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The best possible ragbag

Tuesday, 8th April 2008

I love books like this. A writer writing about what he knows and what he loves and things he has done, with absolutely no thought as to the marketability of the book when it comes out. This very slight lack of focus has already been reflected in a couple of reviews. What is it, fish or fowl? The publishers, probably scratching their heads and wondering which shelf it’ll be put on, will no doubt classify it as ‘music’ or maybe ‘autobiography’, as all the chain bookshops like their non-fiction easily categorisable.

In other words, it’s all a bit of a ragbag, but in the best possible sense of that word. If you never quite know what’s coming next, at least you know that it won’t be much like what has come before. Underlying it all, in theory, is his theme of the Gig — musical gigs he has enjoyed or, in the case of Paul McCartney’s, merely experienced, and his own poetry performances, which are obviously a substantial part of his life. As he travels across the world, squeezed into the poet’s economy class seat (novelists, he says, always fly business class and arrive ‘looking as if they have been delivered by florists’), he keeps an eye permanently open for oddity and absurdity. And more often than not, coincidence and synchronicity arrive unbidden.

None of this would amount to much, though, if Armitage weren’t such an entertaining writer:

There’s something beautifully home-made and amateurish about the traditional British bonfire, and tonight’s turns out to be no exception: a makeshift pyre; toffee and pie in a neighbour’s garage; bottles of beer jemmied open with a penknife; conspiratorial silhouettes up in the field, ducking from the sideways strafing of misaligned Roman candles.

On almost every page there’s a joke or a metaphor or simply a verbal image any writer would like to have thought of first. He talks of ‘the pie-and-chips pregnancy of the shirtless car-park attendant on an August bank holiday’. Flying back from the US on the red-eye, ‘Morning is a warm, moist flannel somewhere above Dublin.’ In Australia at a signing, he is given post-it notes with the names of the people he has to dedicate each book to:

For a moment I have the absurd notion of keeping them all, putting them in a scrapbook. Evidence. Proof of something on days when the armies of Inferiority and Pointlessness smash down the fence and park their tanks on the lawn.

He is also good on the music, on the relatively rare occasions he writes about it. But this book is as much about his dad (and his dad’s cellar) as it is about music; it’s about the comedy and pathos of ordinary life, written with a very singular sensibility; and it’s also the funniest book I have read in ages. Wherever they decide to put it in bookshops, I’m inclined to file it under ‘recommended’, the only category that really matters at all.