The Sex Lives of Siamese Twins by Irvine Welsh review

Irvine Welsh: being a 'sadist'. Photograph: Murdo Macleod for the Guardian

As we've come to expect from an Irvine Welsh hero, Lucy Brennan, the narrator of The Sex Lives of Siamese Twins, is an unrepentant sadist and narcissist. A fitness trainer in the bikini-clad, ab-obsessed world of South Beach, Miami, she becomes an unlikely hero when she disarms a gunman who has chased two men in front of her car on the highway. Lucy's exploit makes her a star on local news – and inspires infatuation in a witness to the incident, the overweight, pathologically lonely Lena Sorensen. Lena tracks Lucy down the following day to schedule a personal training session.

At this point, the reader anticipates a stalking narrative. And when Lena turns out to be an artist who constructs distorted human figures from animal bones, our suspicions seem to be confirmed. But it's Lucy who gradually becomes obsessed with Lena, and specifically with carving the fat off her body. When Lena continues to gobble key lime pies on the sly, Lucy's tactics become increasingly abusive, while her interest in Lena grows perversely sexual. At last, losing patience, she drugs Lena and imprisons her in an empty apartment building. Fed by her captor on blueberries and protein shakes, with only a treadmill and a home gym for company, Lena at last loses weight. She is chained to a pillar, she is defecating into a bucket – but she looks fantastic.

As a concept, this is brilliant. It powerfully encapsulates the book's themes of body obsession, co-dependency, and the American cult of willpower. And, for anyone who's ever tried to diet, it's a twisted wish fulfilment fantasy. But the pleasure of the book is spoiled by a radically misjudged narrator.

Welsh has a history of testing the limits of his readers' capacity for empathy. No one can write about a sociopath in love with so much heart. But his Lucy not only lacks any sympathetic qualities, she lacks any interesting qualities. She has one-night-stands with people she despises and mistreats; personal training sessions with people she despises and mistreats; lunch with her mother, whom she despises and mistreats. Here, all overweight women are beachballs, lard-asses, blimps. An older woman is a "crinkled, leather-faced, old scrotum". Whatever else they are, women are bitches. In a typical passage, Lucy describes the Democratic and Republican candidates for governor: "Thorpe is a well-meaning but flatulent-mouthed, carpetbagging Ivy League asshole, while Quist is a rabid, fascist, sanctimonious, Bible-bashing prick ... It's hard to work out which one I hate the most." When the venom recedes, we're left with passages like this: "Sorenson weighed in at 197.5 ... I decided that I was going to cardio her ass and burn shit off her. I started her on the elliptical, and doing a 4 x 15 minute workout, increasing the resistance level from 8 to 10 to 12 to 14." Meanwhile, in his rendering of American speech, Welsh succeeds a little too dramatically. He conveys not just American English, but the way American English can grate on the English ear. And it does grate, and continues to grate, page after remorseless page.

Of course, it's reasonable to suppose that a South Beach fitness trainer would tediously count calories, itemise her meals, and assess every passerby on his physical appearance. And presumably there are some people whose responses to others are uniformly hateful. Some Americans really do abuse the English language. But choosing to write a 460-page novel in the voice of such a person is crossing a line. Welsh is not just portraying a sadist here; he is being a sadist.

As the novel progresses, Welsh introduces Lena as a secondary narrator. Lena is certainly less loathsome than Lucy, and she's convincing as a Midwestern girl who loves Cute Overload and doughnuts. But she's too leadenly ordinary to be credible as the world-class artist we're told she is, much less as the focus of a stranger's erotic obsession, while her bovine capitulation to Lucy's bullying doesn't seem to be grounded in anything but the author's convenience.

Ultimately, this novel is simply frustrating. Its plot is not only cleverly conceived but genuinely, hauntingly, transgressive. It could have been a powerful and profound book, with just a bit more thought. One reads it wishing vainly for Welsh to humanise some of Lucy's reactions; to motivate some of Lena's decisions; to allow any character the range of expression of Welsh's best creations. Most of all, The Sex Lives of Siamese Twins would have been a great, page-turning read if it were narrated not by Lucy and Lena, but by someone with the intelligence and expressiveness of Irvine Welsh.

• Sandra Newman's The Country of Ice Cream Star will be published by Chatto in June

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The Wizard of Oz, still behind the curtain, lives on

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'The Marvelous Land of Oz' by L. Frank Baum, introduction by Mitchell Kapner

New Oz movie gives birth to new books and reissues'The Wonderful Wizard of Oz' in new editions with new illustrationsThe art from the movie 'Oz The Great and Powerful' is celebrated

We're off to see the Wizard. Again. Yep, skipping down that yellow brick road.

Little could L. Frank Baum have known that when his Wonderful Wizard of Oz was published in 1900 that more than a century later millions would still be making the pilgrimage to the Emerald City. In books. In movies. In merchandise.?

Baum's classic about a little girl who went on a magical journey attempting to make her way home to Kansas was followed by a popular musical in 1902, which Baum adapted from his original. Its place in history was sealed in 1939 with the Judy Garland movie, The Wizard of Oz, ever since a staple in American pop culture. Throw in an additional 17 Oz novels from Baum, and you've got a legend.

