the book was the fact that Trecothick makes many mistakes, admits that he’s made them, learns from them and improves afterwards.

There is some evidence that his cricket career followed some similar stages.  Early in his professional career, he has issues leaving the ball outside off-stump, which Peter Carlstein helps him solve in Australia.  He also has some issues facing spin, which he solves by ‘pressing’ a half step forward at Duncan Fletcher’s request - ‘Duncan’s theory was that, when batting against spinners, if you made a small but positive move onto the front foot before the ball was released, you would put yourself in a better position to go either fully forward or fully back depending on the length of the ball…”if you are going to catch a bus, it is better to arrive at the bus stop early enough to read the the number on the front, rather than at the last moment when you have no choice but to get on and find out later if it is going where you want to go.”’ (p81-82)

Of course, no sporting autobiography would be complete without the obligatory score settling!  Trescothick gets going early by putting a certain Nick Speak (Lancashire batsman) to the sword for saying, ‘this bloke is shit’ (p36) to him as a 17 year old debutant.  Trescothick classifies this as bullying rather than sledging.   Former England captain Nasser Hussain gets a very tepid review.  Trescothick claims he never said anything to him before his England debut until they were in the middle together.  He also tells an unflattering story about him smashing a fridge window in the changing room after he was given out to bad decision.  The most serious allegations are that he put his own batting interests above those of the team during a ODI (p110) and that he was a self-interested captain (p122) - perhaps Trecothick has something of a vendetta against him?  Shane Warne is also slated for writing an article saying he should be dropped from the England team (p143-144).

Alongside these attacks, explicit or veiled, are some more enjoyable titbits.  For instance,  apparently Caddick and Gough used to bicker constantly in the England dressing room.  I also learned that Nathan Astle once went from 101 to 200 runs in 39 deliveries in a test vs England in March, 2002 (p105).  Overall, Astle’s double hundred took 153 balls.  Perhaps most enjoyably we learn that Trescothick is a big Eminem fan and says he was rapping ‘Lose Yourself’ during his test double ton vs SA.  He also gives shout outs to Snoop Dogg and Warren G!

 If Trescothick had never had any of his problems I imagine this would have been a boring read.  Owing to everything that’s happened to him, and the fact he suffered from not being open about it, he’s remarkably candid about his struggles and the mistakes he made trying to manage them.  I also couldn’t help but feel like the professionalization of cricket and the structure of the international game were partially responsible for his issues.  Of course, you could respond, ‘well, he shouldn’t have played then’ but that was never really an option for an obsessive like him.  In my mind, Trescothick’s life might have been a lot more simple and straightforward if he had less talent and was a club cricketer like his Dad without any of the stress that comes with playing for money in the media spotlight.  Whether it was all worth it in the end is anyone’s guess.

Ben Lerner - Leaving Atocha Station

An American poet has received a prestigious scholarship to Madrid for a year.  The book’s opening finds him there, studiously avoiding any contact with the university department he’s supposedly connected to and, instead, smoking lots of hash on the roof of his apartment and going to The Prada to look at a picture for half an hour everyday.  So far so good!  After this daily ritual he writes poetry by copying out bits from Lorca and interpolating them with his own associations.  I really enjoyed his honesty about his professional life and his truthfulness about whether any of it was meaningful.

I became less enamored with the stoner-poet lifestyle when I discovered the poet is also taking unidentified anti-anxiety drugs and suffers from panic attacks.  Smoking a lot of weed seems an odd choice in this context.  He also chooses to multiply his anti-anxiety dose after some negative event or other, to the extent he appears to be losing touch with reality.  I was left with the image of a talented poet, behaving strangely and perhaps unraveling around the edges for unexplained reasons.

The story begins to draw in more characters when the poet makes some friends in Madrid, most prominently a young, fashionable gallery owner and his sister who move in artistic circles and like his poetry.  Or the status his poetry scholarship confers on him.  The poet tells outrageous lies in order to get attention or try to sleep with people –  this was probably my favourite part of the book.  He tells the gallery owner’s sister, who he is perpetually trying to sleep with, that his Mum is dead.  Later, he confesses it is a lie but replaces it with another one about his Dad being a tyrannical fascist.  I loved the way these shady acts are reported without any self-sympathy or attempt to justify his shittiness!  It was also amusing to read in places.

Apart from the central pillar of the Atocha terrorist attacks, the narrative is quotidian and enjoyable.  Visiting the relatives of Spanish friends, going to gallery events, house parties, the odd university conference or symposium and visits to other cities.

The prose was pithy and enjoyable but, perhaps inevitably, given to flights of poetic fancy where the texture of forgiveness or the heart rate of sanctimony are referenced.  Even though I couldn’t find much to enjoy in the less prosaic passages, I was very taken by the fact that the author gives credit to other people’s ideas and phrases in his footnotes.  It seemed like a manifestation of the same instinct towards honesty I found in other parts of the book.  An instinct that is almost entirely contradicted by his reported behaviour during the story!

I thought it was a strange decision to put really small photographs in a paperback edition where the quality would always be poor.  Even to someone who knows Madrid well, in heavily pixelated black and white printed on uncoated paper, the pictures add nothing.  

Towards the end of the book, the poet calls his parents and confesses to lying about them.  He also confesses to his friend, the gallery owner’s sister, who variously performs the role of his tour guide, lover and patron.  She more or less tells him it’s OK for him to lie because he’s a poet.  As someone who doesn't like poetry much, I wasn’t so sure!  But I enjoyed the story as an interesting and entertaining glimpse into the life of a poet.