5. 'Another Country' by James Baldwin (1962)

 That's right, I'm now 1/20th of the way into this project, which is further than I ever thought I would get. And if I needed motivation to continue, and after two epics about Egypt that I admired but didn't really enjoy, then this novel was it.

This is my favourite novel of the ones so far, and I think it might be because it is the most straightforwardly written. I think this might be like the time I saw this film 'Kopps' at the Rotterdam Film Festival. The Rotterdam Film Festival, which is up there with the best things that Rotterdam has to offer, is pretty notorious for screening a whole bunch of 'difficult' films and offering few compromises in terms of films with American stars. I would try to see a good 10-12 films most years, and pretty much every one of them would be about some kind of taboo and tend to end with the main character dying or in despair. ANYWAYS, there was a Swedish comedy called Kopps that played one year and I went to see it with my buddies Bart and Sjoerd. I'm not sure I ever laughed so much at a film screening, and the rest of the sold-out audience were in fits of laughter. When I watched it a year later, having downloaded it and had to download some weird English subtitle device because it wasn't available commercially, the film stunk. It was as dumb as can be. Adam Sandler bought the rights to re-make the film in English. That dumb. The point is that the film was clearly such a relief from all the misery and difficult arthouse tendencies of the other films that this film Kopps was as much a relief as anything else, and the point of this point is that I may just love any books that tells a story in a straightforward way because it will be such a relief from all these other difficult Burgess books. Maybe this whole exercise will lead me to love Dean Koontz novels.

I'd like to think, however, that Another Country is actually a great book. And it's definitely not dumb, with lots of complex and conflicted characters, and dealing with issues of race and sexuality as fluid concepts. At times there were a few twists too many in terms of the various characters emotional disintegration, but these are never obvious or cliched.

A really enjoyable, dare I say it, page-turning novel.

Oh, I bought this in Kinsale (a lovely town) at Bookstor (a lovely bookshop). It stocks predominantly new books but, as all bookshops should do, there was a collection of second-hand books available. Hard cover and the sleeve fell apart as I read it, but such a great find.

Here's a little excerpt from the audio book (it's read by some dude from The Wire. Yeah!)

Ranking Burgess' 99 December 2011:

1. Another Country

2. Ancient Evenings

3. After Many A Swan

4. The Alexandria Quartet

5. The Aerodrome