Crime, Punishment and Occasional Bewilderment

Well, cross that one off the bucket list. Finally. Last night I finished reading Crime and Punishment. It's taken a while, and I had to read two other books in the middle of it for a rest. It's not that Dostoyevsky's prose is denser and less accessible than that of any other 19^th Century author – what really got me were the names. Allow me to explain.

The crime in question is committed by the splendidly alliterative Rodion Romanovitch Raskolnikoff (this is not a spoiler – the dramatis personae lists him as 'Student and Murderer'). Raskolnikoff kills an old moneylender and her sister in what initially appears to be a fairly amateurish robbery, and Dostoyevsky charts his consequent mental disintegration amidst a colourful cast of people with irritatingly similar names.

Perhaps I just haven't read enough Russian literature, but I found it difficult to keep track of Peter Petrovitch, Porphyrius Petrovitch and Elia Petrovitch (none of whom are related). The fact that some characters are known by as many as three different names or diminutives - I'm looking at you, Eudoxia/Dounia/Dounetchka - doesn't help either.

Once these minor hurdles are negotiated, C&P reveals itself as an intensely harrowing and human account of Raskolnikoff's encroaching insanity, and of the disastrous effects it has on his doting sister and mother. The crime takes place early in the narrative and is foreseen in a way that calls to mind the 'murderee' in Martin Amis' London Fields. The official 'punishment' is more or less an epilogue - Raskolnikoff's restless mind provides more punishment than any Siberian labour camp.

Eventually it emerges that Raskolnikoff isn't being driven mad purely by remorse or fear of capture. The student committed his crime to test an academic hypothesis, to see if he could join Napoleon amid the ranks of the übermenschen, to see if he could reject society's conventions and act purely in his own interests, even to the point of murder. Clearly, Raskolnikoff is not that kind of person, and he becomes increasingly exasperated by his own weakness and the fact that, in trying and failing to be like Napoleon, he has ruined himself.

With a beard like that, who needs happiness?

To me, this was the most interesting aspect of C&P and yet it seemed like an underdeveloped sub-plot. Amid the misery and suffering which Dostoyevsky does so well, I would have liked to see more of this Borgesian idea of taking an intellectual curiosity to its monstrous extreme.

Other plot strands include alcoholic fathers, consumptive widows, misogynistic fiancées, starving children and the ubiquitous tart-with-a-heart, who follows the doomed Raskolnikoff almost literally to the ends of the earth. These threads are drawn together with breathtaking skill, although you might find yourself leafing backwards once in a while to remind yourself who on earth all these people are.

On the plus side Dostoyevsky's dialogue is remarkably accessible to the modern reader, particularly Raskolnikoff's feverish internal ruminations. His emotional turmoil is conveyed without apparent effort and the reader's empathy for the murderer is truly poignant. I've never murdered anyone, but now I know exactly what it feels like.

In short, C&P is a horrifying romp through a Dickensian carnival of human misery. There is, mercifully, a glimmer of redemption at the end of the trans-Siberian tunnel, but this certainly isn't a book for the faint-hearted.

Something Amis*

As promised, here are a few thoughts about Martin Amis’ novel London Fields, which featured in my list of top-five-charity-shop-bargains. As I said before, it is an unconventional murder story. You can tell that because I’m over halfway through it, and nobody has been murdered yet. But we all know that somebody will be.

Nicola Six is a beautiful woman who knows what she wants, and what she wants is to be murdered. She wants to be murdered by Keith Talent, an alcoholic and abusive serial adulterer with a gambling problem and delusional belief in his destiny as a professional darts player. She also needs a foil, a patsy to play Keith off against, and this is where the wealthy, charming, pointlessly handsome Guy Clinch comes in – think Hugh Grant in, I don’t know, just about any film he’s ever been in.