And now Disney's movie, Oz The Great and Powerful, starring James Franco as a small-town magician who arrives in an enchanted land in a prequel to the original story, opens March 8. It has spawned a flurry of Oz books, from reissues of old standards from Baum's collection to a coffee-table book celebrating the art of the new movie.

- Disney Press is reissuing the classic The Wonderful Wizard of Oz with a new introduction by Franco. "The Wizard is a showman, and I suppose that is what I am as an actor," Franco writes. "So the Wizard's journey is actually very similar to my own, even though he traverses the strange world of Oz while I work in the stranger world of Hollywood." Baum's The Marvelous Land of Oz (1904) is also being re-released by Disney Press.

- Disney Press also published several titles tied to the new movie, including Oz The Great and Powerful Movie Storybook;World of Reading: The Land of Oz and The Art of Oz The Great and Powerful written by the film's Executive Producer Grant Curtis.

- Artist/illustrator Michael Sieben re-imagines the Land of Oz in a contemporary style with a re-issue of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz from Harper Design.

'The Wonderful Wizard of Oz' by L. Frank Baum, illustrated by Michael Sieben

- Baum's stories are also refashioned in a new collection from 47North, Oz Re-imagined: New Tales from the Emerald City and Beyond, which includes stories about a grown-up and bitter Dorothy, winged monkeys with wings too small to fly and a stuffed Toto. It's edited by John Joseph Adams and Douglas Cohen.

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Review-a-Day for Sat, Aug 6: Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter (Vintage)

by Tom Bissell A review by Nathan Weatherford

Tom Bissell has played a lot of video games over the course of his life. Luckily, this obsession has clearly not hurt his writing or sense of humor. Throughout Extra Lives, Bissell ably intertwines intellectual questions and uproarious anecdotes from his experiences playing video games and his interactions with those who make them. The result is an in-depth look at the struggles that go into both developing and playing these games (which are taking up more and more of our leisure time -- and income), as seen through the eyes of someone who has an appropriately uneasy relationship with his own particular version of this obsession.

While Bissell makes it clear that he has been playing video games since childhood, all of these essays deal specifically with games that have come out in the last 10 to 15 years. Video games have obviously made giant evolutionary leaps from the days of playing Donkey Kong in the arcade, and, indeed, many of Bissell's musings on the subject would not have been imaginable at the outset of the video-gaming era. What was once a potentially frustrating and challenging pastime -- whose main requirements were an ability to memorize patterns and be quick on the joystick -- has now become capable of transporting us to massive worlds, enveloping us in gripping storylines, and scaring us as much as (or more than) any horror film. In Bissell's mind, there's no question that video games have become their own art form. But, what this particular art form does that no film, book, or painting can do is still up for debate, as is how best to navigate the various conceptual pitfalls specific to the form.

One struggle at the heart of modern video game development that I found quite fascinating is the tug-of-war between narrative and ludonarrative. The narrative in video games is the overarching plot that guides the player through the game, usually dispensed through cut scenes in modern games. The ludonarrative is the part of the story that is created through the player's own gameplay. Here's the conundrum: give the game too much narrative, and the player will lose interest quickly, since they didn't buy the video game to watch a movie that they have absolutely no control over; but, at the opposite end, with too much ludonarrative, it's impossible to maintain any coherent dramatic arc or emotional investment in characters. And if this balance wasn't enough to contend with, there's also the possibility of the narrative and ludonarrative being in direct conflict with each other.

Bissell mentions an essay by Clint Hocking (current creative director at LucasArts and former creative director for Ubisoft Montreal) in which Hocking coins the term "ludonarrative dissonance" in reference to the video game Bioshock. In Hocking's opinion, Bioshock's gameplay promotes self-interest above all else (i.e. siphoning life out of innocent characters to make your own character that much stronger in the game, enabling you to progress through the game that much more easily), but its narrative constantly presents selflessness as the guiding theme of the story. Thus, as the game's character, you are compelled to act selflessly in the narrative, regardless of how selfishly you act in the ludonarrative that you're creating as you play -- a basic aesthetic hypocrisy that constantly distracts from the world of the game, and a hypocrisy that not only doesn't but can't exist in books or films. My respect for the careful art of video game development increased exponentially after learning about these and myriad other constraints inherent to the field.

But Extra Lives contains a great deal more than philosophical ruminations about video games (and I promise that Bissell explains ludonarrative much more effectively and hilariously than I have here). Bissell has conversations with some of the best video game developers in the field, tells stories about his personal experiences losing himself in games such as Grand Theft Auto IV and Fallout 3, and has constant internal arguments about whether or not the extraordinary number of hours he's dedicated to these and many other games over the years have been worth it -- and if not, why he keeps feeling compelled to lose himself in them time and again.

Both a highly informative survey of the modern video game world and a refreshingly honest look at one man's trials and tribulations with the medium, Extra Lives is a thoroughly engaging read, one that inveterate gamers would do well to put their controllers down for -- and one that could occasion newcomers to pick up those controllers for the first time.

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