Arabian Leopards Are Tarts

I took this pic in 2008. The picture in the National today 

shows matey clearly hasn't moved in the past six years.

Nice wee story in The National today about how Sharjah's Arabian Wildlife Centre has been working to pull the Arabian Leopard back from the brink of extinction. Their breeding pair has so far given birth to 35 cubs, which is quite a lot of leopard.

You can take a mooch up the Dhaid road from Sharjah (it's the road to the airport - you just keep going into the desert) and make a day out of it. I've posted about it before - founded by a Dutch amateur naturalist called Mariejke Jongbloed who wrote to the ruler of Sharjah, HH Dr. Sheikh Sultan Al Qassimi, to express her concern about the breeding grounds of the endangered thub lizard. His response was to support her in opening up an entire wildlife centre, including (and this made her chuckle a lot) a zoo where the humans were kept inside and the animals outside.

There's a huge amount to see there - a fascinating museum with a wonderful display of the history of Sharjah's desert biome, a petting zoo and the centre proper with scorpions to foxes and deer through oryx and mahas to the leopards themselves, big sprawling tarts of cats who flop on their shelves and logs and bestow glances of utter contempt upon visitors. They're probably endangered because they can't be bothered to chase prey, it's just you know, beneath them...

The centre's amazing fun for adults and kids alike - we go there pretty much every time we have visitors out and Sarah's just been there with her class. According to The National, it stands as the biggest collection of Arabian wildlife in the world.

And all from a letter!

Fake Plastic Souks - The Fear Returns

I've gone and done it again. I couldn't help myself. I've published another collection of 'best of' posts from years passim of this marginal, silly little blog. At the time I did the first volume as a test file for a self-publishing workshop, I joked that if I sold more than ten copies I'd do a second volume. And the first volume has, amazingly, sold significantly more than ten copies. It might even run into the twenties.

The cover image of Fake Plastic Souks - The Fear Returns is taken, as the blog's header and the cover shot of the first volume are, in the Aleppo souk. If you ever doubted Jarvis Cocker's wisdom - everybody hates a tourist - you can see it reflected in the faces of these gentlemen, interrupted in their centuries-old ritual of making fatayer by me and my trusty EOS. I wondered, working on the cover file, what had happened to them and whether they had survived the destruction of that glorious old souk. If you want to get a taste of the timeless alleyways of the C14th Ottoman labyrinth, you have to go no further than buying a copy of that most excellent Middle Eastern spy thriller, Shemlan: A Deadly Tragedy.

The book starts off well, with the story of an Irish building worker whose mobile falls into the hands of police. Trouble was, he'd forgotten taking some spoof shots of him and his mates hooning around with a replica AK47. So plod had him followed around Europe for two weeks as they waged war on terror and our hero just went on an adventurous and boozy holiday. It's a true story, too!

2009-2011 sees us finally realising there's a crisis and the British press ganging up to sling mud at Dubai while it's good and down. Shiny posts crop up as everyone starts to realise the difference between usufruct and freehold, while various inane pronunciations are made then inevitably clarified. I share more of my love for banks and call centres, including a most amusing spoof of 'ten tips for call centres' which the bloke I was parodying was kind enough to not only acknowledge but link to! There's quite a lot of Gulf News slappery, more than I remembered doling out, including the results of deploying my rather fetching Dhs19 weighing scales bought from Lals when I realised GN was looking decidedly Kate Moss these days.

All in all I found it a great deal more amusing than I can remember it being at the time - certainly funnier than the rot I'm posting these days. If you fancy a trip down memory lane and the odd laugh, you can part with £0.77 at this handy link here and have it on your Kindle or your Kindle for iPad app within seconds. If you're in the US and would rather spend $0.99, it's linked here.

If you're in love with paperbacks, that's coming but it takes a few days to populate the Amazon paperback story. Similarly B&N, Kobo and iBooks.

And, yes, if this does over ten copies (making me a princely £3.50) I'll do volume three...

