Review: Forty Nights – by Chris Thrall

I read ‘Eating Smoke’ some time ago, Chris’ autobiographic story of descent into Crystal Meth psychosis while working for the Triads in Hong Kong. It was a great story and I loved that book. I noticed that Chris was appearing regularly on the BBC as an ‘expert’ on a; sorts of drugs stories etc so I guess the book did well and got him a high profile. After reading and reviewing ‘Eating Smoke’ I hooked up with Chris online and we’ve stayed in touch on social media for some time. He’s a real, op, friendly bloke who will bend over backwards to help you out. He’s got stuck right into assist me with some of my darker mental health calamities over the years and he speaks sense. In a social media world which has turned antisocial it’s nice to actually make genuine online friends who aren’t bots or scammers. When Chris released this follow up book ‘Forty Nights’ I felt obliged to get a copy and check it out. So here we go….

Firstly, let me say that if you want the exotic glamour of Hong Kong and Triads and even Crystal Meth, Forty Nights could lead to disappointment. This is Devon’s answer to Irvine Welsh’s ‘Trainspotting’ – It’s not so glamorous. Lots of dingy council estates, messed up dead end jobs, a full-on quite nasty amphetamine injecting habit and promises to sort it all out. The book is set right on the margins of society and Chris just sort of floats there, does his own thing and I cannot comprehend how he managed to write such a big book with so many words with such little obvious material. I mean Wordsworth and Coleridge had the Lake District. Chris just regularly paints dodgy murals on his wall when he’s experiencing the regular insomnia speed addicts are accustomed to. I don’t mean this as a criticism of the book. I think it’s amazing to be able to work with such a blank canvas. The language is not high brow. Its accessible, but some of the best writers have this trait. Think Hemingway: he rarely used long words. It was simple and in its simplicity he managed to evoke great beauty and particularly strong images in the imagination. You feel like you are there with Chris as you go through the chapters. Nothing every really happens. It’s same shit, different day and it sort of spirals. But this is reality. Our generation are pretty oppressed and lack opportunities. The rave generation of the 1990s do have a different ethos, our views on lifestyle choices such as drug use, our general rejection of capitalist materialism, our ability to be creative and opportunistic and just crack on with life. Chris’ story shows he is clearly on the margins. So many ex-military people struggle in civvy street. It’s not straightforward holding down a job and living with 2.4 children, a washing machine and a mortgage. Drug use and abuse is widespread and a hidden problem in that people outside of the social circles have no real clue about the actual realities and the pandemic that is really happening on the streets of Britain. Yes, we partied in the raves and clubs to banging dance music back in the day but the firm heel of the jackboot pretty much stamped everyone down to heel in the real world. Society is oppressive. Try dealing with the dwp on a regular basis, or getting exiled from your family inner circle due to a lack of understanding, or just a casual journey into the patient’s perspective of mental health issues. Any dealing with the police are just negative for anyone no matter what. So many people can luckily skate through life avoiding them totally but once you get on their radar you’re going to have a negative experience and Chris has the odd brush. It’s a story of progress, a self-reflective philosophical work of literature. I can’t imagine how valuable this book would be to drug addicts seeking a working tool for recovery.  It can’t have been easy for Chris to admit his problems so publicly. But I bet it helped him to do this. You can see him trying to fight and change all the way through the story – he wants to keep his personality and values and just cease stuff which he knows is bad in life and is harming him. Ultimately we see him head off to training for voluntary work with an African charity after pretty much getting the speed problem under control. So in that sense it’s a happy ending and there’s the possibility of future books.

The characters Chris encounters are real people, real issues and who are pretty much in a similar situation to him. A lot of the time the core support of friends is noticeably absent and often when he is with friends it’s sort of a bit of a nightmare session that doesn’t really help with life progress but is fun nonetheless. Chunks steals the show – he’s like a council estate pirate with his own language and a completely happy-go-lucky we can do it mentality. Chunks merits a whole book unto himself. He’s a superhero really. Other mates end up in nick or are running dodgy criminal operations like baccy smuggling which Chris gets roped into – but the trips across the Channel seemed quite exotic really compared with life at home in Devon. The book can also read a s a manual for ways to deal with TV License Inspectors and Chris is bang on, creative and off the cuff in his successful approach to this. He is a good neighbour and the local kids love him and he keeps their active imaginations firmly engaged. He is a genuinely nice bloke.

