Here are three books by young British writers who’ve set off, often with more chutzpah than common sense, in their search for new knowledge and interesting experiences. Seb Hunter, Daniel Kalder and Jon Ronson each explore the peculiar corners and crevices of sometimes strange societies — and they take the reader along for the ride.
In Rock Me Amadeus … Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Handel (Michael Joseph — Penguin), self-confessed pop addict Hunter takes a terrible vow. After having written a book about his passion for heavy metal (Hell Bent for Leather: Confessions of a Heavy Metal Addict), he decides that he’ll listen only to classical music for a year. He wants to know what all the fuss is about, and so takes on the entire history of Western classical music while he’s about it.
Despite the cheesy title, Rock Me Amadeus is extremely funny, and I thoroughly enjoyed accompanying Hunter on his rambling exploration. Fortified by friends, alcohol and a very old camera, he starts off in the ruins of the Disibodenberg monastery in Staudernheim where he begins his investigations with Hildegard von Bingen. From here — before the invention of polyphony — he works his way through the golden age of the classics up to the modernists and the minimalists. But he doesn’t always like what he hears. Here he is on one of Von Bingen’s pieces:
‘Play of the Virtues features 82 separate melodies; I sat through all of them. The performance’s only saving grace was that I quite fancied the nun who played Knowledge of God. It went on for 70 minutes, but felt more like seven million. I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”
Even if he is sometimes less than enthralled by what he discovers, Hunter consistently draws the reader in. One feels particularly moved when he attempts, in one sitting, to listen to the entire 14 hours and five minutes of the complete Wagnerian cycle, The Ring of the Nibelung — which he renames The Dwarf’s Cycle.
During his obsessive search, Hunter also speaks to some of the players in today’s classical music industry, such as Darren Henchley, who runs Classic FM in England (the mother ship station of which our local version is a satellite). Hunter asks Henchley what pop music he likes. He also talks to musicians, singers and aristocrats, and asks a conductor strangely honest questions such as: ‘How long is your baton?” and ‘Have you ever got lost and just waggled your arms around a bit till you found your place?”
I almost hate to say it, but Hunter’s book is also educational. It might be easier to learn from somebody who knows nothing, rather than from somebody who knows everything. The trouble with experts is that they don’t realise what you don’t know, and what is obvious to them remains shrouded in a formless grey mass of unconsciousness in the mind of the learner. So perhaps it’s better to learn from somebody who knows as little as you; from an amateur. Perhaps it’s better to learn from a learner than from a teacher.
Lost Cosmonaut (Faber and Faber) by Kalder is written in a similar vein, though it has its own particular idio-syncrasies. Like Hunter’s book, it also contains a fair share of anecdotes about drinking, as well as the requisite dodgy black and white photographs of the writer and his friends on their various expeditions to peculiar places. But Kalder’s area of research is more obscure.
Kalder is a self-declared ‘anti-tourist”, and he unearths a range of pretty fascinating cultures that exist in some of the lesser-known Russian autonomous regions. For example, he finds a nation that is still pagan, and in which the state religion is an ancient form of tree worship called El Mari. Possibly the strangest place he takes the reader is to the capital city of Elista in the deserts of Kalmkia, where a ‘chess city” has been built, in which Kalder discovers a mysterious photograph of Chuck Norris.
The personal style of both of these books reminds me of Ronson’s The Men Who Stare at Goats (Simon and Schuster) in which Ronson taps into the freaky world of United States military intelligence and tracks down a secret psychic unit in the US army. This unit spent a good deal of the Eighties training soldiers to use mind control, and Ronson learns about a suburban shack where 100 de-bleated goats were used by Uncle Sam’s fighting forces in an attempt to practise out-staring goats in the hopes of stopping their heart beats. Apparently this can be done, although the few people who’ve succeeded have also, regrettably, stopped their own hearts from beating in the process. This presented an unexpected drawback to the efficacy of the technique. As in his previous book, Them, Ronson manages to form sympathetic friendships with people operating on the lunatic fringes of colossal institutions.
All three of these books are examples of a new breed of documentary writer emerging in Britain today. These are writers who approach their subjects with an engaging candour and good humour. The sometimes serious focus of these accounts is entertaining, because their narrators don’t take themselves too seriously and because each tackles his subject in a spirit of playfulness.
Instead of trying to present authoritative or monumental works, these authors use a personal, conversational approach. This style of writing provides the perfect anecdote to the deceptions of trying to present accounts that are neutral, timeless and universal.