Loving Monsters

This book was a departure from the usual books which I read but it had been recommended with glowing reviews by friends of mine so I ordered it from Amazon.
From the first page I was fascinated! It's the type of book that one should read in large chunks, or preferably all at once, not in instalments.

The first chapter deals with the death of the character about whom the biographer speaks throughout the book, and even his death, although expected, has a bizarre ring to it as of course does his life.
Raymond Jerningham Jebb (Jayjay) is the character who tells his story to and through his biographer and we are taken from his life in England with a fanatical mother to his life in Egypt - a strange amoral existence in which his pleasures are fulfilled in many sensuous ways.

'The same quarter of town but a different spyhole. The same cockroaches, the same sweat, a newly awakened longing.'
Through a voyeuristic tour of the city, Jayjay gets to know more about people, which he uses to his own advantage, and much more about life.

The narrator, James, tells us about his own life, his daughter and his bees and we learn about his own dreams and desires.
'Trying to skirt a private abyss of my own, I sense a strange congruence that links together tonight's interrogator, Jayjay and myself.'

Finally, it is in Tuscany that the story ends when Jayjay tells James that he is dying and releases all his private thoughts and secrets - and the concepts and dreams fall into place.
This section of the book carries the most beautiful writing by James Hamilton-Patterson who is certainly a master wordsmith.

The beloveds who elude us, the beloveds who were, and are not, the beloveds who never were.
What are these but great works of the imagination, a lifetime's solid stonework?'

At the end, the narrator, James, is left alone to philosophise about himself and about Jayjay and about all the characters whom he met in real life and in his imagination.

'Maybe poets can cope with it better. Maybe they can use their skill to spread scented fragments of that original version throughout a lifetime's work as sparingly as a cook shaves a truffle. But when it happens to the life of the affections it leaves behind the ashes of dissatisfaction, the ghost can never be completely exorcised.'

After you have finished reading this book, the ghost of Jayjay and of Philip and Adelio and indeed of James can never be completely exorcised. You want to start again, to know them better.

Buy this book, it is brilliantly written and it is a very good tale of love, life and death, of beauty, sordidness, humanity and inhumanity.
Above all it is a book you won't forget.

Quintessentially British (9/15 people found this helpful)

James Hamilton-Paterson has written a bizarre diversity of books over decades, including a book on the practice of mumification in Ancient Egypt! He appears to a compulsive writer. I suppose that he first stumbled, but recently, into the mainstream limelight with his splendid, light-hearted and occasionally somehat credence-stretching "Cooking with Fernet Branca" - an excellent entertainment on nearly all levels.
Its precursor "Loving Monsters", which has somethings in common, is a work on an entirely different level. I get a strong image conjured up of his publishers saying " James, lighten up, this stuff is incredibly brilliant but we're not all be buying new Audis out of the proceeds" (Don't all publishers hope for a J.K. Rowlings to wander into the office)
Well this stuff IS really incredibly brilliant, and although the book was published awhile ago it up to us, the reading public, to prove the publishers wrong if we want them to offer us more than flippant and juvenile dross.
James Hamilton-Paterson has the ability to manipulate the English language in such a comfortably way that the reader is barely aware of his astonishing dexterity in using allusion and nuance to create an image. Startlingly immediate images, the stuff of dreams, are solidified from the aether by his prose. As Bella Bathurst wrote in the Sunday Herald "How does he do that?"
The plot is remarkably and cerebrally controlled. The reader is continuously awaiting some kind of climax of excitement or devastating event, which never occurs. And at the end you realise that it has all happened in vivid reality, and everything has taken it course. There has been a story with a start, a middle and a finish but it has been no greater than a series of troughs and peaks that don't spill over into the next frame like an adventure story.Isn't that the real story ?
The terms of reference in this book are isoteric, and many of James Hamilton-Paterson's images could be obscure to a reader who is not a devoted Anglophile or shares that culture. No matter the characters come through loud and defined, and the background is full of, perhaps, unfamiliar images that are reminiscences. The writing is staggeringly wonderful - it repays re-reading, passage after passage.
Something of a monument in the English literary cannon?
I hope he will be allowed to write more books like this.
I am not related.

Oddly Engaging (19/20 people found this helpful)

There was something weird about this book: on the one hand it is utterly compelling, on the other it is extremely difficult to explain to someone - or even to yourself - just why it is so good. Hamilton Paterson's style is outstanding. The idea of the book is interesting, as is the subject, louche and eccentric Jay Jay. But there is something more about the book which makes it so absorbing. Without having read anything more by the author, it may simply be his personality and his insights into life and living which are sprinkled through the book and at times catch you off balance. Comparisons would be cliched, but Hamilton Paterson appears to be one of those alienated upper middle class Englishmen (Britons?) who have devoted themselves to living life with a passionate intensity, some of which leaks into their writing. Hamilton Paterson could gain some sort of cultishness, but I doubt he will: he seems simply to serious for that, less 'mediagenic' and too careful to hide himself within his writing. If you want to be pleasantly surprised that the best writers are not well-known, read this.

James Hamilton-Paterson

Reader Reviews:

FASCINATING ! (6/6 people found this helpful)

Quintessentially British (9/15 people found this helpful)

Oddly Engaging (19/20 people found this helpful)

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