Simon Garfield- The Wrestling

The Wrestling

Faber & Faber

 Simon Garfield

1996 (Original)/ 2007 (Revised)

"Wayne Bridges: (On Les Kellet)I was at his house in Bradford when he was threading a wire through a cork and missed and threaded it through the web in his hand, between his thumb and his forefinger. He said, 'Oh dear, an accident, not to worry,' and he poured a bottle of iodine over a ball of cotton wool, and put it on the needle, and then threaded that through the same hole in his hand."

This might damage my street cred a little bit, but here goes; I'm a bit of a pro-wrestling fan. How much of a fan is something we'll leave for another day perhaps, because it just might get a little bit ugly. Any book entitled 'The Wrestling' then, is certainly up my alley. Well-respected author of non-fiction Simon Garfield's book is a very particular look on wrestling, though, because it's all about the history (or at least popular history) of professional wrestling in the United Kingdom, particularly its glory years on ITV television from the mid nineteen sixties through to its infamous cancellation in the late eighties. In this book Garfield talks extensively with some of the most influential and famous characters from the period, in an ambitious attempt to chronicle the rise and fall of the profession.

As a work of investigative journalism relying mostly on the words of such interviewed participants as Mick McManus and Shirley 'Big Daddy' Crabtree, Garfield does an excellent job of portraying the personalities on paper. The journey through the book is roughly chronological, with interesting sections on the mysterious and probably tall-story infested origins from the twenties onwards, but most of the content revolves around when the likes of McCarthy and Jackie Pollo got into things from the sixties onwards, and then Big Daddy, Giant Haystacks and Kendo Nagasaki from the seventies. Unfortunately it's very hazily organised, partially thanks to the interviewees nostalgically reminiscing on incidents without giving any dates, and Garfield for not encouraging them to do so.

Easy! Easy!

Further damaging its credibility as historical documentation is the nature of the business itself. Though it's possible to guess based on their personalities, it's somewhat hard to distinguish the reality from the legend, particularly in regards to older subject matter. Wrestling was an extremely closed-off business back then to try and protect it from exposure as a fraud, and hype was absolutely everything. As a result some of the wrestlers are hilariously arrogant, sometimes endearingly so, but damaging their credibility. There were plenty of statements in this book that I didn't believe for a second., but, ironically, such tail telling actually adds to the aura of the book in regards to the bizarre second-rate carnival it represents.

Garfield really sells the larger than life aspect with a manner of respect, but the often more depraved aspects seep through. Plenty of the wrestlers were seriously odd people behind the scenes; kind of a cross between local dangerous weirdos and out of control rock stars. Some of the dirt, while not over-represented, offered the seediest insights. The legend of Les Kellet, for example, feared as an incredibly odd and unpredictable man gave the book not only some of its oddest stories, but a touch of poignancy as Garfield documents his attempts to contact Kellet for the book.

Obviously I enjoyed the book and took away a lot, but in my case it was preaching to the converted. It's far from an accurate textbook of events, but more of a collection of second-hand recollections and truths given from a bunch of old men who told myths for a living for decades. It is, however, through this an accurate representation of a period and a culture which is now almost completely dead; drowned through its own incompetence and inability to compete with the worldwide competition of the nineties. There was plenty I found to be incredibly endearing, plenty I found to scoff at, but it left me, at the end, with a greater respect for the mystique of it than ever before.

Hubert Selby Jr.- Last Exit to Brooklyn

Last Exit to Brooklyn

Penguin Modern Classics

 Hubert Selby Jr.
1964

“Sometimes we have the absolute certainty there's something inside us that's so hideous and monstrous that if we ever search it out we won't be able to stand looking at it. But it's when we're willing to come face to face with that demon that we face the angel.”

After diverting my attention from my typical reading material with the young adult novel Mortal Engines, I decided to return to my comfort zone of classic 20th century American literature, albeit with an author I'd never read before; Hubert Selby Jr. and Last Exit to Brooklyn. I had certain expectations going in to this book thanks to the small amount of knowledge I had of it beforehand, but what I found was a piece of fiction too complex in its depth and design for me to understand without really digging in to it. One thing was for certain early on; Last Exit to Brooklyn is definitely not comfort reading.

I'm the type of person that judges a book by its cover all the time (otherwise how do you know what it's called?)  and Brooklyn proudly proclaims that it was banned upon first publication in the UK, which peaked my interest, under the accusation of being exploitative pornography. That by itself wouldn't necessarily make it completely obscene, since artistic censorship in the west seems to almost always be completely random in that regard, but it does allow the book to revel in the glow of anti-establishment coolness before it even begins. Last Exit to Brooklyn is, in ways, a collection of short stories that offer a tinted window into the lives of various inhabitants of Brooklyn, all of whom have problems in the worst ways imaginable.

