PUNKADIDDLE

All-Time Top Ten Topped and Tenned

2012-01-03T12:19:00.000-08:00

So there you have it. Here are the links to my ten posts on the top ten bestelling books of all time. Why? What did you spend your Christmas break doing?

10. Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich (1937)

9. Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code (2003)

8. H. Rider Haggard, She (1887)

7. C S Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (1950)

6. Agatha Christie, Ten Little Niggers (1939)

5. Cao Xueqin, Dream of the Red Chamber (1759-91)

4. J R R Tolkien, The Hobbit (1937)

3. J R R Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings (1954-55)

2. Antoine Saint-Exupéry, Le Petit Prince (1943)

1. Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859)

Top Ten All-Time Bestselling Books, 1: Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859)

2012-01-02T00:00:00.000-08:00

So, we reach the end of this series with the world's bestselling book; and we do so just as 2011 folds over into 2012, the bicentenary of Dickens's birth. As to why this Dickens title, amongst so many other (let's be honest: better) Dickens novels, is the one to sell more than any other ... well I suppose it combines a vivid, well-plotted story -- and the plotting, though obviously melodramatic, is good -- with a degree of historical interest. Plus it's considerably shorter than the fat-man-sized masterpieces, from Copperfield through to Our Mutual Friend. Let us not underestimate the importance of relative shortness, in reaching a global audience who have heard that Dickens is one of the greatest novelists, but who don't feel like scaling a 1000-page mountain, particularly if English isn't their first language. On the downside, this book lacks some of the sheer brilliance of Dickens's humour at its finest; and where Bleak House and Little Dorrit (my personal favourites in the Dickens canon) do extraordinary, eloquent, resonant things with their respective structures of theme and symbol, the bi-urban Tale wrings a rather wearying stream from Christian tropes out of its narrower stretch of cloth: wine that is also blood; dead bodies coming to life; substitutionary atonement. Still, I do love this novel. I love it as the most autobiographical book Dickens ever wrote.

That's not normally how it's taken, of course. The Standard Critical View of A Tale of Two Cities is that it rehearses Carlyle's French Revolution in fictional form by way of airing CD's political views and anxieties. And that's certainly a part of what is going on here. It's just not (I think) a very important part. For the greater part, I'm gonna ask you to -- gimme a 'C'! ("C!") Gimme a 'D'! ("D!").

It is about justice, or more exactly about fairness, just like all of Dickens’s novels—one of the things that gives Dickens his unique appeal is his acute sense of the valences of fairness. Children understand this quality, and it matters very much to them; but some adults fall into cynicism, or despair, about it. I must say I’ve never understood why ‘but that’s not fair!’ has, as a phrase, the negative overtones of spoilt child about it. ‘It’s not fair’ is the most penetrating criticism it is possible to make about human social affairs: it is, at root, the force of the criticism of Marx—and the Gospels. A characteristic Dickens storyline concerns a child, with whom we empathise, who suffers a series of grotesque unfairnesses at the hand of adulthood. In his best books these unfairnesses accumulate, and are only paid-off with a restorative dose of justice right at the end of the book. In this sense A Tale of Two Cities is both intensely characteristic and rather unusual—unusual in that it concerns no children, it traces no Bildungsroman, it does not surround a bland everyman with a ring of exaggeratedly intensified caricature and grotesques. But it is characteristic, intensely so, in that the issue of fairness is elevated to a national, indeed a cosmic level. The abuses of Dickens’s ancien regime are so hyperbolically extreme, the unfairness of life for the poor so manifest, that it feels crude, even clumsy. This, though, is to read only on the level of manifest content. The more interesting things happening here are going on on the level of the latent.

Two cities, one tale. A tale about what? Well, most obviously about the French revolution, and various people (most especially Dr Manette and his daughter Lucy, virtuous Charles Darnay and dissolute Sidney Carton) caught up in it. What else? Well, it's also about the thread linking London and Paris. London, of course, was Dickens's city. He knew Paris pretty well, too: he holidayed there often, especially in the 1850s. And I think the key salient here is that, for respectable British Victorians, there was something disreputable about France, of course: a different alignment of sexual mores (or mœurs) both in life and art. In May 1856 he had a conversation with a friend, Mrs Brown, on this matter. I'll quote from Claire Tomalin's excellent new biography:

When she spoke against them, he praised their openness about social problems, telling her that a leading difference between them and the English was that "in England people dismiss the mention of social evils and vices which do nevertheless exist amongst them; and that in France people people do not dismiss the mention of the same things but habitually recognise their existence." Mrs Brown cried out, "Don't say that!" and Dickens insisted, "Oh but I must say it, you know, when according to our national vanity and prejudice, you disparage an unquestionably great nation." At which Mrs Brown burst into tears. [272]

Hah! That told her! It's always edifying, I feel, when a millionaire celebrity, one of the most influential men of his day, makes an ordinary non-famous woman cry. On another occasion Dickens complained to his friend Forster that Balzac and Sand could write about real heroes, where the hero of an English novel must be 'always uninteresting -- too good.' This question of the representation of the 'indecencies' (Dickens's word) is one of the fault lines separating the English and French literary traditions, I suppose: but it points to one of the way 'France' functions, symbolically, in this novel. Violence and revolution, yes; but also sex.

Now, in the usual course of things I shy away from biographical criticism, and I urge my students to do the same. The notion that a work of literature can be ‘unlocked’ once we understand the life-story of the individual who wrote it can hardly escape banality. Speaking as an author myself I can confirm that the author is dead, and that the business of literary criticism is with literature. But I say all that in order to violate my own rules; and advance a strictly biographical reading of A Tale of Two Cities. Many critics before me have noticed biographical parallels in the novel, of course; but I wish to go further—to suggest, in fact, that this is a novel absolutely saturated with CD. A critical commonplace is that David Copperfield is CD’s most autobiographical novel; I propose that A Tale of Two Cities merits that title.

Appropriately for a novel much concerned with secrets, and repression, the autobiography it construes is a hidden one. In the mid 1850s, after nearly two decades of marriage, Dickens separated from his wife Catherine. After giving birth to ten children (not counting her miscarriages) Catherine had certainly played her part in the Victorian conception of marriage; and if she had grown fat and sluggish in the process I know of no contemporary commentators inclined to judge her harshly on that account. But it is clear that Dickens had long since grown to feel his marriage was a prison, and that being married to his slow, conventional wife and his (even by nineteenth-century standards) large brood of children was tantamount to being buried alive. A Tale of Two Cities opens with Dr Manette, who has been buried alive in an actual prison cell for nearly two decades, reduced to the obsessive making of shoes (shoes are an eloquent trope for the material demands of parenthood: any parent will confirm that one seems constantly to be buying new shoes. The little buggers’ feet keep growing). But the novel opens with him recalled to life, drawn back to the light by the golden thread of his beautiful, eighteen-year-old daughter Lucy—whose name, of course, means light.

The story of Dickens infatuation with the beautiful, eighteen-year-old Ellen Ternan has been well documented—CD first fell for her when she was playing a character called ‘Lucy’ in Dickens’s and Collins’s play, The Frozen Deep. Like Lucy Manette, Ternan was a petite, fair-faced blonde (unlike the large-limbed, corpulent, dark-haired Catherine). Intensely protective of his public reputation as the preëminent family entertainer of his day, CD kept his relationship with Ternan secret; he did such a good job, indeed, that there are professional Dickensians who refuse to accept that theirs was a sexual relationship at all. But of course it was. And CD would hardly be the first wealthy middle-aged-man to have had an affair with a complaisant beautiful younger woman and to feel, thereby, that he had been as it were released from prison.

It seems logical to me (although we have no hard evidence) to think that Dickens told Ellen—and her mother, who was certainly ‘in’ on the relationship—that he would marry her if and when he could. But divorcing the blameless Catherine was out of the question, and so they had to wait—in his letters to his All the Year Round editor Willis (who knew about the affair) CD refers to Ternan as ‘the Patient’, presumably because she was having to wait patiently for Catherine to die to wed. In the meantime, Dickens bought ‘Nelly’ (and her mother) a house in Slough—then, as now, a charming countryside village a short train ride from London.

I used to live a couple miles from Slough. I know all about it.

Later he sold the Slough house and bought her place in Peckham; and there are rumours that (contra the official story, in which Dickens died at his Kentish house Gad’s Hill) he died in Peckham in Nelly’s arms. Certainly the couple travelled often between England and France, on one occasion, perhaps, to go to a safely anonymous place in order for Ellen to give birth to Dickens's son (if this happened, it seems the boy did not live long). Meanwhile he forced his actual wife away from him, against her wishes, with a startling ruthlessness; he was pitiless to those friends, no matter of how longstanding, who did not entirely side with him, and said a raft of cruel things, some of them untrue, about Catherine. As he conceded to a friend: 'I am a man full of passion and energy, and my own wild way that I must go.' For many, to quote Tomalin again, 'the spectacle of a man famous for his goodness and his attachment to domestic virtues suddenly losing his moral compass is dismaying.' But Tomlin, in a perceptive move, speculates that it was precisely the middle-class propriety of Ternan that precipitated the savagery of CD's behaviour during this climacteric: 'a naughty girl,' she speculates, 'could have made him happy.' As it was Ternan seems to have held out, for a while at least. But Dickens, father of ten children and full of stomping, rushing, urgent, unsatisfied vitality, was (to quote his friend Macready) 'not the celibate type'. Tomalin puts it less laconically: 'Nelly simply succumbed. Dickens was a great performer who liked to please his audience. He was famous for his energy, and took his physical pleasures seriously, eating and drinking, walking, dancing, travelling, singing. He had fathered ten children on his wife in twenty years, not counting miscarriages, and he believed that sexual activity was necessary to a healthy man' [Tomalin, 327]. This is not the same thing as saying that he was happy to have so conspicuously lost his moral compass, of course; on the contrary. But however uncomfortable it may have been for CD himself, the rock-and-a-hard-place pressures applied to a genuinely creative imagination can at least generate great art.

At any rate, these circumstance presumably bred two Dickenses: the one who watched the dial on his own moral compass spin wildly and could not get past his self-revulsion at what he had done to his blameless wife, to his family, and potentially to his reputation--and the other, who feeling sexual activity was necessary to a healthy man could not get past his boyish delight that the sexual activity in question was now happening with a beautiful eighteen-year old rather than a corpulent woman his own age.

All in all, it would not overstate things to describe the appearance of Ternan as a revolution in Dickens's life. When things happen to writers, they tend to write about them. Dickens could not write directly about this illicit sexual connection, of course; but he was a writer to the marrow. And so he wrote the story by not writing the story. I've done the same thing myself. Most writers have.

In A Tale of Two Cities, we have three characters who act, to one degree or another, as ciphers for CD. One, Dr Manette, represents Dickens’s sense of himself as imprisoned; as old enough to be Nelly’s father (which he was) and as broken down physically (which, again, he increasingly was: Tomalin is particularly good on this). Two others are the doppelgangers, upon which the plot hinges: the virtuous, hard-working, uxorious Charles 'CD' Darnay—and the talented but alcoholic and reprobate Sidney Carton. Darnay is CD on a good day; with a guilty secret in his past, but making the best of the present. Carton is a repository of all of CD’s worst traits: his rootlessness, his boozing, his faithlessness. We might want to see Carton as a sort of anti-Dickens (hence his name; not C. DIC. but [C]ID C.). Both Carton and Darnay love the young, blonde Ellen Ternan, sorry, I mean, the young, blonde Lucy Manette; and both are prevented, in the novel, from being able to realise that love, Darnay by the outside world (rendered in the novel as in terms of the anger of the mob that feels itself to have been betrayed—CD’s own fears about crossing his own large fanbase) and Carton by his own fundamental unworthiness. This is the Dickens of the early days of his relationship with Ternan: feeling himself blocked from his happy-ever-after with the woman he loved both by the world’s opposition and his own unfitness.

As I say many critics have noted these sorts of parallels. It is less often pointed out that there's a greater preponderance of ‘C’s and ‘D’s in character names in this novel than any other by CD. So we have not only Charles Darnay and Carton, but also the Crunchers, the Defarges (Mr and Mrs). There’s also Cly. Even Stryver has the initial ‘C’. And when character names aren’t built up from Cs and Dcs, they tend instead to elaborate CD’s middle names, ‘John Huffam’—the great many Jacques in the novel, for instance, have a clear relationship to the John (for Dickens is also, in his heart, the force of Revolution and ruin in this novel too, as in his own life); just as the turncoat spy Barsad has the first name John, and even Lorry is a ‘J’ too. There's a plethora of Jacques running through the heart of the novel ("How goes it, Jacques? Is all the spilt wine swallowed?" "Every drop, Jacques" ... "It is not often that many of these miserable beasts know the taste of wine, or of anything but black bread and death. Is it not so, Jacques?" "It is so, Jacques." ... "Hard lives they live, Jacques. Am I right, Jacques?" "You are right, Jacques" and so on). Stretching it a little, I’ve always assumed that ‘Gaspard’, the man whose son is run over by the wicked Marquis, and who kills him in revenge, suggests the gasping, huffing-puffing ‘Huffam’ from inbetween the 'John' and the 'Dickens'. I tell you: I find myself thinking that there’s hardly a character name in the novel than doesn’t riff on Dickens’s own name.

There’s more—much more, I’d say, than even the most assiduous Dickensian has excavated from the novel (and, I must concede, more than many would consider plausible. Not that that's going to stop me). Part of the plot hinges on a letter, hidden in the prison itself, but unearthed by Defarge.

Upon a corner stone in an angle of the wall, one prisoner, who seemed to have gone to execution, had cut as his last work, three letters. They were done with some very poor instrument, and hurriedly, with an unsteady hand. At first, they were read as D. I. C.; but, on being more carefully examined, the last letter was found to be G. There was no record or legend of any prisoner with those initials, and many fruitless guesses were made what the name could have been. At length, it was suggested that the letters were not initials, but the complete word, DIG. The floor was examined very carefully under the inscription, and, in the earth beneath a stone, or tile, or some fragment of paving, were found the ashes of a paper, mingled with the ashes of a small leathern case or bag. What the unknown prisoner had written will never be read, but he had written something, and hidden it away to keep it from the gaoler." [1:6]

DIC, right. What of the prisoner himself? So traumatised by his incarceration that his name has become a number:

"Did you ask me for my name?"
"Assuredly I did."
"One Hundred and Five, North Tower."
“Is that all?"
"One Hundred and Five, North Tower."
With a weary sound that was not a sigh, nor a groan, he bent to work again.

What a name! We read it as 105, but there’s nothing stopping us as reading it as one hundred and then five (hundred); which is to say, in Roman numerals, as C and then D. Did you ask him for his name? It’s CD.

I’m going to go even further. Dickens originally wanted to call his novel Recalled To Life, which is a perfectly good title (he also toyed with The Golden Thread). Yet A Tale of Two Cities wouldn’t leave him alone as a title; and he went with it. A Tale of Two Cities struck him, on some level, as the right name for this novel. And that’s because of what the novel actually is: A Tale of Two CDs. The privately good CD who is blocked by the world, and the privately bad CD who looks exactly like him and who sacrifices himself so the other can go on with his life.

You want more? “Charles Darnay brought before the lawless Court, and examined” [3:4] CD and the Lawless court? Lawless (ah, but you know this already) was Ellen Ternan’s middle name. "When he awoke and was afoot again [by the river], he lingered there yet a little longer, watching an eddy that turned and turned purposeless, until the stream absorbed it, and carried it on to the sea.—'Like me.'" [3:9] Carton, here: the anti-Dickens watching an eddy (E for Ellen, D for Dickens) that ‘turned and’. That Ternan. Like him.

What's that? You don't want me to go on? Oh, alright.

To be clear, or a little clearer. I am not suggesting the A Tale of Two CDs is a designedly constructed allegory of CD’s relations with Ellen Lawless Ternan. On the contrary: I don't believe there's anything strictly allegorical here at all. What there is, I think, is the profound saturation of a imaginative creativity with a set of emotional quanta that relate intensely, in an intensely felt way, to his own life. This in turn produces a text that is haunted by the poltergeists of Dickens’s violent passion for his new inamoratas, and his equally violent guilt and self-disgust at breaking up his marriage, lying (by omission and commission both) to his public, friends and family and—more fundamentally—for being an old and physically broken-down man who had pressed his attentions upon a young, virtuous virgin. Rich old men who press their sexual attentions upon impoverished young women may spin themselves enabling fictions about how the girl in question ‘really’ likes older men—perhaps even going further, trying to convince themselves that he and she are soul-mates, or something of that fashion. But at some level they know that the true salient in ‘rich old man’ is the first of those three terms. And Dickens, however pulled-along he was by his desire for this beautiful young woman, can hardly have been able to keep from his knowledge the thought that had he been poor and unfamous, young Ellen wouldn’t have looked at him twice. Because -- well, of course not!

In other words, the shadow-play of their relationship may have had wonderful moments (who knows?); but the Substance of the Shadow (to use the name Dickens gives the chapter in A Tale of Two CDs where the buried secret of the novel is finally revealed) is surely one of sexual guilt. And, really, how could the buried secret at the heart of A Tale of Two CDs be anything other than the story of the sexual exploitation of a young powerless girl by a old powerful man? The document, written in secrecy by old Doctor Manette, and buried in the Bastille under the rebus 'DIC', reveals that the wicked old Marquis of Evrémonde exercised his droit de seigneur upon an innocent young girl. The girl's brother objected to this treatment, and was stabbed to death with a sword for his pains. As he dies he tells Manette:

They have had their shameful rights, these Nobles, in the modesty and virtue of our sisters, many years, but we have had good girls among us. I know it, and have heard my father say so. She was a good girl.

In the fiercely compressed symbolic economy of the novel it is this (‘he took her away—for his pleasure and diversion’) that propels the entire country into revolution; this is the primal sin that can only be expiated in blood. And whilst Dickens’ outrage at a society in which a rich, old man can see an attractive younger woman and simply ‘take her away for his pleasure and diversion’ is doubtless real, so is his secret exhilaration at precisely that power. This conflict is the identity of the two CDs in this tale: the CD who is properly outraged by this scenario, and the CD who can’t help desire it for himself.

The brother dies, of course; and the woman herself repeatedly shrieks ‘'My husband, my father, and my brother!’—in reference to those of her family who have been killed, but also, we might think, channelling Ellen Ternan’s conflicted sense of the nature of Dickens’s relation to her: old enough to be her father; assisting her and her sisters with brotherly charity; secretly her sexual partner. CDs litter the prose throughout, but in this passage they become more cloggingly obvious: ("I write with so much Difficulty, the Cold is so severe, I am so fearful of being Detected and Consigned to an underground cell and total Darkness, that I must abridge this narrative. There is no Confusion in my memory; it can recall, and Could Detail, every word that was ever spoken between me and those brothers”). When the document is read, at the final trial, it seals CD’s doom, to the C and the D, ‘to the Conciergerie, and Death’.

This is not a novel that delineates the externalities of Dickens's 1850s. Such a book would be much duller. This, on the contrary, is a book about the overturning of an old regime not so much in terms of its externals but as the revolution of the heart and mind, the stirring up of old passions CD had tried to consider long buried. More specifically, it styles the force powering this revolution as dual: as Londonish and Parisian; as the desire to make a better world and the desire to indulge bad appetites and bestial yearnings. And since this is the story of one man, it is therefore the story of his two doppelgangers -- the man who wants to put his bad past behind him and live a virtuous life, only the world won't let him; and the man who wants to make love to a woman on an equal footing -- only he's not worthy. It is a far far better thing, and so on, and so forth.

Perhaps the most far-fetched claim I make in all this blogpost's parsec-far fetches, is the one that A Tale of Two CDs is actually a more interesting story than A Tale of Two Cities. Why is such a claim particularly far-fetched? Because (the contrary voice mutters in my ear) the story of a wealthy middle-aged man putting his wife away to have sex with a younger girl is worse than seedy and scuzzy -- it's banal. It's such a cliché! Whereas, for better or worse, the French Revolution was a unique and prodigious event in world history! But (I reply, to that contrary voice), especially when viewed from the auspice of moral fable, as A Tale of Two Cities does, the French Revolution is horribly one dimensional. The ancien regime was full of horrors; and the revolution, reacting against them, went too far the other way. End of, as the contemporary idiom has it. But A Tale of Two CDs is a story about something intrinsically dramatic, a man at war with himself. I once interviewed Brian Aldiss at the Cheltenham Literary Festival, and he expressed a low opinion of The Lord of the Rings because it had no characters in it, just two-dimensional types; and then he corrected himself -- no (he went on) there was one character in that novel, by far the most interesting figure Tolkien created. Gollum. Now, Dickens was, it seems to me, a better maker of characters than Tolkien. But nevertheless he is open to the charge that his characters tend to be defined by a single dominant. His greatest achievements in that way -- Pip, Clenham, maybe Scrooge -- stand out from the rest. And, I am suggesting here, the fullest articulation of that sense of human nature as intrinsically divided, striated and driven in ways it does not necessarily even understand itself, is here, in this novel. CD. Or the two CDs, of whom this novel is the tale.

Top Ten All-Time Best-Selling Books, 2: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Le Petit Prince (1943)

2011-12-29T00:38:00.000-08:00

The third book in a row, in this series, that I have loved egregiously since childhood. Indeed, of all the books on this strange list, it is surely the most intrinsically lovable. In this blogpost I have two points to make, one serious (or at least 'serious') and a little complicated; the other simple but profound. And that latter point has already been made, but bears repeating. This is a book that provokes love. I love its invention, its wit, its gentleness and wisdom; I love the little prince himself. When I was a child myself I felt in my heart the rightness of its mutual perspectives upon childishness and adulthood, and the losses of passing from the former state to the latter -- like a warmer, funnier, more charming version of Wordsworth's 'Immortality Ode'. That, shown a picture of a boa constrictor that has swallowed an elephant, grown-ups can only see a hat. That grown-ups are besotted with material data. To quote from the English-language edition I read as a kid, and which I in turn read to my kids:

Grown-ups love figures. When you tell them that you have made a new friend, they never ask you about essential matters. They never say to you, "What does his voice sound like? What games does he love best? Does he collect butterflies?" Instead they demand: "How old is he? How many brothers has he? How much does he weigh? How much money does his father make?" Only from these figures do they think they have learned anything about him. [16]

Of course I take the force of Saint-Exupéry's point here, although at the same time -- without the least hint of snark -- if my son came home saying 'I have made a new friend' and I replied How much does he weigh? I would get some very strange looks from my fellow grown-ups. The passage continues:

Say to the grown-ups: "I saw a beautiful house made of rosy brick, with geraniums in the windows and doves on the roof," and they would not be able to get any idea of the house at all. You would have to say to them: "I saw a house that cost £4000." Then they would exclaim: "Oh, what a pretty house that is!"

This, I feel, would be unlikely to be their 2011 reaction. Four grand for a house? It's like playing Monopoly. The kids enjoy the game, and the adults spend their time picking up cards, saying '"Solicitors Fee £50"? Oh HAHAHA!' and '"School Fees Due: £150"? I SHOULD COCOA!' and falling about clutching their sides.

But I'm getting distracted. Not only do I love this book, I love Saint-Exupéry himself, surely of all the authors of this list the most fundamentally likeable: a pioneer aviator and a righteous man. I love that although he was a patriot, who died (probably) defending his country against the Nazis, he was nonetheless deeply opposed to war (in 1942's Pilote de guerre he wrote: 'la guerre n'est pas une aventure. La guerre est une maladie. Comme le typhus.'). I love that he recognised fascism for the great evil it was early on; and I love that he championed the bravery and skill of his fellow pilot Jean Israël in the teeth of contemporary anti-Semitism (Pilote de guerre was banned in Vichy France, Saint-Exupéry's own country, because of this). And I love the fact that, instead of looking like a lantern-jawed, aquiline-profiled, muscular man-of-action stereotype, Saint-Exupéry actually looked like Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory.

Most of all, like millions, I love the message of this beautiful little book. As the fox puts it, 'On ne voit bien qu'avec le cœur. L'essentiel est invisible pour les yeux.' The only way to see properly is with the heart. The most important things are invisible to the eyes. True, that.

The conceit of the book, its miniature planetoids circling in space, and the various representative (crazy) humans who inhabit thereon, is charming. There's a Hillaire Belloc passage I like a great deal,and have quoted before [it starts 'The Inn Of The Margeride' (from Hills and the Sea, 1906)], about the appeal of miniaturisation:

Whatever, keeping its proportion and form, is designed upon a scale much greater or much less than that of our general experience, produces upon the mind an effect of phantasy.

A little perfect model of an engine or a ship does not only amuse or surprise; it rather casts over the imagination something of that veil through which the world is transfigured, and which I have called "the wing of Dalua"; the medium of appreciations beyond experience; the medium of vision, of original passion and of dreams. The principal spell of childhood returns as we bend over the astonishing details. We are giants--or there is no secure standard left in our intelligence.

So it is with the common thing built much larger than the million examples upon which we had based our petty security. It has been always in the nature of worship that heroes, or the gods made manifest, should be men, but larger than men. Not tall men or men grander, but men transcendent: men only in their form; in their dimension so much superior as to be lifted out of our world. An arch as old as Rome but not yet ruined, found on the sands of Africa, arrests the traveller in this fashion. In his modern cities he has seen greater things; but here in Africa, where men build so squat and punily, cowering under the heat upon the parched ground, so noble and so considerable a span, carved as men can carve under sober and temperate skies, catches the mind and clothes it with a sense of the strange. And of these emotions the strongest, perhaps, is that which most of those who travel to-day go seeking; the enchantment of mountains; the air by which we know them for something utterly different from high hills. Accustomed to the contour of downs and tors, or to the valleys and long slopes that introduce a range, we come to some wider horizon and see, far off, a further line of hills. To hills all the mind is attuned: a moderate ecstasy. The clouds are above the hills, lying level in the empty sky; men and their ploughs have visited, it seems, all the land about us; till, suddenly, faint but hard, a cloud less varied, a greyer portion of the infinite sky itself, is seen to be permanent above the world. Then all our grasp of the wide view breaks down. We change. The valleys and the tiny towns, the unseen mites of men, the gleams or thread of roads, are prostrate, covering a little watching space before the shrine of this dominant and towering presence.

It is as though humanity were permitted to break through the vulgar illusion of daily sense, and to learn in a physical experience how unreal are all the absolute standards by which we build. It is as though the vast and the unexpected had a purpose, and that purpose were the showing to mankind in rare glimpses what places are designed for the soul--those ultimate places where things common become shadows and fail, and the divine part in us, which adores and desires, breathes its own air, and is at last alive.

I said at the beginning of this post that I wanted to make two points about the book. The first is made, and it is less a critical point than a simple assertion of the charm of the book, although we might dilate for a moment upon the particular kind of charm. It would be wrong, I think, to talk about the Little Prince himself in terms of 'innocence'. Despite his bafflement in the face of various grown-up eccentricities and obsessivenesses, the Prince is not innocent in a wide-eyed, or foolish, or unworldly (hah!) way. Indeed, the larger thrust of the book as a whole is surely that it is adults who are the innocents -- for the true vibrancy of things goes over their (our) heads; and they (we) simply don't know, or simply don't see, how the heart's-blood flows. Besides, the Prince patently isn't 'innocent'. He knows more about death, which he actively welcomes, than most. It is not that the little prince is innocent; it is that he is holy. I can't think of another character in literature of whom that is so marvellously true.

So what is my second point? Well, it has to do with the character's title. Why 'prince'? Now, it is true that -- for a country whose modern identity was established by a revolution that supposedly did away with all that aristocratic-monarchist gobbledegook -- France is unusually fascinated with ranks, titles and princeishnesses. Saint-Exupéry, himself a Count, knew a good deal about this airless status-discourse; but the mouthfeel of his book is so removed from the absurdity of all that (and indeed, in several of the adult characters, the book actively satirises all that) that it puzzles me his protagonist has the distinguished title of 'prince' at all. Perhaps he is 'prince' in the sense that, as his world's only inhabit, he is necessarily its ruler. But 'prince' makes me wonder whether there isn't some easy-for-an-Anglo-to-miss allusion to the last 'prince' to rule France, Prince Louis Napoleon, otherwise known as Napoleon III. Two thirds of a century separate Napoleon III's downfall from Saint-Exupéry's writing; but as his country's last absolute ruler (he was known as the 'Prince-President', and initially swept to power on the back of an 1848 plebsicite; but he seized absolute power in a coup-d-etat in 1851 and ruled as a dictator until the Prussians invaded in 1870 and chased him out) he was still a name to conjure with. More, he was known to satirists precisely as a little prince, a pygmy version of his much more famous uncle, Napoleon Bonaparte: Victor Hugo's savage 1852 book Napoléon le Petit was banned in France until the Prince-President's regime came to an end (you can read it here). This is Saint-Exupéry's 'best portrait' of his little prince:

Elsewhere in the book he is dressed more casually; but this first image is (it seems to me) a deliberate confection of the two most celebrated official portraits of Napoleon III: taking the cloak and boots from one, the colours and trappings from the other.

Beyond that (and assuming you swallow the parallel) it's hard to see the function of the parallel, unless it is there precisely to operate by a sort of photographic negative mode. Louis Napoleon, the 'little' Prince-President: calculating and cynical, addicted to pomp and pleasure, inward-looking and decadent, elderly and infirm. The Saintly Exupéry's little prince: young, holy, charming, widely-travelled, loving and loved, self-effacing and wise.

Top Ten All-Time Best-Selling Books, 3: J R R Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings (1954-55)

2011-12-27T00:35:00.000-08:00

In lieu of a separate post, and for fear simply of repeating myself: here are things I've already written about Tolkien in another place:

Fellowship of the Ring I.

Fellowship of the Ring II.

The Two Towers I.

The Two Towers II.

Return of the King I.

Return of the King II.

Master-slave dialectic in Tolkien.

Pauline Baynes cover.

A placeholder, yes. Sorry about that; but -- you know. Christmas and whatnot. Still, there are real, actual posts about Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and Dickens just around the corner.

Top Ten All-Time Best-Selling Books, 4: J R R Tolkien, The Hobbit (1937)

2011-12-25T00:27:00.000-08:00

We're into the closing straight: the top 4 best-selling books of all time. And I had better disclose, fully: three of these four are texts I have no critical distance upon at all. They're books I have loved from a young age, and love still. That fact interpenetrates anything I might write about them, and therefore erodes the necessary critical distance. Ah well: can't be helped.

Chief among them is The Hobbit, or There and Back Again, which I read and heard (in 1974 my parents gave me a cassette-tape talking-book version, narrated by the never-knowingly-underacted Nicol Williamson, to which I listened obsessively over and over) and adored as a child. What to say about a text to which I'm so close?

