14th Sept – we’ll drink and we’ll dance ’til the end of our days.

THE FIX IS IN -review. A novella that feels like an eye witness account to a thrilling racing coup.

Have you ever come across those stories about people who’ve lived in the future, and come back to tell everyone about it? Not those NDE stories, they’re just dreams, well, perhaps the odd one, but I mean those where, say, someone’s been in a coma for a few months, and during it, they lived an entire life in another age, in another country. There’s one where a bloke in America went to live in Scotland; another where someone went to live in 3069. Then they came back and told anyone who wanted to listen, in minute detail, what it was like, and what they did.

Well, I’ve been thinking that perhaps I am in a coma, and I’ll go back to my real life soon. When I get back though, I don’t think I’ll tell anyone about how I got every important decision wrong, and came out on the bad side of every single 50/50 that came my way. No exceptions. The more I think about it, the more it seems like the only rational explanation for this cycle I currently find myself in: the desire for it to be all over; the feeling that this isn’t the real me; and the sheer aberration of those facts —every single thing turns out wrong. Yes, that will be the only difference between mine, and those other reported stories —I won’t bother telling anyone about this when I get back.

The only thing I might do though, in the interests of winding down the time while I’m still here, is to start writing stories about how I’m so out of kilter with norms in my current present. No, hear me out. Books and stories that relate a ceaseless stream of hard luck stories, which are never tempered by the occasional incidence of good luck, would not normally be considered credible. Now that I know that I’m in a coma-dream and belong somewhere else, where the real rules of cosmic chance play upon my life, it feels kind of liberating. It makes me free to tell the truth about this pitiful tour of sorrow, in all its skewed misery, paying no heed to the cries of “No life is that unlucky.” They are, when you’re an extra-terrestrial experiment, mate.

Speaking of which, my old mate, Robert Braithwaite —well, he’s not actually, I’m one of but a few people who, having met him, don’t actively dislike him. He has a new book out. I know that his real interests are mad/unhappi-ness, and misanthropic noir, not unlike me, and Dickie, and Sammo Beitch,  now that I think about it (perhaps the real him is lying etherised upon a table in 1932, or something similar, too), but he has given us a new pot-boiler from his misspent years amongst horses. [paperback: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0FMQ19MPC]

Now, I know that he wouldn’t say this, so I will say it for him. Dick Francis novels are so wretchedly execrable, that they are unworthy of the epithet, novel —their shortcomings, too numerous to list in their entirety here, including: they are seldom about horse racing —they are merely poor crime thrillers put in a racing setting, a Midsummer Gaffs of English Racing, if you will; they do not relate the sport of horseracing, the people that populate it, or their crimes, with any plausibility whatsoever; they lionise racing and its participants, when over 90% of them are social inadequates, of whom, their most able are too thick to get a job in the City, or parliament, and their less able, to get any other sort of job at all; that where he does take on the task of relating a racing anecdote, it is so dumbed down in an attempt to make it accessible, or given to a racing snob to relate in non-relatable language, that, what could have been the good bits, are turned into the yarns of 1970s golf club bores. There is nothing that sums up old Dick better than his novel (I forget its name) where the perpetrator of the crime was ultimately identified because he was wearing the regimental tie he’d stolen from his victim’s corpse. Yeah, I know.

It’s why John Francome should be a good racing writer. But he doesn’t know how to read and write, and he has to get someone else to do it for him, and something gets lost in the translation.

So, Robert Braithwaite, has started a new venture it seems —to tell racing stories in novella form. If you want to know the difference, a novel is usually about 70-90,000 words, and The Fix Is In, is about 21,000 [kindle version: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0FMPDKCWH ]. In doing it that way, he tells the story of a racing coup, alone. There are no other crimes, there is no padding, and no crime-thriller formulae. But there is plenty of time to set out the coup properly, (it probably gets more space than it does in longer novels) and to explain it, without dumbing it down. The result is a bit like a really well-told anecdote by someone who was there, and saw the original story first hand as it unwound. Yes, that’s right, it gives the story an eye-witness vibe. And a story that racing, and non-racing people will get. I remember reading spy novels, and stories of spivs and criminals who worked in the City, when I was younger, desperate for an insider’s guide to how these places really worked. I think that Braithwaite will do this for a novice racing audience, anxious to know how racing operates behind the scenes, the terms of art, and it’s secret codes. They’ll get all that off him, without being talked down to, or left behind.

Other than that, the great advantage for the reader, besides that it’s all over quickly, is that it makes the cost of acquiring it, quite cheap.

Harry Potter novels were supposed to have created a new generation of readers. They are adults now, but it seems that most of them just kept re-reading the Harry Potter novels. Last summer, though, a little hope was re-born, in that the Dostoyevsky novella, White Nights, became very popular, through Tik-Tok. There is something to be said about this short-form, small size, reading experience. It never looks daunting, I suppose. Maybe the same can be said about racing stories now, because this is a good way to tell them. I hope so.

They’re also the sort of thing that you could tuck into the folds of your skin, and take back with you, to your real life.

Cubby Begge
Eggs for eyes, and an eye for an egg

P.S. IF ANYONE LEAVES A NICE COMMENT FOR ME, THAT THEY’D BE PREPARED TO LEAVE ON AMAZON TOO, I’LL SEND THEM A FREE PAPERBOOK, WHICH I’LL GET ROBERT TO SIGN.