1419, Billy Summers and all that

It has taken me a couple of months but I have been listening to Lord of the Rings on audiobook over on Youtube. I started off with a multi voiced dramatisation which vanished after a few chapters (as things are wont to do there) then I found Rikash Doekhi and Paul Skinner who provided the remainder (though I was irritated the way Paul pronounced Gandalf, not enough to spoil it and his reading voice is excellent). I reviewed the book back in 2015 after Monkey and I shared the reading of it, and enjoyed it just as much this time around. I was reminded of the ending, which is missing from the films, where the Hobbits return and must fight again to reclaim their Shire from the forces that have invaded it. In some ways it feels a vitally important part of the tale, of how much they are transformed by their experiences, and how nobody rescues them, they do it together, without help from their fellowship. 

We had a very successful charity shop trawl last week, including copies of 'Girl, Woman, Other' and 'Piranesi'. Certainly enough to keep me going for quite a while. I tend to pick out authors that I have read before so I can be quite sure I have some good reading in my near future.

I picked out 'Me and the Fat Man' by Julie Myerson as a quick read (I have reviewed her before, here and here). In it Amy is drifting through life, not knowing who she is, having lost her mother very young and been raised by disinterested foster parents. She meets Harris, who claims to have known her mother, and through him, the fat man, Gary. But things are not at all as they seem, and events rush on, overtaking her, until a tragedy forces her to face up to things. It is a weird little story, about how a person flounders without roots. 
"It had seemed like chance that Gary and I should meet in the pub that night and had felt like choice when I fell for his big body and his gentle, unlikely ways.
But Harris had special skills. He had the skill of making you feel you were choosing, making you believe that anything could happen - that fate was just messing around. They were good times, the ones that followed - though then I was too blinded by the newness to see it. Just when I thought I understood a fact, another, stranger one appeared. Like the dolls you get that you open and there's another inside - each one eating up the next, so as the whole thing can continue. " (p.85)

Previous to this however I had finally managed to get hold of 'Billy Summers' by Stephen King. (Shocked to discover it is a decade since I read 11/22/63, it feels like only a couple of years ago.) I really enjoyed this book, he knows how to keep the story moving, with plenty of twists and turns, and how to make you like people, even when they are bad people; which I guess means he writes them as people not clichés, with strengths and weaknesses like the rest of us. 

Billy is a contract killer. But he only kills 'bad people', at least that's how he justifies to himself how he makes his living. He is sucked in to doing a final job by the promise of a big payout. But as he waits around preparing to make the hit he becomes more suspicious of the set-up, and makes his own plans to extricate himself from the situation. As is so often the case (they are criminals after all) people have not been straight with him and he digs a little deeper to find there are some even badder bad people behind the arrangement. Acting on instinct (and proving he is not such a bad bad person) he rescues a young woman and their relationship leads to other bad shit. All the while he is writing his own life story, which we read, and he reflects on how things have come to be this way. While I have no desire to dip into the horror genre I have enjoyed Stephen King, he tells a great story.

"Half way back to his office, he had a nasty thought. There were a few moments on his way here when he lost focus, his mind on Shan's drawing instead of staying where it belonged, on this morning's preparations. Has he dropped the Dalton Smith phone into the sewer instead of one of the others? The idea is so terrible that in that moment he's positive that's just what he did, when when he reaches in his pocket he'll find the Billy-phone, or the Dave-phone, or that useless burner. If so, he can replace it, his Dalton Smith credit cards are all good, but what if Don or Beverley Jensen should call on the day or two before FedEx can deliver a new one to 658  Pearson? They'll wonder why he's out of touch. It might not matter, but it might. Good neighbours, grateful neighbours, might even call the police and ask them to check his basement apartment to make sure he's okay.

He grabs the phone, and for a moment just holds it, feeling like a roulette player afraid to look at the wheel and see which color the little ball has landed on. the worst thing - worse than the inconvenience, even worse than the potential danger - is knowing he was careless. He let his thoughts slip to the life that's now behind him.

He brings the phone out of his pocket and breathes a sigh of relief. It's the one that belongs to Dalton. He's gotten away with one potential mistake. He can't make another. The fates are unforgiving." (p.144-5)

Stay safe. Be kind. Turquoise or Tangerine for the new sofa covers?