Well, one thing I can say is that Tolkien wrote two versions of the story of The Hobbit. In the first, a troop of dwarves, to use what Tolkien insisted was the proper plural form of the word, are planning to trek to a distant mountain in order to steal a great pile of treasure guarded by a lethal, fire-breathing dragon -- or more properly, to steal it back, since they claim it belongs to them. They are looking for a professional thief to help them in this dangerous business. The wizard Gandalf, for reasons that appear largely capricious, tricks the dwarves into hiring Bilbo Baggins, an ordinary, sedentary, unadventurous hobbit; and likewise tricks Bilbo into going along. This situation is played broadly for laughs, because Bilbo is so patently unfitted to the business of adventuring. 'Unfitness' also seems to characterise the dwarves, mind you: the party stumbles from disaster to disaster as they journey, escaping death by hairs' breadths half a dozen times at the hands of trolls, goblins, wolves, spiders and hostile elves. They are saved from their early misadventures by Gandalf's interventions, for though eccentric he is considerably more competent than they. Later, though, Gandalf goes off on his own business, and the party has to rescue itself. As they continue to stumble into a series of potentially fatal pickles, they somehow manage, by a combination of luck and hobbit-judgment, always to get away. Indeed, following Bilbo's development from massively incompetent to marginally incompetent is one of the pleasures of the narrative. At one point in the story, as the group passes through subterranean tunnels and caves underneath a mountain range, Bilbo gets separated from the others, meets a fellow called Gollum. The two play a gambling game, guessing one another's riddles, and when Bilbo wins Gollum hands what he had wagered -- a magic ring that makes the wearer invisible.

Ownership of this ring, and a very shallow learning curve, gradually make Bilbo better at thieving and sneaking about. When, against the odds, the party reaches the dragon's Mountain, the quest is achieved, much much more by luck than judgement. Bilbo does use the magic ring to creep into the dragon's lair and to steal one cup from the great hillocks of piled pelf; but that's as much as he can do. Luckily for all of them, the loss of this single piece happens to enrage the dragon, causing him to leaves the mountain with the furious intention of burning up the local town of men. One of the defenders there, warned by a talking bird, shoots a lucky arrow that kills him. After this there is a big battle: armies converging on the mountain and its now undragoned hoard. The leader of the dwarf-band is killed, but otherwise things work out well for everybody. Finally, having spent almost all the novel adumbrating the 'there' of the novel's subtitle, the story sprints through the 'and back again', hurrying the materially enriched Bilbo home in a few pages.

I stress the 'incompetence' angle in my retelling here because, really, that's what characterises the main players. It's an endearing incompetence, used partly for comedy; partly for dramatic purposes (by way of ratcheting up the narrative tension and keeping things interesting) and partly to facilitate the readers'—our—engagement. Because we can be honest; we'd be rubbish on a dangerous quest. We're hobbitish types ourselves, and our idea of fun is snuggling into the sofa with a cup of cocoa and a good book, not fighting gigantic spiders with a sword. Or more precisely, we enjoy fighting giant spiders with a sword in our imaginations only. The book has sold as many copies as it has in part because the Hobbits are able (textually-speaking) so brilliantly to mediate our modern, cosseted perspectives and the rather forbidding antique warrior code and the pitiless Northern-European Folk Tale world.

That there is something haphazard about the larger conception of this adventure is part of its point: obviously, it makes for a jollier tale if an clearly unsuitable comic-foil is sent on a dangerous quest than some super-competent swordsman alpha-male. The bumbling, homely qualities of Bilbo, and the pinball-ball bouncing trajectory from frying pan to fire to bigger fire of the narrative, are loveable aspects of the whole. And that's right: the motor of the story is the idea that adventure will come and find you, and winkle you out of your comfortable hidey-hole. It's a beguiling idea, in part because it literalises the action of story itself. We settle ourselves to read, in physical comfort; but the story itself transports us imaginatively out of our hole and away, upon all manner of precarious, exciting, absorbing and diverting journeys.

This is The Hobbit that appeared in 1937, to both acclaim and commercial success. But there's another The Hobbit. I don't mean the upcoming film. I mean a second The Hobbit written by Tolkien, comprising revisions to this first edition, additional material written for the Lord of the Rings and the appendices of The Lord of the Rings, plus other material -- most importantly two separate prose pieces, both called 'The Quest for Erebor' that were collected in the posthumously-published Unfinished Tales (1980). JRRT's first revisions were confined to the 'Riddles in the Dark' chapter: for after writing he first Hobbit Tolkien came to the conclusion that 'the Ring' was more than just a magic ring, more even than a ring of Gyges: that it was indeed the most powerful artefact in the whole world, one with which people became so besotted they lose their souls. Gollum, he reasoned, would not freely give up such an item. So he rewrote the scene. But this is symptomatic of something larger -- a reconceptualising (Tolkien purists might say: a distillation or focussing) of the now-celebrated JRRT-legendarium: no longer a folk-story, now a grand sacramental drama of incarnation, atonement and redemption. I can't say I'm particularly fond of Tolkien's coinage 'legendarium', by the way, which to me sounds like a Bluewater store selling lead Warhammer miniatures. Not, I might add, that there's anything wrong with Warhammer miniatures. My point is this: Tolkien's celebrated 1939 essay 'On Fairy Stories' actually celebrates two modes of Fantasy, homely and transcendental. Traditional fairy tales, which Tolkien sees as beautiful and profound narratives of escape and resacralisation; and the New Testament, which he thinks shares those qualities with fairy stories but which he also thinks exists on a higher, truer and more important plane. This is how he puts it: 'the Evangelium has not abrogated legends; it has hallowed them, especially the "happy ending." The Christian has still to work, with mind as well as body, to suffer, hope, and die; but he may now perceive that all his bents and faculties have a purpose, which can be redeemed. So great is the bounty with which he has been treated that he may now, perhaps, fairly dare to guess that in Fantasy he may actually assist in the effoliation and multiple enrichment of creation.'

My beef, if I may slip into a nonvegetarian idiom for a moment, is not with Tolkien's religious beliefs, which (although I do not share them) are clearly essential to the dynamic of his art. My beef is with the notion that all our bents and faculties have a purpose. In Tolkien's second version of The Hobbit, it is precisely the haphazardness, the intimations of glorious, human, comic incompetence, that must be sanded, smoothed and filed away. It is no longer enough for Gandalf to turn up on the doorstop of the world's least likely adventurer merely because that is the sort of thing batty old wizards do. Now he must do so because he has a larger plan. In the first version of the story it doesn't really matter why Gandalf chooses a hobbit, of all people; or more precisely, his whylessness of choice is actually the point of the story. ('I am looking for someone to share in an adventure that I am arranging,' Gandalf says, with what sounds to me rather like desperation, 'and it's very difficult to find anyone.') This is because the novel is not about Gandalf's whys, it is about Bilbo's adventure: why he is chosen matters less than the way he acquits himself on his journey, and the extent to which he sheds his unheroism and becomes a better fellow. That's what matters because we are he. That's how the reading experience goes.

But in Tolkien's second version of the hobbit everything has to happen for a reason. Gandalf was not idly arranging an adventure; he was setting in motion one crucial play in a larger strategy of a grand war against Evil.

I knew that Sauron had arisen again and would soon declare himself, and I knew that he was preparing for a great war. ... The state of things in the North was very bad. The Kingdom under the Mountain and the strong Men of Dale were no more. To resist any force Sauron might send to regain the northern passes in the mountain and the old lands of Angmar there were only the Dwarves of the Iron Hills, and behind them lay a desolation and a Dragon. The Dragon Sauron might use with terrible effect. Often I said to myself: "I must find some means of dealing with Smaug." [Unfinished Tales, 322]

Just to be clear; I have no problem with retconning; not in the least (for I take 'text' to be fundamentally fluid and adaptable). I can go further, and say that one of the things that gives Tolkien's art depth and resonance is precisely the way he layers medium and deep historical pasts into his present-set tale; and having this secondary perspective on the material of The Hobbit adds echoey, plangent splendour to the whole. But that's not to say that this piece of retconning makes sense. On the contrary: it compels us to believe that Gandalf, deciding that it was a strategic priority that Smaug be eliminated, thinks not of sending an army, and certainly not of going himself and tackling the dragon with his, you know, magic and that. Rather he thinks: "I'll go to the extreme other end of the continent, recruit a number of dwarves, some of them manifestly not up to the task (Bombur?), plus a hobbit without any experience or aptitude for a mission of this sort whatsoever, and send them off travelling halfway across the world past unnumbered perils in the hope that somehow they'll do the old worm in." Why the dwarves? Well, I suppose they can at least be persuaded to go, since they regard Erebor as rightfully theirs; although you have to wonder whether a military strategist who wasn't actually senile mightn't think first of approaching the men of Dale. But there is no reason in this scenario why Bilbo would be anyone's first, or thousand-and-first choice. In his second version of the story, Tolkien comes up with three reasons why it's a good idea to wager the entire success of the operation of Bilbo -- a figure of whom Thorin rightly says 'he is soft, soft as the mud of the Shire, and silly,' a judgement with which Gandalf concurs ('"You are quite right", I said' [Unfinished Tales, 325]). Those three reasons are:

1. That Hobbits don't wear shoes, where Dwarfs do ('suddenly in my mind [I pictured] the sturdy, heavy-booted Dwarves ... the quick, soft-footed hobbit'), a consideration, certainly, since Dragons have good hearing; although you might think that advising the Dwarves to take off their boots might be less precarious than hanging the success of the enterprise around the neck of a sort of Middle-Earth fur-footed Homer Simpson.

2. That Smaug would not know Bilbo's scent, where he would recognise the smell of Dwarves, although apparently Tolkien added this as an afterthought to his MS ('a scent that cannot be placed, at least not by Smaug, the enemy of Dwarves'). A scent that cannot be smelt at all by Smaug would make more sense, but OK. The fact that he smells a thief in his lair but can't immediately place the thief's provenance might confuse him for ... six seconds or so. The third reason is the most arbitrary of all --

3. Gandalf just feels in his water that it would be a good idea: 'listen to me Thorin Oakenshield ... if this hobbit goes with you, you will succeed. If not you will fail. A foresight is on me' [325]. Hard not to see this as code for 'I've already written this story and know how it turns out', which comes dangerously close to a cheat.

The story of The Lord of the Rings is that even 'the little people' (that's us, of course) have their part to play in the great historical and martial dramas of the age -- and it is a potent and truthful story, well told. But The Hobbit is that story only in its second iteration. In its first, the one we are chiefly considering here, The Hobbit is not about the great dramas of the age; it is about us-sized dramas of people being taken out of their comfort zone -- whisked away by Story.

I'm happy that there are two versions of The Hobbit, and feel no desire to try and force them into some notional procrustean 'coherence'. Only narrative fundamentalists, the textual Taliban, believe that all stories must be brought into that sort of rigid alignment. But of the two stories, really I prefer the one (homely, funny, a little bit slapstick and a little bit wondrous) over the other (grand-verging-on-grandiose, theological, epic and strenuously, to coin a phrase, eutragic). Although I do love them both. And I love the Dwarves vastly more than any number of elves. I love precisely their lack of graceful elegance. Thorin Oakenshield has some noble speeches in The Hobbit it's true; but his Dwarves are better at stuffing themselves with food and drink, and getting (with endearing incompetence) into ridiculous scrapes. Consulting the Dwarf family tree, in the appendices to Return of the King, I discover that amongst Thorin relatives are "Borin" and "Groin". A little more groin would have done The Lord of the Rings no harm at all, I think. Not borin' in the least.

Top Ten All-Time Best-Selling Books, 5: 红楼梦 (1759-1791)

2011-12-23T00:36:00.000-08:00

女娲炼石补天，剩一块石未用。这补天顽石（通灵宝玉）经过修炼已经有了灵性。一僧一道携它变幻为美玉带入尘世。适逢神瑛侍者对一株绛珠仙草有浇灌之恩，又动了凡心下凡游历人间。绛珠仙草后修炼成女体，闻讯亦随之下凡，打算把一生所有的眼泪还他。僧道二人欲了结这段公案，并将石头（通灵宝玉）夹带其中。元宵时节，霍启不慎丢失了英莲。葫芦庙失火祸及甄家，落魄的甄士隐被一僧一道点化，解出《好了歌注》出家。穷困的贾雨村反而由贫入官。贾府是金陵四大家族之一，受有功勋，分为宁荣二府，族中最长者为贾母，最疼生来口中就含有一块通灵宝玉（补天顽石）的孙儿贾宝玉（神瑛侍者）。贾宝玉生来不喜读圣贤书，却爱与青春女性玩耍，为此与其父贾政关系紧张。林黛玉（绛珠仙草）此时入居贾府。刘姥姥为了生计，也一进荣府。学堂内发生一场大混战，贾府男子众人，丑态尽出。
宁府长孙媳秦可卿去世，托梦叮嘱王熙凤盛筵必散。王熙凤协理秦氏丧事，场面辉煌，展示理家才能。荣府贾元春获选为妃并省亲，荣府为元春省亲修建别墅大观园，极尽奢华。
宝玉在池边读《会真记》，宝黛第一次葬花。赵姨娘与其子贾环，最恨贾宝玉。贾环欲烫瞎宝玉其眼，幸而未伤到眼睛，王夫人不骂贾环，把赵姨娘一顿臭骂。赵姨娘遂又命马道婆扎纸人作法害凤姐和宝玉。凤姐有事求黛玉，被打断，拿宝玉和黛玉的婚事取笑。宝凤二人忽随即因道婆作法而发狂，一僧一道前来相救。宝黛在春季结束时第二次葬花，林黛玉作成葬花词一首。
忽闻与贾府素无往来的忠顺王府来人，要找宝玉问琪官下落，说出交换汗巾之事，贾政大怒。贾政本要拿贾环出气，贾环却趁机说出金钏跳井之事，谎称金钏是因宝玉意图强奸而自尽。贾政怒不可遏，亲自下重手打了数十板，方被王夫人哭止，贾母闻讯训斥贾政，贾政亦自后悔。宝玉想听《牡丹亭》，却被龄官冷落，待见得贾蔷与龄官的景况，方知情缘皆有分定。

清光绪刊本的《红楼梦》插图，图上人物为袭人。改琦绘。
探春写帖邀众人结诗社，众姐妹和宝玉以海棠为题作诗。宝玉想起湘云，邀来入社，湘云之作众人皆赞。刘姥姥二进荣国府，贾母设宴招待刘姥姥，刘姥姥闹出不少笑话；众人行酒令，所说词句颇有寓意，黛玉不经意说了几句《西厢记》中的句子，引起宝钗的注意，刘姥姥的令词又引发哄堂大笑。众人途经拢翠庵，妙玉请宝钗、黛玉到里间喝体己茶，宝玉也跟去。刘姥姥用了妙玉的一个成窑杯，妙玉嫌脏准备扔掉，宝玉做顺水人情送给了刘姥姥。刘姥姥出恭之后误打误撞到了怡红院，在宝玉的床上睡着，好在被袭人发现并掩饰过去。宝钗审问黛玉在行酒令时背出《西厢记》词句之事，以正言相劝，二人从此和好。黛玉于风雨夜作《秋窗风雨夕》词。
贾赦欲纳鸳鸯为妾，鸳鸯发誓不嫁贾赦。贾赦闻讯，疑心鸳鸯看上了宝玉。贾母闻讯大怒，认为贾赦有意要把她身边的人支开。香菱向黛玉学作诗，以月为题，苦吟多首之后终得佳作。邢岫烟进京，路遇李纹、李绮，加上宝琴一起住进大观园，湘云也被贾母留下，园中热闹许多，交织成大观园中最美丽的景色。众人争联即景诗。宝琴作了十首怀古诗。元宵当晚，贾母在荣国府设宴。贾母把陈腐旧套批驳一番。
凤姐操劳成疾，李纨、探春、宝钗代为主持内务，更为严谨。蕊官托春燕给芳官带去蔷薇硝擦脸。贾环也想要，芳官把茉莉粉给了贾环。赵姨娘借此进园大闹，夏婆子从中加油添醋。
柳家的想叫女儿去宝玉房中当差，托芳官给宝玉说，芳官要玫瑰露给柳五儿吃。并答应让五儿在宝玉房里当差。赵姨娘内侄却欲娶柳五儿，柳家父母同意，五儿不愿，父母未敢应允，钱槐气愧，偏与柳家相与。柳家欲回，其哥嫂送给柳五儿茯苓霜。迎春的丫头莲花儿为司棋到厨房要炖鸡蛋羹，柳家的不给，迎春的大丫头司棋便领人大闹厨房。柳五儿将茯苓霜分些赠芳官，回来被林之孝家的发现，王熙凤叫把柳家的打四十板，永不许进二门，把五儿打四十板，交给庄子，或卖或配人。宝玉替彩云瞒赃，平儿向偷太太玫瑰露给环儿的彩云说明情况，凤姐还要追究，经过平儿相劝，凤姐方罢。贾敬归天，尤氏理丧，尤老娘母女三人到宁府着家，贾蓉戏二姨。
刚烈的尤三姐因柳湘莲的拒绝娶配而引剑自尽；温柔的尤二姐因王熙凤的迫害吞金自杀。黛玉做的“桃花诗”。众人改海棠社为桃花社，推黛玉为社主。湘云填柳絮词，黛玉邀众填词。宝钗诗中有“任他随聚随分”之句。众人后放风筝。鸳鸯望候凤姐，说凤姐患的是“血山崩”。贾琏请求鸳鸯暂把老太太的金银家伙偷着运出一箱子，暂押千数两银子支腾过去。
王夫人带着众仆抄检大观园，王熙凤消极配合。睿智聪颖的三妹贾探春愤而说出：「百足之虫，死而不僵！必须先要从家里自杀自灭起来，才能一败涂地！」宁府夜宴，祖先灵位前竟听见了诡谲的叹息声，似乎是在指责贾府的不肖子孙，即将毁掉百年的簪缨望族。史湘云和林黛玉中秋夜联诗，句句似乎预言了贾府的命运，极为凄凉感伤：「寒塘渡鹤影，冷月葬花魂」。之后宝玉的贴身丫鬟晴雯因聪明灵巧被逐，病亡之后宝玉作《芙蓉女儿诔》。而薛宝钗愚蠢纵玩的哥哥薛蟠，娶了泼辣闹家的妻子；贾宝玉懦弱温和的二姊(堂姊)贾迎春，嫁给了残暴淫秽的丈夫。

Top Ten All-Time Best-Selling Books, 6: Agatha Christie, Ten Little Niggers (1939)

2011-12-21T01:47:00.000-08:00

To save myself a lot of tedious precis work, here's a quick wikisummary: 'Eight people, Lawrence Wargrave, Vera Claythorne, Philip Lombard, General Macarthur, Emily Brent, Anthony "Tony" Marston, Doctor Armstrong, and William Blore have been invited to a mansion on the fictional Soldier Island ("Nigger Island" in the original 1939 UK publication, "Indian Island" in the 1964 US publication), which is based upon Burgh Island off the coast of Devon. Upon arriving, they are told that their hosts, a Mr. and Mrs. U.N. Owen (Ulick Norman Owen and Una Nancy Owen), are currently away, but the guests will be attended to by Thomas and Ethel Rogers. Each guest finds in his or her room an odd bit of bric-a-brac and a framed copy of the nursery rhyme "Ten Little Soldiers" ("Niggers" or "Indians" in respective earlier editions) hanging on the wall ... During their meal, a gramophone record plays, accusing each of the ten of murder. Each guest acknowledges awareness of (and in some cases involvement with) the deaths of the persons named (except Emily Brent, who tells only Vera, who later tells the other guests), but denies any malice and/or legal culpability. (except for Lombard and Blore, the latter telling only the former.) The guests now realize they have been tricked into coming to the island, but find that they cannot leave: the boat which regularly delivers supplies has stopped arriving. They are murdered one by one, each death paralleling a verse of the nursery rhyme, with one of the figurines being removed after each murder. First to die is the spoiled Anthony Marston, who chokes to death when his drink is poisoned with cyanide ("one choked his little self"). That night, Thomas Rogers notices that a figurine is missing from the dining table. Mrs. Rogers dies in her sleep that night, which Dr. Armstrong attributes to a fatal overdose of sleeping draught ("one overslept himself"). General Macarthur fatalistically predicts that no one will leave the island alive, and at lunch, is indeed found dead from a blow to the back of his skull ("one said he'd stay there"). Meanwhile, two more figurines have disappeared from the dining room. In growing panic, the survivors search the island in vain for the murderer. Justice Wargrave establishes himself as the decisive leader of the group and asserts one of them must be the murderer playing a sadistic game with the rest. The killer's twisted humour is evidenced by the names of their "hosts": "U.N. Owen" is a pun and a homophone for "unknown". The next morning, Rogers is missing, as is another figurine. He is found dead in the woodshed, struck in the back of the head with an axe ("one chopped himself in halves"). Later that day, Emily Brent is killed in the dining room by an injection of potassium cyanide that leaves a mark on her neck ("A bumblebee stung one"), which at first appears to be a sting from a bumble bee placed in the room. The hypodermic needle is found outside her window next to a smashed china figurine. The five survivors — Dr. Armstrong, Justice Wargrave, Philip Lombard, Vera Claythorne, and William Blore — become increasingly frightened and almost frantic.'

First of all, I must apologise for the use of the n-word, in this post title and elsewhere within the actual post. I appreciate it is an offensive term, nowadays. More, and just to be clear, it was offensive then: Dodd, Mead and Company published the book in November 1939 as Ten Little Niggers, but reissued it only two months later as And Then There Were None because of the original's racist tone. It has been published and adapted as Ten Little Indians and Ten Little Soldier Boys, and naturally the option is available to me to discuss the text under one or other of these euphemistic names. But the offensiveness of using the original title needs to be balanced against the greater need not to airbrush away the immanent low-level racism of the culture out of which these novels were created. To render the racism of the past invisible is to empower the racism of today by innoculating it against history.

Black characters crop up rarely in Christie (there are none in Ten Little Niggers, for instance, despite its title). But 'foreigners' are one of the key types of otherness by which her cosy-catastrophic narrative twostep of death (Order Lost) and detection (New Order Regained) are orchestrated. The other type, perhaps surprisingly, is 'middle aged men of the professional classes'. I can't remember where I first read about Christie's dislike of doctors, the textual consequence of which is that if you are reading a Christie whodunnit and one of the characters is a doctor (especially a surgeon or consultant) nine times out of ten he (of course the doctor will be a he) is the murderer. Other 'professionals', especially lawyers and judges, are also broadly distrusted by Christie. Nor do these two stereotypes fit together into an uncommon combination of dislike: the trope of distrusting, disliking and, of course, actively blaming the racial 'other' who has lots of money because he is unlike oneself and has lots of money gears only too easily up to some of the worst inhumanity of the twentieth century. The ten characters in Ten Little Niggers are all invited or induced to Nigger Island by the murderer, who cloaks him/herself under the ignotus-y pseudonym 'U.N.Owen' ('or by a slight stretch of fancy -- UNKNOWN! [72]'). The flash young Captain Lombard, for instance, is offered quite a lot of money, but although he goes he has his suspicions:

What exactly was up, he wondered? That little Jew had been damned mysterious ... A hundred guineas when he was literally down to his last square meal! He had fancied, though, that the little Jew had not been deceived -- that was the damnable part about Jews, you couldn't deceive them about money -- they knew! [16]

1939, ladies and gentlemen.

This is glancing enough, but not untypical. Elsewhere in pre-War Christie, Jews are vermin (‘he was king of the rats … his face gleamed white and sharp in the moonlight. There was the least hint of a curve to the thin nose. His father had been a Polish Jew’ The Mystery of the Blue Train, 1928) or repulsive toad-like moneylenders—as in The Secret of Chimneys (1925) whose villain Isaacstein has ‘a fat yellow face and black eyes as impenetrable as those of a cobra’ as well as a ‘generous curve to [his] big nose’. He represents ‘Hebraic people. Yellow-faced financiers’ and is dismissively referred to as ‘Ikey Hermanstein’, ‘Nosystein’ and ‘Fat Ikey’ by the novel’s gentile dramatis personae. T S Eliot and Wagner make references of this stripe in their art, and critics fulminate or wring their hands. Christie does it and people nod indulgently, mumble that she is 'of her time' and pass over it in silence. Or they actively scrub it out of the books, via surruptitious Bowdlerisation and re-naming. This might be because people think they take Christie's art 'less seriously' than Eliot or Wagner; but I don't think her work is less serious. It's less complex, and less resonant, but its main theme -- death -- is exactly as serious, and she has enjoyed far greater cultural penetration and reach than either of the other two.

This, I think, is part of what is interesting about 'the whodunnit' as a form, a distinctively twentieth-century mode of art and indeed one of only a handful of modes invented by that troubled century (along with cinema, TV and pop music). Puzzle-mystery stories had been popular in the nineteenth-century, of course, but the emphasis there had been on the puzzle; it is a striking thing to read the complete run of Sherlock Holmes stories and appreciate how rarely Conan Doyle presented his detective with a dead body -- much more often the mystery will something stolen, somebody blackmailed or kidnapped, or a painted canine. But the default premise of the classic 20th-century crime novel is death, one or many; and that shift of emphasis is interesting.

One of the things that is new about the C20th-century whodunnit is precisely the way it handles death. Previously (excuse me if I talk a little over-generally) art encountered death as tragedy, either for the individual or (in Wagner) for the world, something to be apprehended with sorrow or defiance; or else art represented death as a portal, a transcendental supercession of mortality into (usually) a glorious spiritual state. These are both meaningful ways of relating to mortality, of course; but the Golden Age whodunit proposes a different one: it says not just that death is a puzzle -- which is fair enough, I suppose -- but that death is a soluble puzzle. That latter part is the radical bit, I think.

Martin Heidegger talks about humans embodying a 'being-towards-death', a dimension of our Dasein that, uniquely for us, can project itself forward against its own finitude. Now, Heidegger was for a time a member of the Nazi party, so we can intuit his attitude towards racial otherness. But putting that on one side for a moment. He elaborates 'being-towards-death' in his big book, Sein und Zeit, ('Being and Time' 1927) a text I'm tempted to characterise as 'boring-towards-death'. To cut a long boring short, here's Simon Critchley's deft summary:

There are four rather formal criteria in Heidegger's conception of being-towards-death: it is non-relational, certain, indefinite and not to be outstripped. Firstly, death is non-relational in the sense in standing before death one has cut off all relations to others. Death cannot be experienced through the deaths of others, but only through my relation to my death ... Secondly, it is certain that we are going to die. Although one might evade or run away from the fact, no one doubts that life comes to an end in death. Thirdly, death is indefinite in the sense that although death is certain, we do not know when it going to happen ... Fourthly, to say that death is not to be outstripped (unüberholbar) simply means that death is pretty damned important. There's no way of trumping it and it outstrips all the possibilities that my power of free projection possesses.

The puzzle-whodunit dramatises the first three of these modes of being-towards-death, fairly straightforwardly, but where it gets interesting is the fourth. I suppose that on one level, even (perhaps) a banal level, it is central to the form that the veil of mystery is always stripped away by these books' conclusions. You may object that this only happens in a trivial sense, but I'd suggest both that the structure of these sorts of novels constellates a plotted trivium against a metaphorical profundity. More, I'd go further and suggest that, regardless of what a large number of 'serious' novelists suggest, this is the right way round, actually.

I'll dilate upon this point for a moment, before coming back to Christie's novel. Crime stories still have huge reader appeal, but the puzzle-whodunit has (broadly) gone out of fashion. Instead we have a great many novels that attempt to put the profundity up front. There is now a different sort of generalised anxiety about the ‘death’ around which the genre is structured, a desire to ‘take it seriously’, in contemporary crime fiction. Now personally speaking I’m drawn to the Golden Age whodunits because they often are superbly ingenious, and I prize ingenuity; but I suppose it's that contemporary crime stories have lost interest in ingenuity for its own sake. In such titles as I have read from the franchises of Dibdin’s Aurelio Zen books, or the Rebus novels of Ian Rankin, or from watching The Killing, the mystery itself is rather watery, and the emphasis is shifted over to the creation of atmosphere, location, a particular city (Rome, ~~Glasgow~~ Edinburgh) and a distinctive central character—or in the many historical whodunits, from Lindsay Duncan to Ellis Peters, a kind of historical infodumping. Or to direct our attention in another direction and our eye falls on the vasty stretches of ‘gritty’ crime novels, police procedurals, serial killer yarns, ‘psychological’ tales and so on. Here ingenuity seems simply to be out of place, perhaps because these novels pretend to verisimilitude, and ‘we’ don’t really believe the world to be a place of ingenious schemes and plots. Murder, the consensus today, is brutal and, in an existential sense, simple. But it seems to me that, in fact, that death is not existentially simple. On the contrary, it is prodigiously puzzling, a mystery hidden in plain view—we all know we will die, after all, although that knowledge is not a simple thing. And furthermore it strikes me that there are things a notionally trivial mode of art, like the whodunit, can say about this puzzle—about its opacity, or more particularly about the disconnect between surface glamour and the resistance-to-interpretation of the depths—that more notionally ‘complex’ forms cannot.

One way of responding to Ten Little Niggers is to test it for plausibility and coherence. But this is not the best way, because of course the plot is implausible and incoherent; it makes no more pretence as far as this is concerned than do Samuel Beckett's plays. It's not likely all ten of the suspects would accept the invitation to the island, or that they would play along; it's not likely that the whole filigree elaborate scheme of 'the murderer' would run along its grooves as smoothly as the book has it doing. That the victims wouldn't simply swim away (the weather isn't always bad, and the mainland is clearly visible from the island), or build a boat. That they wouldn't all just lock themselves in their rooms until rescue came. But to think like this is to miss the point. The artifice of the scheme, worked through in the narrative, is a feature, not a bug. Arguably it is a key feature. From a metaphorical point of view, whodunits like these are in effect saying: death is complex, ingenious, unexpected and artificial. And although perhaps it sounds counterintuitive, I wonder if this doesn’t actually encode a greater existential veracity than the ‘realist’ mode. Think of your own mortality. Of course in one sense it is the very opposite of ‘an unexpected thing’; we all know we must die. But in another sense it is necessarily radically unexpected: we can never anticipate it, because we shall not live through it. It is something incommensurate with our living being-in-the-world. Its complexity derives, I think, from this.

But there is also this question of the solubility of mortality. It is something, in a deep sense, insoluble; and perhaps the logic of the ingeniously difficult mystery is a better way of apprehending that than notions that death is, in any sense, straightforward. Or to be a little more specific: obviously these sorts of books do offer a ‘solution’; but unlike the death of Othello, or of Prince André in War and Peace these ‘solutions’ are radically unsatisfying. They address the epiphenomena of the victim’s death without touching in any sense upon the deeper questions—and this, I’m arguing, is more existentially honest than the conventional tragic mode. The artificiality of the Golden Age whodunit set-up refracts Heidegger's perspective: any notional ‘realism’ about death must be existentially mendacious, because death is not ‘real’ in the sense that the events of my life are real (having breakfast, dropping the kids at school, going to work and so on). Death is not a part of life, not lived-through, only ever lived-towards. It is an artifice, not in the sense that it has an artificer; or more precisely only in the sense that its artificer is us ourselves, the stories we tell ourselves. And Ten Little Niggers makes great play with its egregious artificiality. A character notes that ‘it’s only in books people carry revolvers around as a matter of course’ [146] precisely to set-up the discovery that one character is carrying around a revolver around as a matter of course. To quote General Macarthur: “the whole thing is preposterous—preposterous!”’ [64]. Of course it is, and designedly so.

