To the Ritzy on Saturday night to see Submarine with my wife and daughter, with (I must admit it) some reluctance, as Source Code was on in the next screen and that looked just the ticket for a hot weekend night with beer in the head and noodles in the belly. I’ll get to see Source Code soon, I trust – but I’m bloody delighted I got to see Submarine.

If you’ve been hiding under a rock, you won’t know this is the first film directed by Richard Ayoade, who’s become known as Moss from The I.T. Crowd but who for me will forever be Garth Marenghi’s publicist and co-star Dean Lerner (when Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace came out, I remember Ayoade doing a radio interview in character as Lerner and it is still about the funniest bit of live radio I’ve ever heard).

Ayoade also wrote the script, adapted from Joe Dunthorne’s novel about a teenage boy growing up in South Wales (in the film, the date isn’t specified, but from little clues around technology the wife and I guessed it’s around 1980/81, which makes the hero the exact same age as me). The film also has added Alex Turner, who provided a half-dozen strummed little guitar-and-voice songs which punctuate the story without ever seeming to be about very much at all (in a good way).

Harder to put down in words is the quality of the film, by which I mean not how good it is (and it’s very good indeed) but its flavour, the way it looks at the world. It’s got a skewed Super 8 kind of light to it, and there’s lot of interesting faces and puzzled expressions, as if everyone’s woken up on a strange film set and is wondering how on earth it happened. The central character, Oliver Tate, is played by Craig Roberts with the most bemused face of all, as if he’s constantly asking us to make some sense of a cracked world full of fires in skips and teenagers sitting in baths, contemplating eternity on the Gower Peninsula. His parents are played by Noah Taylor, whose wonky face and slight Aussie accent are in a strange way descriptive of the whole film, and a near-unrecognisable Sally Hawkins, who swaps her “isn’t life BRILLIANT!” grin from Happy-Go-Lucky for a jittery, tragically repressed woman who seems scared of everything.

It’s a lovely, brave thing, this film, with a whimsy to it that is very British indeed. It’s pretty tempting to draw analogies with Gregory’s Girl, which had a similar kind of fractured comedy to it (set in the same era, too). And there, look, I’ve succumbed to the temptation. But the world needs as many Bill Forsyths as it can get, and if Richard Ayoade wants to be one of them, hip hip hooray. Submarine was funded by the UK Film Council. So we won’t be seeing many more like it, presumably. I found myself asking why the BBC doesn’t make stuff like this: poetic, funny, sad, beautiful, memorable. Ayoade is a serious player, says this film. Looking forward to what he does next.

Just finished Justin Cartwright’s masterly satirical comedy of manners Other People’s Money. It’s the story of an ancient British bank, Tubal & Co., which is on the brink of going under in the wake of a the 2008 credit crisis. The ancient head of the bank is on his death bed, and his son is frantically trying to secure the future of the place by moving money in from external trusts to prop up the balance sheet and get a sale with an American megabank through on the never-never.

The financial stuff is great, but the real energy of the book is in the characters. There are few monsters or angels, just recognisable human beings struggling through extraordinary crises (I’m a sucker for this stuff – the reminder that even people with extraordinary power are still subject to the same rules of comedy, anxiety and depression as the rest of us). The comedy is very good indeed, if at times pretty dark; the picture of a local newspaper in Cornwall (read the book if you want to know who they become involved) and what happens to it is accurate, funny and desperate all at the same time. Anyone who’s ever worked for a newspaper, or thought of it, should read this book.

And there are dozens and dozens of light, witty and lucid descriptions. Some of the stuff I highlighted:

Despite the tardiness of his leg, he doesn’t at a distance present a figure of pity.

For Daniel he lights the candle and drops a splodge of boiling wax on to the envelope – some falls, inevitably, on to the remains of an Asda quiche.

All night Melissa heard the sound of police and ambulance sirens, heavy rumbling from beneath the streets like furniture being dragged in another room, the detached shouts of drunks and, from the hotel’s pipes, anguished moaning, followed by clunking and juddering and also there was muffled speaking in tongues – maybe of sex between strangers – and below and around all this, a constant thrumming from deep beneath the crust of London with mysterious electrical and gaseous qualities, as though she could hear the power lines and gasworks and sewers all in constant flux and surge and spurt.

I haven’t read any Evelyn Waugh for a decade or more, but this clever, witty and elegant book reminded me pretty strongly of some of Waugh’s work, not least in its ability to be very angry and very funny at the same time. Given the subject matter, it seems ironic to say it is in fact very, very English, in a very, very good way. Deft, in a word.

I’ve read a lot of big books in my time (you don’t get to be an Eng Lit graduate without reading at least some doorstops), but I’ll admit to one thing: I’ve only ever re-read a Big Novel once, and that was David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. And I only finished the second reading last night.

(On an unrelated note: how do so many very Clever people find the time to read so much of the canon, and then re-read it – it’s one thing reading Dickens and Tolstoy and Austen and Hardy and James and Eliot and Trollope and all, it’s another to have read the things twice).

Two things occur on the second reading:

1. Don’t read Infinite Jest as your night-time novel. I did, and it was stupid. First of all, it’s hard enough keeping the capaciousness in your head during the day; doing it when you’re nodding off is another thing entirely. Secondly, there’s something about this book which makes you think you’re ready for sleep, but then you close your eyes and the bloody thing is off firing synaptic connections like some insane microbe electrician. It’s a kind of Entertainment of its own, and it won’t let your brain shut down. I swear, odd things happened most nights when I finished reading – oddest of all, a strange itch in my foot which continued for hours and which for some reason I believe was connected to the narrative of the book. DMZ in my cocoa, obviously.

2. Don’t try and answer the question “what happened?” through reading online discussion. I wrote a post a while back about Infinite Jest‘s online communities, and helpful though these are, there is a banal reductiveness to the attempt to answer questions like “Is Joelle deformed?” and “What happened to Hal?” in a threaded discussion board. Better to find someone else who loves the book and argue about it there. The wisest most thought-provoking comment I had in the book was in a text message. I think DFW would have approved.

But really, all I wanted to say was: read this book. Seeing an intelligence with as much flame and desire and appetite as Wallace’s at work is a wonder in itself, and the tragedy that this intelligence was unable to tolerate itself into old age is a terrible one.