As you might have noticed, the names have some kind of vague allegorical significance. I haven’t quite worked this one out yet. I think sometimes it just pleases the author: Keith’s semi-criminal drinking mates have names like Thelonious and Shakespeare, and his goodtime girl is the obviously anagrammatised Trish Shirt. Then there is Enola (try it backwards) and the sexually liberated Analiese Furnish. And so on.

There is, I suppose, an excuse for all this word-play. As with the recently-read Baudolino, the main plot of London Fields is framed by the narrator’s circumstances. The first person narrator is a struggling writer with his own problems, and therefore an excellent excuse for Amis’ richly misanthropic prose. This writer asserts that he is no good at making stuff up, so he is just reporting the facts, which perhaps accounts for the pseudonyms.

This situation also creates some interesting layers of reality within the novel. At one point, the writer turns up and demands that Nicola Six kisses him, in the interests of research. He cannot write about it, he says, unless he knows what it is like. What a good excuse.

The plot is one of entrapment, as Nicola Six grooms the two male leads for their respective roles, and there is a real sense of looming catastrophe behind all the sex and black humour. There is also a slight dystopian edge to the novel, with a number of sideswipes at the degraded morals of the end of the twentieth century, and an awareness of impending nuclear holocaust on the side. The narrator stands detached from all of this, immune to Nicola’s powerful charms, safe in the knowledge that he is dying from an incurable disease. So it goes.

This is not a cheerful book, but it is beautifully executed in a language that might sound self-consciously ‘writerly’ coming from anyone else, but which Amis gets away with. Nicola’s character is not always believable, something which the writer observes, asking her to be less of a femme fatale. She responds that she is not a femme fatale but a Murderee, plain and simple. All we need now is a murder.

*The title for this blog post is a gratuitous pun that I came up with. Then I saw that it had already been used for a post on the Guardian Books Blog. But I’m going to use it anyway. For more on this phenomenon, watch this space for something on pre-emptive plagiarism in the not-too-distant future.

Fiction for the Unemployed: my five favourite charity bookstore bargains

1. Cervantes – Don Quixote

Although it has only featured indirectly in this blog, Cervantes’ weighty masterpiece was the fruit of one of my first visits to the Oxfam bookshop in Muswell Hill. It’s hard to underestimate Cervantes’ influence on countless later authors, including – glancing down this list - Eco and Burgess. And in terms of the sheer quantity of book for the price, this one is a winner. Don’t sneer; it’s an important factor.

2. Umberto Eco – Baudolino

I think Eco has gained a boost from the fact that I read Baudolino very recently. However, it is an excellent novel, and might even be credited with rekindling my enthusiasm for medieval history after my dissertation poured cold water all over it. Swashbuckling adventure and dusty manuscripts can sit comfortably alongside each other, as this novel proves.

3. Martin Amis – London Fields

This is a work in progress, a novel I’m reading at the moment, but it is pretty phenomenal. A murder story set in the seedy Portobello Road, where murderer and murderee are marked out from the outset. Keep your eyes peeled for a post on it in the near future.

4. Anthony Burgess – The Devil’s Mode

Anthony Burgess has very rapidly become one of my favourite authors. His novels are both witty and sophisticated, and his short stories share this excellent balance between serious learning and human life with all its bodily functions. This collection resurrects a host of characters from history, literature and music, and delivers them all in vivid, bite-sized stories.

5. Italo Calvino – Invisible Cities

If Cervantes won the prize for number of words vs. capital investment, Calvino’s slender tome is the exact opposite, but is nonetheless full of very interesting ideas. A light book, but containing some philosophically dense concepts of utopian societies, Invisible Cities really benefits from being viewed as a collection of short stories united by a broad theme, rather than a novel as such.

Well, there we go. I’m afraid this list is very Eurocentric, and it doesn’t really reflect a lot of great American literature. But Melville, Hemingway and Vonnegut would all be contenders if I’d actually got them from charity shops. I’d like to thank the Oxfam bookshops of Muswell Hill and Crouch End, and the upstanding and thoroughly middle class citizens of those areas who read so widely and pass their books on to a good cause: me.