This is not to absolve Ten Little Niggers of its horrible title, or Christie's work generally of its ubiquitous though low-level racism. On the contrary; it is to highlight the way that this novel -- not to labour the point, but a book published in 1939 -- is precisely about an ingenious though sadistic plot to isolate a number of clever, mostly affluent but fundamentally wicked people on an island, and dispose of them. The late 30s and early 40s had no shortage of crazy schemes to solve the (please note my inverted commas) 'Jewish problem' by bunging them all on an island somewhere. Paul De Man wrote an essay on "The Jews in Contemporary Literature" (published, notoriously, in Le Soir early in 1941) in which Jews are described as possessing precisely the calculating, remorseless qualities of the murderer in Christie's novel ('Their cerebralness, their capacity to assimilate doctrines while maintaining a cold detachment from them ...'). De Man actively advocates isolating them all on an island: 'one can thus see that solution to the Jewish problem that would lead to the creation of a Jewish colony isolated from Europe would not have, for the literary life of the West, regrettable consequences. It would lose, in all, some personalities of mediocre worth.'

The 'solution' to Ten Little Niggers is a final one. In that respect the euphemistic re-titling is correct, 'and then there were none'. Film versions of the book fudge this issue, leaving a couple of survivors. Christie is more ruthless -- all die. All must die. We could put it, appropriating a contemporary's words, that her position is that reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking 'bad people' undesirable. And a spirit of excessive tolerance is to be deprecated.

More particularly, in Ten Little Niggers, as in some other of her titles, Christie knowingly pushes the 'puzzle whodunit' form to an extreme. Usually, of course, a whodunit will entail one murder, a gaggle of suspects -- a dozen, say -- one of whom is shown to be guilty. But in Christie's most remarkable books everyone is guilty (Orient Express, Ten Little Niggers), or the Law itself is guilty, both in the sense that the representative of the law is the murderer (Ten Little Niggers, Hercule Poirot's Christmas, Mousetrap, Curtain) and in the broader sense that justice is the same indiscriminate, mortal process as murder. Her more conventional whodunits pale into feebleness beside this splendidly, Lutheran conceit -- that we are all guilty, that the law exists to punish us all.

Regular whodunits are stagey, right down to the assemble-in-the-library-please denouement. But Ten Little Niggers takes this aspect to stagier-than-thou lengths. The murderer addresses the assembled group via a pre-recorded gramophone record; but this is described in the novel in terms of a capitalised Voice (‘into that silence came The Voice. Without warning, inhuman, penetrating ...’ 56). The starkly typified characters—retired Judge, religious spinster, flash young man and so on—in this bright-lit artificial environment, as the storm rages outside, Lear-like (or Peter-Brook-Staging-King-Lear-like): there is a sense of unaccommodated man facing down his mortality, although when Christie reaches (uncharacteristically) for the Vatic it doesn’t really convince (all the following ellipses are hers: ‘Aeons passed ... worlds spun and whirled ... Time was motionless ... It stood still: it passed through a thousand ages ...’ [277])

The last two left alive are Vera and Philip Lombard. Vera has the gun, and Philip jumps her for it. ‘He sprang. Quick as a panther—as any other feline creature ... Automatically Vera pressed the trigger ... Lombard’s body stayed poised in mid-spring, then crashed heavily to the ground’ [281]. In another setting, the Wile E. Coyote touch of ‘Lombard’s body stayed poised in mid-spring’ would be simply risible. Here, in this pared-down Beckettian landscape, it feels oddly right.

What does all this have to do with the question of racism, with which this post opened? The obvious answer to this is that Christie's novels, as unusually pure examples of the puzzle-whodunit form, necessarily trade in stereotypical characters; and that therefore the Weltanschauung they construct must be stereotypical too. This is because a puzzle whodunit needs to put its pieces in play, for the reader to solve the puzzle; and that a too rich or detailed individuation of those pieces would interfere with the crispness of the larger pattern. Reading Christie's whodunits puts me in mind of what Nabokov said in Speak, Memory about his favourite hobby, constructing chess problems:

It is a beautiful, complex and sterile art related to the ordinary form of the game only insofar as, say, the properties of a sphere are made use of both by a juggler in weaving a new act and by a tennis player in winning a tournament. Most chess players, in fact, amateurs and masters alike, are only mildly interested in these highly specialized, fanciful, stylish riddles, and though appreciative of a catchy problem would be utterly baffled if asked to compose one.

Mutatis mutandi, as the mutant Latin goes, this applies wonderfully to the relationship between Christie's puzzles and actual crime; the relationship between Christie's 'death' and actual death. There is a sterility to what she does, it is true; but an invigorating rather than enervating one.

I'm tempting to suggest that the real theme of Ten Little Niggers is not death, so much as the way we are trapped by death, the way it permits us no get-out. Like the monolithic, mind-straitjacket called racism, death closes down our possibilities, and fills us with fear and irrational suspicion. Plus, it has to be said, a weird, gallows hilarity. In the novel, all the occupants of the island have a mortal sin on their conscience. In the case of Philip Lombard, this is that when an army once officer he abandoned a company of native soldiers, making off with their supplies and so ensuring their death. Vera Claythorne and Emily Brent discuss his case. ‘He admits to having abandoned twenty men to their deaths,’ notes the latter. ‘They were only natives!’ retorts Vera. Emily’s response to this (that ‘black or white, they were our brothers’) provokes laughter in Vera: ‘our black brothers—our black brothers! Oh, I’m going to laugh. I’m hysterical. I’m not myself ...’ [122] What is it that Christie finds funny here, I wonder: that 'we' might consider black people 'brothers'? The grounds of the comparison are the gravest, and the most profound: that black people, Jews and white people all share the predicament that they are thinking, feeling beings who will die. This grim brother- and sisterhood unites us all, after all; and it is this, most fundamentally, that makes a mockery of racism.

Top Ten All-Time Bestselling Books, 7: C S Lewis, The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (1950)

2011-12-19T00:58:00.000-08:00

Still running up this hill: and we've reached number 7, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe: 85 million copies sold.

This is the best-made and most compelling of the Narnia books: four English schoolchildren, evacuated to the countryside during the Blitz, find a magical wardrobe. Passing through it they move (in a splendidly realised, dream-like pun) from fur coats to fir trees: they have passed into the Fantasy realm of Narnia where all the animals can talk. Here they find themselves in the battle between the White Witch -- whose malign magic is keeping the world always winter -- and Aslan, a magical talking-and-flying lion. Edmund, one of the four kids, seduced by the White Witch, betrays his brother and sisters for some Turkish Delight. To redeem him Aslan delivers himself willingly into her clutches. She kills him, but he comes back to life, and in a big conclusive battle the wintry evil is defeated and the White Witch killed. It's a book with genuine charm (impossible to fake, that); inventive, witty, well-plotted and immersive.

Now, alright. Let's talk turkey, and by turkey I mean: Christ and his wattle. I have seen this novel described as an allegory of Christ’s passion, but it’s not—this may seem like an unimportant quibble, but I'm going to insist upon it. Tolkien, Lewis’s friend, always expressed his ‘cordial dislike’ of allegory; and although Lewis was fonder of the mode, he isn’t writing it here. What The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe does is explore the logic of incarnation, something of central importance to Christians. Aslan doesn’t allegorically represent or symbolise Christ; he is the form Christ’s incarnation would take in a reality populated by talking animals. Similarly, Christ in this world (I mean our world, the one we're in now) was not a ‘symbol’ for God; he was actually God, incarnated in human form.

Nevertheless, though not allegorical, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe clearly adumbrates a Christian story, and does so because Lewis considered that story true. Some find the way this religious proselytising is handled in the novel to be sneaky; and I know people who talk about how disappointed they were when they grew old enough to spot, or had people point out to them, the Christian burden. I don’t see that myself.

It is striking, mind you, how bourgeois the fantasy is—the extent to which, indeed, the fantasy is precisely of bourgeois life. A faun with an umbrella and a pile of department-store goods under his arm, good food (easy to overlook how intense the craving for good food was in Britain in the immediate aftermath amongst WWII), fine clothes, pets—all of which presumably means there are department stores in Narnia; and that tea—which Mr Tumnus has—is imported from somewhere. (Incidentally: Tumnus knows what tea and cakes are, wears a scarf and owns an umbrella; but he has no idea what a ‘spare room’ is? Pull the other one). Above all, this book prizes the sanctity of the family unit. The family unit in this novel is so important it even takes precedence over the life of God; for Edmund’s venal failings must be bought-back by Aslan’s death. The pets thing is crucial too; Lewis was, from an early age, fascinated and charmed by the notion of talking animals, and he wrote his fantasy in part to give himself an imaginative platform for the elaboration of this dream. But the talking animals of Lewis’s world are much more house-pet-like than they are (say) the numinous god-like talking animals of Norse or Egyptian religion, or the uncanny unsettling talking animals of folklore. To grow up with a loved pet is, surely, to enter, half knowingly, into the belief that your cat or dog or hamster is, in some sense, a person; that you talk to them and they look just like they can understand you. This is the mode of anthropomorphisation that informs Lewis’s vision. Even Aslan is, in effect, a housecat on a large scale: the book’s repeated stress on his ‘wildness’ notwithstanding. I could add that I’m not necessarily deprecating the book when I say this—religious observation may be no less heartfelt because it happens within a comfortable middle-class milieu, and the love people (and especially children) feel for their pets can be as genuine and as intense, or intenser, as that they feel for other people. It would be clumsy and insulting to sneer at this: love, after all, is love.

Nonetheless, I’ve always felt it is the metamorphosis of Lewis’s re-imagining of the Christian story that is the most interesting part of the novel. Gender-bending the traditional maleness of Satan, such that your cosmos’s principle of wickedness becomes a proud but sexually alluring woman is not ideologically neutral, of course; and there is a strain of sexism (in places it touches on active misogyny) running though the Narnia books—most egregiously where poor old Susan gets excluded from heaven at the end of the series because she starts wearing lipstick. A similar pressure of deformation elevates the Lion of Judah, an aspect of Christ only marginally adumbrated in the Bible, to the central expression of the messiah’s nature. The lamb pops up too, from time to time, in the later books; but you can’t help feeling that, subconsciously, Lewis just wants a more carnivorous Jesus than the one supplied by his actual Bible. A Christ with bigger teeth.

This is political too, of course; and for many (genuine, devout) Christians part of the struggle of their faith is precisely to find a way of decanting off all the hippy, Communist, wimpiness with which their saviour is characterised in the NT. There is a certain type of Conservative for whom, the cosier he is at home, the more he feels that Christian values of ‘love’, ‘mercy’, ‘forgiveness’ and ‘turning the other cheek’ are best manifested in the world via helicopter gunships, daisycutters and the sanctioned torture of tan-skinned detainees. Lewis isn’t quite in this camp; but it is a striking thing that Aslan in Narnia neither (apparently) requires nor is offered worship by the other creatures. They speak highly of him, follow him as a warlord and leader (although it is the sons of Adam and daughters of Eve who, it seems, must actually rule)—but there are no churches or temples to Aslan, and he provokes no soul-shaking terror and wonder in the hearts of his people. It’s tempting to ascribe this to a littleness in the scale of Lewis’s imaginative conception (this is a kid’s book, after all); or to spin it more positively, a sort of modular simplification of the larger questions of belief.

It’s Lewis’s fantasy, and he can do what he likes, of course (I can go further: the fact that so many scores of millions of people have bought his fantasy suggests that he was in tune with very widespread views). But I always used to wonder—what does Aslan eat? In this world the animals are all of them more than sentient: they are intelligent. They have, in a word, souls. Eating beings with souls is called cannibalism. Is that what we’re dealing with here? It moves our thought in a rather startling direction; because, I suppose, the answer to the question what does God eat? is liable to be—us. The good shepherd looks after his flock, of course; but he doesn’t do so just for the sake of it. On the contrary; he does it because the sheep are valuable comestibles. The good shepherd enjoys roast lamb as much as any of us.

You might feel that this is to miss the point of the book, and I might (almost) agree with you—Lewis’s worldbuilding is not predicated upon a logic of internal consistency. To ask ‘what does Aslan eat?’ is no more to unpick the world described in the novel than to wonder, as I do above, how a fundamentally medieval world supports a trade in tea or the manufacture of umbrellas. To be a little more precise: as the series goes on, Lewis becomes patently more concerned with internal consistency: the Narnia of Prince Caspian or The Horse and his Boy is much less interpenetrated by marks of bourgeois prosperity, and The Magician’s Nephew goes so far as to explain away the most egregiously anachronistic feature of Lewis’s medievalised realm, the cast-iron lamp-post. But by doing so the books lose something, too; a sense of the way fantasy exists not as a locus of radical otherness, but on the contrary as a holey-space that precisely intersects our world of middle-class comforts, restrictions and anxieties. Tolkien does something similar in Lord of the Rings, except that he separates out his bourgeois eighteenth-century hobbits geographically from his medieval Gondorians and tenth-century Rohan riders. Lewis, by jumbling it all in together, Cair Paravel next to the department store that Mr Tumnus has just visited, makes a bolder imaginative alloy,

My real criticism of this novel relates to a different matter. It is that it ends just when it is getting interesting. The Pevensie kids become the kings and queens of Narnia: King Peter the Magnificent, Queen Susan the Gentle, King Edmund the Just and Queen Lucy the Valiant. They grow to adulthood in this world, until, many years later, they chance upon the lamppost again, and tumble back into our world, no longer adults, now children. Only a few hours have passed on Earth, for all the year (decades?) they spent in Narnia. Then Lewis stops; but this is where the story starts, surely -- what would it be like to have an adult consciousness inside the body of a child? To have passed through puberty, and then suddenly to have the hormone tap switched off? You could hardly go back to you former existence; but neither could you expect to live as an adult. Would you go mad, or use your beyond-your-seeming-years wisdom to some purpose? How would you cope? Would you try to explain? Would you betray yourself, and reveal the Narnia portal to the world -- would governments attempt to exploit it? The psychological interest in the story begins at the end; but that's exactly the place where Lewis drops the bar down and ends things. Grrr!

Top Ten All-Time Best-Selling Books, 8: H Rider Haggard, She (1887)

2011-12-17T01:47:00.000-08:00

Brainy but manly English gentleman Horace Holly, his handsome young friend Leo Vincey and various others adventure their way into darkest Africa where they meet the fabled "She-who-must-be-obeyed". And here you have it: after a surprisingly turgid start, with lots of faffing around an ersatz rossetta-stone complete with long stretches of transcribed Greek, Latin and medieval English, this book metamorphoses into a nicely-paced adventure yarn in unexplored Africa, and a titular character who expertly focusses erotic intensity, mystery, and deep history into one doll-shaped fetish. Good stuff, although its ideological limitations (its naked imperialism; its racism and cultural condescension) are harder to forgive than is the case with many other Victorian novels. Still: the eighth bestselling single book of all time? Surely you're joking, Mr Feynman. Surely? Mr Feynman? Excuse me?

Can't hear me.

I could speculate about the book's appeal: its imperial mysticism must have appealed to large number of people in the US and the Commonwealth (really?), for only global success can explain sales like this. But I suspect that actually the explanation is staring us in the face. The enormous success of this volume is like that of Nabokov's Lolita (the 14th best-selling book of all time) and Delany's Dhalgren -- two great books, hard, even rebarbative works, that sold as well as they did because people thought they were all about sex. They're not, really; either of them. But people thought they were. In an age before the widespread availability of sexually explicit material (and Delany's book is at the latter end of this long-lasting era), even books like these two could ride the wave of popular lubriciousness. And I'd say that's surely what appealed to so many people about She.

At any rate, I think I have plumbed the mystery of this novel, the secret at its heart, and I am willing to share my discovery with you. The book is about sex, yes. But we can be more specific. Here, Holly is trying to get to sleep:

Above me shone the eternal stars... Oh that we should shake loose the prisoned pinions of the soul and soar to that superior point, whence, like to some traveller looking out through space from Darien's giddiest peak, we might gaze with the spiritual eyes of noble thoughts deep into Infinity! What would it be to cast off this earthly robe, to have done for ever with these earthly thoughts and miserable desires... Yes, to cast them off, to have done with the foul and thorny places of the world; and like those glittering points above me, to rest on high wrapped forever in the brightness of our better selves, that even now shines in us as fire faintly shines within those lurid balls. [123]

Lurid balls. That is what this book is, fundamentally, about -- the lurid balls and the phallic pillar of fire. These gift Ayesha her power; but also rob her of it, revealing her (at the end) to be not sexually desirable after all and therefore worthless. The lurid balls and the fiery pillar are the arbiters of worth in this text.

Where does the adventure happen? The land of Kôr. What does Kôr mean? According to Patrick Brantlinger, 'Kôr, derives from Norse mythological romance, where the deathbed of the goddess Hel is called Kor and means "disease" in Old Norse.' I think this unlikely, partly since Old Norse has so little to do with this novel, mostly because the novel generates its affect via its weird potency, rather than by any too immersive wallowing in disease and deathbeds. No: I have another theory about the meaning of the word 'Kôr'. I proceed from the observation that Haggard goes to great length to establish the Hellenistic provenance both of Ayesha and the novel itself -- the latter by inserting great slabs of Greek actually into the text:

Ayesha, on seeing Holly for the first time, 'mounted the daïs and sat down upon the chair, and spoke to me in Greek'. Greek is at the heart of this book; a confection of spiritualised sensual Hellenism.

So: Kôr -- the long 'o' is the giveaway. This is a Greek word, not an Old Norse one (Haggard had been educated in Greek, after all; not Old Norse). The Greek Κῶρ (Kôr) means a leather pouch, a little bladder, a small wallet, a sac: Κῶρυκις, according to Liddell and Scott is 'a bladder like excrescence produced on the leaves of elms and maple trees'; Κῶρυκος is 'a leathern sack or wallet'. But this is dancing around the issue. The Greeks called these things words beginning with Κῶρ because these things are ballsack-like and Κῶρ means balls ('the scrotum' is L&S's more delicate phrase). This is where the novel's action takes place: in the mysterious land of Balls.

What of 'She'? She is the woman who says 'yes' to sex ('Ayesha', her name has a 'yes' at the heart of it); the woman who positively worships male sexual beauty -- the name of her original lover, Καλλικράτης, means 'beautiful strength'. The novel makes a fetish of She, but not on her own terms; 'She' is nothing without the male member to make her whole, and she is prepared to wait two thousand years for the right one to come along. This, I hardly need to add, is the very definition of the phallocentric reduction of the female principle.

Indeed, the male member defines her in more ways than this. The novel's phallic imagery, from spears and knives to pillars of fire, is all clean, purifying, strong, potent: the roofs may have fallen off the palaces and temples, but 'owing to their extreme massiveness' the 'great columns still remained standing' [259]. Of course they did. Indeed, 'She' is only desirable whilst she embodies this strength ('a tall white figure', 'a perfect and imperial shape', 'serpent-like') and she is at her best when she acts like Holly's phallus: 'as I stretched out my hands to clasp, she straightened herself, and a quick change passed over her ... life-—radiant, ecstatic, wonderful—seemed to flow from her.' Phew!. When's she happy, Ayesha grows literally erect and straight ('she shook her gauzy covering from her ... rising from her wrappings, as it were, she stood forth ... stretching out her rounded ivory arms') and when she's sad she shrinks down into detumescence ('her lovely oval face seemed to fall in and grow visibly thinner ... she bent down'). And the heart of her kingdom is the source of her power, the great 'pillar of fire' that stands up tall and makes Holly feel good: 'I rejoiced in this splendid vigour of a new-found self.' And not just him, neither: the magic phallus has remarkable effects on Vincey and Holly both:

We became sensible of a wild and splendid exhilaration, of a glorious sense of such a fierce intensity of Life ... we gazed at each other in the glorious glow, and laughed aloud in the lightness of our hearts and the divine intoxication of our brains. ... it was as though the bonds of my flesh had been loosened and left the spirit free to soar to the empyrean of its native power. The sensations that poured in upon me are indescribable. I seemed to live more keenly, to reach to a higher joy, and sip the goblet of a subtler thought than ever it had been my lot to do before. I was another and most glorified self, and all the avenues of the Possible were for a space laid open to the footsteps of the Real.

Sexy!

On the other hand, Ayesha's kingdom is also threaded with images of monstrous feminity, from the vision of uterus-as-horror-chamber of 'the cave of torture' ('I afterwards saw this dreadful place,' Holly tells us; 'slabs of a porous stone, were stained quite dark with the blood of ancient victims that had soaked into them. Also in the centre of the room was a place for a furnace, with a cavity wherein to heat the historic pot'), to the 'honeycomb of sepulchres' filled with death and decay. And, ultimately, this is revealed to be the true nature of Ayesha herself:

I faint even as I write it in the living presence of that terrible recollection—-she was shrivelling up ... and in place of the perfect whiteness of its lustre it turned dirty brown and yellow, like an piece of withered parchment. She felt at her head: the delicate hand was nothing but a claw now, a human talon like that of a badly-preserved Egyptian mummy ... Smaller she grew, and smaller yet, till she was no larger than a monkey. Now the skin was puckered into a million wrinkles, and on the shapeless face was the stamp of unutterable age. I never saw anything like it; nobody ever saw anything like the frightful age that was graven on that fearful countenance, no bigger now than that of a two-months' child, though the skull remained the same size, or nearly so, and let all men pray they never may, if they wish to keep their reason. At last she lay still, or only feebly moving. She, who but two minutes before had gazed upon us the loveliest, noblest, most splendid woman the world has ever seen, she lay still before us, near the masses of her own dark hair, no larger than a big monkey, and hideous—ah, too hideous for words. And yet, think of this—-at that very moment I thought of it—-it was the same woman! [294]

'Oh, the horrible pathos of the sight!' notes the narrator, adding a sage footnote: 'What a terrifying reflection it is, by the way, that nearly all our deep love for women who are not our kindred depends-—at any rate, in the first instance—-upon their personal appearance. If we lost them, and found them again dreadful to look on, though otherwise they were the very same, should we still love them?' It's a profound truth: for is not upstanding pure beauty of the phallus not, in some sense, the same thing as these wrinkled monkey-brown shrivelled-up sacs? Oh, horrible!

That's enough lurid balls for now.

[Various format e-texts of the novel here]

Top Ten All-Time Best-Selling Books, 9: Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code (2003)

2011-12-15T00:18:00.000-08:00

More of this.

And here, with crashing inevitability, is the ninth best-selling book of all time (more than 70 million sales): the only one of the top-ten titles published in the 21st-century, the only one by a living author, and so on, and so forth. You know this score. It's drivel, but drivel of a bafflingly popular sort. I was pleased, in a petty way, to see that my own name crops up on the novel's Wikipedia page; because, yes, I have gotten closer to this novel, in various ways, than most normal people have done, or might want to.

It's tempting simply to lay into this book on account of its egregious shitness. On the other hand, it seems to me (I suppose) that slagging off The Da Vinci Code is, really, the least interesting thing to do with it. So I set myself a challenge: what can I say, by way of praising the novel, perhaps even by way of explaining why it has been such a behemothic success? Well, alright. For although the prose is bad, the infodumping tiresome and the characterisation so meagre it seems wrong to apply a word as long and complicated as 'characterisation' to it -- let's call it 'Crct-ing' -- yet the plotting is effective. The plotting is not complex, or challenging, or very good, and it causes plausibility to strain and bulge like a condom stuffed with walnuts, but it is effective. By that I mean: you read on, to find out what's going to happen next, and to find out what's going on. Writing a 450-page book that readers want, actively, to keep reading all the way through is something; and whilst booknerds like me will tend to sneer, many of the 70 million people who bought copies of this book were people who don't read much, or at all. Getting people who don't read novels interested enough in something for them actually to read a novel is something, too.

More, there is a kind of category error in much of the contumely this novel has called forth from its critics. They take the book very seriously, and lambast it accordingly for what are (nobody would deny) a pantechnicon of errors, distortions, factual idiocies and plagarisms. But this criticism mistakes its target. It is not The Da Vinci Code that is notable; it is only The Da Vinci Code's commercial success. On its own terms, and if we put aside the money it has earned, we're looking at a slight, silly but time-passing yarn (Tom Hanks, in an interview, put his finger on it: the book 'is filled with all sorts of hooey and fun kind of scavenger-hunt-type nonsense'); a yarn that happens to touch on a couple of quite interesting ideas. Those ideas may strike you as trite, or clumsy, or even as so well-worn as not to need stating: but the success of the book implies, I think, that for many people they are none of those things. When I say 'a couple of ideas', by the way, I mean just that: there are two ideas in this book, both of them quite interesting and both, I think, more progressive than people give Brown credit for being. Incidentally, by 'two ideas' I don't mean 'the Priory of Sion' and 'The Knight's Templar.' Those aren't ideas, they're thriller pretexts, and rather dull ones at that.

No, I'm talking about two broader ideas. And here's the first: that the world is not as it seems, and that -- particularly where high culture, established religion, wealth and power are concerned -- you need to dig down beneath the surface appearance of things to get at the truth. Now this is an idea both powerful and dangerous, for applied with too much force to a receptive consciousness it can easily lead to conspiracy-theorising, batshittery and all manner of 'lizards secretly rule the world', 'the moon landings never happened' and '9-11 was an inside job' idiocy. But it is an important idea nonetheless; and insofar as a large constituency of people on the planet are in the habit of taking things, particularly Established Things like church and government, precisely at face value, it is a progressive one. Of course, this idea is shrouded around in the book with a great deal of chaff and bollocks; but that matters less, I think, than people think it does. And whilst I'm on the subject -- 'Chaff and Bollocks': are those good names for a duo of crime-solving dudes? Not good names? Ah well. Back to the drawing board for me.

The second idea is a better one, I think. It is that Christianity, historically, has undervalued female-ness, to the point of (for much of its history) actively stigmatising and oppressing women. This idea gets articulated in the novel both as a corollary to the idea that 'aboriginal' Christian dogma was much more progressive, in gender terms, and also is presented as secret to be uncovered. The fact that you, personally, may consider this a 'no-shit-sherlock' kind of secret may not be the most relevant reaction. A great many of Brown's biggest fans encountered this idea with a shock of revelation. They could of course have come across the idea in many other places, and most of those places it would have been better put, more sanely developed and so on; but the fact remains, they didn't, and they weren't going to. Of course (again) the idea itself is rendered into fiction via a lot of pfiffly running-about nonsense, as well as a quantity of active slandering of the Catholic Church (although at its end the novel pulls back from some of its more offensive anti-Catholicism). But to focus on the pfiffly details rather than the big idea is to miss something important about why so very many people fell for this title, I think.

So, yes; despite some brain strain on my part, I'm thinking myself into imagining why this novel should be the 9th-best-selling book of all time. And there are reasons. Moreover, bad though it is, it is a least better than the equally-stupid but considerably-more-turgid ('turgider'?) The Lost Symbol, also now being turned into a movie. I reviewed The Lost Symbol on this very site a couple of years ago, and don't want to rehearse my detailed critique of the novel here. But I'll note one further thing. The motor of the plot was to uncover the secret word that grants supernatural, demonic power -- the villain of the piece puts Robert Langdon in a tank filled with a fluid supersaturated with breathable oxygen, from where Langdon deduces the word, which the villain then tattoos on his head. The word is this:

Later we discover the word is not this, but is in fact the Bible, or something -- I forget the specifics. But for a while you, the reader, are really being told that the ultimate word, the word to which all others are subordinate, is a pictogram of a tit. It demonstrates, perhaps, Brown's dedication to the female principle. But I don't want to get distracted.

Top Ten All-Time Best-Selling Books, 10: Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich (1937)

2011-12-13T05:08:00.000-08:00

Off we go, then.

Well, I'd never heard of this one: the 10th best-selling title of all time. I suppose it doesn't surprise me that a self-help manual would make the top-ten; for obviously these sorts of book sell by the barnload. And two things endeared me to this title straight away. One, the author's superbly-formed imperial tumulus of a name. 'Climbing the Napoleon Hill' is, I think we can agree, a euphemism to conjure with. Then I chanced upon this:

The secret of achievement was tantalizingly offered to readers of Think and Grow Rich, but it was never explicitly identified. Hill felt discovering it for themselves would provide readers with the most benefit.

By gum it's true!

The secret to which I refer has not been directly named [in this book], for it seems to work more successfully when it is merely uncovered and left in sight, where THOSE WHO ARE READY, and SEARCHING FOR IT, may pick it up. [3]

This is a touch of such genius I feel the impulse to get out of my chair and salute it. The plan is: to put on sale a book called Think and Grow Rich, to be bought by people who hope to become rich, such that the inside portion of the book is given over to saying, in effect, 'you want to become rich? My advice is to think how to become rich, and then do that.' Ian McKellen would be pleased.

Anyway, the text is available online: you can see for yourself.

Top Ten All-Time Best-Selling Books.

2011-12-13T04:45:00.000-08:00

So, over the Christmas break I'm going to put up ten posts running down the top-ten best-selling books of all time. If you want to know what those ten books are, you can follow this link to the Wikipedia page that tells you. But why would you want to do that? That would spoil our fun over the following ten posts, don't you think? Oh, alright, please yourself. I'm not the boss of you.

Here are the parameters, lifted straight from the online encylopedia itself:

Religious books, especially the Bhagavad Gita, the Bible and the Qur'an, are probably the most-printed books, but it is nearly impossible to find reliable sales figures for them. Print figures are missing or unreliable since these books are produced by many different and unrelated publishers. Furthermore, many copies of the Bhagavad Gita, the Bible and the Qur'an are printed and given away free, instead of being sold. The same goes for some political books, such as the works of Mao Zedong or Adolf Hitler. Thus it is impossible to determine either the number printed, or the proportion of those printed that are sold. All such books have been excluded from this list for those reasons.

So, if you exclude the Bible, Qu'ran and Little Red Book, what is the all-time best-selling top ten? Stick with me and you'll see. [Although, having said that, the 'kipedia still include this title in their top 20, despite it being in effect a Seventh Day Adventist holy text. Ah well: consistency is for losers, I guess].

Two notes. One: I'd already read all but two of the titles on this top-ten before starting this exercise. That may or may not surprise you. Two: no Rowling or Steig Larsson in the top 10! Blimey.

Keith Ward, Why There Almost Certainly Is a God (2008)

2011-12-05T00:49:00.000-08:00

Keith Ward's Why There Almost Certainly Is a God (Lion 2008) is a splendid book, a book of almost Pythonesque silliness. It is, as its subtitle says, a textual means of 'doubting Dawkins'. And since Ward is a former Professor of Philosophy from London, and is now Regius Professor of Theology at Oxford, I like to believe that he intends the whole thing as a joke: a confection of god-of-the-gaps and appeals-to-authority, mixed in with some marvellously stretched-out nitpicking and point-missing where Dawkins is concerned. God-of-the-gaps? There are, Ward asserts, two games in town: spiritualism or materialism. The latter won't do. Why?

We are no longer very sure what 'matter' is. Is it quarks, or superstrings, or dark energy, or the result of quantum fluctuations in a vacuum? It is certainly not, as the ancient Greek materialist Democritus thought, lumps of hard solid stuff -- invisible atoms -- bumping into one another and forming complicated conglomerations that we call people. [14]

It seems to me that this depends upon what we mean by 'hard', 'solid' and 'stuff'; but Ward is happy that he has herein completely demolished materialism as a viable philosophical position.