These problems, such as drug abuse, violent crime, rape, and every form of discrimination possible, are all topics and threats common to certain authors of the period; William Burroughs, Charles Bukowski, Allen Ginsberg etc, the uncensored evolution of beat poetry and alcoholism taken to new extremes, not just insulting the concept of the American Dream, but brutally beating and raping it until it likes it.  Fifty years on from then, the general modern day reader has encountered enough of this to desensitise him/her to the power of nasty topics by themselves, so for me content isn't enough.

The thing about Hubert Selby Jr. is that his prose is unique. At first, the long, meandering sentences reminded me of his contemporaries, and it wasn't until I delved deeper into the book that I started to understand the crucial differences. Like Burroughs et al, Selby explores the nature of human evil and drug psicosis with maximum intensity, but I found within Selby's characters a true sense of sorrowful humanity that left lasting imprints. There's less surrealism, as Selby focuses less on the trip (or the crime) than he does with the mental fall into despair. It's never presented overtly, but for me Selby's characters exude a loss of innocence, a fall from grace with enough memory to regret it, whereas Burroughs implies that no such innocence ever existed in the first place.

Gritty, grimy, unpleasant and intentionally so; Last Exit to Brooklyn is a supreme piece of literature, deserving of far more detailed praise and analysis than I can muster. Read it yourself, see what I mean. 

Phillip Reeve- Mortal Engines

Mortal Engines

 

Harper Collins

Phillip Reeve

2001

“Is it...dead?" asked Tom, his voice all quivery with fright.
"A town just ran over him," said Hester. "I shouldn't think he's very well...”  

At first glance, illustrator Phillip Reeve's debut novel Mortal Engines doesn't look like the type of fiction a well-respecting adult reader would be seen in public with, but my desire to try and catch upwith my reading pile meant that I was cramming brief bits of reading where ever I could. I'd been looking forward to getting to the book for some time now, specifically to try and fill a particularly-sized gap that I felt in my reading appetite; that for a bit of young adult fiction. I'm a big proponent of the potential of the genre to create the right type of atmosphere for an author to create amazing fantasy, and there's no better example of this than Phillip Pullman's truly epic His Dark Materials trilogy, where Pullman dramatically pulled his readers through an intense inter-dimensional adventure with philosophical and religious themes playing out across an amazing, neo-classical setting. I was looking for an imagination as vast as that, and the premise of Mortal Engines captured my attention.

I was probably most attracted by the promise of steampunk; that curious artistic mixture of classical Victorian design reinterpreted in futuristic ways. Mortal Engines is set thousands of years from the present, in a post-apocalyptic future where devastating war has changed life as we know it, and destroyed most knowledge of the past. While computers and other electronics  no longer exist, the mad scientists of the future have turned the very cities they live in into almost unrecognisable machinery. Each city is placed upon huge constructed tank tracks, that connect to immense steam engines that propel them across the desert planes. With natural resources extremely scarce, each city and town is forced to prey upon smaller ones. The city of London is one of these; larger than most but not invulnerable.

Reeves refrains from giving every detail of this world immediately, leaving plenty of mysteries unsolved even at the end of this book (which is the first in a series of three). He narrows the perspective on this amazing world when he introduces his unassuming main character, a young orphan named Tom. It's through Tom's perspective and experiences that things become a lot more simplified and typical; I'm not sure if this is a slight or not, but Reeve's portrayal of Tom is hardly original; for one he's an orphan, and all orphans in all books ever always eventually overcome the odds. In other developments common to all children's literature, Tom quickly becomes tightly wrapped-up in a major conspiracy involving the adults he knows, where he and his friends go against the odds to do what's right. It's oddly comfortable, in the spirit of Harry Potter and all that.

It's because of this that I enjoyed the book; though the adventure is fast-paced and exciting, and the plot full of twists (without giving too much away, Tom finds out that the leaders of London aren't quite as benevolent as they like to appear and are planning on using some rediscovered olde tech to conquor their enemies via killing masses of innocents) Reeve's writing remains fairly simple. In some respects it's limited, far behind the narrative mastery of Phillip Pullman and lacking the emotional power of J.K. Rowling's books, but it does retain a sense of wonder and  majesty suited to the uncanny backdrop of events. At some point I'll certainly pick up the second book in the series, with some hope that Phillip Reeve's talents as a writer grew with experience.