Book Post: I Love Book Clubs

(Photo credit: MEGATOTAL)

It's getting busy with the LitFest around the corner, interviews here, blogposts there. Here's a LitFest blog post in which I answer the immortal question, "Can you teach someone to be a writer or is it an inherent quality?" among others!

I'm scheduled to talk at a school, moderate a session, participate in a panel and, as usual, sit in looming empty space next to someone like Eoin Colfer as he wrangles a signing line stretching to Ras Al Khaimah.

And, by sheer coincidence, I got invited to a book club meeting. Did I ever before mention I love book clubs? I did? Good. Because I do. Who else would buy things from you, invite you to their house/favourite coffee shop and ply you with hooch/coffee and food/cake whilst spending three hours talking to you about your favourite topics (in my case me and my books) and then thank you for coming?

It's insane.

I  attended a meeting of a book club in the Arabian Ranches last night. Ten members, all women, seemed to think they were a daunting sight, but you'd not have walked into a sea of friendlier faces in most pubs or gatherings.

There was quite a lot of curiosity. Do authors have Tourettes or anything like that? Should you feed them anything special in case they start biting book club members?

We sat around the table outside and chatted, mostly sort of Q&A. Everyone was very curious indeed. What started me writing? What does it take to write a book? How do you know you're any good at it and that sort of thing, but then we also started to look at characters, their motivations and what made them tick. The club had read Olives - A Violent Romance before, so I was expecting recrimination over the dirty thing I do at the start of Beirut - An Explosive Thriller (the book the club has just finished reading) but everyone was very forgiving.

I got a hard time over whether Lynch is sufficiently realistic as an Oirish person, our hostess being a 'Dub' herself and therefore unwilling to let my 'Darby O'Gill' Norn Irish spy go without a spirited attempt at skewering me for getting it wrong. Luckily I had remembered to put a Magdalene Laundry and a paedophile priest into the mix and so managed to avoid being filleted. All you need to craft proper Irish characters are laundries and priests. And maybe the odd 'top of the mornin' to yer'.

Given my Mother In Law has read Beirut and responded with 'Fair play, Alexander,' no Irish person holds any fear for me. Lynch has passed muster with the heavyweights and we had a lot of fun with the whole thing. Mind you, if I'd been Joe O'Connor it would have been all 'Love the priest, Joe, ain't he gas?' and 'Great nun scene there, Joe. Don't ye love a nice nun?'

I noted I wasn't asked about my 'Hasn't Mary Got A Lovely Bottom' t-shirt...

Ah well, to be sure. A few remembered highlights, although there was a lot more in our conversation, including lots about my journey to publication, the state and nature of publishing in general and how publishers and Amazon respectively pay authors and that kind of thing...

Is Lynch's behaviour with Leila consistent with 'tradecraft'? 
Sure, did you ever see Lynch employing any conventional 'tradecraft' ever? He's a mess, a maverick product of the system gone irredeemably native. Lynch works because he understands the Middle East doesn't work, because he's more effectively hidden by being en clair than if he went around skuldugging.

Is he a rougher James Bond? 
No, he's the anti-Bond. He doesn't use gadgets beyond a memory key, he doesn't have Aston Martins, he uses servees shared taxis. He's not a loyal servant of the Crown, he's a dodgier proposition altogether. I guess that's why I like him.

How much research do you do? Like the Lebanese politics and the whizzbangs?
A whole load. You write from recollection, but you have to double check every recollected fact. In Olives, for instance, Paul remembers Joshua and the walls of Jericho as being from Joseph's Technicolour Dreamcoat. Now that was a flawed recollection and it would be valid for the character to have flawed recollection except it jars readers and they 'spot the mistake'. So you can't actually afford flawed recollection, someone, somewhere will have expertise in yachts (can the Arabian Princess really go from point a to point b in that time? Yes, I checked every sailing scrupulously for that very reason) or the Czech police (the cars are in their livery) or Oka warheads (they're real and yes, the Russians 'lost' about 180 of them) or how to kill a man with superb single grower extra brut champagne (I often check a bottle of Lamiable Extra Brut to ensure it hasn't lost its potency. No problem, I consider it a service to my readers).