What is the point of being a materialist when we are not sure exactly what matter is? [15]

Parody doesn't get any sharper than this! Brilliant stuff. (Since not even Ward can claim wholly to comprehend the deity he worships, he is beautifully finessing the obvious 'What is the point of being a theist when we are not sure exactly what theos is?')

There's more: he says [23] that his decision to get up in the morning and write Why There Almost Certainly Is a God, rather than (say) stay in bed or have a cup of coffee, cannot be explained by science. Beautiful! 'How can my talk of knowledge, desires, intentions and awareness translate into statements of physics that only relate to physical states?' There are many rhetorical questions like this in the book; and Ward is aware that some scientists have set out to answer them; so although sometimes he's happy to leave his questions hanging, from time to time he fleshes out answers. Now, one book I personally admire very much, which addresses precisely this issue (that is to say, lays out how the physics of brain chemistry underpins human behaviour) is Daniel Dennett's Consciousness Explained. There's the possibility that the arguments of Dennet's book could undermine Ward's splendid rhetorical question ('how can my thoughts translate into statements of physics?'), and indeed his whole book. But it's ok -- he's got that covered:

Daniel Dennett [believes] that conscious states are 'nothing more than' brain-states and brain-behaviour. Dennett wrote a book called Consciousness Explained in which he defended this radical theory. Most competent philosophers were unconvinced and privately referred to his book as 'Consciousness Explained Away' [16]

No further engagement with Dennett is needful: for any philosopher who agreed with him would, by definition, be announcing their incompetence. But Ward's appeal to authority does not stop with certain unnamed philosophers. It also includes a large number of unnamed people who all agree with him about God:

If you are thinking seriously about the God hypothesis it will be very strong evidence if a large number of people, apparently well balanced, intelligent and virtuous, feel that God has met them in the proclamation of Christ's teaching, death and resurrection. [140]

Irrefutable! There are something like 2.5 billion Christians on the planet. That fact alone proves Christianity is true. Of course, there are also 1.5 billion Muslims, but you can disregard them: they are not competent philosophers -- in private we call their religion 'Isnotlam'.

It would be nice to be more serious about the arguments Ward puts forward, but, really, it's difficult to see how. The main spine of the book's thesis is the appeal to 'personal explanation': that human consciousness cannot be explained by science and must therefore be grounded in a primary, infinite, divine consciousness. His 'two big' objections to Dawkins are: 'the irreducible existence of consciousness' and 'the irreducible nature of personal explanation'. As to the first, it seems to me that nobody who has observed a loved-one diminish under the effects of Alzheimer's disease could ever genuinely claim that human consciousness can never be reduced. (Ward means 'reduced to scientific explanation', but the point holds, I think: if consciousness is a function of brain activity as Dennett says, then deterioration in the material capacity of the brain through disease or illness would lead to deterioration in the consciousness of the individual concerned. Which is precisely what we see). And when it comes to his second question, I'd say Ward uses 'irreducible' when he means 'distinctive'. And anyway, the 'irreducible nature of personal explanation' has no bearing on the larger question. That's not only my view, incidentally: it's also Ward's: 'what human beings can imagine or picture to themselves is not a reliable guide to the ultimate nature of reality' [109].

John Varley, In the Hall of the Martian Kings (1978)

2011-12-01T00:54:00.000-08:00

In the title story, a group of Martian explorers are trapped on the red planet when the plastic tents they're living in are deflated by plasticophage alien bugs. It's good, foresquare, old fashioned golden-age-y fun, as the group struggles to survive until the rescue mission is launched from Earth, and gradually mutates into the first true Martian settlers. One of the characters may be black, I'm not sure. I may have been misreading Varley's cues. What do you think?

At this distance he would have been unable to tell who she was if it weren't for the black face.

Hmm. Not sure.

Mary Lang, the black woman, was sitting on the edge of Lou Prager's cot

So difficult to tell, when a text is as colourblind as this one.

The floor heaved up in the center, throwing the black woman to her knees.

Hmm. Maybe all the characters are black? Hard to say.

Don Delillo, Point Omega (2010)

2011-11-28T00:03:00.000-08:00

Oh, and you think the title's poynt OHmega, but actually it's pwanto MAYgar ('because now comes the introversion. Father Teilhard knew this, the omega point. A leap out of our biology.' 52). And as it goes, the novel is a riff upon Douglas Gordon’s video installation artwork 24 Hour Psycho (originally screened in 1993 in Berlin and Glasgow; now in New York’s MOMA), in which Hitchcock’s famous film is projected at a speed such that it takes 24 hours to run its course. The novel opens and closes with scenes describing this installation, the eerie slowness of it. The middle bit is a three-actor set-up: the old man (Richard Elster) who had a job advising government, at the highest level, on matters of war, rendition and torture, and who has retreated to a hut he owns in the middle of the American desert; the young man, Jim Finley, who wants to make a sort of avant-garde film interview/documentary about the old man; the old man’s daughter Jessica, who visits. The three pose around the shack in a series of wearyingly ‘meaningful’ unspoken constellations of desire and disappointment. The film is not made, no connections are established. Then Jessie disappears. Has she been abducted by a stalker-ish old boyfriend? Has she wandered off into the desert to commit suicide? The police find a knife. Allusions to Psycho are sounded, gong-like, throughout the book. Here Jim spies on Jessica. Here he pulls back a shower curtain sharply. Here -- a knife.

The prose is how might you say? The prose is the standard repetitious, offkilter Delilloese. It bears the same relationship to Delillo’s earlier brilliance that strenuous, autopastiche late Pinter has to early Pinter’s exquisite, studied inarticulacy. I missed the extraordinary comedy of White Noise. The prose is ponderous and weak.

I quite like the last paragraph, mind.

This feels like a worn out book, in a good and a bad way. It is worn out because it is about the end of empire, about things running down, about a nation coughing up a palmful of green phlegm and then staring hypnotised at what is in its hand. It is about people sailing past moral and social engagement, past their fullest human-ness, at an oblique angle. Delillo has been here before. He has been here before, and he adds nothing by coming here again. It is brief, but drags. It is a short story. It feels too long.

Let me tell you, Psycho, at whatever speed, is a poor way of conceptualising the American response to 9-11, war, rendition and horror. Really.

But then I’m increasingly a stick-in-the-mud. The mud, that’s where I’m stuck. Me, I might like a writer of trustworthy and rigorous prose (‘Delillo is the most trustworthy and rigorous prose writer of our age’, John Burnside) to know what the words he uses actually mean—to know, for instance, the difference between ‘enormousness’ and ‘enormity’ [‘it was hard to think clearly. The enormity of it, all that empty country’, 76]. It might be nice for a novel named after Teilhard de Chardin’s ‘omega point’, which references Chardin, and has characters discussing the concept at length, actually to understand it, and not to confuse it with Freud's thanatos (‘back now to inorganic matter. This is what we want. We want to be stones in a field’ 53). This is what we want: Delillo to write better books again. Not the same books, not this book. Better. Better than this. That's the point.

Cave, Neverendless (2011)

2011-11-26T10:45:00.000-08:00

So there's a new album from Cave, the Chicago-based psychedelic drone band: more kraut- and space-rock, I’d say, than drone, but I wouldn't want to split hairs. I was alerted to the existence of this album on account of it including a track called 'Adam Roberts'—about me, or some other Adam Roberts—so I bought it. You can, too, here. Very good, it is. No lyrics (the only exception is the band chanting 'on the rise' during the track called, er, 'On The Rise'), and with genuine drive and variety, an expert sense of how far to take the build-up of repetitive musical riffs. Pitchfork think the band has been 'studying up on krautrock for a long time', and praise the 'motorik drive, bass grooves, and Neu!-reminiscent synths.' That's about right.

They don't settle on one sound: They quiet down, increase the volume, add subtle licks, string airy synths above their guttural guitars, and all the while, establish a few central hooks.

According to that Pitchfork review, the track ‘Adam Roberts’ is the worst on the album. It’s not likely that I’d agree with such a judgement, of course (I like its grinding/driving sound and it's perky little round-and-round organ riff, like an early 90s Julian Cope B-side)—and in fact I’d say ‘O.J.’ is the least attractive, endless in a way that starts to approach interminability, with its perky-annoying little 60s electronic organ riff. It’s jolly, though; it just lacks the splendid drive and build of the opening track ‘W.U.J.’ (which builds very neatly, until lifting off the ground at 2:52). ‘This Is The Best’ is a beautifully, hypnotically worked piece; even the use of a dumb little up-and-down truncated arpeggio in the first section, like the sound emitted by a truck when backing up, doesn’t spoil the mood. The drumming is particularly good throughout. It pleases me that my name, assuming it is my name, has not been taken in vain.

W B Yeats, The Tower (1928)

2011-11-24T00:05:00.000-08:00

Chancing upon a box-set of Penguin 'first edition' volumes in a charity shop I was moved to do something I haven't done since I was an undergraduate: to read through Yeats's The Tower from first to last. (Indeed, I didn't even do that as an undergraduate, confining myself to reading the Yeats poems were were assigned from the Big Green Book of Complete Yeats we were all instructed to buy). And the Penguin 'first edition' reprint of The Tower is a lovely little thing: beautiful cover image (up there) good quality paper, nice typeface and no distracting editorial matter or notes.

So I read the whole collection in one go -- on a train journey, actually: it's 58 pages, easily manageable. Of course, much of the poetry here is just magnificent: thrilling, haunting, powerful, fully deserving its reputation. But at the same time, in large doses the idiom does start to feel a bit creaky, a bit too-deliberately-stilted. And the Homes & Gardens architecture of the collection as a whole -- all these Byzantine palaces, gold mosaics, towers and stately homes with peacocks trailing over their lawns -- is rather cloying. It's not the privilege that sticks in my craw so much as the incipient naffness: the way the tower is modishly decaying, like an eighteenth-century folly; the fact that there's so much Gothic-y moonlight, hooting owls, death and mystery, 'glittering swords in the east' and so on. More, the collection as a whole can't make up its mind whether its main theme is the tragic grandeur of national life filtered through magical and mythic lens, or a lot of grumbling at the fact that Yeats himself is not as young as once he was. Is the pathos of 'Meditations in Time of Civil War' a new-born country tearing itself apart, or is it Yeats's advancing age and receding hairline?

That's not fair, of course. And actually my point isn't ad hominem. Indeed, I wonder if the power and the majesty here is in an intriguing way complicit with the naffness -- the magical unicorns, the rhyming 'barrel' with 'star, all' [you'll find those two on pp. 7 and 16 respectively]. As if the two actually exist (transcendence/bathos) in a functioning dialectic, aesthetically speaking, the function being 'the numinous', 'the sacred', 'the ascent'.

One thing that hadn't occurred to me about the title poem (for instance) is that Yeats's 'tower' is not really a structure, or building, so much as it is a mechanism for ascent. 'Being dead, we rise' he insists; and the poem's reiterated insistence upon going upwards ('climbing the mountainside'; 'up Ben Bulben's back'; 'climbed the narrow stairs') is about the dream of swan-flight, or reaching the moon, or in other ways getting a better perspective on things. All the circles (man, this volume is full of circles) start to get on one's nerves, symptoms of a stare-eyed idée fixe. And reading 'Leda and the Swan' in this context slightly diminishes the poem, I think -- though you'd hardly think that possible with a poem of such power. But there are so many swans in this slim volume, and such an undercurrent of mystic fascination with the force of overpowering, that the light in which the bird's rapist power/knowledge combo is presented comes over as more suspect than it might otherwise do. But 'Sailing To Byzantium' is still one of the single greatest poems ever written in the English language, so there's still that.

Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark. Illustrated by Mahendra Singh (2011)

2011-11-21T00:31:00.000-08:00

My Monday book recommendation is this extraordinary rendering of Carroll's Snark into an illustrated volume of great beauty and delight, by my friend the Canadian illustrator Mahendra Singh (not the cricketer). You can get a sense of Singh's visual style, part Henry Holiday, part Ernst-y or Dali-y, part his own unique thing, from his blog, where many of the images were first posted. It strikes me as brilliantly suited to the source material: a forkish and hopeful visual idiom. But great though the blog is, you'll want to own the book itself, in all its large-format loveliness; and there's a list of ways you can buy it, here.

Connie Wllis, All Clear (2011)

2011-11-19T00:58:00.000-08:00

My review of the second 50% of Connie Willis's Hugo-winning megatron of a book is in today's Guardian. Or you can read it online here, and marvel at the handsome phizog of, oh, wait, is that supposed to be me?

Students of professional copyediting may like to compare the Guardian's version with what I initially sent them (or the last two paragraphs thereof):

The Hugos are voted for by fans, so Willis’s win reflects her popularity in the genre. That said, some fans have shown themselves undelighted. UK commentators in particular have complained about faults in Willis’s research: errors about the 1940s London Tube layout, and the like. These errors are certainly present, but I can’t say they bothered me—for absolute accuracy is a chimera in fiction, and the presence of (to pick an example out of the air) chiming clocks in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar shows that even the most clanging anachronisms need not interfere with the suspension of disbelief on the part of the reader. And Willis overall aim is a commendable one. Despite walk-on parts by General Patton, Agatha Christie and Alan Turing the bulk of the characters in All Clear are ordinary people getting on with their ordinary lives. It’s rare to find any novel nowadays happy to pootle gently along as Willis’s does here. Since civilian life, even in wartime, is more gentle pootle than crash-bang, this might be thought a commendable aesthetic strategy. But the problem is that All Clear lapses too often into actual dullness: hundreds of pages in which characters worry that so-and-so hasn’t phoned, or that St Paul’s Cathedral might have suffered slightly worse bomb-damage than was actually the case. The comedy is weak, and sometimes actively wincing; the tragedy oddly creaky and unconvincing. Nor are Willis’s ‘ordinary’ characters particularly well drawn. In particular her cheeky cockney urchin ‘Alf’ is so dreadfully conceived and rendered that I grimaced with displeasure whenever he appeared.

So why did this slab of Blitz pudding and time-travel custard win the Hugo? It presumably has something to do with the fact that Willis herself, well-liked in SF fandom, has written many other good novels (including previous Hugo winners Fire Watch (1982) and Domesday Book (1993), both about the same time-travelling institute, the former also concerned with the fire-bombing of St Pauls). And it can’t be denied that the subject here, the heroism of ordinary people in testing times, is worthy and honourable. Conceivably Hugo voters thought that giving this novel the prize (or half of it) was a way of registering their respect for the collective sacrifice of wartime Londoners. Which is fair enough; although perhaps a better way of honouring them might have been to write a tighter, less self-indulgent novel in the first place.

Oh the pressures of space! Particularly in a confined location like, er, the Guardian website.

Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, The Grand Design (2011)

2011-11-16T00:23:00.000-08:00

Here are some lines from Hawking and Mlodinow's 'new answers to the ultimate questions of life' book:

Philosophy is dead. Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science. [13]

Oh.

A law of nature is a rule that is based upon an observed regularity and provides predictions that go beyond the immediate situations upon which it is based. For example, we might notice that the sun has risen in the east every morning of our lives, and postulate the law, "The sun always rises in the east." This is a generalization that goes beyond our limited observations of the rising sun and makes testable predictions about the future. On the other hand, a statement such as, "The computers in this office are black" is not a law of nature because it relates only to the computers within the office and makes no predictios such as , "If my office purchases a new computer it will be black". [39-40]

This is wrongheaded. Saying 'the sun rises in the east' has exactly the same truth-status as saying 'the computers in this office are black'; viz., a localised one. The sun does not rise in the east on Venus, after all. Just as the 'law' about the colour of the computers is falsified by going to an office with white computers; the 'law' about the sun rising in the east is falsified by going to Venus. Indeed, this Popperian notion of 'falsification' is weirdly absent from the book's discussion of what constitutes 'scientific law'. Really, not a single mention of Popper in the entire book.

One of [Aristotle's] predictions was that heavier objects should fall faster because their purpose is to fall. Nobody seemed to have thought that it was important to test this until Galileo. [69]

Lucretius and Democritus both disagreed with Aristotle about the nature of weight; Democritus probably and Lucretius certainly thought that unequal weights would fall with the same finite speed in a vacuum; and Simon Stevin showed that two objects of different weight fall down with exactly the same acceleration in 1586, long before Galileo.

The idea that the universe is expanding involves a bit of subtlety. For example we don't mean the universe is expanding in the manner that, say, one might expand one's house, by knocking out a wall and positioning a new bathroom. [159]

No shit, Sherlock.

Eddington visualised the universe as he surface of an expanding baloon, and all the galaxies as points on its surface ... if at some point two galaxies were 1 inch apart, an hour later they would be 2 inches apart. [160]

OK.

It is important to realize that the expansion of space does not affect the size of material objects held together by some kind of force. For example, if we circled a cluster of galaxies on the balloon, that circle would not expand as the balloon expanded. [160]

But you've just a few lines earlier said that the distance between galaxies—this circle—is expanding! There's a problem here. Hawking and Mlodinow want to insist upon this point, because 'we can detect expansion only if our measuring instruments have fixed sizes. If everything were free to expand, then we, our yardsticks, our laboratories, and so on would all expand proportionately and we would not notice any difference' [161]. But the point of the balloon analogy is that spacetime itself is expanding (not, for instance, that the big bang happened in the middle of a cavernous empty space, filling it with matter; but that the big bang created the space as it expanded). If spacetime is expanding, then matter that is coordinated in spacetime would expand too. That gravity and atomic bonds set up a counterforce plays a part here, although there is nothing in the book at all on either dark matter or, more crucially, dark energy.

The boast at the beginning of this book is that it will explain 'not only how the universe behaves, but why'; and more specifically that it will answer the three-part 'ultimate question', viz:

Why is there something rather than nothing?
Why do we exist?
Why this particular set of laws and not some other? [19]

But the answers Hawking and Mlodinow provide are weak. They dismiss theological answers on the (reasonable) grounds that answering 'how created the cosmos?' with 'God' only shuffles the question along to a new term ('so who created God?'). But then they do the same thing with their questions. For example, their answer to 'Why is there something rather than nothing?' is that though 'the total energy in the universe must always remain zero' it is possible to balance 'the positive energy of matter' and 'the negative energy of gravity': 'and so there is no restriction on the creation of whole universes' [227]. But this doesn't explain why there is a balance of energy in the first place, or why the cosmos was pushed into this positive/negative state rather than the default nothingness. They answer their second question by invoking Conway's game of life, which shows that complex forms can emerge without a designer, but says nothing about the why. And they answer their third question by gesturing, rather vaguely, towards the anthropic principle. Bah.

To go back to:

Philosophy is dead. Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science. [13]

Dudes! You need to read more widely in contemporary philosophy.

Robert Van Kampen, The Fourth Reich (2000)

2011-11-14T00:45:00.000-08:00

Well, this is terrible; but you'd expect me to say so. The painfully pious Van Kampen works his personal interpretation of St John's Revelation into a cloggy future 'thriller'. In the afterword, he insists upon the precision and truthfulness of everything in the book: 'I have tried to be as precise as to what will happen, when it will happen, and the order in which it will happen, following the timing and sequence of events outlined in scripture' [444]. Accordingly he sticks closely to the passage in Revelation 23:7-20 in which a genetically altered egg containing DNA extracted from skull fragments tagged "Berlin 4 May 1945" is implanted in the wife of a high-placed Russian official; the child, once born, being removed and his mother told that her son has died.

So, yes, Adolf Hitler is Boys-from-Brazilled back to life, and sweeps to power in Russia inaugurating the end times. Nobody notices that he looks like Hitler to begin with, on account of him having a beard -- a brilliant strategy (we have to wonder why the historical Hitler didn't think of it himself: growing a big beard in 1945, and sneaking out of the bunker). Hitler reports directly to Satan, and goes by the name 'Nikolai Bulgakov' (cle-ver!) until about halfway through, when he comes out and reveals that he is actually Adolf Hitler. This doesn't seem to harm his political career. It's all precisely and truthfully terrible:

Defense against the flying creatures proved almost impossible, and the following weeks the insects continued to find a way around all but the most sophisticated barriers. Ordinary citizens in the Reich had little protection. Hitler's promise that no one would die brought little comfort to the millions who suffered the excruciatng pain of the poison stings. [336]

I half-wonder whether the author is playing with the derivation of the word 'excruciating' here; but no, he's not. His style is soggy and clichéd throughout; the story prodigiously dull and dreary. In the afterword, Van Kampen says that when it comes to decoding the identity of 'the Beast' in Revelation, 'I think Hitler is as good a choice as Nero.' They both strike me as equally likely to come to a position of global power in the next ten years, certainly.

My personal view is that the antichrist, when he comes, will either be called 'Mr Beast' or else 'Viv I. Vi'. I'm presently working on my screenplay for the latter eventuality: Vivien: Omen 6.

Walter Holland, Falsehoods, Concerns (2011)

2011-11-12T04:19:00.000-08:00

Compromised though the recommendation is by my friendship with the author, I nevertheless recommend this title: you can buy it, hardcopy, for $12 (I'm not sure what the e-book status is). More to the point, you can see whether this is the sort of thing that would interest you by browsing le blog hollandais on which many of these pieces first appeared. The fact that you can see for yourself what kind of a writer Holland is, by clicking through to his blog, renders my summing-up of his style mostly redundant, of course; but in respect of the cover blurb, up there, and the 'wanna buy a book?' page to which I just linked, I'll say that the book itself has a slightly lower quotient of goofy than they might imply. There's some goofy, true; and a touch more Foster-Wallaceishness; but Holland's voice is his own, unlike anybody else I can think of. Stylistically and formally there is a flavour of the riff about the way he writes; but it's not as freeform or sprawling as that description, perhaps, makes it sound. Say rather, perhaps, that his writing has the more structured sense of Phishian improvisation (there's quite a lot in here about Phish; some of which is perhaps a little over-specific and fannish) -- I mean, the working through of a tight set of particular fascinations (childhood and the making of children; love and hate; remembering and belonging; the new and the old) in ways that deliberately resist a too-polished articulation, a commitment to using a considerable technical accomplishment as a springboard to something a little less constrained by technique.

The falsehoods are experiments in writing fiction (fragments thereof, mostly); the concerns are wide-ranging -- music, politics, cinema and TV, gaming, religion, art. What he's particularly good on is the relationship between truth-telling and gaucheness, a fruitful worrying away at the limits of originality -- how 'original' can any writer be, today? -- and a genuinely complex relationship, in what he does, between the urge to splurge everything, no matter how embarrassing, and the urge to autoprotect, to mask-up, to hide behind affectations and styles and ironies and obscurities. If Holland committed wholeheartedly to either route, he'd be a less interesting writer. The standouts for me, here, are: the piece on pregnancy and possibility; the essay on atheism (I'm writing a book on religion at the moment, and plan on quoting this); the classroom essay. I liked plenty more -- the 'fixing you' stuff, for instance, which Holland himself dismisses, in the book, as 'dumb'. Some I disagreed with quite strongly (the love/hate piece, for instance) -- a state of affairs which is, in case I'm not being clear, commendable and praiseworthy rather than anything else. You'll have other stand-outs. The whole is stimulating. There are some typos; but -- hey.

One more thing: I don't believe, whatever he says, that Holland's Dad ('from the north of England') was 'a snappy soccer player'. He was a football player, is what he was. There. I've said it.

Dennis Wheatley, Star of Ill-Omen (1952)

2011-11-07T01:36:00.000-08:00

Wheatley was huge, once-upon-a-time; a global bestseller who wrote thrillers in a variety of genres. By the 1970s though,when I was at school, his star had waned to the point where he was associated only with naff horror gubbins like The Devil Rides Out; prolix, oddly genteel bodice-rippers about Satanism that were (amongst my peer group, in those days, at any rate) strictly for those without the stomach for James Herbert. So my knowledge of his oeuvre is small. The Devil Reads Not in fact. Earlier this year I read Robert Hanks’ elegant skewering of Wheatley as the worst writer to become globally successful since Marie Corelli (sadly, the article itself is behind a paywall; but it’s worth checking out); which did not inspire me to search out his backlist. But then I chanced upon a charity-shop edition of Star of Ill-Omen, one of Wheatley’s SF novels—no, I had no idea that he wrote SF (he did though, and quite a lot); yes I bought this one (first edition incl. dust jacket good condition, £4); yes I read it; no it’s not any good. Interesting though.

It starts out as a cold war thriller. Argentina (under General Peron) is trying to start a nuclear programme; and our hero, the sub-Bond ‘Kem Lincoln’, is on a mission to steal the plans to the reactor from Colonel Esté Van Escobar’s safe, which he manages in part by seducing the Colonel’s wife, Carmen. Here’s the opening sentence, which gives some flavour of Wheatley’s prose-style, something to which the descriptor ‘good’ cannot, I think, truthfully be applied:

Kem Lincoln slid back the chamber of his automatic to make certain that it was working freely, snapped home a clip of bullets and repouched the weapon in his shoulder holster.

‘Repouched’ is a splendidly 'good show sir' stylistic touch. And, indeed, this sort of kangarooese flavours the writing all through; and despite having a name that sounds like an unaerodynamic model of 1950s US automobile, Kem Lincoln is plucky and resourceful. There're some fisticuffs and running around on the Argentine pampas, until the story takes an abrupt left-turn: ‘In the centre of the clearing, only forty feet away from him, reposed a Flying Saucer’ [76] ‘Reposed’. Yes. So, Kem, Carmen and the Colonel are abducted, and whisked away into outer space. What do the aliens look like?

They were twenty feet high, broad in proportion, and, from what he could make out in the starlight, naked … neither of the giants had beards or moustaches; instead they had great tufts of stiff hair fanning out from their nostrils and ears. Apart from that and their size they differed in no obvious way from human beings. Both were males, their hair on both their bodies was red, and both of them were completely bald. [80]

They spend quite a long time imprisoned on the saucer, flying through space. To pass the time, Escobar displays his surprising amount of cosmological knowledge (‘The universe is estimated to contain 300,000 million stars … there are at least 200 stars for every man, woman and child living on Earth.’ ‘Everyone knows that the universe is a pretty big affair,’ replies Kem, ‘but I had no idea that it was quite so colossal as that!’ [84]); and luckily for the three of them the saucer is supplied with ‘a large-mouthed fixed funnel leading down to a pipe about a foot wide, at the bottom of which daylight could be seen. It was clearly a lavatory on the same principle as those installed in railway trains, but lacking any form of trap, or, as far as could be seen, sluicing apparatus’ [88]. The abductees speculate about how the craft is powered. ‘I understand enough about Einstein’s Unified Field Theory to give you some conception of it,’ says Escobar, breezily:

’It has been proved by means of the tenescope that there are 1,257 magnetic lines of force in every square centimeter of matter. If a way could be found to cross two or more of those lines, the power so generated could be used to propel matter in any desired direction at speeds hitherto regarded as outside the bounds of possibility; and Einstein contends that by these means matter could be made to travel at the speed of light. [94]

Does he? Does he, really?

‘Jupiter; the big boy of the Solar family … he is ice all over, and ice miles deep at that.’[106]

Anyway, eventually the saucer takes our heroes to a Lowellian Mars, canals and all. They’re taken off the vessel inside giant bags and depouched (if I may) into a subterranean cinema, where they are shown a black-and-white film of Earth’s development, from the Chaldeans to nuclear power stations, for reasons that escape me. We discover the pink humanoid giants are actually in the service of some giant bee-beetles (‘incredible as it at first appeared, the fact was inescapable. These bee-beetles must be the masters of all life on Mars!’ 158). The three of them escape into the Martian desert where they meet Nickolai [that’s how Wheatley spells it] Zadovitch ‘the M.V.D. man’ and Anna ‘the pretty Russian who looked like a “good-time” girl but could be deadly with a pistol’ (dedicated Communists both, who had been abducted from Siberia the previous year) together with Harsbach, an old Nazi rocket scientist. It seems the bee-beetles are hoping to utilise the secrets of atomic power by kidnapping Earthly atomic scientists, though why they need it when they are able to build and fly the flying saucers isn’t explained. We also discover that Phobos and Deimos are not moons, but giant saucers. I think we can all agree that makes a lot more sense, astronomically speaking. The team pool their expertise to build a rudimentary atom bomb, in the hope of using it to hijack a saucer and get home. Kem, naturally, sleeps with the Russian: ‘in everything but the sexual urge they were poles apart, but for the time being it dominated them both utterly. Straining their muscles, they kissed and kissed until their lips were bruised and sore’ [235]. Sexy! Wheatley has a low opinion of Communists in general of course, and a particularly low opinion of this one (‘Love, according to Western standards, played no part in her life. Like a young heifer, she merely had preferences for males who by a combination of strength and cunning could overcome their rivals’). The team builds the bomb; the Colonel and Zadovitch die along the way; and when the bee-beetles take them and it up in a saucer to test it, the remaining Earthlings seize control of the craft, in a splendidly bathetic struggle:

Thrusting out his free hand, [Kem] pushed the lever back, but only just in time to prevent the Saucer turning over. The insect threw its weight against another lever. [295]

‘The insect threw its weight against another lever.’ Now that’s a sentence worth savouring. Anyway, the victorious humans fly the saucer back to Earth—but, oh no! Harsbach plans to drop the atom bomb they made onto London ‘to revenge himself for the way we smashed Hitler!’ [315]. In one of the oddest endings I can remember reading for a long time, Kem and Carmen (who has forgiven him for sleeping with the heartless Russian heifer) secretly remove the innards from the bomb and hide themselves inside, such that when the evil Nazi and his evil female Communist colleague drop the bomb onto Tower Bridge—from, I might add, a height of 2000 feet—it does not explode. ‘Both Lincoln and Madame Escobar’ the novel relates at the end, ‘are suffering from bad bruising. But the doctors report that they should be fully recovered in a few days time.’ Of course they will. Of course they will.

---

Since I mention the incomparableGood Show Sir up there, I'll end with a few of other examples of Star of Ill-Omen covers. They're not good.

That is a scene from the book, sort-of; doesn't make it any less ridiculous as a cover. Then there's this one:

Hair-gel-tastic! Or this one:

'Must Earth be destroyed? Must it? Really?' This one, however, I quite like:

Eliza Parsons, The Convict (1807)

2011-11-04T01:45:00.000-07:00

Edward Copeland's Women Writing about Money: Women's Fiction in England, 1790-1820 (Cambridge University Press, 2004) notes how Eliza Parsons’ husband’s financial collapse forced her onto a punishing literary treadmill. To quote Parsons herself: ‘I was compelled by dire necessity to become an Author, and in the course of 12 years have written 65 vols of Novels under every disadvantage of Sickness, Indigence, never ceasing Anxiety, and as many repeated misfortunes as human sufferance could well support’ [in Copeland, 43]. Even if we assume, as perhaps we may, that ’65 vols’ means, strictly, volumes (most of Parson’s output consisted of 4-vol novels; she also produced 5- and 6-vol translations and other things) that’s a pretty steep workrate. She was so prolific, indeed, that even experts don’t really know how much she published. Here’s Copeland again:

In spite of Parsons pious insistence in her last novel, Murray House (1804) that Anna Sydney, the heroine, must, as the whole duty of woman, obey the demands of her feckless father and her philandering husband, she draws a devastating picture of a male-controlled economy. [46]

Ah, but 1804’s Murray House was not her last novel. For example, here’s 1807’s The Convict, or Navy Lieutenant.