I really liked the book – and perhaps I’m showing my age – as I found it nostalgic about a period of time where life was so radically different. It was pre internet and pre social media and the friendships and societal values of the 1990s dancefloors bound us together as a society. Although today we have shiny mobile phones and are ‘more developed’ in many ways we now don’t get out and about as much and we also don’t have as many adventures or fun. Yes, life back in the day wasn’t perfect but it was still pretty damned good.

I can’t do the book justice really in this review but I would seriously recommend it. It has a sort of addictive quality and you get drawn into the story and just enjoy it. On social media I’ve seen that Chris must have move on leaps and bounds and totally transformed his life since writing ‘Forty Nights’ – He does ultramarathons which frighten the life out of me. I can relate to life on a Devon sink council estate right on the margins of society and ‘Forty Nights’ is eminently more readable for me than any future work on sweating and jogging silly distances. But it’s good to know there’s a happy ending and a possible way out. Get onto ‘Forty Nights’ folks and spread the word!

Review: Heart of Darkness – by Joseph Conrad

I love Apocalypse Now. It is one of my most favourite films. I learnt that apparently, Joseph Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’ is the literary work that provides the basic narrative of the film. Apocalypse Now, however is set in war torn Vietnam, with the US Military hunting down an insane, erratic, murderous, rogue officer in the interior, deep in the Vietnamese jungle. Marlon Brando plays Kurtz and it is a totally gripping and disturbing performance. Conrad sets his work in nineteenth century Congo. The narrator, Marlow is sailing a British ship up the Congo river, into the interior, his mission to locate the important ivory trader, Kurtz, who none of the government officials have heard from for a while. This is the peak of Victorian British Imperialism, an Age of Empire, a time when the colonies offered all men a chance to enrich themselves and seek out adventures in wild, untamed, unknown lands. Marlow is on this quest himself. Kurtz has set out and established himself and apparently is making a good name for himself and delivering huge quantities of profitable ivory. The trade of ivory in itself is obviously ethically and environmentally questionable, but this is a different age. Also, when reading the book from a post-colonial politically correct, almost apologetic modern sense, the reader can discover often brutal and quite simply plainly racist terminology which recognises the African as quite a lesser human being than his Caucasian Western counterparts. Racist terminology is throughout the narrative and the value of the lives or the work of Africans, be they pilots of the ship or part of Kurtz’s native crew, is seen in very typical Victorian fashion. Civilisations were of course vastly different. Although the book may seem to contain a lot of prejudice, it does, however, offer an enlightened view of a different, exotic world and the way in which the Other is described in this novel may have had a transformative effect on the views of its contemporary readers. Although elements of an exotic, tropical, vast untouched African interior are well described in the story, on the whole it is the ‘darkness’ element of the ‘dark’ continent which forms the rather moody, melancholic, quite frankly intimidating atmosphere of the journey. We encounter a brutal world where traditional values have evaporated. It is a savage world. Kurtz has embraced the native and is wild and quite frankly, although recognised as very intelligent and does seem to make a lot of sense, he is also, prior to his tragic demise, clearly quite disturbed, even verging on insanity. His ivory jaunts with the natives into the deeper interior from his river Congo base have scarred him and de-Europeanised his ways. When Marlow’s steamer arrives natives greet the boat with a flurry of poisoned arrows, killing his undervalued African ship pilot. On the way, a starving African crew are seen by the Western travellers on board as totally alien and their open confessions to cannibalism is quite frightening. The whole novel is, very much like Apocalypse Now, memorably disturbing and although clues to divine salvation are mentioned the whole nature of the evil of mankind is central to the book’s winding theme. Conrad is originally Polish and although based in London and writing in the English language, he has quite a difficult style. His sentences are extensively long and sometimes a bit confusing and also he peppers the account with quite a wide range of difficult vocabulary not use in common vernacular. It is only a short work but is and, one can tell from its popularity and praise as a classic, a key piece of literature from the Imperial Age.

