5ive Books: Richard Blandford

"I’d be lying if I said I got the joke."



Rather than list the five best books I've read, which would probably be a similar list to everybody else's (The Iliad, Don Quixote, Wuthering Heights, Salem's Lot, Kane and Abel), I’ve decided to concentrate on five books that had some bearing on the nature of my debut novel, Hound Dog.

The Story of the Eye - George Bataille
This interested me because it is literally obscene. Not because it's got a lot of sex in it, although it has, but because in this work sex is presented as possessing the power to defile. Everything that exists is made dirty by sex here, all social structures and conventions, the natural world, even sex itself is soiled by the urophilic tendencies of the main characters. In Bataille's novel, this is a force of liberation. I think some of the sex in Hound Dog is also obscene, but rather than setting the characters free, it imprisons them in a cycle of repetition and inability to hold on to any core values. Which I suppose makes my book quite morally conservative when compared to Bataille.

Candy - Terry Southern & Mason Hoffenberg
Another book that takes the logic of pornographic writing and subverts it. In a way, pornography is anti-literature, or at least the classical idea of it, in that it never results in the resolution of a dramatic situation, merely the climax of orgasm followed by immediate reset and resumption of desire. It is therefore necessarily cyclical and episodic rather than linear in its structure. Here Southern and Hoffenberg rewrite Candide, another episodic book, to attack both the hypocrisies of '50s America and the sexual revolution waiting in the wings. My original intention was to make Hound Dog similarly episodic, but a more conventional structure imposed itself against my wishes.

The Ginger Man - J.P. Donleavy
This book taught me that you could have a fantastically unpleasant main character, who spends most of the book being nasty to people, including wife-beating, and still get away with calling it a 'comic novel'. Similar to Ulysses in many ways, although shorter and with more nob gags, this was a big influence on me, even though I'd be lying if I said I got the joke.

Last Summer - Evan Hunter
A brilliant little gem from the author sometimes known as Ed McBain. Essentially a '60s American teenybopper version of Lord of the Flies, what I like about it is its absolutely serious intent combined with direct, pulpy writing style. Makes the whole high/low-brow distinction absolutely meaningless, which is something I hope I've managed to emulate. This book's been out of circulation for years, but if you find a copy, snap it up.

Hate: Buddy Does Seattle - Peter Bagge
For me, much of the best writing these days is appearing in comics and graphic novels. Peter Bagge is not only the best cartoonist since Robert Crumb, his powers of observation and characterisation are about the best there is right now. He gets inside the head of his protagonist to a level many contemporary novelists can't manage. Funny, extreme and bittersweet, these tales of Grunge-era Seattle twenty-somethings are simply fantastic.

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Richard Blandford is the author of the brilliant Hound Dog, a "novel of redemption and rock'n'roll, masturbation and morality," about an Elvis impersonator who hates Elvis.