Where did Gabe Lentini's 'castrato' voice come from?
My head. It just seemed fun to have a really burly tough guy speaking with Mickey Mouse's voice. It also helps to differentiate him as, as one club member pointed out, there is a quite stellar cast in Beirut and there are an awful lot of characters flying around at any given time.

Isn't Lynch rather, well, naíve at times?
He's certainly unconventional but I wouldn't call him naive. He sometimes takes the alternative road - the road less travelled - and it doesn't always work out for him. That's the problem with being a maverick. Most of the time, of course, it works brilliantly.

We wouldn't have read this if it hadn't been for Olives. It's outside our comfort zone.
A couple of members felt this, although most seemed not to. That's interesting, because Beirut seems to have attracted more female than male readers, which has surprised me. A couple of female reviewers have been clearly taken aback by the wanton violence and bad language in the book, but that's okay. I was taken aback writing it.

You kill an awful lot of people in this book...
Better out than in...

All your women have breasts.
Yup. Great, isn't it?

Is Michel Freij modelled on Saad Hariri?
Oh lord, no. He's mephistolean, that's all. He's modelled on a thousand over-privileged Lebanese sons of the terrible old men who have too much money and power. But on Hariri specifically or intentionally? Absolutely not.

Did I intend Beirut when I wrote Olives?
No. I had thought of an interlinear to Olives where I would take Paul to Beirut with Lynch looking after him and then manage the other side of Olives' story, Lynch's machinations. But then Beirut happened, mostly as a result of a dream that became the Hamburg scenes in the book and it took off from there. The Olives screenplay, titled When The Olives Weep which I've finished, tells more of that 'other story' than the book - necessarily, because of the way film works. At least, the way I think film works!

Are you doing another Lynch book?
I wouldn't say no, but my next project, whatever it is, won't be one. Maybe in the future. There's a Lynch short story out there somewhere, but I'll tell you about that later.

And so we went on into the night. I had a lovely evening and tried to answer every question or point as honestly and interestingly as I could. As usual, it's shocking how much people invest in a book, how much care they put into your work. And it's always so nice to be answerable to them. Honestly.

Emirates Airline Festival Of Literature Fun

(Photo credit: IsaacMao)

Saturday the 8th March will see me once again pretending to be an author at the LitFest. As well as my usual moderatin' and likely some radio stuff as well, I'm on a panel, "Of Spies, Conspiracy and Censorship", which promises to be a fascinating experience.

There are three inky-fingered teasers of prose in all - myself, Rewa Zeinati and Ibrahim Nasrallah. And we are being joined by Juma Alleem, who is director of media content at the National Media Council. It is he wot is responsible for the people responsible for reading my books and passing them 'suitable for printing' in the United Arab Emirates.

This is going to be particularly interesting for me as I have now faced two instances of censorship in regard to my participation in the festival - both utterly trivial, but then all the more perplexing for it. I have never had any of my writing knocked back in the UAE for moral, social or cultural reasons before. So I'm going to enjoy exploring the nature and purpose of censorship with my fellow panellists. You never know, we might even get around to some spies and conspiracy too!

Here's the session blurb:

Are there specific challenges associated with the context in which an author lives? As writers, are we guilty of self-censorship or are there real obstacles to writing about certain topics and people? What responsibilities do writers have and what role might central guidelines play?

I must confess to being particularly fascinated at the idea writers have responsibilities in regard to censorship. Is a 'responsible' writer merely subservient and compliant? I'm minded of Bulgakov's wicked, hilarious revenge on the fat cats of the Moscow writers' union.

The session's linked here if you want to sign up for it. The LitFest will relieve you of Dhs65, but that's the price of a scrambled egg on toast and coffee at The Archive, so you'll just have to skip breakfast one day this week.

I'm also moderating the session with Simon Kernick & Deon Meyer, 'Criminally thrilling' which looks at techniques for keeping readers glued to the page as your novel flashes around the world like a careening, mad and out of control juggernauty thing. That one's linked here.