Review: Class of 88 – Find the Warehouse. Lose the Hitmen. Pump the Beats – by Wayne Anthony

This book is about a promoter’s journey in the beginnings of the Acid House music scene that took over Great Britain back in the late 1980s, cementing a new popular culture that would grip the masses of rebellious youth at the end of a prolonged period of Thatcherism. Genesis is run by Wayne Anthony, the author of this book. In it he incandescently writes an emotional, truthful and honest tale of a rather strange journey that would shock the average person. As a later promoter in the acid house music scene I could relate to many of the experiences one gets when running events and I found the book to be a great memoir of an often overlooked music movement after it was so successfully repressed shortly after its foundation by the 1994 Criminal Justice Bill. Genesis began by breaking into warehouses in East London that were disused. Sound systems would be set up, blissful decor applied top the venue and impromptu bars set up. A top security firm was always necessary for the promoter as vast amounts of cash would be made by Acid House Warehouse parties attracting thousands of clubbers. From the outset Wayne is running a constant battle against the authorities. The police initially are caught a bit unawares and Wayne can hone his blagging skills to great effect with false contracts drawn up and police not no driven to break up the illegal events as they were pretty clueless as to what was happening. As time progressed and the media driven frenzy about the dangers of ecstasy and the wild nature of acid house in the U.K., these police armed with more government powers became more hostile and violent towards organisers. The security firm was mainly ex military and the whole operations of running the early Genesis events by Wayne and his team were arranged with military style precision, from cutting edge party phone numbers, to vast flyer distribution, to electrical engineers, co-ordinating a synchronised arrival of guests to each event and ensuring that trouble and accidents were kept to a minimum. Genesis teamed up with the likes of Biology and also with Fantasy FM and were a major force in the London scene. Wayne is very candid about the drugs involved in acid house and we hear of wild cash excesses at the events leading to mass quantities of cocaine. He eulogises about ecstasy and its life-changing effects and its influence on the culture of the nation yet also, later in the book he does acknowledge that he suffers from most of the major mental health effects of long term ecstasy use that had been foreseen by doctors in the early days. He predicts a future generation of 50 something mental patients whose heads are completely shot! A particular acid experience involving an ex girlfriend going completely off the rails indicates some of the potential dangers of narcotics use. Wayne concludes with advice to youngsters not to make the same mistakes with chemicals and that they can have more productive lives and indeed enjoy dance music culture just as much without all the add-on chemicals. Some of the incidences involving organised crime kidnapping him and also promoters hijacking events by pretending to be Genesis, and also the constant battle against police show some of the darker issues that many promoters are faced with. We see early dance music political activity in demonstrations by the masses to fight for party rights. I loved the tales of DJs and early house music records that I know very well and it was great hearing a real account of the hedonistic days of the ‘Class of 88’ which unfortunately I was a bit too young to experience in the full sense, only coming into the British U.K. music scene properly in the mid 1990s.