Henry Thompson, a curate’s son, is a navy lieutenant on the HMS Vengeance. He takes pity on an orphan girl, but his duties at sea mean he can't care for her directly, so he pays some friends, Mr and Mrs Barton, to look after her. Barton loves the child, but comes to hate his wife (‘her cruelty to little Fanny was beyond endurance; it so indisputably proved the baseness of her soul, that no consideration on earth could induce him to remain domesticated with a woman so devoid of feeling and humanity’ 1:124). So Barton separates from his spouse, obtaining a warrant as first mate to a ship’s surgeon and making alternate arrangements for the girl. We discover the orphan’s girl’s mother was a convicted criminal, whose written testimony Thompson reads (‘Oh!’ it says ‘that this horrid tale may impress an awful lesson on the minds of the young and inexperienced female!’ 1:141). Seduced and abandoned by the Right Honourable Lord C—, she was driven to attempted murder.

Fanny, the orphan girl, goes to stay with Mrs. Fitzwilliam and her posh relatives who live at a house called Malvern Abbey. This is the point during my reading where I started to think: ‘hmm, this has a certain Mansfield Park-ishness about it'—(or I suppose it would be more accurate to say that, Mansfield Park (1814) has a certain The Convict-ishness about it, Parsons' being the prior text): the stately home; the virtuous, diffident young girl called Fanny surrounded by various well-bred people who treat her indifferently; the West Indian connection (for Thompson and Barton are both posted to the Windies). The 'naval officers' angle perhaps recalls Persuasion (1817), too; and there are occasional moments of Sense-and-Sensibilityness too: as when Mrs Fitzgerald dies, leaving a will: ‘All my landed estates, independent of Malvern Abbey which was settled on his father and his heirs, with ten thousand pounds from my landed property, to be my nephew Meredith’s … Ten thousand pounds to each of my two nieces, daughters of my sister Bruce, now resident with me. … To Fanny Thompson, whom I have taken under my protection, I give forty-five pounds a year, for clothes and education, for seven years from the date of this my intended will. At the expiration of the said seven years, the further sum of three hundred pounds to place her in some line that may enable her to procure her own subsistence.’ [3:25-6] Fanny’s legacy is small enough, but still provokes envy:

The young ladies, who were present at the reading, were at first much elated by their legacy of ten thousand pounds. But when a little cooled, and they reflected on the great property, thrown into the hands of their cousin, with the bequests to poor Fanny, envy and rancor took possession of their bosoms; … So blind is envy to its true interest. [3:23]

So Fanny ends up with nothing. All this lacks Austen’s expert ironic touch, of course; but its outlines are familiar: ‘The poor girl often felt the consequences of her apparent degradation from others, by the haughty impertinence of some ill-bred and bad tempered misses, whose chief merit lay in their high birth, or their riches; and who, while they affected the utmost contempt for the poor orphan Fanny, were not a little mortified in seeing themselves excelled by her in many points’ [3:117].

Meanwhile Lieutenant Thompson is unjustly dismissed from the Vengeance, and becomes Captain of the Britannia, ‘a country ship’ (that is to say, a ship that trades with the ports of the East) owned by a certain Mr Selwyn. Unfortunately the Britannia is ‘wrecked on the Malabar coast’, such that ‘it was feared Captain Thompson and his people all perished, or had been carried off prisoners by the native Indians’ [3:81]. Selwyn adopts Fanny, who is moved to another country house called Ringwood Park, to live with the kindly Mrs. Wharton (‘there was a very good library in the house, and there Fanny passed most of the hours’ 3:134) and afterwards becomes the companion of Lady Overton in London. This latter ‘had been initiated into the vortex of fashion by a set of despicable interested beings, who sought their own gratification by her destruction. Her fortune was the lure to the unprincipled and avaricious, her beauty the meteor which attracted the eyes and hearts of the gallant, gay Lotahrios of that age ‘[4:62]. Overton is married, but ‘her husband’s unhappy debility of body and intellect left her sole mistress of her own actions’—a situation which Parsons straightforwardly deplores. Anyway, living with Overton, Fanny comes into contact with a fast set of London aristos. The wicked Lord Presville attempts to seduce her (‘you must, you shall be mine!’ 4:147) and is unimpressed by her virtuous rejection: ‘ridiculous! You have already seen enough of the world to know that virtue, as you call it, claims but very little pre-eminence in the fashionable circles’ [4:149]. But just as she is about to be raped, Fanny is rescued by a mysterious stranger who knocks the lord down with his walking stick. This turns out to be Thompson himself, not dead in India after all—‘yes reader,’ says Parsons, with studied vagueness, ‘it was the identical Lieutenant Thompson…—Thompson, who after four years residence among the Indians had wonderfully effected his escape’ [4:171]. Yes, yes! That part of the story doesn't sound in the least bit interesting! You're quite right, Eliza, to hurry past it, in order to concentrate on your interminable London polite-society stuff.

Anyway, Fanny befriends a family called Lascelles, and their son William falls in love with her. Then, after various longeurs, the novel suddenly jerks to life for a stompingly melodramatic ending. Fanny’s mother, it transpires, is not dead; and Fanny is reunited with her (a mysterious invalid called Ellen Lumley, preserved from the hangman's noose by an unlikely last-minute royal pardon.). She also learns that her would-be rapist Lord Preswick is her father ... ‘our readers are now informed that Lord Presville was the infamous, unprincipled man who, under the fictitious initials of Lord C— and Lord M— in the Convict’s narrative, seduced, deceived and abandoned that unhappy young woman’ [4:251]. When all this comes out, Presville has an unlikely change of heart and (very belatedly) proposes marriage to Ellen. But she rebukes him, and later dies ‘serene to the last moment’ [4:330] Fanny marries William Lascelles, and the various, numerous other characters are shuffled off with indecent haste (‘of the other characters introduced into this work,’ Parsons says, ‘we have but little to say', 4:340). The book concludes on a clanging note of moralizing: ‘the errors and wrongs of Ellen exemplify how wide spreading is vice, how dreadful its progress, and how awful in its termination! [4:350]. So that’s us told.

The Austen flavour is most evident in vol. 3, it must be said; and overall there’s little actual merit in the novel. Despite the nautical theme, Parsons is wholly uninterested in actual scenes at sea. There are a few less-than-convincing bits of naval slang right at the beginning (‘dash my buttons!’, 1:3 ‘Avast take care how you steer!’1: 35; ‘Young woman, you are upon a slippery fore-castle!’ 1:37), but the book swiftly becomes bored with all that and throws it over. Almost all the action has to do with the conversations, courtship and intrigue of polite society. But Parsons’ melodramatic instincts keep intruding, and dragging the novel down into absurdity. Still, it is at least possible that Austen read this novel, and that bits and pieces of it fed into her own imaginative creative life. Which seems to me a mildly interesting thing.

(PS: What does Parsons’ Fanny look like? ‘She was a clear brunette, an animated complexion, expressive dark grey eyes with long dark eye-lashes; an oval face, good teeth and fine hair … her nose might, by some, be thought rather too large, and her mouth not exactly a model of perfection, therefore, though every one who saw her, would pronounce her a very pretty genteel girl, she was not a beauty;—she was attractive, but not dazzling. [3:152] We might compare Austen’s Fanny: ‘she was small of her age, with no glow of complexion, nor any other striking beauty; exceedingly timid and shy, and shrinking from notice; but her air, though awkward, was not vulgar, her voice was sweet, and when she spoke her countenance was pretty’). Moral? Broadly sentimental: viz ‘misfortunes humanize the mind, and teach us to feel for others’ [3:264])

Eliza Parsons, The Mysterious Warning (1796)

2011-11-03T01:06:00.000-07:00

My second Parsons, and this is a little better than the later Peasant of the Ardenne Forest (1801)—still rubbish, basically, but with more going on. And actually there are enough similarities between the two novels to suggest that Parsons writes variations upon basically the same yarn: a virtuous hero traversing Europe and encountering various people made miserable by vice, with a particular emphasis upon a sexually depraved femme fatale who ends up stabbing herself. We might want to peg The Mysterious Warning as more actually Gothic, in the sense that it opens with an actual supernatural element. But it is otherwise the same mess of lubricious cod-morality and saggy, overheated goings-on.

The novel starts, strikingly, with old Count Renaud’s death. Here’s the first, characteristically ill-disciplined, sentence:

No sooner had the struggling soul escaped from the clay-cold body of Count Renaud, than his eldest son, Count Rhodophil, hastened to the library, and opened the secret cabinet, where his late father usually deposited his papers of consequence, after a strict examination of the contents, returned to the anti-chamber, on the floor of which lay extending his brother, the deeply-afflicted Ferdinand, just recovering from a fainting fit, and overwhelmed with inexpressible anguish.

In the spirit of W C Fields’ claim that nobody who hates children and animals can be all bad, I'm tempted to suggest that nobody capable of writing such a bad sentence can be beyond the pale, critically speaking. The people who compete to win the Bulwer Lytton prize by specifically inventing terrible opening sentences can hardly do better than this genuine example of 18th-century prose. Indeed, Parsons’ pile-em-on attitude to clauses in her sentence construction is revealing, I think, of a larger aesthetic flabbiness and, indeed, flappiness. Here’s the novel’s second sentence:

“Brother!” said Rhodophil, in an accent of grief and tenderness, “Brother! here is my father’s will, and I have little doubt but that you will find he was your father also, and that, however severely his resentment was expressed in his life-time, he has not extended it beyond the grave, nor forgotten, in the disposal of his effects, that he had a younger son, and a grandchild.”

That approach to prose, heaping clause on clause in an agglomerative fashion punctuated occasionally by the insertion of ‘oh, I forgot to mention...’ elements, is also Parsons’ approach to plot. So Count Renaud disinherited his son Ferdinand because he married without his permission. Rhodophil inherits all, and promises to look after his younger brother. Ferdinand accepts this promise gratefully, and launches himself into a brilliant military career, leaving his wife Claudina and kids in Rhodophil’s care. But returning on leave and eager to embrace Claudina, he hears a mysterious voice warning him “Fly, fly from her arms, as you would avoid sin and death!” [51]. In the event it is Claudina herself who runs away, absolving Ferdinand of his marriage vows on account of her ‘shame’ (though without going into specifics) and insisting ‘no clue will be found ... to trace me; I have taken measures too securely for any possibility of discovery.’ Ferdinand greets this news with: ‘I intend to ramble, I neither know nor care where, chance shall be my guide’ [60]. And ramble he does, as does the novel as a whole. Whichever army it was in which Ferdinand served evidently takes a pleasantly lackadaisical view of discipline, for nobody makes any fuss when he simply walks off.

Thereafter he visits a nunnery near the family castle in which Claudina, having taken measures too securely for any possibility of discovery, is immediately discovered, but from which she refuses to emerge (it later turns out that this is a case of mistaken identity). He also visits a ruined castle in which lives a gloomy aristocratic hermit, Baron S***, a name I found impossible not to read as ‘Baron Shit’. The Baron conveniently dies whilst Ferdinand is staying with him, and our young hero discovers the Baron’s wife Eugenia and her lover Count M*** locked in his dungeons. Eugenia had been forced into marriage with the Baron by her father, Count Zimchaw, but finding life with him intolerable had run off with her true love. But Baron Shit caught up with them, locked them away and murdered their servants to keep the secret safe. Eugenia is worn out by her long imprisonment—‘she appeared,’ Parsons prolixly says, ‘like a fine statue that had long been exposed to the injuries of time, and lost the beautiful polish that first adorned it; a most elegant form reduced to that delicate thinness which the slightest blast of air might dissolve;—a face, the contour of which was inexpressibly beautiful; but the roses and the lilies that once adorned it were all fled; the eyes hollow and sunk in the head, a sickly hue over the countenance, and a solemnity in every feature’ [144]. Off she goes, to a convent. The novel then lumps in a couple of other back-stories, separated by, as it were, narrative commas; after which Ferdinand accompanies the disappointed Count M*** (Ming? Mojo? Mongo?) to his castle in Suabia.

There's a great deal of rather clogging sub-plotting here, characters tangling emotionally with other characters, backstories, moralising and the like. Things pick up when Ferdinand and Count M*** are captured by Turks, imprisoned, freed, betrayed, ransomed, freed again and befriended by a chap named Heli. Heli's wife (I think she is) is called Fatima, and she turns out to be Ferdinand's half-sister, the product of an illicit relationship his father had undertaken a few years before Ferdinand's birth. Fatima runs off with a group of bandits and takes Heli's jewels with her. Ferninand later catches up with her, but she brazens it out and escapes, leaving her half-brother gobsmacked. '"Good heavens!" he exclaimed, "is it possible that woman, so soft, so lovely, so interesting in her gentleness, can, by vice and profligacy of manners, attain to such a degree of boldness and impudent bravery, as would shame the most hardened of mankind!' [316-17]. Apparently so. Vol 4 is a rather confusing tangle of plotlines, to be honest; although a burst of action near the end picks the pace up. Ferdinand gets a letter from his brother ('Life is ebbing fast; all hopes are over; if you ever wish to see me more, lose no time; set off directly; I have things of consequence to impart' 327). He sets off, gets shot on the way, yes, I said shot, is nursed to health by a hermit, and finally arrives back home. Then, with massive bathos, we discover that the mysterious warning was uttered not from beyond the grave, but by Ernest, Ferdinand's servant, who had eavesdropped on Rhodophil and Claudia's quasi-incestuous adultery and chose this way, rather than just, oh-I-don't-know telling Ferdinand directly about it, to communicate his misgivings. Rhodophil then dies, with some splendidly inadvertent comedy:

"Heaven have mercy on me!!!" Those were the last words he spoke. -- Violent convulsive hiccups soon came on, which drove the Countess and Ferdinand to their respective apartments, and in less than a quarter of an hour, the latter was informed the dreadful scene had closed!!! [364]

No such thing as too many exclamation marks in my book. Anyway, after Rhodophil has hiccoughed himself to death the shameless Fatima pops up again, insists her mother was legally married to Count Renaud, making her the rightful heir; but when this is disproved she 'snatched a dagger from her side' and 'plunged it into her own bosom' [386]. With the haste of a writer tired of her over complicated plotting, Parsons then ties-up all remaining loose ends in a handful of pages, marrying Ferdinand to Theresa (Claudia meanwhile having conveniently died in her nunnery) and various other characters to various others. Then, only too evidently heading out the door on her way somewhere more interesting, Parsons closes the novel with 'from the characters of Rhodophil and Fatima, we may trace the progression of vice, and its fatal termination! "Vice to be hated needs but to be seen." FINIS' The last bit, there, is a truncated couplet from Pope's Essay on Man ('Vice is a monster of so frightful mien,/As, to be hated, needs but to be seen'). Well, indeed.

***

Here's the page from Austen's Northanger Abbey (1817) in which Isabella Thorpe tells Catherine Morland that she absolutely must read 'horrid' Gothic novels:

Check the paragraph beginning 'I will read you their names...' You can see Mysterious Warning (incorrectly titled) nestling in the middle of that list, there; just after another Parsons title, Castle of Wolfenbach (1793). This throwaway mention ('but are they all horrid? are you sure they are all horrid?' 'Yes, quite sure') has rather overdetermined the reception of this novel, I fear. That's a pity, in a way, because horridness, even in the grander sense of 'liable to evoke a quasi-sublime emotion of horror' really isn't what makes Mysterious Warning interesting. The only supernatural element, the voice that appears at first to be Ferdinand's father speaking beyond the grave, turns out to have been Scooby Doo's janitor after all, who would have gotten away with too if it hadn't been for you meddling etc etc. More, Parsons goes out of her way to stress that Ferdinand has no truck with the occult ('Ferdinand ... had no fears of supernatural beings', 346). This is not a novel interested in ghosts and ghouls; but it is obsessive-compulsively fascinated by questions of parental authority and the right way for offspring to balance their personal desires and their familial duty.

The chief problematic (if it doesn’t overly dignify novel putting in those terms) that the text works through is sexual. More specifically, The Mysterious Warning is a novel absolutely crammed with bigamy and the threat of bigamy. The novel’s primal scene, as it were, is the love of two brothers for the same woman: Claudina marries Ferdinand, but when he is away in the army she has an affair with Ferninand’s brother Rhodophil. This dynamic is then repeated in the various interpolated tales: Eugenia married wicked Baron S***, but is also married to her true love, Count M***. Another nobleman Count Wolfram is engaged to Theresa, but has already secretly married Theresa’s schoolfriend Louisa, and thereafter marries a lady of means called Theodosia; this same Theodosia leaves Wolfram and, after sojourning in a convent for a while, goes off to marry a gentleman called Reiberg. Ferdinand himself is married to Claudina, is ‘released’ from his marriage vows by his wife on account of her own shame, and later marries Theresa. It’s all a bit hard to follow, but more than that, its bramble-tangle formally embodies the blockage as a nexus of illicit desire and intra-familial obsession that is the novel's real theme.

What's really going on here, I suspect, is Parsons working through, in more or less coherent ideological fashion, the anxieties of Revolution. The novel opens (or so it seems) with a conscious imitation of Hamlet, the father's ghost booming from beyond the grave ('swear!') and warning of the ruin necessarily attendant on the illicit passion of one brother for another brother's wife. This in turn revolves (of course) on the very grounds of the English Reformation itself, Henry VIII's decision to marry his brother's wife, and his subsequent desire to undo that, as he later saw it, sinful action. This led to the establishment of the Church of England, the ground of Parson's egregiously preachy moral code -- in this novel, as in Peasant there's a deal of stuff about wicked nuns and abbots -- and also one of the discursive vectors along which contemporary English reactions to the French Revolution were oriented. In its clumsy way, Mysterious Warning is asking far-reaching questions about the nature of social and political authority, and how far the power of parents should determine the life-choices of their offspring. Revolution is one way in which a society can break away from the (bad) authority of parents; but Parsons can't endorse anything so radical. Here, on the novel's penultimate page, is a rather hurried attempt at moral summing-up, with Parson's characteristic herky-jerky punctuation:

Generally speaking, those marriages, contracted contrary to the wishes of parents, influenced chiefly by transient personal charms, and hurried on by rash tumultuous passions, seldom fail to be productive of sorrow, regret and reproach -- perhaps of punishment and shame. -- We have only to add, that in less than three years after the marriage of Ferdinand, the once unfortunate, but then happy Eugenia, was translated from a state of resignation and piety, to a life of blessed immortality: -- From her melancholy story may be deduced two observations of equal importance to society: when a parent exercises an undue authority over his child, and compels her to give a reluctant hand without a heart; by giving his sanction in the outset to deception and perjury; he has little to expect but that the consequences will be fatal to her honour and happiness. [392]

It's stating the obvious to say that this is flatly contradictory (and that Parsons seems to forget the second of the 'two observations' she promises); more interesting is the way that this confusion is exactly the current of the novel as a whole. Thwarting to the authority of the (bad) older generation leads to sorrow, regret and reproach -- perhaps to punishment and shame. But so does submitting to that (bad) authority. Parsons' novel can't think itself out of this ideological double-bind. That's what's so fascinating about it.

And tomorrow? Tomorrow we unlock 1807's The Convict.

Eliza Parsons, The Peasant of Ardenne Forest (1801)

2011-11-02T01:01:00.000-07:00

Going off the beaten-track here, no question. For work-related reasons I've been reading a couple of Eliza Parsons' late 18th/early-19th-century Gothic or quasi-Gothic tales. Snap judgment: they're awful, but in quite interesting ways. (I might add: it'll be all Parsons here, for the rest of this week, so if the prospect of that bores you, you may wish to report back later)

Here's one: The Peasant of the Ardenne Forest (1801), available on Googlebooks for free at the other end of that link. Our eponymous hero, Lewis, is a humble Ardennes woodcutter. 'Nature,' we're told,

had been most truly bountiful to him in her gifts which were not simply confined to his person, for she had enriched his mind with a good understanding, a retentive memory, a genius that soared above the humble state of his birth and fortunes,--and with a heart, where honour, integrity, and every social virtue glowed with as much ardour as if he had been born a prince, and inherited nobility of sentiment from a long list of noble ancestors' [1:11]

This little passage is characteristic, embodying both the novel's larger theme (the staggering notion that individual virtue doesn't inevitably coincide with aristocratic lineage) and the novel's flabby, prolix style. The plot certainly takes a long time to unwind: Lewis gives shelter to an elderly man and his beautiful young daughter, Hermine; both of them noble though in distressed circumstances. To be honest, I couldn't work out if 'Hermine' is an actual name, or a Young Visiters-style spelling of 'Hermione'. Reading Parsons generally, I could certainly believe her capable of the latter incompetence. Anyway, Hermine's father quickly dies of old age (I think), and since she does not disclose her surname, and carries about with her a trunk of papers, there's some mild mystery associated with her. A local Abbess offers her shelter, although for purely mercenary reasons, believing her to be wealthy. Indeed much of vol. 1 is given over to not-unrepresentative 'nunneries are full of wickedness' narrative boilerplate typical of English Protestant writers of the nineteenth-century (go browse The Little Professor's blog if you doubt me: this post is a good starting point):

"The Lady Abbess will answer your insolent interrogatories," replied the enraged nun, "and to her you may refer yourself." Then seizing the arm of the trembling, shrinking novice she almost dragged her thro' the cloysters; -- and left Hermine surprised, provoked and excessively grieved. [1:221]

In vol 2 almost nothing happens. Well, Hermine befriends a young English girl called Fidelia, born out of wedlock and abandoned in the nunnery by her father, the well-to-do Mr Douglas; but the father turns up and reclaims her, and then takes on Lewis as a companion for his son Frederic. This youth, however, has 'corrupt principles', the result of 'a dissipated preceptor to whose care he had unfortunately been confided by a weak father' who had encouraged 'the ruin of the youth's morals and health, by a criminal indulgence of his irregularities' [2:136]. In what may be my favourite bit of the whole flabby novel, Fred makes a pass at Hermine, who rebukes him thus: 'with a cool bow she quitted the parlour, and left him to chew the cud of vexation' [2:147]. Ah, the cud of vexation! One of the staple diets of my own adolescent years. One interesting thing: Fidelia's mother, the dissipated Mrs Douglas, has been paralysed down one side as a consequence of indulging what Parsons coyly describes as 'those so-called pleasures'. But she gets better, and this is how:

Thus humbled by disease and neglect her temper grew every day more irritable and capricious ... But very soon after Mr Douglas left England she had been persuaded to try electricity, to which she had constantly objected, and had really found much benefit by it -- returning warmth had reanimated her side, and she could use her hand. [2:187]

The reanimating potential of electricity: interesting stuff in a pre-Frankenstein novel. It's part of contemporary therapuric discourse, of course, rather than SF; but still.

Anyhow, not to beat around the bush: Lewis accompanies young Douglas and another wicked fellow called De Preux to Florence, where his natural peasant vartue is tested by a number of temptations. There's a great deal of narratorial moralising -- 'how vitiated, depraved, and contemptible is the mind of man when once he gives himself up to dissipation, and becomes the slave of a vicious woman!' [2:264] and the like. By now we've reached vol 3, and still almost nothing is happening. Lewis sees through the evil De Preux, who stabs him with a stiletto, though not fatally. Young Douglas falls ill, and is redeemed from his evil ways. Lewis meets Hermine's aunt, Lady Somerset, and learns her back story. There's some patriotic reinforcement of the natural superiority of the English ("Brave, sincere, liberal and munificent!" "Such I believe is their reputation in most countries, and I would have respect and esteem for the British character be impressed upon your mind." 3:151), and Parsons iterates and reiterates at tedious length her main point, viz. the innate virtue of Lewis: '"I am really astonished," said her Ladyship, "at the manners and understanding of that young man. -- Nature has done more for him than high birth and a finished education with many of our modern young men of fashion."' [3:188] The scene shifts to London. The beautiful but wicked Countess Eleanora kidnaps Lewis with a view to depraving him, but he resists her blandishments -- somewhat after the manner of Joseph Andrews, though without Fielding's humour or irony or, you know, ability actually to write:

Mean time the ci-devant Countess whose passions, naturally violent, had risen almost to the degree of frenzy, who, for the first time in her life, had conceived a most fervent attachment for Lewis and had flattered herself that the seducing charms of her person, the fortune she possessed and the blanishments of love, would, altogether, allure the affections and gratify the vanity of a low born, obscure young man, [was] maddened by her disappointment. [4:24]

When reading passages like this I like to imagine that Lewis looks exactly like Lewis from the Inspector Morse TV series. But, really, Vols 3 and 4 drag dreadfully. Then there's a flurry of action a little before the end: Eleanora tries to shoot Hermine, assuming (erroneously) her to be a rival for Lewis's affections ('"Seize her!--seize her this moment!" cried Lord Somerset ... Fidelia shrieked and fainted. "No, no," said Lewis, in an agony. "O! for Heaven's sake keep behind me -- let me receive the ball!" [4:257]). Eleanora is disarmed, and various characters preach at her for many pages ('shameless woman, a disgrace to your sex, I wave all delicacy with such a wretch!'). Eleanora stabs herself in the chest, receives medical treatment, has fits, and after 60 pages of padding it out, dies. Finally Lewis marries Fidelia -- a middle-class female being more appropriate bridal material for him than the upper class Hermine I suppose, despite his passion for her, and despite Parsons' inerminable stress upon his actual virtues. But Hermine buys him an estate, and effectively raises him in rank. So that's alright then.

---

I called this novel bad but interesting. In what does the interest, then, lie? Not in the overheated, poorly managed frantic intriguing love-storying, silver-forkish travel narrative, or the occasional flurries of what Parsons fondly imagines are 'excting action.' Rather it is the way Parsons sets herself an explicit moral about class and then cannot live up to it.

The novel opens with ‘a very tempestuous day, followed by a violent story, for several hours during the night’. Lewis reports that ‘“The Abbey and Convent,” said he, “ingulphed as they are in the bosom of a thick wood, have little to fear from the violence of the tempest ... But I fear the remaining part of the old Castle is entirely demolished; its battlements are doubtless thrown down’ [1:4]. This suggests the novel will establish vaguely liberal post-French Revolution bona fides; religion will survive ‘the storm’, but the castle will not—the old oppressions of class will be swept away, but the Rousseauian nobility of the common man (in this French forest) will stem the destructive potential of terror. So Lewis goes to see what has happened to the Castle—and the storm has left it untouched (‘great was his surprise when he beheld at a distance the turrets of the castle peeping over the trees’, 1:5). This odd little narrative cul-de-sac is actually symbolic of the novel’s larger ideological knot: for this is a text that asserts, repeatedly and tediously, that the humble Ardennes peasant Lewis has the honourable nature of a prince; but nevertheless it cannot let go of the idea that honour is actually a function of nobility and breeding. Lewis’s homely virtue is talismanic as he travels around Europe, but almost all the other characters are noble. Aristocratic vice is largely a matter of sexual delinquency, the larger system is fine as it is, and Lewis’s is rewarded after the manner of a lower-rent Richardsonian Pamela by being elevated by marriage and an aristocratic gift of land, to the respectable classes. To say that the book lacks the courage of its convictions would be to suggest that it has convictions. The truth is that Parson’s one idea—a member of the proletariat may be virtuous—is swamped by the larger infatuation with the structures of money, status and class. In this respect it seems to me superbly revealing of a specifically British, or perhaps English, response to the French Revolution—less politically reaction than Burke and his tribe, but very far from being able to sympathise with the levelling principles behind the undertaking.

Tomorrow: The Mysterious Warning. Oo-er!

Anthony Burgess, ABBA ABBA (1977)

2011-11-01T01:42:00.000-07:00

English Keats dies in Rome, over 80 densely vivid pages. Then, over forty more (what a shame it couldn't have been sixty), we encounter a clutch of sonnets by Roman poet Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli.

The second volume of Burgess's autobiography, You've Had Your Time, includes an account of Keatsian quasi-haunting (Burgess himself calls it 'psychic'). Burgess was asked to read aloud from Keats's poems inside the Rome building where the poet died: 'Reciting the odes, I became aware of a kind of astral wind, a malevolent chill, of a soul chained to the place where the body died, of a silent malignant laughter that mocked not my reading but the poems themselves.' On another occasion, working on a programme for Canadian TV, Burgess returned to the steps outside that house and read out Keats's sonnet "When I Have Fears That I May Cease To Be." He insists that during the course of this brief reading the weather changed completely from a clear sunny sky to a thundrous, stormy downpour that drowned out the words. By way of explanation, Burgess claims not to be "imputing a demonic vindictiveness" to Keats's soul, although doesn't repudiate the idea that the young poet's 'fierce creative energy', thwarted by death, in some sense haunts the house where he died. But it occurs to me that we need not take this sort of thing any more literally than any of the other things in Burgess's unreliable memoirs; but it pinpoints two useful things -- one, that there is something haunting, something hard to rid oneself of, about Keats's poetry (we could go further and suggest that that something, as in this novella, has to do with the uncanny superposition of sexual desire and death); and two, that this haunting is not benign.

ABBA ABBA strikes me as a characteristically good, though small-scale Burgessian achievement. The historical recreation is surprisingly lively, in the sense of avoiding musty cardboardness in the way it disposes of its research into living prose. Keats and Belli feel real, as are some of the characters who cluster around them: Keats's friends Joseph Severn and Lieutenant Elton; Pauline Napoleon, the deposed Emperor's sister. But there's also a fictional character, Giovanni Gulielmi ('John Wilson', Burgess's real name, of course), who translates Keats's sonnets into bad prosaic Italian, and who introduces Belli to Keats in the novel. In real life the two poets almost certainly never met, which is to say that Giovanni Gulielmi performs, in the logic of the novel -- bringing Keats and Belli together -- the same task that 'John Wilson' performs by actually writing the novel. There's also an element of 'what-if?' about the imagining -- like Andrew Motion's 2003 novella The Invention of Dr Cake (which parses the 'what if Keats never died?' question), this short novel flirts with alternate history, particularly in the second section, where Gulielmi's family tree diverts into an alt-Anthony-Burgess, born one year before the real one, having a roughly parallel though less literarily productive life (including a stinging run-in with the critic Geoffrey Grigson, a real life enemy of Burgess and here rather coyly referred to as 'G--y G--n') and a death in New York at the hands of muggers.

The title, as countless reviewers and critics (including Burgess himself, both in his autobiography and, oh, in this very novel itself, p.81) is (a) the rhyme scheme of the octave of the Petrarchan sonnet, and (b) the Aramaic for 'father father', which is to say, the words Christ yelled on the cross. It's also, of course, Burgess's initials, set out, then reversed (as if in recognition of the more Scroogey element in Wilson's own makeup) twice. "Abba Abba" is also the epitaph on Burgess's marble memorial stone, behind which the vessel with his remains is kept, in Monte Carlo. One problem with the 'father, father' conceit is that there are no fathers in the novel, either actual or Papal (designedly, I suppose: Burgess brings forward Belli's appointment as Roman censor for dramatic purposes, he could just as well have brought forward the 1824 birth of Belli's son). Father, we intuit, is not worked-through here in familial or biological ways, but it rather a formal and textual quantity, the crucifiction cry rendered, bathetically, into the chant of a theatre audience 'author! author!' Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say: form itself becomes the father of art, and the actual subject of this narrow, carefully worked text. Here's A S Byatt, from her introduction to a 2000 reprint of the novel:

In an essay published in 1967, in a collection entitled The God I Want, Burgess typically conducted his argument as a dialogue between two speakers, in this case "Anthony" and "Burgess". "Anthony", the sceptical voice, interviews "Burgess" who confesses to believing in a God whom he compares to mathematics, to grammar, and to the score of a symphony. Not, he says, the composer. The score, the notation, the form itself of the symphony, the potential experience of coherence and beauty. Like, he might have added, the sonnet form. Elsewhere, he said that his God did exist, but was like a Beethoven symphony eternally playing itself to itself, unconcerned with human plights.