The Road Oop North - National Paints Opens Up

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Sorry, second post about traffic in a week, but we took the Mohammed Bin Zayed Road north from Dubai to Ajman yesterday - the day the northern section of the National Paints Widening project opened - and what a glorious ride it was. Not a queue in sight. Five lanes of blissful blacktop all the way over the top and down the other side. Even the Grand Old Duke Of York would have fitting his men on this one.

Perhaps a little hesitancy as traffic encountered the new section, likely a lot to do with the lack of road markings (they clearly couldn't wait to get this sucker opened up), but nothing like the miles of choking misery that usually mark the northern approach to the infamous painty bridge.

Apparently the southern section will open within two weeks. It's going to be fascinating to see what this does to Sharjah's traffic - as I pointed out the other day, it will likely transform a whole range of Sharjah's flows and dependencies, including the daily torrent of those fleeing to the 611 and therefore congestion on the Airport, Middle and Mileiha roads.

Finally you CAN get to Ras Al Khaimah from Dubai in 45 minutes. But poor National Paints. Infamous no more, they'll have to start advertising now...

Book Review: Tatiana

(Photo credit: Mark Coggins)

Martin Cruz Smith's first big bang bestseller was Gorky Park, still held up as a remarkable example of the detective/spy thriller genre. My genre, in fact. The one I write in. And I happen to consider Mr Cruz Smith to be among the very best of his kind. What's perhaps depressing is that after Gorky Park he's never really seemed to become a massive international bestselling author along the lines of Deaver et al. Sure, he's popped 'em into the NYT list every time, but I never felt he got quite the accolade he deserved. Maybe he has and I've just missed it.

His work is consistent, solid and bang on genre. I read Havana the other week and enjoyed myself immensely - it's another 'Arkady Renko' novel (Renko being the star of Gorky Park) and a thoroughly entertaining romp around corrupt Cuba. There's even a touch of Rum Diaries to it, which I loved. Both the Hunter Thompson book and the touch. Actually, and the film - although that's an unfashionable opinion, I know. It was something of a box office tank, that one.

I digress.

Tatiana is the latest Arkady Renko novel and will cost you a staggering £7.99 as a Kindle ebook. That's a hell of a price for an ebook - I usually wouldn't pay more than £4.99 simply because above that publishers are merely taking the mickey. I have turned my back on novelists whose work I have consistently enjoyed at this price point before, more a matter of principle than anything, but I weakened. Cruz Smith is very, very good after all.

I'm not sad I did, although even being a millionth of a percent responsible for convincing the yoyo toting cretins in mainstream publishers that this price point is acceptable to ebook readers still makes me feel guilty.

Tatiana is Cruz Smith at his finest. It's probably a better book than Gorky Park all in all. The self-hating Renko (The son of a badass old Soviet-era General who hated him and considered him a soft Southern shandy drinking poofter, Renko keeps a revolver in his safe and a single bullet in his bookcase) is once again drifting around looking for trouble. His dogged pursuit of 'inconvenient' cases has destroyed his career, leaving him an investigator still rather than a prosecutor or even higher - everyone agrees if Renko had just gone with the script instead of being an awkward bastard that's where he'd be. Renko's got a bullet lodged in his brain that could move and kill him at any time.

He really doesn't give a shit. Got it?

He's on the trail of the murderers of journalist Tatiana Petrovna, who has been investigating some big-time crooked oligarchs and 'fallen off' her balcony as a consequence. What follows is a dash across Russia, from Moscow to Kaliningrad, featuring old soak coppers, officials on the take, gunmen and mafiosos and much dashing around and shooting things. Renko's chess-playing genius of a ward makes a reappearance and hooks up with a check-mating red-head babe as he gets sucked up into the mayhem, a splash of humanity propelled pell-mell through a soup of corruption, fatcats and wickedness. It's brilliantly written stuff, painstakingly researched, with plot points built around the unlikeliest of things - handmade racing bicycles, the symbolic language of international interpreters' notes and Chinese shipyards all make an appearance. The dialogue is bang on, Renko's self-loathing actually endearing and the love interest suitably lovely.

It's quirky, fresh and dynamic. The pace never really lets up and it's one of those books you find yourself standing naked on cold ceramic tiles and reading because you just don't want to close the Kindle.