Review: Kim – by Rudyard Kipling

‘Kim’ is recognised as the greatest work of famous author Rudyard Kipling. This is a cult novel especially in espionage circles. It is fiction but documents the widely popular Great Game between the British Empire and Tsarist Russia, a clandestine cat and mouse conflict between the two powers fought out on in British India and the border territories which separated the two great powers. Indeed one of the twentieth century’s most famous and notorious spies, the treacherous Kim Philby, who rose to power in British Mi6 whilst in reality working directly for the Soviet Union’s KGB. Philby takes his nickname Kim from Kipling’s protagonist. Kim is a young lad. His parents who are both Irish have left him in an orphan like state and he grows up, streetwise in the slums of Lahore, known to all as ‘Little Friend of the World. Despite his Caucasian European heritage, Kim felt half native and he spoke his English with a sing song native accent and dreamed in Hindi. The 19th century period of the book’s setting was Imperial India at the very apogee of Queen Victoria’s dominance of the sub-continent. The book highlights some of the conflicts of Empire, politically from both sides, native Indian and British overlords. It is clear that the author, Rudyard Kipling, has a deep connection to India and his prose is written in a high style, invoking beautiful descriptions of geographical features and the characters have emotional exotic traits, rarely denoting negative feelings towards the Indian people. Some of the descriptions and flow of the prose are so beautiful and poetic the reader must often stop and wonder at this great master in full flow. Often new native terms, unfamiliar to the lay reader are thrown into the mix, giving us a rich glossary of terms, deepening our understanding of this alien culture. The crux of the book revolves around young Kim’s relationship to the elderly Buddhist lama who is master to Kim, taking him under his wing. As chela, Kim traverses India from cities to alluvial plains to across the great mountain ranges of the Himalayas. The quest is for fulfilment of ‘The Wheel of Life’ and the lama seeks out his mysterious river that will give him enlightenment. The religious other of India, a simple renouncement of materialism, monastic begging and the virtues of Buddhism are explored and influential, although other major subcontinent religions get coverage such as Hindu ideas and Kim is often disguising himself as a Musselman invoking the ideas of Islam. The former regiment of Kim’s dead Irish father chance upon the wandering young boy and forcibly take him in and make him attend school. The lama contributes financially to ensure that Kim gets the best available education and treatment. He could aim to become a powerful Sahib in the service of the British Raj government. Kim has contacts a plenty and often through various merchants or influential friends such as a famous horsetrader, Kim’s adventurous spirit leads him into the adult world setting off on inquisitive and often potentially dangerous missions and adventures. He is inadvertently being sucked into the Great Game and his work as a spy reaches his climax when some foreign indeed Russians who are travelling with the lama and him across the mountains, fall out and, completely taboo in the eyes of natives, actually physically assault the old sage, it is Kim who defends with violence the outrageous attack and the travelling foreigners lose all their possessions including critical maps and documents that will prove useful to the British government of India. We weave through an increasingly more native world deep in the heart of India and the special relationship of old man and boy, the romance of the whole journey, culminates in the lama finding his river and way up deep in the mountains we see a fully-matured adult Kim contemplating future, his world view and philosophy so touchingly formed with spiritual non-material values by his master. It’s a wonderful tale and a unique book that surely must be one of the best cultural products of the British Empire in India.

Review: The Great Game – On Secret Service in High Asia – by Peter Hopkirk

The Great Game, as immortalised by Rudyard Kipling in ‘Kim’ was the nineteenth century adventures in espionage between Russia and the U.K. across Central Asia. Both sides were on the verge of a full on military confrontation and sought advantage. The Russian Tsars sought territorial expansion across Asia and always had their eye on the riches of British-controlled India. The Empire under Queen Victoria was to be protected at all costs. A series of adventurers mapped out the relatively unknown regions that separated the two great powers. The regions of Persia, Afghanistan, India, Tibet, Turkmenistan and China became the board on which this Great Game was played out. Deep political intrigue and outright treachery features heavily in these factual adventure tales. Wild eccentric characters fill the landscape on both sides of the divide. Often when the two sides meet on the field war in averted and gentlemanly camp meals and Vodka accompany the standoffs. It is the unruly under-civilised Asian powers that often produce the venomous brutal murders and beheadings and downright scandalous betrayals in this period. The explorers are feted by the British Geographical society and often write bestselling books about their travels. Russophobes and Anglophobes in London and St Petersburg devour the press articles and hawks dominate doves in foreign policy decisions between the powers although other than the Crimean War a total conflict is luckily just avoided by both sides. There are some great character sin this book and it highlights a time in the relatively recent past when Britain still had its Empire and the world was still being mapped out and explored. Very well written and a five star read.