The danger, I suppose, is that this works out in practice as a kind of watery Platonism. Here's Burgess's dying Keats:

He had one dream or vision that shocked him at first with a sense of blasphemy, though it must be a sense borrowed from Severn, since he who did not believe could not well blaspheme. Christ pendebat from his cross and cried ABBA ABBA. Now John knew that this was the Aramaic for father father, but he knew better that it was the rhyme scheme of a Petrarchan sonnet octave. It came to him thus that the sonnet form might subsist above language, but he did not see how this was possible. Language itself was perhaps only a ghost of the things in the outer world to which it adhered, and a ghost of a ghost was a notion untenable totally. And yet it seemed that two men, of language mutually unintelligible, might in a sense achieve communication through recognition of what a sonnet was. Belli and himself, for instance. Then breathing became a craft to be craftily learnt again, a matter of catching the gods of unbreathing off their guard.

The shift from a vague sense of the mystical ultimate formal reality of art to an emphasis on translation perhaps saves this. In the novel Guliemi translates Keats, Keats translates Belli, Belli translates 'official' Italian into Roman dialect, and (of course) Anthony Burgess translates a clutch of actual Belli sonnets. And the way the novel captures the sense of Keats's actual death as a process of relentless diminution that is both well written and moving:

St Valentine's Day came, and with it Valentino Llanos to announce he would go to England soon. Then a week passed and two more days, and John knew his dying day had come, yet to achieve death might be a day's hard labour. Severn held him, as it were carrying him to the gate, but he could not bear Severn's laboured breathing, for it struck like ice. To put off the world outside – the children's cries, snatches of song, a cheeping sparrow, the walls and the wallpaper and the chairs that thought they would outlast him but would not, the sunlight streaking the door – was not over-difficult. A bigger problem was to separate himself from his body – the hand worn to nothing, the lock of hair that fell into his eye, even the brain that scurried with thoughts and words and images. It took long hours to die.

"I'm. Sorry. Severn. My weight. "

"Nothing, it's nothing, rest now. "

He tried to give up breathing, to yield to the breathless gods, but his body, worn out as it was, would not have that. It pumped in its feeble eggspoons of Roman air, motes in the sun and all, but there seemed to be nothing in his body to engage the air. The afternoon wore on to evening and his brain was fuddled and he groped for the essence he had called I. It fell through his fingers.

"John. John. "

There was nothing there to make any answer. Severn dropped the body to the bed and the body gave out some teaspoons of fluid and a final sigh.

The quiet house became busy. The apartment was stripped of everything, and the children gaped at the carts outside in the piazza, on to which furniture, rugs, rolls of stripped off wallpaper were piled, to be taken off for the burning. Signora Angeletti presented a bill. "I have money enough, fear not, madam, " Severn said. "Only enough, but enough. " The plates and cups they had used, these he smashed with his cane, smashed and smashed while Signora Angeletti cried, "Accidenti."

This latter word is unobtrustive enough in its double referent, the Aristotelian/Catholic hint that only Keats's somatic accidents have died, that his spiritual substance continues, not to be clanging. And the thinness of the dying poet is parleyed into the slenderness of this novel.

Enough for now: at some future point I'll engage with Colin Burrow's interesting, kind-of perceptive and yet, I feel, somehow massively point-missing LRB essay on Burgess. It's about time Burgess's bright star began to wax again.

David Lodge, A Man of Parts (2011)

2011-10-25T00:41:00.000-07:00

Here's a younger David Lodge (quoted in Malcolm Bradbury's The Modern British Novel 1878-2001):

This rising self-consciousness was one remarkable quality of mainstream British fiction over the Sixties; we can justly say a significant rediscovery of the novel and its possibilities was now occurring ... But where was it leading? The novelist, David Lodge famously said in 1969, now stood at the crossroads: 'the pressure on the aesthetic and epistemological premises of literary realism is now so intense that many novelists, instead of marching confidently straight ahead, are at least considering two routes that branch off in opposite directions', one towards neo-documentary, fiction as history, history as fiction; the other towards fabulation. [411]

There's never been any doubt in my heart that the latter is the right way to go; but Lodge, having made his name with a string of successful Campus novels (Changing Places: A Tale of Two Campuses, 1975; Small World: An Academic Romance, 1984; Nice Work, 1988 and the underrated Thinks ..., 2001) appears to have decided on the former. Author, Author (2004) was a carefully researched facto-novel about Henry James; Deaf Sentence (2008) a fictional autobiography about Lodge's own experience losing his hearing, lightly dusted with a sort-of-thriller plot; and this year's A Man of Parts, though subtitled 'A Novel'. is actually a scrupulously researched biography of H. G. Wells. The two main narrative strategies are, on the first hand, a process of docudramatisation of Wells's life as narrative; and on the other, a slightly stiff notional interview between Wells and an unnamed individual who poses question in bold type. Conceivably this is Wells's own conscience. I'm not entirely sure and can't remember if the novel makes it plain. Anyway, much of the book concerns Wells relentless pursuit of sex (hence the parts, private in nature, dangling about the book's title); although various other aspects of the public Wells gets handled (oo-er! 'handled'!) here -- lots on his early life; a great chunk about his engagement with the Fabians -- indeed, there's something a touch distorting about the centrality Lodge gives this episode to Wells's larger biography, I think -- and some interesting material on his later life as a world-famous man.

I interviewed Lodge (and, as it happens, Steven Baxter) at the British Library over the summer. Despite his deafness, and thanks in part to a very cool advanced-tech hearing aid, he was fluent, eloquent and on the ball. The novel itself is consummately crafted, and full of fascinating detail, without ever, quite, coming alive. I wonder if, in some sense, this has to do with the way this is a novel that goes down route A, in 1969-Lodge's fork in the road, even though it is about an individual whose most important contribution to world culture was the way he paved route B. I asked Lodge why he concentrated in this novelmentary on Wells's non-SF life -- his politicing, Fabianising, New Women novels and other mainstream writing. SF gets mentioned (as how could it not?) but you get the impression that Lodge really does prefer Ann Veronica and Boon and Mr Britling Sees It Through -- I was surprised to see this last title get such a resounding endorsement ('Whatever you say, Mr Britling Sees It Through was a good novel. Britling lives' [478] ... really?). His answer, whilst conceding the influence the SF has had, was basically that these were the Wells novels that intrerested him. Wells's life is full of fascinating busy-ness, but despite its high fucking quotient, and its interpolated Wells/Conscience interviewing, the focus here remains public and exterior, as neodocumentary surely must. It lacks the element of fabulation that might have enabled it to do what metaphor can do, and what factuality rarely can, howsoever scrupulously pursued -- infused the Frankenstein spark into the monster and have it lurch to life.

Alastair Reynolds, Blue Remembered Earth (2012)

2011-10-22T00:25:00.000-07:00

This isn't published until next year, so a detailed review from me now would be premature. But I have read it, and if you are asking the question 'should I be looking forward to this one?' then I can answer: yes. Yes, you should.

One hundred and fifty years from now, in a world where Africa is the dominant technological and economic power, and where crime, war, disease and poverty have been banished to history, Geoffrey Akinya wants only one thing: to be left in peace, so that he can continue his studies into the elephants of the Amboseli basin. But Geoffrey's family, the vast Akinya business empire, has other plans. After the death of Eunice, Geoffrey's grandmother, erstwhile space explorer and entrepreneur, something awkward has come to light on the Moon, and Geoffrey is tasked - well, blackmailed, really - to go up there and make sure the family's name stays suitably unblemished. But little does Geoffrey realise - or anyone else in the family, for that matter - what he's about to unravel. Eunice's ashes have already have been scattered in sight of Kilimanjaro. But the secrets she died with are about to come back out into the open, and they could change everything. Or shatter this near-utopia into shards . . .

The utopian, or neartopian, world is well-handled, actually: believable and engaging. Here's the thing: utopia, by definition (by dissolving away the conventional obstacles and conflicts that inform 'drama') is often the enemy of an engaging, exciting read. But somehow Reynolds (and thinking back, I'm really not sure how he does pulls this off) manages not to get bogged down by that at all. His future solar system is managed by a benign surveillance AI called the 'aug'; crime and disease are rarities -- yet Blue Remembered Earth still somehow construes a genuinely gripping mystery/crime/chase thriller out of this world without it feeling forced. The best thing about the fact that almost all (or possibly, I'm not sure, actually all) the characters are people of colour is the way this fact is simply a feature of the novel's future world, unshowboated and unremarked. There's plenty of ingenious gosh-wow and hmm-cool, and above all the plot is, as ever with Reynolds, disgustingly readable. The worst you could say is that there's the slight whiff of Nancy Drew about the trail-of-crumbs clues and mystery portion -- a sense (not unpleasurable) that the reader is being manipulated along the steps of the solution in order to provide the Cooks Tour of this particular Reynoldsworld. But the pay-off, which could have been anticlimactic, worked very well; and the whole thing is just an extremely accomplished piece of writing.

On Awards

2011-10-21T00:23:00.000-07:00

:1:
So the 2011 Awards season is almost over. ‘Hello adam,’ commented the almost-certainly-not-a-spambot “goals” yesterday: ‘some words about the booker prize?’ What was it Hamlet said? Words, words, words. There's no shortage of them. In sooth, to switch plays, I know not why I am so unmoved by the Man Booker this year. Most years I read the entire shortlist. This year – not a one. Couldn’t muster the interest. I suppose I will read Barnes’s winning title, Sense of an N-Dubz, at some point. At the moment, having sat in one of those comfy chairs in a bookshop for half an hour browsing a copy, I can say: it looks slight, not merely in terms of length: well-written but essayistic. Maybe it is the single best novel published this year. Maybe not. More likely, I think, is that this award represents recognition for Barnes’s whole career, a sort of long service medal. The Booker has form for this: nobody would nowadays place 1998’s Amsterdam amongst McEwan’s best or even better books; it certainly wasn’t the best novel published in 1998. Similarly, by all accounts (and by ‘by all accounts’ I mean: according to something I read when I used to teach a course on the prize, but which I can’t locate at the moment) the judges were upfront that giving the prize to 2000’s The Blind Assassin, one of Margaret Atwood’s stodgier books, had more to do with her larger reputation than the novel itself. And giving last year’s prize to Howard Jacobson for the actively bad The Finkler Question (the worst book on that year’s shortlist, never mind questions of larger merit) was surely motivated by a sense of: ‘it’s about time we gave some formal recognition to Jacobson’ than anything else. It may look, from inside the judges’ eyrie, a safer bet: at least nobody can deny that Barnes and Atwood are writers of stature. In those years when the prize tries to live by the good-wine-needs-no-bush mantra it as often as not goes embarrassingly wrong, rewarding lightweight, mediocre novels by newcomers like The White Tiger or Vernon God Little (this latter surely the most meager work of fiction ever to win a major prize). Still, it’s a letdown when weak novels win prizes, whatever the reason.

I'm more interested, personally, in SFF award-dom; which, this year, has been all a-kerfuffle. The 2011 British Fantasy Award collapsed in ignominy and recrimination, and is now being painstakingly rebuilt from the ground up. In another part of the forest, the 2011 Hugo went to two Connie Willis books that (taken together or separately) were, or are, not especially good. This wasn’t a catastrophic award—like the year the Campbell went to Ben Bova’s execrable Titan (again, I presume, for reasons of long service to SF: it would be more than sane mind could cope with the thought that the prize was awarded for the merits of the novel itself). Having just read the Willis (I was sent it to review) I'd say it’s certainly not actively bad, in that way; but it is flabby and ill-disciplined, a bit tedious and a bit self-indulgent. And, really, it isn't the best non-realist novel in the world.

I’ll come back to the Hugos in a minute, but I want to pause for a moment to say something about prizes more generally. The on-going British Fantasy Society kerfuffling is largely centred on reforming the voting protocols. It’s clear why that's so, and it’s a commendable thing; but it’s not, I think, at the heart of what went wrong. Similarly, when people criticize the Hugo awards, they are sometimes accused of criticizing the people who voted for the Hugo awards—the logic seems clear, there, but it’s misleading. Really, that's not the point. Then again, when an award-winning novel is greeted with anything other than unanimous rapture, the canard is brought out of its canard sheath and waved about: taste is subjective. If I say that Ben Bova’s Titan is a bad book and somebody else thinks it was the best novel published in 2007, then perhaps our dissonant opinions represent a Lyotardian differend that can never be reconciled. Live and let live. Bollocks to that.

Now, aesthetic judgment is not an exact science, and sometimes the toss can genuinely be argued. But here’s the elephant in the room: the most contentious decisions, award-wise, are usually the ones where the wrong book is given the prize. As to what the ‘right’ book is, in any given situation: well, there will be a number of possibles. But too often the book that is chosen is not one of these.

This very rarely (if at all) happens, I think, for reasons of corruption or delinquency, certainly in SFF, where fans really do care about their genre. But it does happen nonetheless, and for a number of reasons. Fandom tends to distort distinterested objective judgment: when an author of whom one is a fan puts out a sub-par book, the fact that one is a fan of that author can lead one to an inflated assessment of the book’s merits. Tribal allegiance makes this worse, bedded-in by the mild siege mentality that is (we can be honest) precisely one of the appeals of being a genre fan—for when the ‘mainstream literary culture’ flies over us like the Luftwaffe, we inside the urbs of Truefandom can generate a really excellent Blitz spirit, as many a jolly con attests.

Let me put it another way. Giving a prize to a novel is, in effect, trying to second-guess posterity. If I say ‘this book is great’ I may be talking about my idiosyncratic taste. If I say 'Dune is a classic of postwar American SF' I'm not. Indeed, if we look at the result of the 1966 Hugo -- joint winners Frank Herbert's Dune and Roger Zelazny's ...And Call Me Conrad, it is no disparagement of Zelazny (a very interesting writer, who has written several enduring novels) to say: one of those books has been endorsed by posterity in a way that the other hasn't. And this is the nub of my point: what matters about an award is not how it arrives at its decision. What matters is the extent to which its decision is posterity-proof.

And actually, I'd say SFF has proven itself pretty sound when judged by that criterion. We might, I suppose, look back and think ‘well, broadly speaking I’d say Phil Dick (say) should probably have won more awards, and Robert J Sawyer (say) fewer’, but scrolling down the lists of Hugo, Nebula and Clarke winners from the last century—far enough ago for us to begin to get a sense of how posterity is settling with respect to the books’ longer term reputations—is to encounter a list of, mostly, actual classics.

Two further things occur to me. One is that, as far as making one’s decision posterity proof goes, you’re generally better selecting a book by a newbie—because then the people making the decision, not having the reputation of the author to fall back on, are more likely to be guided by the actual merit of the book. China Miéville was a relative unknown ten years ago; yet his 2001 Clarke Award for Perdido Street Station was clearly the right call; and now we'd all agree it's a modern genre classic. It’s far too early to say whether posterity will endorse Lauren Beukes’ 2011 Clarke award—though I’d say there’s a good chance—but I’d much rather see the judges going with a newer writer on the merits of the novel than give the prize to one of the genre old guard on the grounds that ‘it’s about time so-and-so won a prize'. The other thing that occurs to me is this: I wonder if popular votes, rather than juried awards, actually have a slightly better posterity-convergence than juried awards. It’s hard to demonstrate this, statistically; although the wisdom of crowds—assuming one believes in such a thing—might lead one to expect it. In the 80s the Clarke went to books like George Turner’s The Sea and the Summer and Rachel Pollack’s Unquenchable Fire--good books, both, but, really, without the staying power in terms of long-term reputation of some of the BSFA Best Novel awards from the same decade (I’m thinking of Aldiss’s Helliconia books, Gene Wolfe’s Shadow of the Torturer or Holdstock’s Mythago Wood). Still, this is starting to get mushily subjective, so I’ll come back to my main point. Which is this: really, and in the longer term, ‘the process by which you arrive at your decision’ matters much less than whether or not you pick the right novel. The path by which the BFS arrived at their best novel award this year was dodgy, and that’s regrettable; but a bigger deal is putting the weight of fandom behind the idea that Demon Dance is the best non-realist novel published this year. One need not think it a bad novel to say: it’s not that.

:2:
When I was a whippersnapper, snapping my whippers and hoovering up SF, a Hugo award for best novel or best short story really did work as a bellwether. It meant I would seek out the text in question and read it. But it's been a long time since the prize has influenced my reading like that. For some years after that I was barely even aware of the shortlists and winners. Then, in 2009 I read a sizeable portion of the Hugo shortlists. I did this because I was booked to appear on a panel about the prize, at Swecon in, er, Sweden, and wanted to be minimally prepared for the discussion. I was underwhelmed by what I read, largely speaking. Indeed, I blogged the lowness of my general whelm; a post to which some people added comments deploring what I said, and some others added comments of the 'very useful info and great post, I like it so much because it's a unique article and easy to remember for me' type. Sadly for me, the latter comments were generally from such knowledgeable and dedicated SF fans as 'penisenlargement4men' and 'Freearcadegames'. Still; who’s to say that, after the robot revolution, those won't be the blog-commentators that really count? Anyway, John Scalzi, whose followers number in the millions, responded to my post. He was classy enough to refrain from slagging me off personally (despite the fact I called his Hugo-shortlisted novel 'mediocre'), although he did don the Jeremiah mantle to assure me that criticising those fans who voted for the Hugo was biting the hand that fed me and would result in the short-order death of my career as a writer of SF. Something that has, of course, subsequently come to pass. There's more than a difference in writerly temperament at work here, I think; however much (and with what undeniable success) Scalzi has filtered his genuine wit and charm through a Mr Rogers 'I want to be your friend' idiom; and however much I have sacrificed my dignity and sales to the idol of being Johnny Rotten at the Winterland Ballroom, San Francisco, jeering at the crowd 'you ever get the feeling you've been cheated?' We all have our crazy Fitzcarraldo-type dreams, after all; and nobody is going to deny that Scalzi is a much more successful writer than I am. Indeed, after I posted that 'Hugos 2009' piece several people emailed me saying in effect 'you realise, don't you, that by posting that you've completely scuppered your chances of ever winning a Hugo yourself?' These messages surprised me very much: for this thought had literally never occurred to me -- not because I assumed Hugo voters would have saint-like powers of forgiveness, or that I have ever forgotten the truth of Auden's lines about those to whom evil is done and what they do in return. But for a more fundamental reason: because it had never occurred to me that I ever could have won a Hugo. I can go further, actually, and state without fear of contradiction: I never was going to win a Hugo. Posting negative thoughts about the prize made no difference to that. I could have posted a whole string of positive blog essays, I could have praised both Hugos winners and Hugo-voters to that place in the skies where the air goes indigo, and it would have made absolutely no difference to my chances of winning a Hugo. There are many reasons for this; and many writers (some of them far better than I) of whom it is true. Certainly I have a very low US profile; I am not (those two quantities that tip the balance in the voters' minds) well-known and well-liked amongst typical Worldcon attendees. I suppose it was a little naive assuming that this, which seemed so obvious to me, would also be obvious to people reading my post. Some accused me of being motivated by sour grapes. I can promise you; my Hugo grapes are entirely free of sour. I no more fret about my chances of winning a Hugo than I fret about my chances of winning a 2012 Olympic gold medal in the womens’ shot-put.

Anyway, this year there was a lot of reaction to the Hugo announcement (Strange Horizons links to a few of these here). Some people were happy, and rather more were disappointed. My sense of it is that, broadly speaking, this year’s winners are not of a very high standard. That may strike you as a terribly condescending thing to say. John Scalzi thinks it is -- or rather, thinks that suchlike sentiments, generally speaking, are:

Post-Hugo Kvetching: Meh. There’s always post-Hugo kvetching, for the same reason there’s pre-Hugo kvetching, which is, people like to kvetch, and/or they have a hard time internalizing that their own tastes are not in fact an objective standard of quality. I do think there’s a core of commenters whose problem internalizing that other people have other tastes is overlaid with a more-than-mild contempt for fandom, i.e., “Oh, fandom. You’ve shown again why you can’t be trusted to pick awards, you smelly, chunky people of common tastes, you.” Fandom does what fandom does with folks like that: it ignores them, which I think is generally the correct response to such wholly unwarranted condescension. But if people want to gripe, however they want to gripe, it’s their call. Point is, yes, people are bitching about the Hugo results. When do they not?

When do they not? I didn't, last year. Actually I thought last year's Hugo results were pretty good, the tied best novel award to Mièville and Bacigalupi in particular (and I said so, in The Guardian; a venue with a rather larger readership than my blog). But that didn't register, and I'm not surprised. Negative criticism touches us in ways positive doesn't. Nevertheless, to Scalzi's two reasons for kvetching about the Hugos, 'people like to kvetch' and 'people have a hard time internalizing that their own tastes are not in fact an objective standard of quality', we are, I think, entitled to add a third: people kvetch when the books and stories winning a prize that describes them as the best in the world aren't very good. Putting such a case is neither unwarranted (on the contrary: the health of the genre depends upon it); nor is it condescending. Aesthetic criticism includes grounds for judgment that go beyond 'I like this, you like that, there's nothing more that can be said'. Damien Walter challenged Scalzi on the 'condescending' line, in a post which seems to me worth reading, not least for a comment by Jonathan McAlmont (you probably know him best from his performing days as part of 'McAlmont and Butler') which is, I think, very well put:

SF Fandom is an affinity group and many of its institutions were created at a time when the realities of technology, culture and geography meant that if you wanted to talk to people about written SF then you went to places like Worldcon and if you wanted to write SF you joined the SFWA. Because of this, the Hugo and Nebula awards carry a good deal of cachet.

Fast forward forty years and we live in a world where it is easy to talk to other people with an interest in SF: All you need to do is set up a twitter account or a blog and away you go. Because talking about SF no longer requires these big centralising institutions, the field has fragmented into dozens of more-or-less interconnected tribes. Many of whom have never been to a Worldcon.

Despite the fundamental structure of the field having changed, the concentrations of social capital in the older sections of the fan community mean that venerable awards like the Hugos and the Nebulas still carry a good deal of cachet. Cachet completely disconnected from their capacity to represent a more and more disjointed and multicultural field.

The sound that Scalzi is hearing is the tiny groan emitted by every science fiction fan who looks at the Hugos and sees no connection to their experience of either the genre or the field.
When challenged on the increasing self-marginalisation of the Hugos, defenders (such as Scalzi) speak of bitterness, condescension and jealousy but the truth is far simpler: The Hugos have made no effect to keep up with changes in the field and so they are becoming increasingly irrelevant with every passing year.

The tragedy of this is that the Hugos are a social institution created before many of us were born. They were nurtured by a generation of fans and passed along to those who came after them as an act of trust. Great institutions are never owned by the generation that controls them, they are simply held in trust. By failing to update the awards, retreating behind bureaucratic barriers and shouting down anyone who complains, the current generation have done their best to destroy something that should have been held in trust for the fans of tomorrow.
I am neither condescending nor disappointed. I am disgusted.

My gust isn't quite as dis as that. But it seems to me that there are a couple of structural pitfalls where awards are concerned. One is the move from 'eligible titles' to shortlist to winner. It's probably a necessary thing, that; it spreads the recognition around a little, and more importantly it breaks the difficult task of 'picking one novel from hundreds' into more manageable chunks. But it contains its own difficulties: for once the shortlist is decided we stop thinking 'I'm choosing the best book published this year' and start thinking 'I'm choosing the best book out of these six titles'. With that comes a relaxation, which in turn makes it easier to justify to oneself the elision that results in Julian Barnes winning the fucking Man Booker prize for a fine-brush bone-china elegant squib of a novelette -- because, I suppose, it's easier to say to oneself 'Barnes deserves it; maybe the other shortlisted titles are better, but they have at least the satisfaction of having been shortlisted so no great injustice is perpetrated by overlooking them' and 'all six shortlisted titles are great books, so there's no harm in going for any one rather than any other' and so on. You forget, in other words, that telling the world 'The Sense of an Ending is the best book published this year' is also, tacitly, telling Alan Hollinghurst, or China Miéville, or whomsoever 'comparatively speaking your book sucks'. And if you're going to do that, you'd better be sure you have a good case. My gut: both The Strangers Child and Embassytown will still be current in ten years time (who can say whether The Sense of an Annoying "Ding!" will? When I've read it, I'll report back).

So, what am I saying? I'm saying that award judges, or voters, need to believe, or at least to suspend their disbelief, that it is meaningful to talk of the best book of the year -- to think not that you are making purely subjective and arbitrary decisions but on the contrary are engaged in a worthwhile and a possible attempt to get the drop on posterity. It can be done. And that's quite enough of the auld kvetching from me for now, I think.

Kenneth Ingram, The Symbolic Island (1924)

2011-10-20T06:08:00.000-07:00

Here's John Clute, from the newly-gone-live Science Fiction Encyclopedia (Third Edition), on Ingram:

INGRAM, KENNETH. (1882-1965) UK barrister, lay theologian, and author of some novels in the field of the fantastic, including two fantasies: The Symbolic Island: A Novel (1924), an abstractly mystical tale; and Midsummer Sanity (1933), in which Faerie and mortal Earth intersect at the summer solstice, at which point the denizens of the former convey wisdom to the denizens of the latter. Of sf interest are England at the Flood Tide (1924), which espouses a UTOPIAN Britain in which natural aristocrats rule a willing populace, and women have property rights; and The Premier Tells the Truth (1944), in which a truth DRUG causes fruitful disarray in the distant NEAR FUTURE. The Coming Civilization Will it be Capitalist? Will it be Materialist? (1935) is a nonfiction speculation.

I discover that Ingram died precisely two days before I was born, so no overlap there. Phew! And of course, you know about the new online SFE3? If not, then haste to the site. There's good browsing there, as well as the answer to almost all SF-related questions.

Still, 'an abstractly mystical tale' isn't right for this novel (I picked up a copy in a Bracknell charity shop). It's much more specific and sciencefictional than that; and although it is certainly over-schematic and, frankly, not very good, it does have some interesting moments. So, a group of varied characters -- amongst them a middle-aged Civil Servant, a Capitalist, a retired Colonel, a Vicar (and his wife), a journalist with Socialist sympathies, and a philosopher -- are holidaying on a pleasant island off the coast of Cornwall. The neighbouring island, Tresala, houses the experimental laboratories of industrialist Lord Steinher, where is being developed a new super-weapon that, we're told, will 'revolutionise war'. As the novel starts Steinher himself is visiting the holiday island and is away from his labs, which is lucky for him, because a few pages in Tresala blows up ('a deafening thunder, a blinding crash, a convulsion ... the island of Tresala had suddenly been blotted out from existence and in its place was a wild crater belching out terrific angry clouds of smoke' 27). This smoke is actually some unnamed but new element, the active ingredient of the wonder-weapon; it settles around the island in a circular belt ('the belt destroys anything up to twenty-six thousand feet above it!' according to Steinher, which is a neat trick) and the people on the island are marooned. Some embrace the modestly utopian possibilities of their isolation; others fall back on authoritarian structures of control -- Steinher and the Colonel proclaim a militaristic regime, though others oppose them. The staff at the island's hotel, where everyone is staying, go on strike. Characters do that Magic Mountain-ish thing of talking about their various different world-views at one another with a persistence that approaches interminability. A storm threatens to move the killing 'band' of the poisonous wonder-weapon to the island, but in the event it dissipates the stuff and a steamer is able to get to the island and rescue everybody. The author's thumb slips into the balance at the end: the Vicar, having discussed religion with a Catholic on the island, has a sort of mystic vision and decides to convert. Ingram's slightly peculiar thesis is that, alone of all religions, Catholicism grants access to a 'sixth sense': '... the Catholic Religion produces, or rather develops a sixth sense in man. Other religions have a remarkable influence, but they do not quite do this' [168]. That's the frequency, Kenneth? Really? Hmmm.

Amanda Roberts, Strictly Shimmer (2010)

2011-10-09T09:02:00.000-07:00

Not, so far as I know, a relation; although if they asked me to write a Strictly tie-in I'd positively leap at the chance, so maybe it's a Roberts thing. You can read excerpts here, but I believe I need to do no more than quote the opening paragraph:

The first time I walked onto the dance floor, I had to pretend I wasn’t gawping. My eyes must have been spinning like disco balls as I tried to take it all in. I gripped the clipboard I had just been handed as tightly as I could, in the desperate hope that this might keep me calm. Chloe, my new colleague, walked straight across the dance floor as if it were nothing more than a studio, and I trotted along behind her, trying to keep my pulse rate – and my eyes – down.

The eyes! The eyes! I'm sold, and so is Thog.

Ra Page & Magda Raczyńska (eds), Lemistry. A Celebration of the Work of Stanisław Lem (2011)

2011-09-30T01:59:00.000-07:00

I can't review this title (much as I would like to) because I'm in it; but I can plug it, and more importantly urge and exhort you to seek out the extraordinary, brilliant writing of Lem himself. So, go on: buy a copy (I've been paid the fee for my small contribution and get no share of royalties, so accept this as a disinterested recommendation). It's in three parts: the first being three hitherto-unavailable-in-the-UK short stories by Lem himself (all very ably translated into English by Antonia Lloyd-Jones). The second, longest portion of the volume is original fiction by Frank Cottrell Boyce, Toby Litt, Annie Clarkson, the marvellous Ian Watson, Trevor Hoyle, er, me, Piotr Szulkin, the legendary Brian Aldiss, sarah Schofield, Wojciech Orlinkski, the excellent Adam Marek, Sean O'Brien and Jacek Dukaj. Some of these writers aim to reproduce, with expert, living pastiche, the authentic Lemmy tone (which is ace-of-spadestastic, of course); others, including me, work more broadly within a Lemmish or Lemic or Lemony mode. The final section is a fascinating series of non-fictional responses to Lem, including a very good essay by Andy Sawyer that starts to get to the bottom of Lem's uniqueness and enduring appeal.

Vladimir Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading (1935)

2011-09-23T08:11:00.000-07:00

Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading (Priglashenie na kazn’, 1935; English version 1959) is—amongst other things—a far future fantasy. The protagonist Cincinnatus C. has been sentenced to death for an obscure crime (to do with the unusual nature of his being-in-the-the-world rather than for any act he has omitted or committed) and spends the whole of the novel in his prison cell: recalling his earlier life, contemplating his situation, visited by various people. You might call the work ‘Kafkaesque’ save only that, tonally speaking, it is completely unlike that Czech-deutsch master. Instead of Kafka’s deliberately attenuated, tartly bitter dark comedy, Nabokov’s idiom is a rapturous richness and fullness. And the novel is science fiction, a fact rarely noted.