That might have been too much detail. Sorry.

Tatiana half made me want to give up writing and half inspired me to try harder. It's a brilliantly crafted book that has its flaws - there's some sloppy editing (FOR SEVEN POUNDS NINETY NINE!) around the shooting up of a Zil, the endgame's a bit slapdash and not quite worth the build up. That bit reminded me of Smilla's Feeling For Snow - by the time you realise the endgame's a bit off, you've finished the whole thing and enjoyed it all so much it doesn't really matter. But I'm really quibbling here, because I loved this book and finishing it was one of those 'Oh. Bloody hell...' moments when you realise there's no more banoffee pie in the world, ever.

Seriously. Get this book. It's simply glorious fun.

Traffic (Or The Increasing Mess On The Mileiha Road)

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Only a charlatan would post about the weather or traffic.

It goes something like this. The construction of Sharjah's new 'middle road' linking the city centre to the Mileiha road has allowed the morning traffic to flow out to the 611 (neologistically The Emirates Road) and the evening traffic to flow back. There's just one teensy weensy problemette here, in that whatever genius conceived said road decided the conjoining of the two should be a traffic light rather than a 'clover leaf' exchange. The result has been that as an increasing number of commuters have discovered the shortcut, the traffic has backed up at the light more each morning.

The Anjads used to rock up and turn the lights off, which worked handsomely, but now they've stopped. And so the traffic has found other ways out to the 611, further up the airport/Dhaid road and turning at the University or the road down through the residential areas to the Sharjah Inland Container Terminal.

The result has been to spread the increasing chaos. The pressure of the roadworks on the Emirates road has meant more drivers are willing to go to greater lengths to try and get out to the 611. In short, it's not pretty.

It's like watching sand pouring through marbles. This route blocks up, that route gets busy. That one blocks up, the other one gets busy. There's simply too much traffic trying to find its way through too small a ratrun - and it's growing noticeably busier out there.

You can do traffic studies until you go blue in the face, but the situation you're studying is constantly fluid and subject to massive change in the next few months. When the National Paints remediation is finished we'll finally see if it is enough - or too little, too late. It'll take a few weeks for things to settle down and a complete picture emerge as word gets around and the traffic patterns shift as a consequence.

I can only hope it does, because we travel on the Mileiha Road to Sarah's school every day and it's starting to look ugly every which way. And I'm talking 06.15am here, not 'rush hour'...

The Childish Game Of Number Plates

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Sarah and I for some time now have been playing a most diverting and totally childish game - number plate spotting. It's remarkable how seriously a 'good number' is taken here in the Emirates - landline, PO Box, mobile, number plate. All of these should reflect a chap's status and so, ideally, be in single figures or failing that all the same digit or otherwise auspicious. A palindrome is always good...

Car license plates in the UAE consist of a single letter and then a number. A pilot with A 777 is therefore top banana, while H 71534 is a complete duffer altogether. Clearly, a number like 25 denotes super-star status and we have actually seen one such number plate pull a massive wheelspin in front of police officers who initially started towards their bikes then saw the plate and just shrugged it off.

You'll often see the swankier breed of car on the UAE's roads sporting 30503 or 12121 and we have taken to giggling at those who have just missed the mark, for instance a Lambo with a 24749 plate has us laughing and doing 'You had one job...' impersonations.

Yeah, it probably is time we went home...

Anyway, The National today reports on the latest number plate auction in Dubai, where a bunch of two-digit plates are expected to fetch Dhs250,000 (about $68,500). That's not the whole story, though - the RTA has published a list of the plates it's got up for grabs this time around (it's by no means their first auction, the boys at the RTA have been making pin money this way for years) and we can see that Dhs 3,000 ($822) gets you a relatively unexciting H33311 while upping the ante a bit to Dhs 40,000 ($10,950) will net you 0 50005 which is a pretty neat plate, all things considered. Start getting serioo with the amount you're prepared to shell out, and you start seeing real results: Dhs 120,000 (almost $33,000) could see you sporting three figure plates, in this case M 202 or N 707.

