Alec: The Years Have Pants

 

Alec: The Years Have Pants - A Life-Sized Omnibus by Eddie Campbell (2009 Top Shelf Productions, Kindle 641pp)

 

Sometime around the turn of the century I got hold of a bulky collected edition of Alan Moore’s magnum opus “From Hell”. Ostensibly about Jack the Ripper but actually about so much more, that book was illustrated by Eddie Campbell, an artist whose work was new to me. His scratchy, sketched-in-ink, gloomy art initially repelled me but eventually grew on me and by the end of the volume I thought nobody else could have done the story justice.

“Alec” collects nearly all of his autobiographical strips from the early 1980s to around 2008. Initially he uses an alter-ego, ‘Alec McGarry’ to tell the stories of his friends, family and dead-end job in the UK of the 1980s. The early work mainly involves the patrons of a bar named the King Canute and all his misadventures involving them. The artwork and story-telling style alters from time to time, sometimes becoming more surreal then switching right back to ultra-realistic. As the years go on, he drops the Alec identity and things become more of a straight chronicle of his life as he struggles to find his way as an artist. He marries, moves to Australia and sets up his own publishing company. Issues with money and travel become a major theme.

There’s a lot of material crammed into this book, he includes pages of abandoned projects and just about everything including the kitchen sink. It took me a couple of months reading this on and off to get through it all. Its probably not something you should try to read all the way through in one go. As it consists of many one-page strips, its easier to dip in and out reading a few of those at a time.

Maybe one for fans of the artist or anyone into unusual biographies, it’s probably a bit of an acquired taste.

Just Ignore Him

 

Just Ignore Him by Alan Davies (2020 Little, Brown softcover 274pp)

 

Alan Davies first came to my attention in the late 1990s when he took on the title role in the comedy-mystery-drama series Jonathan Creek. Created by David Renwick who had found success with his earlier TV comedy One Foot in the Grave, the series concerned a stage magician’s technician who lived in a windmill and had a side-line in solving locked-room mysteries. I was a fan although over the years much of what made the programme special was diluted away until it became just another detective show. Davies was already an up and coming comedian when he started playing the role although I don’t think we’d really seen anything of him here. He dropped out of the limelight a few years back and nowadays can only be seen on the panel show QI where he seems to have the role of village idiot.

Marketed as yet another celeb memoir full of childhood japes and memories of glory days, this book actually takes a darker turn. I picked it up and by the time I was 30 pages in we had seen the present-day Davies struggle with what to do with his elderly father’s pornography collection before flashing back to his fond memories of his mother who died age 38 when Davies was 6. Then we have memories of his father making the young boy have ‘special cuddles’ in bed.

Although it does deal with some lighter material – school days and family outings etc, its clear that this is mainly a record of Davies coming to terms with his disturbing childhood and how much of his life has been affected by those events. His mother was dying from Leukaemia but the medical professionals actually kept that information from her and Davies’ father hid the information from his own family including the children. His mother was simply wiped from existence in their household and then the child abuse began. Although a star student at school and talented in many areas, the young Davies rebels against the world and his family, eventually becoming something of a drop-out before turning his life around when he discovers comedy.

The latter part of the book deals with the author’s efforts to take legal action against his father (now in his 80s) and all the complications that arise from that. Now with a family of his own, he muses over some of the big questions in life thinks back to times when he himself failed to take the high moral ground.

So, not what you might expect from a book of this type but very readable and thought-provoking all the same.

Secondhand Time

 

Secondhand Time by Svetlana Alexievich (2016 Text Publishing softcover 471pp)

 

I bought this book around four and a half years ago, not long after it had won the Nobel Prize in literature. At the same time, I bought the same author’s “A Chernobyl Prayer” (aka “Voices from Chernobyl”). I read the Chernobyl book right away and left this one untouched until now.

There’s not much you can criticise about this book; it is exactly as advertised – an oral history of people who lived through the momentous changes when the USSR ceased to exist. Its split into two sections, the first features interviews undertaken in the early 1990s when events were fresh and the second section from the Putin era looking back.

The interviewees’ words are left to speak for themselves, there is little record of what the author had initially asked them to start the conversations. Most of the stories they tell include harrowing details and by the end I was a little shell-shocked from all the stories of brutality and suicides. There’s quite a lot of cognitive dissonance on show – people who pine for the security of the Soviet era whilst at the same time describing the horrors and hardships of that time. There many stories of being informed on by friends and neighbours, being sent to camps and having to live like animals for years but at the same time they want another Stalin to arise and lead the nation. Stories of family, relationships and the plight of ethnic minorities in modern Russia are also covered in depth.

It took me a while to work my way through this book, not only because of the contents but also because of the structure – its written as the people interviewed spoke, so things get hazy before becoming clear again. Those interviewed often go off into unrelated topics or speak in unfinished sentences. Sometimes its hard to even work out who is talking.

If like me you find yourself as something of a Russophile or just have an interest in the effects of history on ordinary people, this book makes for good reading. Just don’t expect any happy endings within.