Cincinnatus’ world is a rather old-fashioned place, civilised according to an early 20th-century Mitteleuropean style. Nevertheless the novel refers at several places to a more technologically-advanced deep past. The town keeps a ‘venerable, decrepit aeroplane, with motley patches on its rusted wings.’

There was in town a certain man, a pharmacist, whose great grandfather, it was said, had left a memoir describing how merchants used to go to China by air. [38]

No longer, though. In this novel ‘time gently dozes.’ Cincinnatus reads an antique magazine and is amazed at the plush life his ancestors lived:

That was a remote world where the simplest objects sparkled with youth and an in-born insolence, proceeding from the reverence that surrounded the labour devoted to their manufacture. Those were years of universal fluidity; well-oiled metals performed silent soundless acrobatics; the harmonious lines of men’s suits were dictated by the unheard-of limberness of muscular bodies; the flowing glass of enormous windows curved around corners of buildings; a girl in a bathing suit flew like a swallow so high over a pool that it seemed no larger that a saucer; a high-jumper lay supine in the air, having already made such an extreme effort that, if it were not for the flaglike folds of his shorts, he would seem to be in lazy repose; and water ran, glided endlessly; the gracefulness of falling water, the dazzling details of bathrooms; the satiny ripples of the ocean with a two-winged shadow falling on it. [43]

This is a familiar trope from SF of course: the present seen from the perspective of a notional future and so reimagined. But I don’t know of any SF writer who treats it quite like Nabokov does here. This is not just because the language so gorgeously recreates the images under description—(that high-jumper!)—although it does; but rather because where most SF writers are interested only in the minutiae of the content of their imagined worlds, Nabokov’s description engages the medium, time, directly, by balancing atemporal form against formless endless fluidity. On the one hand the timelessly frozen (the diver, the athlete) in mid-action; on the other, the water. It's a Nabokovian Dying Earth or Book Of The New Sun, and as intensely poetically SF in its precise imagism as all Nabokov.

M D Lachlan, Wolfsangel (2010), Fenrir (2011)

2011-09-18T14:59:00.000-07:00

Hwæt! Ic novela cyst secgan wylle,
hwæt mē árǽdatte tō midre nihte,
syðþan cildren reste wunedon.
Þūhte mē þæt ic gesāwe syllicre wulf
on bóc áwritan, lēohte langtwidig,
bóc-fantasia beorhtost. Eall þæt átellanung wæs
begoten blódgéotende; wulfas stōdon
fægere æt foldan scēatum, swylce þær þríe wæron:
Vali and Felig, lífgetwinnan, Adisla gefǽmne
Behēoldon þær þríe wulfsengel dryhtnes ealle:
werwulfen ofer moldan, ond eall þēos mære gesceaft.

Þys boke ys issue and generacioun of þe moost-praysed saga of wulfmen & Norsmen ycleppit Wulfesangelus, verilye þe howlinge soule of Fantasia binden bitween two boords. Ne better boke ypublisht was, nor ys, þeis yere or þe last of þe fascion or matter of Fantasy; and newist þe facte of fulle disenclosure (for þe auctor ys freend to mee and myne) shd gif ye stynt nor pause but to buyen þes boke wiþ al haste.

Þe scene yt is, Anno Domini 886, at Paris, sich citie be onder seggen of þe Norsmen, þem by King Sigfred wealden; and þat mightig citie forestonds þe asaut. Yet þe Norsmen nicht for grenehede, nor spoyle, but misse lefer an wyf of high estat, ycleped þe Ladie Aelis. An heileg Prest, yclept Jehan, ablenden ond crippled, most her avise to tradice herseln and pass to þe Norsmen entir. Yete he wol nat, for dreden the paynim will her sacrifise & lot, liken Isak by Abram; and she is loth. Prest mid mayden, hem tua voyden þe citie. For þe troth of þe matiere is stranger, far, and ferlie. For þe fals goddes Odin and Loki and the wulf yclept Fenrir foughten the nones, a greet battel of wyttes and will, gildir and ytrapping arond the lifes of þreo mortall men. Þiy died, Odin þwerted was, and Loki did wynn; bot þe whele tornes anew, and peples souls reborne sich þat þe game beginneþ againe.

Grete ys þe Wold, grete þe firm auctoritas et potentia of Lachlanes Lettrure; selden is boke as doughtie and mightie. Brod in reach and scop; bricht in imaginatio; yea þe dramatis personae, sich Aelis, Jehan, Leshii and Ofaeti, all be an weolthe of qhat þe rhetoritians do calle characterisatio. Pythagoaras þe Grece spake of Re-incarnatio, and Lachlanes boke also. þis is þe world in dare, and þe darken of Lachlanes soule is stark and stronge. As þe poete sayde, and richtig: Þe more strenghþe of ioye myn herte strayneз. An grete boke: ye most beye yt.

Graeber on Debt (2011)

2011-09-16T09:12:00.000-07:00

:1:
Not a review of economist/anthropologist Graeber's Debt: the First 5000 Years, with the utility orange cover there, which I have yet to read (though it looks very interesting indeed); but a reaction to a couple of online piece and interviews with Graeber covering some of the same ground, here on the origin of money, and here at the New Left Project (in two parts) on debt, promises and freedom. I enjoyed reading these very much, so much so that I'm going to quote some chunks by way of encouraging you to read and buy Graeber's book. Then I'm going to speculate in a freeform sfnal manner, as is my wont. But first:

NLP: In a recent column criticising right-wing Republicans for being cavalier about possibility of default, David Brooks made the following comment:
“The members of this movement [i.e. Tea Party Republicans] have no sense of moral decency. A nation makes a sacred pledge to pay the money back when it borrows money. But the members of this movement talk blandly of default and are willing to stain their nation’s honor.”
This intertwining of the language of debt with that of morality is a main theme of your book. Could you talk a bit about its history?

DG: The idea that ‘honour’ and ‘credit’ are the same thing occurs in situations in which people are trading with each other directly. If there is some kind of market, and debts are denominated in money, but you can’t haul someone off to jail or break their legs if they don’t meet their obligations, then to operate successfully as a business your honour is your greatest resource. In medieval Arabic law - Sharia law – credit was capital: your personal honour was a form of capital, and was legally recognised as such. So Brooks’s comments aren’t as crazy as all that, because states actually can’t force each other to pay.

But there is an irony in thinking of a promise made by a state to pay a debt as something absolutely sacred. After all, a debt is just a promise, and politicians make all sorts of different promises. They break most of them. So why are these promises the only ones that they can’t break? It is considered completely normal for someone like Nick Clegg to say, ‘well of course we promised not to raise school fees. But that’s unrealistic.’ ‘Unrealistic’ here means ‘obviously there’s no possibility of breaking my promises to bankers, even those linked to banks we bailed out and in some cases effectively own’. It’s striking that no-one ever points that out. Why is a promise made by a politician to the people who elected him considered made to be broken – it isn’t “sacred” in any way – whereas a promise the same politician makes to a financier is considered the “honour of our nation”? Why isn’t the “honour of our nation” in any way entailed in keeping our promises to people to provide healthcare and education? And why does everyone just seem to accept that, that this is just “reality”?

NLP: And why do you think that is?

DG: Because the latter promises are not typically framed in the language of ‘debt’. The language of debt is not an economic one; it’s a language of morality. It has been used for thousands of years by people in situations of vast inequalities of power. If you have a situation of complete inequality, particularly violent inequality – if you’ve conquered someone, or if you’re a mafioso extracting protection money – then framing the relationship in terms of debt makes it seem as though the extractors are magnanimous and the victims are to blame. “Well, you owe me, but I’ll be a nice guy and let you off the hook this month…” Before long the victims come to seem almost generically morally at fault by the very terms of their existence. And that logic sticks in people’s minds – it’s incredibly effective. Not universally effective, because it’s also true that the vast majority of revolts, insurrections, populist conspiracies and rebellions in world history have been about debts. When it backfires, it blows up in a big way. But nonetheless, that’s what people almost invariably do when they’re imposing a situation of complete inequality.

The irony of course is that when dealing with each other, rich and powerful people know that debts aren’t “sacred”, and they rearrange things all the time. They are often incredibly forgiving and generous when dealing with each other. The idea of the sacredness of debt is chiefly applied when we are talking about different sorts of people. Just as rich people will come to the aid of other rich people, so poor people also will bail each other out – they’ll make ‘loans’ that are really gifts, and so on. But when you’re dealing with debts owed by people without power to people with power, suddenly the debt becomes sacred and you can’t even question it.

So far, so right on, and hard to argue with. A couple more things. He goes on to talk about the difference between predominantly credit economies, where trust and reputation (or 'credit rating') are centrally important, to predominantly cash or bullion economies, where it they are much less vital:

DG: Credit-based systems are more like human economies, although they don’t go all the way.

NLP: Because credit is not completely impersonal in the way that cash transactions can be?

DG: Yes, it relies on personal trust, but it’s also quantified and transferable, which makes it a debt rather than a simple moral obligation. This is where you get symptoms like those I have described – for example, in medieval Islam one’s honour is a form of capital; one’s reputation for being a decent person, for being trustworthy, becomes key. As Pierre Bourdieu said of contemporary Algeria, honour is superior to money because you can convert your honour into money, but you can’t convert your money into honour. I thought this was a brilliant discovery– that honour is a form of capital – until I discovered that in traditional Islamic law it is literally true: honour is legally recognised as a form of capital. That sort of system is similar to the kind of thing that prevailed in medieval Europe. In England, for example, you find expressions like “a worthy man” or “a man of no account”, which refer both to one’s personal reputation for decency and to one’s credit-worthiness. The two essentially could not be distinguished.

The interesting thing this brings out, I think, is that while markets emerge as a side-effect of military operations, in certain times and places in history they become something different. They become something which is neither dependent upon nor a side-effect of state actions, but instead become opposed to the state. The first time I’m aware of this happening is in medieval Islam, but you also see it in Ming China and there are traces of it in renaissance England. It is a kind of market populism that tends to occur when controls are instituted to ensure that credit systems don’t go crazy. So in medieval Islam, for example, there was a ban on usury. But that ban was not enforced by the state— people appealed to religious law to settle commercial disputes and contracts, but the state couldn’t haul someone off to jail for violating them. Abusive practices like usury and debt peonage had been typical of the Middle East for thousands of years, and were essentially made illegal under Islam. That’s one of the reasons why many people were so willing to convert – it was really through the judicial system that it all happened.

The way I put it is that the mercantile classes basically switched sides. Throughout most of Middle Eastern history they were allied with the government – they were the money-lenders, they were the people that others fell into debt traps with and became debt peons because of interest bearing loans. And essentially they said, ‘OK, OK, we’ll become the good guys. We will stop charging interest, we will outlaw slavery and debt peonage, and the government are the bad guys now, we won’t even talk to them, we’ll just work this stuff out among ourselves.’

And Graber has very interesting things to say about the origins of money. In a nutshell he repudiates the Classical Economics 101 model: first everybody bartered according to a mutually agreed scale ('one pig is worth six chickens' and so on); then the scale became formalised via tokens we call money. Not so, says Graeber.

The persistence of the barter myth is curious. It originally goes back to Adam Smith. Other elements of Smith’s argument have long since been abandoned by mainstream economists—the labor theory of value being only the most famous example. Why in this one case are there so many desperately trying to concoct imaginary times and places where something like this must have happened, despite the overwhelming evidence that it did not?

It seems to me because it goes back precisely to this notion of rationality that Adam Smith too embraced: that human beings are rational, calculating exchangers seeking material advantage, and that therefore it is possible to construct a scientific field that studies such behavior. The problem is that the real world seems to contradict this assumption at every turn. Thus we find that in actual villages, rather than thinking only about getting the best deal in swapping one material good for another with their neighbors, people are much more interested in who they love, who they hate, who they want to bail out of difficulties, who they want to embarrass and humiliate, etc.—not to mention the need to head off feuds. Even when strangers met and barter did ensue, people often had a lot more on their minds than getting the largest possible number of arrowheads in exchange for the smallest number of shells.

I think this is brilliantly put; and Graeber goes on to give 'a couple examples from the book, of actual, documented cases of "primitive barter"', including this jolly-sounding set-up:

The Gunwinngu of West Arnhem land in Australia, famous for entertaining neighbors in rituals of ceremonial barter called the dzamalag. Here the threat of actual violence seems much more distant. The region is also united by both a complex marriage system and local specialization, each group producing their own trade product that they barter with the others.

In the 1940s, an anthropologist, Ronald Berndt, described one dzamalag ritual, where one group in possession of imported cloth swapped their wares with another, noted for the manufacture of serrated spears. Here too it begins as strangers, after initial negotiations, are invited to the hosts’ camp, and the men begin singing and dancing, in this case accompanied by a didjeridu. Women from the hosts’ side then come, pick out one of the men, give him a piece of cloth, and then start punching him and pulling off his clothes, finally dragging him off to the surrounding bush to have sex, while he feigns reluctance, whereon the man gives her a small gift of beads or tobacco. Gradually, all the women select partners, their husbands urging them on, whereupon the women from the other side start the process in reverse, re-obtaining many of the beads and tobacco obtained by their own husbands. The entire ceremony culminates as the visitors’ men-folk perform a coordinated dance, pretending to threaten their hosts with the spears, but finally, instead, handing the spears over to the hosts’ womenfolk, declaring: “We do not need to spear you, since we already have!” In other words, the Gunwinngu manage to take all the most thrilling elements in the Nambikwara encounters—the threat of violence, the opportunity for sexual intrigue—and turn it into an entertaining game (one that, the ethnographer remarks, is considered enormous fun for everyone involved). In such a situation, one would have to assume obtaining the optimal cloth-for-spears ratio is the last thing on most participants’ minds.

Here's Graeber's point, nutshelled for us:

Economists always ask us to ‘imagine’ how things must have worked before the advent of money. What such examples bring home more than anything else is just how limited their imaginations really are. When one is dealing with a world unfamiliar with money and markets, even on those rare occasions when strangers did meet explicitly in order to exchange goods, they are rarely thinking exclusively about the value of the goods. This not only demonstrates that the Homo Oeconomicus which lies at the basis of all the theorems and equations that purports to render economics a science, is not only an almost impossibly boring person—basically, a monomaniacal sociopath who can wander through an orgy thinking only about marginal rates of return—but that what economists are basically doing in telling the myth of barter, is taking a kind of behavior that is only really possible after the invention of money and markets and then projecting it backwards as the purported reason for the invention of money and markets themselves. Logically, this makes about as much sense as saying that the game of chess was invented to allow people to fulfill a pre-existing desire to checkmate their opponent’s king.

Ha! Take that, Homo Oeconomicus!

:2:
And now (briefly), thoughts. Graber's assertion that 'in actual villages, rather than thinking only about getting the best deal in swapping one material good for another with their neighbors, people are much more interested in who they love, who they hate, who they want to bail out of difficulties, who they want to embarrass and humiliate, etc.—' seems to me patently and obvious true. But perhaps the danger with the study of origins is that in situating oneself pre-historically, in order to prove wrongheadedness in other economists, one runs the risk of colouring one's grasp of the current state of affairs with retrospective tints. Which is to say: we no longer live in a village. The Adam Smith model, although it started out as putatively descriptive (and howsoever wrong that description was) has become something else: prescriptive, or more than that, normative.

Here's the SF thought: in the future, market trading and other aspects of economical and financial interaction will be increasingly undertaken by clever machines, guided by ingenious and complex algorithms as to when it is best to buy and when to sell, how to get the maximum modern equivalents-to-arrowheads for the minimum modern equivalents-to-shells. We may not act this way 'in real life', but we have invented a chessgame market where following these rules maximises our results. And our machines will be precisely the Homi Oeconomici Graeber so wittily skewers; they will indeed wander through our metaphorical orgies thinking only about marginal rates of return, not because they are monomaniacal sociopaths but because they are machines. It seems to me we're halfway to this state of affairs already; and the closer we approach it the more (paradoxically, perhaps) we will need Austrian or Smithian economics: not because it is right, but because with unconscious prescience Adam Smith envisaged a market populated by clever AIs rather than actual people. The invisible hand is invisible because it is virtual, not actual.

Mad Men (2007- )

2011-09-09T23:48:00.000-07:00

We’re up to season three of Mad Men, watching it out of a DVD box-set after the manner of middle class married couples all across the country—which is to say: evening routine -- supper, kids to bed, glass of wine and sink onto the couch to boot up another episode. It took me a little while to warm to it, actually; but by now the characters feel like old friends (no, that’s not right; I probably wouldn’t be friends with any of them—they feel like old work colleagues, which is appropriate enough. One of the strengths of the show is the way it puts so much of the actuality, or simulated actuality, of working in an office front and centre. There have been shows set in offices before of course, and plenty of them: but almost always the actual work has been a backdrop to the real focus of the show, the emotional interactions of the characters—and whilst that’s clearly part of the point of Mad Men too, I’m consistently impressed how large a portion of the drama is simple office work in its office-workish-ness: meetings with colleagues and clients, preparing material for projects, doing accounts, applying for promotion—all that. And this parenthesis has gone on long enough).

So, one of the reasons I’m blogging about the show here is to direct you to my wife’s post (on her blog) about it. But also to jot down some random thoughts.

Here’s one random thought. One reason I held out against the show for, roughly speaking, the first half of series one is that it struck me as too glib. Glibness, I figured, was part of the point; but glibness needs to be handled carefully, artistically speaking, or the art will melt away like icecream in front of the fire. Mark Greif’s famous (in some quarters, notorious) criticisms of the show in the LRB seemed right to me. The surfaces were all so perfectly glossy and immaculate and 1950s/60s cool; the sexism and racism was of the sort designed to flatter our more enlightened 21st-century perspectives. The episodes often struck me as having a too pat ‘Creative Writing 303’ labour of theme and story—as it might be, 'this episode is about mirrors, so we’ll build it around a Playtex ad showing Jackie reflecting Marilyn and have lots of shots of characters staring at their own reflections in bathrooms etc. Deep!’ More particularly, I thought Grief was right that John Hamm playing Don Draper was too beautiful, and not tough enough, to actually occupy the Tony-Sopranoesque alpha male role the scripts often demanded. There’s a quaver in his eyes, you see: a tremor of weakness.

I also thought, watching series one, that the show was missing two key beats. One was religion—these people (almost all of them living, at least ostensibly according to tenets of Republican respectability) would be religious, or many of them would; yet religion was absent from the drama. The other was race: the most famous achievement of the 1960s in the US was Civil Rights, after all (well, there was the Apollo programme too; but it comes second to Civil Rights). The only characters of colour occupied marginal roles in the drama. We might think ‘well, they occupied marginal roles in these sorts of people’s lives in the actual 1950s/60s’, but that is to let the scriptwriters—who have the say—off the hook too easily).

Persevering in my watching, I have come to revise all of these objections. I was wrong; I spoke too soon. To take the last first—series 2 tackles religion head on, with Peggy Olsen’s relationship to the creepy priest (Catholicism is shown to be centrally part of her social praxis). And race is given a higher prominence too, although in a slightly awkward way. More importantly, I’ve come to revise my opinion on John Hamm as Don Draper—that quaver in his eye, the melodramatic farrago about his swapping identities with a dead officer in the Korean war, all that. The point I was missing, I think, is: the core theme of this show is selling, and one of its insights is that whilst satirical mileage might be made out of showing advertising as being in the business of persuading people to buy shit, there’re more depth and drama in the idea that ad-men are trying to get us to buy stuff that, actually, is often cool. But. There has to be a but, of course. Draper is a beautiful man—my wife certainly thinks so—rich, clever, creative, superbly dressed and so on. The quaver in his eyes, much more than the creaky old hidden identity story, is the But.

I could go further: the show’s lavish visual aesthetic, its myriad triumphs of design and costume and historical recreation, work by a kind of Freudian inversion. Selling is all about implanting in people the desire to buy things; and desire is wanting, a lack, an absence. As the cocky young rich boy, trying to seduce Betty Draper at the riding stables they both frequent, observes—‘you are profoundly sad’. Betty is, too; it’s just that this matters much less than you might think. It is not, for instance, the occasion for grand existential angst and drama. On the contrary, sadness in the motor by which advertising—and by extension, Capitalism—operates. It is a necessary thing. That’s one thing Mad Men does very well, in the larger sense: rendering sadness not as depression and withdrawal, but precisely as affluent social living and conspicuous consumption.

The name that occurs to me here is Richard Yates—indeed, I’m surprised more isn’t made of the connection in reviews and online discussion (maybe it is, and I just haven't come across it). But Yates is surely one of the key influences on this show. He’s a novelist perhaps best known for the film made out of Revolutionary Road—an equally good-look portrait of postwar US period suburban sadness as Mad Men, but a touch too mournful, even maudlin, in its treatment. Unlike the film, I don’t think it would be fair to call Yates’s exquisitely judged, low-key novels and stories ‘maudlin’, but they are all fascinated by the valences of sadness in everyday life. ‘Draper’ is the name of the protagonist of Yates’s A Good School (1973)—not about advertising, this short, beautiful novel, but very alive to the way sadness can propel us onward through life. Near the end, one of the characters (who had refused the Purple Heart he had been awarded in the war because he felt he didn’t deserve it) tells Draper: ‘listen—don’t look back to much, OK? You can drive yourself crazy that way.’ The novel doesn’t record Draper’s reaction to this advice; but the Draper of Mad Men in effect takes it as his personal mantra.

Ben Aaronovitch, Rivers of London (2011)

2011-09-07T02:20:00.000-07:00

Very good. Really very good—easy to see why this has become a bestseller. What we have here is a sort of modern-day Jonathan Strange and Police Procedural. The narrator, Peter Grant, is an ordinary copper in contemporary London who becomes involved in the investigation of a murder outside St Paul’s: some poor geezer having had his head knocked clean from his shoulders. This in turn brings him into contact with a hidden world of magic, supernatural beings, vampires, revenants and other such in-the-night bump goers. He is transferred to a semi-official and rather endearingly amateur ‘magic’ branch of the Met, and becomes the apprentice of a wizard-policeman called Nightingale. The story is well-told but the real triumph here is one of tone: Aaronovitch creates a genuinely likeable voice for Grant, and the whole book is carried off with tremendous charm. I mean that word in a more than flippant sense; charm is more than niceness (charms are the currency of magic, after all). It cannot be faked, and it cannot be taught at creative writing school. But it makes a story glide very agreeably along.

The book also works as an entertaining gazetteer of London, a city Aaronovitch groks, in a way that—to pick a name at random from my London hat—Peter Ackroyd, doesn’t quite. Aaronovitch knows the topography and lore, gets the multicultural vibe and glamour and friction right, and captures the scuzzy along with the magical very neatly. In particular the rivers are important—not just the Thames but the various tributaries, now mostly bricked over. I liked the fact that, at one point, Grant drives his cribbed-from-Morse jag over Staines Bridge. I wrote a novel a couple years ago in which Staines Bridge gets blown up. And, actually, if you've got a moment: I’d like to take this opportunity to agitate for a new literary movement in Fantastic Literature, after the manner of the New Weird or the Mundane, to be called ‘Staines Bridgers’. The manifesto would require novels to make some mention of Staines. And /or to have a title that can be sung to an XTC track—I found myself humming Rivers of London to the tune of ‘Towers of London’, and it works quite well. Beyond that, the details of the Manifesto have yet to be, er, worked out.

Not to get distracted.

Anyway, my purpose here is not to review Rivers of London (beyond saying: really very good, read it), so much as to shoot off at an angle and think about Fantasy more generally. Charlene Harris is quoted on the back of the dustjacket praising Aaronovitch’s book as ‘fresh and original’, which it isn’t, really (isn’t trying to be, really—it’s an expert midrash upon a venerable body of magic-intersects-reality fictions that re-imagine London: Dickens, Carter, Gaiman, Mièville, Harry Potter, Susan Clarke et al. This is a feature rather than a bug, and Aaronovitch handles his intertexts cannily, often wittily and adds depth and texture to his writing through them). In particular, and despite wearing the coat of a police-procedural/crimey/murder-investigation plot, Rivers of London shares one quality with fantasy that we do not find in noir. I’m going to call this quality amplitude. Here’s how Aaronovitch opens his novel:

It started at one thirty on a cold Tuesday morning in January when Martin Turner, street performer and, in his own words, apprentice gigolo, tripped over a body in front of the West Portico of St Paul’s at Covent Garden. Martin, who was none too sober himself, at first thought the body was that of one of the many celebrants who had chosen the Piazza as a convenient outdoor toilet and dormitory. Being a seasoned Londoner, Martin gave the body the ‘London once-over’—a quick glance to determine whether this was a drunk, a crazy or a human being in distress. The fact that it was entirely possible for someone to be all three simultaneously is why good-Samaritanism in London is considered an extreme sport—like base-jumping or crocodile-wrestling. Martin, noting the good-quality coat and shoes, had just pegged the body as a drunk when he noticed that it was in fact missing its head.

This is how Chandler or Hammet would have written this opening:

Martin Turner, noting the good-quality coat and shoes, had just clocked the body as a drunk when he saw it was missing its head.

This isn’t a better way of starting a novel, naturally, except in the general horses-for-courses sense that applies to all writing everywhere. But it would be a mistake to think that Aaronovitch writes 150 words instead of 25 because he has more specific detail to communicate to the reader. The point is not in the content; it is in the tone—the voice of the novel. It is a voice that sets its face against terseness and reticence in favour of a generous discursive expansiveness.

This isn't to say that I'd describe Aaronivitch’s treatment of his murder mystery as ‘leisurely’: there’s plenty going on, and the novel rarely feels flaggy or slack (I might have done with a little less of the sub-Harry-Potter ‘learning magical spells’ stuff, but I’m a grump). Rivers of London isn’t trying to do the hard-boiled thing. On the contrary, it is trying, and succeeding, to flesh-out a world in which mundanity is underlaid by magic, with plenty of detail and atmosphere and tone and not a little humour too. Indeed, we lose sight of the initial murder for quite long stretches. In fact—I wonder if this is linked to the thought that there are a great many brilliant SF short stories and hardly any Fantasy short stories worth mentioning—this amplitude is precisely what many readers of Fantasy go to their chosen genre for in the first place.

It goes without saying that this amplitude can easily become bloat. But my point is that we may go astray if we single out (for example) the latest Robin Hobb or Branden Sandandersenbrand novel and say ‘there’s a fit, lean 250-page novel hidden somewhere inside this flabby 1000-page monster’. Critics certainly do this; on occasion I’ve even done it myself. But perhaps it is missing the point. Not everybody considers ‘size zero’ to be an aesthetic ideal, after all.

I really am moving away from Aaronovitch when I say this: his novel is a trim 400 pages and has a lot going on. Rather, I’m trying to put my finger on something critics of the novel, content-obsessed as they often are, sometimes miss—and arguably critics of SFF titles are more likely than not to fixate on the manifest content of a title and to ignore the form, style, voice and the like. So, to step away from genre for a moment. You see, I was chatting with a writer friend of mine recently about the case of Sir Walter Scott.

Here’s the thing with Scott: he was, in the nineteenth-century, bigger than you can imagine. Everybody read him. Many people read his (very ample) complete works right through, from start to finish, every year (Henry Crabb Robinson talks about the pleasure of maintaining a sort-of on-rolling Scott read, of closing the last page of his last published novel knowing that he could now open the first page of Waverley yet again). Scott was the first international mega-celebrity of letters, rivalled only by Byron (whom he outsold, and outlasted). Aha, but nowadays who reads him? It’s hard enough getting English literature students, people who have specifically chosen to read books, to trudge through Waverley, never mind the rest of the Scotty oeuvre. The problem is that he is prolix. Things do happen in Scott’s fiction, and some very interesting questions of history and politics, of identity and modernity and fantasy, are worked through in complex ways. But the ratio of ‘things happening’ to ‘great wodges of prosy prose’ is weighted, for modern tastes, disadvantageously on the latter side of the scale. As a result, Scott has gone from being the most famous novelist in the world to (outside academia) almost total desuetude.

The trick to understanding the prodigious success of Scott in the 19th-century is the realisation that he was popular not despite being so prosy, but because of it. You don’t read Scott’s prose for its sharpness, for its quotable zingers or apothegmic wisdom. Opening the covers of a Waverley novel and starting to read is, or ought to be, like sinking into a warm bath. It is the very amplitude of Scott’s art that explains its success. One of the striking things about Scott’s career is that he had a significant stroke in later life, yet continued writing—great screedy novels like Castle Dangerous (1831) and Count Robert of Paris (1832) which read like regular Scott novels with all the actual stuff-happening taken out. Nobody seemed to mind. As if Scott didn’t really need a fully functioning brain to produce the sort of verbal art that made his name.

My point, I suppose, is that although Scott himself has fallen from favour, the taste for amplitude in our verbal art hasn’t. Many readers don’t want their fiction to work as a brisk, cold shower. Many really want to sink into that warm bath.

[PS: I don't want to give the impression I'm doing Scott down, by the way. You might want to glance at this, Chesterton-quoting post and consider whether you don't agree with me that the brief exchange between Sir Arthur Wardour and the beggar from Scott's Antiquary isn't one of the greatest things written in the C19th-century]

Mark Gatiss, Night Terrors (Doctor Who) 2011

2011-09-05T13:21:00.000-07:00

Last Saturday's ep.: very enjoyable, much better realised (in key ways: stronger conceit, better structured and paced, better-judged characterisation and less "wait, what-the-??" bollocksness all round) than the preceding week's 'Let's Kill Hitler!' story. I especially liked the Doctor's 'I've seen things you people wouldn't believe, attack ships on fire off the shoulder of specific content altered to avoid copyright infringement' speech ('Do you see these eyes? These are old eyes' -- lovely delivery from Smith really nails the moment). And the ending, where the Dad hugged his young son and told him he loved him, was genuinely affecting. But then I'd be likely to say so, since I am a Dad and I have a young son, whom I love. At any rate, Gatiss is getting better as a writer, I think. Apparently there's talk of him as a future showrunner, when Moffat steps down. Well, I suppose they'll need someone to fetch the coffee, and that.

Now. Well. Here's the thing about decoding dreams the Freudian way: once you get into the habit of reading off for manifest and latent content it becomes both gratifyingly easy and surprisingly eloquent and revealing ... or, at least, it gives the simulacrum of eloquence and revelation, which is all we can really ask for. Some Who episodes are more dreamlike than others in this sense; but 'Night Terrors', true to its name, was very like a dream indeed. More, problems on its manifest level are, I think, resolved by reading the latent content, which is nice. For example: the premise of this episode [spoilers] is that l'il George is a Tenza alien, who has (cuckoo-in-the-nestishly) morphed into the perfect kid for his infertile parents and wants nothing more than to feel safe and loved and to belong. We discover that all the monsters and the terrors are the result of Tenza-George manifesting (via his [wave-hand] alien telepath[hand-wave]ic powers) the terrible anxiety that his parents are going to send him away. Fine, but, thinking back: his parents were only thinking of sending him away because of his debilitating level of fear and anxiety. So something doesn't add up, chicken-egg-wise, in the show's conceit.