Although I must confess, neither of those really 'do it' for me.

If you're keen on holding the clean end of the stick, you can go for I 98, L 51 or N 34. Those are the biggies. The full list of plates, just in case you're interested, is linked here. Personally, I think the Dhs40k for 0 50005 is the best deal. Anyway, happy bidding!

Apropos Nothing (Or How I Became The UAE's First Self Publisher)

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

When I first got involved in publishing, I was introduced to a strange world of new terminologies and arcane practices that were in the process of being transformed by technology.

You'd write your words and then print 'em out from your PC, 'marking up' the text for the typesetter, showing fonts, point sizes, leading and any special effects or characters you wanted in the text. You'd also give them the column size. They'd send back 'galley' - long rolls of typeset copy that had been output onto bromide (photographic paper). All of this would be designed to fit into a 'page grid'. The make-up artist would use boards ruled with blue lines to show that grid, pasting the 'galley' from the setters into the pages using roller-ed hot wax and, latterly, 3M's obnoxious 'Spray Mount' aerosol glue. Both had the advantage of being re-positionable immediately after application but firmly adhesive shortly after. Spray Mount was horrible stuff, creating clouds of fine gluey mist. You could only imagine how bad it was for anyone not using advanced breathing apparatus. Our makeup guy used to wrap a scarf around his head, which made him look like a New Romantic terrorist.

Images would be sized to fit into the grid and then bunged into envelopes and attached to a copy of the made up pages, which would be 'marked up' again for the printers - this tint here, that colour background there. You had to give 'em the CMYK of any colour you wanted or percentages of tints. And then the whole papery lot would be sealed up in a large packet and dispatched to the printers to be 'camera-d' and made into four huge steel plates. These were affixed to rollers and then coated in printer's ink, pressed onto sheets of paper in four, eight, 16 or even 32 page sections. Really big presses could do more, 64 or even, one Dutch press we used also did Yellow Pages, and they had a massive press that could do 128 pages.

Start to end, the whole process was very analogue, but the Gods of digital were already starting their insidious and increasingly disruptive transformation. Our typesetters were using Linotronics, machines with green screens that automated typesetting, which had previously been a highly skilled job that called for a four-year apprenticeship. A proper 'hot metal' compositor could hand justify text by eye as he hammered the keys to drop the type into place in grids. The phototypesetter cleared these skilled men out of Fleet Street almost overnight, but also did a great deal to 'democratise' publishing. Now smaller, more agile publishers could create publications without having to use the unwieldy, expensive (and unionised) typesetters.

I arrived into publishing just as desk top publishing was becoming viable. Now we could run type into grids on the screen. We could send a whole page, already 'made up', to the setters and get back a full page bromide. We didn't have the technology to scan colour images, the printers still had to do that, but we could make up our own boxes to size and attach our images. Proofing was a pain, watching a tabloid page printing out on a dot matrix printer was like watching the world's slowest kettle boil. We were pioneering users of the technology, as it happens, becoming the first publisher in the UK to go 100% over to desk top publishing. We used Ventura Publisher, running on DR's GEM user interface over MS-DOS. And by golly it was clunky - but it did the job.

I told our typesetter, Phil, what we were doing. He'd have to get machines to output our pages. Rubbish, he said. You haven't got the skills, the understanding of type. You're not compositors. How could you compete with the quality of work a trained comp can output?

I had to take my pages to his competitor, a man I didn't like who had set up a DTP output bureau. Within the year, Phil (with his £30,000 Linotronic machines) had gone bust. It was my first experience of the wonders of disintermediation. I have been boring audiences at conferences for years with this: Quality becomes irrelevant where technology improves access.

And so it was I arrived a few years later in the UAE, back in 1993, with my publishing house in a cardboard box. A PC was all I needed - and a bureau that could output pages from Quark (I had moved on from Ventura by then). When they tried to shut me down, they could not for the lives of them work out how one snotty wee Brit could produce publications all by himself. The Ministry was looking for the massive infrastructure behind me required to produce magazines, the writers, the graphic artists, the makeup guys and so on. I was the best they could come up with and clearly wasn't quite as impressive a catch as they had in mind!

