When We Were Dreaming - Clement Meyers

Robert McKee's criticism of Betty Blue was that it had no story: it was two hours of watching someone fall deeper into a violent madness that we knew she had in the first five minutes of the film. Its director understood his audience: there's a type of twenty-something woman who laps this stuff up. Along with vampire movies and anything else with Beatrice Dalle covered in blood. (Just as, I suspect, there's a type of man who laps up anything with St Isabelle - awkward shuffle.) McKee's point still holds - there's no character development, no situation-complication-resolution, no Heroes Journey. The same can be said for Morvern Caller: we know she's a dissociated psychopath within ten minutes, and she doesn't change throughout all the weird little adventures she has. It's a mood piece, one of those films we watch because the lead actress is fascinating (cf every Andrea Arnold or Jean-Luc Godard movie ever). Films can get away with being story-free if they are visually arresting, the soundtrack is cool as heck, and the cast fascinate us.

Novels can't do any of those things. NO soundtrack, no luscious setting and photography, no Samantha Morton / Anna Karina / Norah Jones to be fascinating. Just those darn words on the page. A novel needs a story: a series of events that change the thoughts, feelings and circumstances of the lead characters in a way that makes the end of the novel feel satisfying. Novels without this are called picaresque, and are interesting partly because of the adventures but mostly because of the portrayals of the society and people with whom the picaro deals. A good picaresque novel will have brushes with the law, the military, high life, and give us a sense of how the low life works. It will have a picaro who fascinates, amuses and educates us, and who has a reasonably complex character. Otherwise it's just a long sequence of drinking and fights.

Clement Meyer's When We Were Dreaming, published by the Deptford-based Fitzcaraldo Editions, is 597 pages of drinking and fights. It's an account of the lives of low-level teenage delinquents in one rough district of Leipzig after the Wall came down, who are in awe of the gangs in the "red light district" which may as well be on Mars. The narrative is a mess. At one point Danny, the central character, does four weeks in a juvenile detention centre, amongst other things, for trespassing, but the only trespassing we're told he does is a good few chapters later when he runs an illegal club with others in the gang. It has its moments, but by about page 250, I was starting to want something to happen, but instead Danny goes to a brothel and gets drunk.

At 597 pages, with so many minor details and no overall direction, it feels like speed-writing. Not the shorthand they used to teach, but what happens when the writer takes one too many Adderall and lets fly. I have no idea if that's what happened, but it feels a lot like it. Whichever, Meyer's editor should have sat him down and asked him to take 350 pages out, and put the rest into a tighter linear narrative.

There are some books that when I read them, I can wander round a bookshop and choose the next books I'm going to read. There are other books that put me off making those choices. As if I have to grind through this one before I can choose another. That is usually a sign that I'm not enjoying reading it. A movie ends after a couple of hours, but a damn novel can go on for a long time if I'm not really enjoying it.

I tried to read it so you don't have to.

Thank me later.