I suppose that was my first experience of self publishing in the UAE. I'd never thought of it like that before...

Book Review: Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In conference presentations, when it comes to discussing the changes being wrought by the Internet in areas such as publishing, I am fond of referring to the concept of quality. I almost invariably include a picture of the cover of Robert M. Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, because the book itself centres around the complexity, even impossibility, of defining Quality.

The argument I am making goes something like this: arguing that the quality of a book is inherent in its being something you curl up on a sofa and read is mad. You can curl up on a sofa and read a Kindle, too. The smell of a book is not the quality of it, either. The form 'book' is merely a receptacle for the words; changing the receptacle does not change the quality of the words, merely the quality of experience in consuming those words. If we look at the qualities of the receptacle: stable text, easily readable, accessible and easy to store, it's quite clear that the ebook reader is vastly superior to the booky book. It's like a Sumerian arguing for the rich smell of clay instead of that nasty papyrus stuff. It doesn't matter. Its.about.the.words.

Quality becomes irrelevant where technology improves access. See?

In fact, we are willing to accept lower quality receptacles where we can gain easier access to content. Look at the iPod, which is vastly inferior to a CD, but which we prefer because we have instant access to pretty much all the music we could ever want. And so the Kindle, which made it possible for me to wake up the other day, decide I had been referring to a book I hadn't read myself since the late 1970s and so conclude I wanted to read it now. Thanks to the Kindle, instead of having to comb bookshops or place special orders for it, I had the book in my hands in seconds flat.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is about a man who has another man inside him, embarking on a road trip with his son Chris and two friends (John and Sylvia). The author is never named, but the man inside him, his former self, is called Phaedrus. Phaedrus was a lecturer at a university in Bozeman, Montana who went insane and was treated with electroshock therapy, erasing his troubled and destructive personality. Phaedrus reappears in the protagonist as the road trip takes them back to Bozeman, the protagonist drawn back to the university, his past and his emergent past self. The book is subtitled 'An enquiry into values' and it weaves the story of the road trip, Phaedrus' story of intellectual angst turned gradually inward into burgeoning insanity and the protagonist's own musings and observations on life, philosophy and, of course, motorcycle maintenance.

The narrative is constructed with a light hand, even though the book can nosedive deeply into the syrupy quasi-murk of philosophy at times. You can choose to skip here or to slow down and get to grips with Pirsig's forays into analytical thought - some of which are light and some of which become almost impenetrably heavy. At times my 'so what' gland kicked in, so I found myself both skipping and slowing, depending on my mood, my patience and the passage.

Bits of the book came back to me as I read, I was surprised to find my memory of certain key sections was inaccurate - over the years I had modified the tale in my recollection. Sort of Chinese Whispers for one. In one section, a student finds it impossible to write an essay about Bozeman, then a street in Bozeman and so Phaedrus has her write about the front of the town hall by breaking it down into bricks, starting with the top left hand brick. She dashes off thousands of words without a hitch. I remembered that one wrong, for instance.

But my memory of Pirsig's arguments about the indefinability of Quality were clear. And they remain a fascinating element of a book that is rarely less than enthralling. Somehow it manages - in the main - not only to be readable, but enjoyable and thought provoking too. That's a pretty heady mixture of qualities in itself - a mix that Pirsig generally pulls off deftly. It's also a book that polarises readers rather neatly - I've met people who think it's all tedious, pretentious twaddle wrapped in a thin veneer of everyman philosophising.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was apparently rejected by over 120 publishers, going on to become a major bestseller (over 5 million copies). In its time, it was one of those books you simply had to have on the bookshelf, dahling. And you always suspected some people just cracked the spine before adding it to the collection in a prominent place. It's one of those books.

It's perhaps no surprise to learn that Pirsig studied at Bozeman and struggled with mental illness, himself undergoing electro-convulsive therapy. He also had a son called Chris - the book turns out to be deeply autobiographical and I hadn't appreciated that before sitting down to write this review. Love it or hate it, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance stands as a remarkable work. And yes, I would recommend reading it.