But this doesn't matter. The latent level is where the show's emotional punch is located. See, this is a story about a talented kid with a secret who lives in terror that his parents, once they discover his secret, will reject him. It is the story of somebody who hides his secret self in his closet, even though this act of repression causes him misery and angst. You see, he is not like his parents, even though he loves them dearly. And although they love him dearly, he is terrified that they will reject him and send him away if they find out the truth. The truth that is in the closet. The girly, dolls-house sort of truth about his actual nature that is tucked away at the back of his closet. The emotional release of the show comes when the Dad embraces his son and tells him that, no matter what secret identity is hidden in his closet, he loves him and will never reject him. How could that not be touching?

And to think some people find Freudian interpretations of dreams reductive! In other news: according to the Independent on Sunday's Pink List of 2010, Gatiss is the 38th most influential gay person in the UK. Bravo!

Christopher Priest, The Islanders (2011)

2011-09-01T00:47:00.000-07:00

It's an extraordinarily good piece of writing. Now, now, wait a minute. I hold Priest in high esteem as a writer. He’s one of the authors the reading of whose novels (as a kid) inspired me to want to write myself. I’ve met him, too; on several publisher-party occasions, and he’s always been very cordial and encouraging towards me personally (he doesn't much like what I write, and has reviewed my stuff accordingly, but that's fair enough). This is by way of a rather roundabout full-disclosure; since fans rarely provide the disinterested objectivity vital to sound reviewing, however much they may try. Nonetheless, The Islanders seems to me one of the later Priest’s very best novels; beautifully put-together, absorbing and compelling as well as elegantly wrongfooting and soursweetly offkilter.

It is set in the ‘Dream Archipelago’, a planet-wide assortment of island communities, the scene of some of Priest’s best early stories, as well as his 1981 novel The Affirmation. My memory of the early short stories—since my house move, I can’t lay my hands on my old bashed-about paperbacks of An Infinite Summer and The Dream Archipelago to check, so my memory may be playing me wrong—is that the Archipelago used to have a more Aegean feel to it. In this latest novel, and although there are islands in every latitude, the broad flavour seems to me more Scandinavian, or Scots, especially in the book’s latter stages. It's not just the names (the theatre where a crucial crime is committed is the Teater Sjøkaptein, for instance), or the comfortable, Nordic-middle-class quality of life many of the characters enjoy. It's also to do with the cool, even Bergmanesque tone of the writing itself. On the other hand Priest himself says, on his website:

the Archipelago itself is not a transplant from a single place, but is an amalgam. You can find archipelagian images and recollections of Guernsey and Sark, the Greek islands, Harrow-on-the-Hill, the French Riviera, the Harz mountains in Germany, Hastings, the Pennines, even Dartmoor and the Isle of Wight.

So I may be barking up what the Swedes call the wrøng trïï. The novel takes the form of a gazetteer of islands in the Archipelago, 50 or so of them, from ‘Aay, the “Island of Winds”’ to 'Yannet' known as 'Dark Green' and 'Sir'. In listing the histories, flora, fauna, tourist spots and other interesting things about these various places, Priest starts to pick out a series of interlinked character narratives, mosaically assembling these from different contexts, and different perspectives, such that each new cell of the story changes our sense of the larger tale, its rights-and-wrongs, its meanings. The Priestalike ('sacredocish'?) writer Chaster Kammeston is one, mysteriously opaque figure; and several other individuals are constellated around him. Many of the specifics are recognisable mundane and contemporary, although there are a few (immortality for some, 'temporal distortion zones' and the like) which are more fantastical. But the focus is less on these.

One of the things I loved about The Islanders is that pretty much all the Priestian fascinations and preoccupations are here: doubles; mirrors; dreams; stage magic; the unreliability and instability of narrative, and several intriguing and underplayed metafictional touches (a young [female] novelist writes fan letters to a tetchily unpredictable Kammeston; when her first novel is published she sends a copy to him. It is called The Affirmation). It coheres, or more precisely refuses quite to cohere, very stylishly indeed.

It's an archipelagic novel in more than one sense (always assuming that that word has more than one sense), formally embodying its scattered loosely connected strings of island subjects in a loosely connected strings of narratives. There's a distant family relationship with Borges, perhaps; or Ballard’s anthology of ‘condensed novels’ The Atrocity Exhibition. What else? Not so much Primo Levi’s Il Sistema Periodico (1975), which, although it adheres to its ‘Periodic Table’ structuring conceit, is a collection of separate short stories; where The Islanders is fully a novel. One book that did keep popping up in my head as I read is Milorad Pavić’s Hazarski rečnik (1984; published in English 1988 as Dictionary of the Khazars: A Lexicon Novel). That novel is more modishly postmodern, and has less by way of connecting story, or indeed story of any kind. (At least, that’s my memory of it: I read it because it was a hip campus novel at the time when I was a university student myself, but 1988 is—now that I come to think of it—a frighteningly long time ago, and my memory may be wrong). I have heard of, but haven’t yet read, Han Shaogong’s widely-praised A Dictionary of Maqiao, although from reviews it looks like Priest’s novel has a little more in common with it. And Bolaño’s Nazi Literature in the Americas is on my tbr pile. The Islanders, though, has a very different mouthfeel to all of these titles.

We’re talking, really, about what the critics call Ergodic literature, a phrase coined by the Norwegian critic Espen J. Aarseth; or to be a little more precise, we're taking about novels that stir interesting patterns out of the mix of traditional narrative, and more freeform ergodic structures (many critics interested in ergodic narrative structures trace them through video games and hyperlink texts). The key thing, though, is books that 'produce a semiotic sequence which may differ from reading to reading'. 'Ergodic' not only from 'ergos', 'work', but also from 'hodos', 'path', you see. We often think of narrative as a kind of path. The Islanders presents itself to be read linearly, from start to end, and that's certainly how I read it. But the elements of the various narratives are not laid out in a linear sequence; they appear here and there, and I fitted them together into my larger sense of the story, having to revise my sense of what was going on and how people really were as I went (that creative tension between sjuzhet and fabula that's technically quite hard to do but which can be immensely satisfying to read) -- a little like Ford's The Good Soldier in that way, although much more kaleidoscopically rendered. One of the things that grounds this is precisely Priests' cool command of traditional style, world and character; and there's a scrupulousness with which everything is set out -- the doubleness and uncertainty of the book's treatment of naming, for example (most islands and many people have more than one name here) -- that only enhances the artfully fractured misdirection. As if to say: you think of a story as being like a journey, and maybe it is. But perhaps it's less like a march along a road, putting one step in front of the other like Bunyan's pilgrim progressing. Perhaps its like an odysseusing tour of a large group of islands, passing from one to another, losing track of time and orientation, visiting some several times, only glimpsing others, tantalisingly, in the distance. Stories are islands, and we, the readers, are the islanders; but the archipelago of story is far far too large for us to explore in its entirety, and although we roam widely and try our best, the accretion of our fuller perspective is still partial and fog-bound. And that's enough metaphors in this review for now.

In sum: The Islanders is a magnificent novel, one of my books of the year, and you must read it.

W. E. Johns, Return to Mars (1955)

2011-08-30T09:27:00.000-07:00

The second of a series of ten space adventures by the Biggles man. My 50p car-boot-sale copy was dust-wrapper free, but all ten original dust jackets are on display here, and looking lovely. Nor can I do better than quote 'Stella and Rose' by way of giving a flavour of the books themselves:

A collection of 10 books where W.E. Johns tries his hand at Science Fiction novels. The main characters in the books are Group Captain Timothy (nicknamed 'Tiger') Clinton R.A.F. (retired) and his son, Rex Clinton and Professor Lucius Brane. They go off adventuring - initially around our Solar System, but as the books progress they go further and further afield meeting up will all sorts of alien life forms and visiting many planets.

Return to Mars is very Bigglesish, tonally: all foresquare derring do and adventure. The plot is episodic and peripatetic. The Professor has invented an insecticide to rid Mars of its apocalyptic plague of red mosquitoes (in a rather nice touch, it turns out that the 'red' colour of the red planet is down to these beasties; and the red opacities observed by astronomers passing over the face of Mars are not dust storms but swarms of billions of insects). They visit Phobos, land on Mars, meet some dying humanoid Martians, wrestle with the problem (lifted from Wells's Food of the Gods) of some agent that is making insects and plants grow to prodigious size, and eventually win through. The Martians are telepathic. Earth, it transpires, is going to be destroyed 'in ninety days' by a rogue planet called Vontor crashing into it. After some variegated to-and-fro Vontor is blown up by a Martian superweapon, in a rather underwhelming piece of pyrotechnic description: 'what appeared to be a flash of lightning passed ... almost simultaneously a great sheet of white light filled the section of space that held the intruder. Slowly it died, leaving in its centre a ragged cloud from which sprang a thousand sparks' [135]. It's all good clean fun, although in the preface Johns puts in a little Von Danikeny nonsense:

The moons [of Mars] were only discovered in 1877, after the telescope made it possible to see them. Yet the ancients must have known of them, for they gave them their names -- the names they still hold. Phobos (meaning Terror) and Deimos (Rout). Homer and Virgil talk of them as the two horses of Mars, dragging his chariot. Why horses? Did they have tails? Comets have tails. We are forced to the conclusion that Mars was at one time nearer to us than it is today. [14]

I was going to suggest that Johns has got this the wrong way round, the astronomers were quoting the myth rather than the other way around; but the implacable force of his logic is simply irresistible. Horses have tails. Comets have tails. Ergo ...

Anyhow, the best bit of this book are the illustrations. Some of these are just gorgeous [click any of them to embiggen]:

Some have a splendidly hokey-cokey vibe to them:

Here's the exhausted Martian. Too much popcorn and Mars-juice, I'd say:

Doesn't that second astronaut, visiting the exhausted Martian there, look like a young Gordon Brown though? Anyhow, onwards. Here are some of the wisest words ever placed in a picture caption: 'That's what comes of monkeying with things you don't understand!':

And this one may be my favourite of all:

Raja Gosnell, The Smurfs (2011)

2011-08-28T07:21:00.000-07:00

I took the kids to see this, at their insistence. And I did see it. Unless (I was tired) I fell asleep as soon as I settled into the darkened cinema seat. If so then I had a vivid, rather horrible dream in which Doogie Howser M.D. and that breadstick-skinny, manga-faced lass from Glee are visited in New York by a horde of Na'vi-Liliputians who pass through a portal in order to steal the commercial success of Enchanted. Everybody mugs and overacts, the Smurphs most especially; and the wicked wizard Gargamel, in smurf-pursuit, more than mugs and overacts. He Mmmmugs and hyperacts. For some reason (I don't know why) I had it in my head that Gargamel, perfectly unrecognisable beneath an inch-thick facial prosthetic, was being played by the excellent Tom Hollander. He wasn't. He was played by the equally excellent Hank Azaria. Both men should be ashamed. It looks harsh, I know, tarring Hollander with the brush of a film with which he has nothing whatsoever to do except in my confused head. But that's the way it goes. Smurphy's Law. This movie is so bad it contaminates the careers of actors who have literally no connection with it whatsoever.

Anyway, I came away with a theory. Some of the we-might-as-well-call-it comedy here is of the pratfalling, mistaking-a-portaloo-for-an-alchemical-laboratory, pissing-in-a-wine-cooler sort. But one running gag ... one corpulent 52-year-old man having a heart attack mid-jog gag, at any rate ... is the replacement of random words with neologisms formed by adding prefixes and suffixes to the word 'smurf'. 'Smurftastic!', 'What the Smurf?' and 'Smurfxactly!' and so on. Now, some of these usages clearly stand in for the word 'fuck'. You may have seen the trailer, in which Smurfella, of Smurfette, or Smarymagdelene or whatever the female Smurf is called (voiced by Katie Perry) announces 'you picked the wrong girl to Smurf with': one of those situations where a like-sounding euphemism, such as 'freak' or 'feck', stands-in for the word we all know is actually being invoked. Once I twigged this, I understood. This movie is actually called 'The Fucks'; and all the dialogue has been lifted from Scarface ('Where the Smurf are we?') I trust there will be a version on the Director's Cut DVD in which every 'smurf' is replaced with the word 'fuck'. I'd prefer that.

Jonathan Littell, Kindly Ones (2009), 6 and 7

2011-08-27T01:55:00.000-07:00

So The Kindly Ones concludes with two brief sections: ‘Air’ (867-913) and ‘Gigue’ (917-75). In the former, Aue takes advantage of some convalescent leave to go to the country estate of his sister and brother-in-law (he the elderly crippled composer) in the eastern bit of Germany. Sister and brother-in-law are not there, sensibly enough, what with the Russians being close and coming closer every day, but Aue settles in: drinks the wine in the cellar, wipes his arse on the curtains, wanks in, er, every room in the house and generally indulges himself in a variety of peculiar, or revolting, or baffling ways. Some of this time he engages in conversation, or physical intimacy, with phantoms (eidolons, figments of his imagination) shaped like his sister, his brother-in-law and others. On one occasion, as I had been warned, he goes outside and has passive gay sex with a tree. It’s not made clear in the narrative whether the tree itself is gay, or not.

His friend, deus-ex-machina-man Thomas comes to get him before the Russians overrun the place. Which brings us to ‘Gigue’, which is first of all a fairly exciting (after all the tiresome sensual excesses of ‘Air’) dash through Germany, avoiding Soviet tanks and gangs of feral children, back to Berlin; and then a more obvious pastiche of Hirschbiegel’s ’04 flickDownfall: life in the increasingly smashed-up city and the bitter, bitter end of the Reich. We’re even given a going-down (an untergang) into Hitler’s bunker itself. Aue is one of a dozen officers to be awarded the German Cross in Gold by the Führer in person. This is what happens next:

Then the door opened and the Führer appeared … he came forward with a hesitant, jerky, unstable step. Bormann, buttoned up tight in his brown uniform, emerged from the room behind him. I had never seen the Führer so close up. He wore a simple grey uniform and cap; his face looked yellow, haggard, puffy, his eyes remained fixed on one spot, inert, then began blinking violently; a drop of spittle stood out at the corner of his mouth. [858-60]

So far, so clichéd. I assume Littell is content to give us this central casting Hitler (his trembling arm, his ‘hairy paw’, his bad breath) because he knows he has something out of the ordinary coming up:

As the Führer approached me—I was almost at the end of the line—my attention was caught by his nose. I had never before noticed how broad and ill-proportioned this nose was … it was clearly a Slavonic or Bohemian nose, nearly Mongolo-Ostic. I don’t know why this detail fascinated me, but I found it almost scandalous. The Führer approached me and I kept observing him. Then he was in front of me. I saw with surprise that his cap scarcely reached my eyes; and yet I am not tall. He muttered his compliment and groped for the medal. His foul, fetid breath overwhelmed me: it was too much to take. So I leaned forward and bit into his bulbous nose, drawing blood. Even today I would be unable to tell you why I did this: I just couldn’t restrain myself. The Führer let out a shrill cry and leapt back into Bormann’s arms. There was an instant when no one moved. Then several men lay into me. I was stuck and thrown to the ground. [960]

Aue is hauled away, naturally enough, to be interrogated and shot. Then the narrator puts in some stuff about the historical veracity of this (‘Trevor-Roper. I know, never breathed a word about this episode, nor has Bullock, nor any of the historians who have studied the Führer’s last days. Yet it did take place, I assure you.’). Aue escapes his death in much the same manner that Harrison Ford escaped imprisonment in The Fugitive; but he only staggers as far as the policemen Weser and Clemens—who have come to punish him for his matricide. Weser is killed by the Russians. Aue flees into Berlin zoo, where Clemens catches him, but as he is about to summarily shoot him deus-ex-machina-Thomas guns him down. As this latter is going through the dead man’s pockets (‘… waving a thick wad of reichmarks: “Look at that,” he said, laughing. “A gold mine, your cop.”’, 974-5) Aue thwacks him with an iron bar, breaking his neck. He steals Thomas’s false papers, which enable him to impersonate a French worker, and that’s where the book ends.

One brief note, before I go away to digest this book and consider whether it’s any good or not. Andrew Seal’s blog-post on the novel has this interesting link to two letters Littell wrote to his translators, from which I discover that in the original French Aue does not bite, but rather pinches Hitler’s nose. Littell says he always wanted the nose bitten, but that his French publisher thought it too outlandish and substituted a pinch instead. I’m with the French publisher on this one. This penultimate oddness hits the wrong note; not for the first time in this book Littell hasn’t got the mix right between bald factual flattened-affect stuff and weird, bizarro-world surreality. In the comments to the last post (and here, before I end, is my obligatory Rich Puchalsky quotation) Rich wondered if the book isn’t ‘a partial repeat of Michael Moorcock’s Pyat books’. I said I thought not really; since those Pyat books I’ve read are tonally quite different to Littell’s text. But biting Hitler’s nose is exactly the sort of wacky thing Max Pyatnitski would get up to. More, it might itself be a deliberate allusion to the scene in The Vengeance of Rome when Colonal Pyat, compelled for complicated reasons to pretend to be Hitler’s favourite prostitute, walks over the Führer in stilettos and shits on his face. [Original plus comments here]

Postscript: a conversation with Andrew Seal.

Andrew: I’m trying to come up with some questions and ideas for our dialogue; one element I was having a lot of trouble with (and ended up leaving completely alone in my post) was the “pineal eye"/gunshot wound and its significance. Did you have any strong feelings about that?

Adam: I agree with you that the head wound ‘third-eye’ thing is problematic. On a practical level, clearly, Littell needs somehow to get his narrator out of Stalingrad alive; and only a serious wound is going to work as far as that is concerned. But the difficulty with the head wound is that it leaves open the possibility that it is this brain damage that is responsible for Aue’s later excesses—that before the wound he is a diligent, dutiful murderer with nothing more eccentric about him (in that context) than a bit of brother-sister rumpy-pumpy in his past; where after the wound and because of the wound he’s the unhinged individual who does all the things in ‘Air’ and ‘Gigue’. This would be a problem, I suppose, because it would compromise the representative capacity of Aue as a character. It would be unusually obtuse to write a novel implying that Germany perpetrated the holocaust because it had, in some sense, been brain damaged. I don’t mean to be stolidly literal in this: Kindly Ones isn’t an allegory, and Aue isn’t presented as a ‘representative German’ except insofar as he is, you know, hard working and focussed on the specificity of the work he is given. Nonetheless something like this has informed the dispraise of a number of reviewers, who argued that the novel would work better if the narrator had been more like Eichmann, and less like the insane brother from Tarantino’s From Dusk Till Dawn. I’m not sure about this—except where the headwound is concerned. What I mean is that being gay, or having had incestuous feelings to one’s sister, don’t speak to motivation, to the reasons a person chooses to do bad things, in the way that suffering severe brain damage does.

For me the extended phantasmagoria immediately after the head-wound is more interesting. It struck me particularly, I think, because I’m such a big fan of SF, so much so that there’s a danger I’ll see it where it may not be. I did see it in Kindly Ones, though (and not just because Littell’s first published book was a SF novel that he’s now disowned). I’m curious what you made of all the science fictiony, Vernean-Burroughsian material in the novel.

Andrew: I have to confess, I don’t know very much about (and haven’t read very much) science fiction. I agree with you that perhaps the brain damage opens up some possibilities for reading the rest of the novel that simply don’t contribute to anything--not to our understanding of Aue as a character, not to our understanding of the job he’s performing, and most of all not to the reverie passages. I tried not to read with the possibility of brain damage in mind, and I do think that there are a few points in the novel which stand out as disavowals of reading the wound as an authorial cop-out. The primary one being, I think, the confirmation of what certainly seems like a hallucinatory passage, where Thomas gets hit with shrapnel--later we find out that it did happen, since he bears a scar and acknowledges the episode. Although that technically happens before the head wound, I felt this was a sort of sign from Littell that the reader shouldn’t be overly enthusiastic in attributing unreliability to the narrator whenever/wherever possible.

A quick google leads me to Georges Bataille, and taking a look at the relevant section in Visions of Excess, this seems very much like something Littell was drawing from.

I guess I generally take a very skeptical view of the sort of esotericist criticism that insists these kind of references within the text are coded such that only a diligent or vastly literate reader will gather the full meaning of the book, or of the idea that only by reconstructing the author’s trail of reading can we understand a book. And this is certainly an issue for reading Kindly Ones, I think; it’s very tempting to say something like, “If you haven’t read Blanchot, you can’t understand The Kindly Ones.” I’m not an author, though--do you feel like you want the readers of your books to be trying to track your references in this way? Do you leave “easter eggs” for them?

Adam: Putting in gags or in-jokes is one thing; burying something crucial to the understanding of your text looks more like cheating. On the other hand, Littell talks about Blanchot a fair bit in interviews and so on; and has published at least one essay on him (a commentary on B.’s ‘On Reading’ piece: here ((translated here) so it’s not exactly buried away. The specifics of that passage you pick out from Visions of Excess are certainly interesting; and you’re right, that section reads almost too directly as a gloss upon what Kindly Ones does.

His ‘On Reading’ piece is interesting too, I think, for different reasons … it addresses the situation of ‘the author’; and the author (‘Jonathan Littell’) keeps intruding into discussions of this particular novel: he’s a good man, a bad man; he has the right to write these things, he doesn’t have that right; he’s laughing all the way to the bank, he’s a serious and ethical person who worked for an NGO on hunger … and so on. This is what he himself says, quoting Blanchot:

D’où la vanité de demander à l’écrivain ce qu’il avait «voulu dire», comme si l’écriture procédait de son vouloir, de sa libre et souveraine volonté. Il faudrait la mettre en rapport, plutôt, avec l’angoisse, Blanchot, on l’a vu, le souligne (invoquant l’exemple de Kafka). Déjà, en 1935, dans Le dernier mot, un de ses tout premiers récits, il écrivait : «La peur est votre seul maître. Si vous croyez ne plus rien craindre, inutile de lire. Mais c’est la gorge serrée par la peur que vous apprendrez à parler …

‘Anguish’ and ‘fear’ rather than ‘will’ or ‘desire’ at the heart of the writing process … that’s interesting. Strange—or, probably not if I come to think of it—how bleached of fear Aue is in most of this book; how little anguish he registers.

But since you ask about my own writing practice, and since we’re talking about Littell’s likely influences (and talking about SF) let me say something that did occur to me as I was reading. Littell has written a novel about genocide (called The Kindly Ones) narrated by a flawed and in many ways amoral narrator called Aue, who travels about his world, has various encounters, some strange sex, murders a few people, although really the most significant thing about him is that he is (partly) responsible for mass murder on a vast, numbing scale. A few years ago I wrote a science fiction novel about genocide (called Stone) narrated by a flawed and in many ways amoral narrator called Ae, who travels about his cosmos, has various encounters, some strange sex and murders a few people, although really the most significant thing about him is that he is (partly) responsible for murdering the entire population of a planet.

Now I’ve no reason to believe (and, actually, several reasons to disbelieve) that Littel has so much as heard of my SF novel. Quite apart from anything else, the differences between the two books (over and above the difference of genre) are even more pronounced than the similarities—I won’t list all the differences here, or it would swiftly become very tedious. But other than the most obvious (that my book is far-futuristic and interplanetary and Littell’s book historical and European) there’s the point that my novel mocks the nature of SF specificity—lots of invented terminology, appendices maps and so on—where Littell presents actual specificity with a completely straight face. But the real reason I mention this is because it foregrounds for me exactly this question of addressing these issues historically as opposed to fantastically—SF is full of genocide, and often in nakedly celebratory terms. Read E E Doc Smith, or actually any one of a number of Pulp and Golden Age SF writers, for examples of that.

If Littell’s point is that one aspect of the tragedy of Nazism was that a fundamentally adolescent, science-fictional Weltanschauung got itself projected upon the actual world—then as Rich Puchalsky noted in the comments to the earlier posts, that’s already been done (Spinrad’s Iron Dream is only one of several interesting books that explore this: Burdekin’sSwastika Night is another) and Kindly Ones starts to look belated and kind of superfluous. Actually I think Littell is doing a lot more than that; although I suspect that is part of what he’s doing.

But there’s another angle. The standard (if you like) SF take on Nazism is alternate history … there’s a whole subgenre called ‘Hitler Wins’, of which Dick’s Man in the High Castle is perhaps both best-known and best, in which history is replayed via German victory, and the book explores the dystopian possibilities of what such a postwar world would look like. Holding the subject matter at one remove like this at least partially inoculates the books against the sort of hostility Littell’s book has provoked; because on some very obvious level such books don’t make implicit truth claims the way Kindly Ones does (just look at the historical verisimilitude). This seems to me very wrong-headed. Books aren’t life. In fact, one of the ways I’m toying with reading this book is precisely as, inter alia, an intervention into the now bulging mini-genre of Hitler Wins books: not a world in which Hitler wins the war, but a textual universe in which Hitler saturates; a world in which Hitler has won the narrator’s consciousness, as it were.

My novel, Stone, isn’t a Hitler Wins alternate-history: it’s set in some far future of interstellar travel. But it does have quite a lot to do with quantum physics, and the idea that observation affects reality. And this in turn made me wonder about what in my series of ongoing reading posts I kept coming back to as the ‘veillant’ aspect of the novel: Les Bienveillants as surveillance (I mean: spectator, observer, watcher; although I note that ‘surveillant’, in French, actually means ‘prison warder or guard’ and also ‘supervisor, overseer’), the extent to which the novel is based on the belief that observing something is not a neutral, scientific or distancing matter; that observing something affects it and you—that watching the murder of Jews makes you as complicit as pulling the trigger. What did you think about that? Or am I putting too much emphasis on the watching aspect? My Ae discovers that the universe he lives in literalises this, via a strong reading of the Copenhagen quantum hypothesis. But Littel’s Aue seems to be an exemplification of the very basic but very important point: it all depends upon how you see the world.

Andrew: The presence of SF and the possibility that it is, as you say, about “a fundamentally adolescent, science-fictional Weltanschauung got itself projected upon the actual world,” is I think matched by a running commentary on romanticized 19th C. novels of war or heroism: War and Peace is unmissable, though not directly referenced, but Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time, Stendhal, and of course Flaubert’s L’Education Sentimentale are both cited repeatedly. If Littell is indicting SF or trying to tie it to Nazism, he is certainly doing so to this genre as well. I’m not sure either is a major concern for him, but I think these two need to be paired together.

I really like your idea about treating the novel as an intervention into the Hitler Wins genre: I think especially recently (even more so since 1985, when DeLillo’s White Noise mocked Hitler Studies) there is an attempt to understand Hitler as a sort of primal scene for the whole Nazi psyche, capable of unlocking the complexes and cathexes of the German soul if only we could understand him. There was the movie Max, for instance, which starred John Cusack as a Jewish art dealer who tries to help the young Hitler achieve his dreams of artistic success; the German film Der Untergang (Downfall) raised some eyebrows with a, if not sympathetic, at least fully humanized Hitler as seen through the eyes of one of his secretaries. Then there was Norman Mailer’s Castle in the Forest—which fixates on Hitler’s childhood.

One of the most interesting things, for me, about The Kindly Ones was how inaccessible—both on a psychological level and on a narrative or plot level—Hitler is to Aue and, even more, to the reader. The whole biting scene, I think, just made that inaccessibility absurd, but it didn’t contradict it. It’s a totally ridiculous parallel, but when Hitler hobbles into that scene to pin medals on Aue and the others, I thought of the scene at the end of Philip Pullman’s Amber Spyglass, where Lyra and Will get to the Ancient of Days just as he’s expiring of tremendous old age. Aue’s ludicrous action deprives the reader of any meaningful confrontation with Hitler, and thus any meaningful confrontation with Nazism as it could be contained in one man. We are given a chance for a half-page or so to read Littell’s descriptions of Hitler as an embodiment of Nazism, then the biting occurs and we’re too thrown to keep that embodiment idea in our heads.

The ‘veillant’ aspect of the book is certainly one I picked up on as well, though I had some trouble fitting it into my focus on work. But I think this is because I was thinking of “looking” or even “watching” as passive actions; when you point to the ‘prison warder or guard’ or ‘overseer’ this makes a great deal more sense to me. The Oresteia opens with a night watchman, for one thing, if we want to keep reading for allusions, but more important to me is Littell’s insistence throughout the book on the completely aleatory distribution of actions within an army: the watchers at an execution are no less culpable than the shooters because it is only the arbitrary orders of other men that have put the guns in the others’ hands.

Also, I think the notion of watching as no less participatory than acting has obvious (and well-remarked upon) effects on the position of the reader. I do think the discourse of witnessing is crucial to the novel, although I think that the force of it is less about trying to make the reader be a witness than it is about the efforts we make to change the act of witnessing to something less active. This is why of all the criticisms of the novel the comparisons of Aue to Zelig, as the uber-improbable figure who pops up everywhere, irritate me the most, especially since these references (I’m thinking mainly of Samuel Moyn’s review from The Nation) don’t talk about Zelig’s chameleon-like nature, just about the fact that he’s humorously ubiquitous. Zelig is, one could say, an anti-witness, and I find him distinctly unuseful as a comparison to Aue.

Insisting on the activeness of the witness is also a way of talking about the conversion of the Furies into the Eumenides, this revision of the role of the witness from a persecuting (or prosecuting) force to a docilely observant one. And I think we see that Littell directly implicates the reader in this conversion: the only use of the term is on the last page, in the last line, when the only witnesses to Aue’s actions that remain are his readers. “The Kindly Ones were on to me.” Are we, though?

Adam: What do you make of Thomas? Might we want to take him, as Rich P. suggests, as a kind of author stand-in?

Andrew: I thought your description of Thomas as a deus ex machina or as a get-out-of-jams-free card was much better; of course the frequency with which Aue runs into any of the friends he makes--Hohenegg, Osnabrugge--is uncanny. Again, though, I think the Zelig comparisons miss the mark; constantly new characters just seems like a really poor alternative to developing a few characters more while sacrificing a small amount of probability. I guess different readers have different valuations of fictional probability, however.

Thomas in many ways actually seemed much more believable and “real” to me than Aue; Thomas Hauser’s character type seemed more universal to me, as if I could meet him today: that same assured sense of knowing where the crucial connections are to be found, whose stock is on the rise, whose is stagnant or falling, and the constant focus on incremental advancement, an ally won here, a patron there. I won’t say I’ve met people like that because it would be a little rude, but I found Thomas to be sort of familiar.

Thomas’s inexplicable patronage of Aue led me to wonder on more occasions than the last page, what relationship does he have to the Kindly Ones, watching over Aue? His nick-of-time rescues of Aue certainly seem angelic, but why would Littell give Aue a guardian angel? The snappy answer is laziness or lack of skill; I don’t buy this because I found a lot of the writing to be both diligent and skillful, and I dislike presuming authorial misconduct where it’s usually me not working hard enough to figure out some narrative riddle. But I don’t really have an answer for Thomas; I guess I just accepted his presence and his role while reading the book, and didn’t really try to fit him in later.

Adam: Surely not laziness, no. But I can certainly see the argument that, broadly speaking, Nazi Germany was not punished for its crimes; a few token representatives were hanged at Nuremberg, rather more escaped (many with the active connivance of various Western powers) or were recruited into the cause of antiCommunism, and in a decade and a half Western Germany was one of the great powers of the world again. I’m not suggesting Germany didn’t learn important and (of course) very hard lessons; but this isn’t the trajectory a Götterdämmerung is supposed to follow. So, yes, I guess it’s non-negotiable, for this fictional project, that Aue escapes; and not just so that he’s in a position to write his memoirs. The innocent suffer, the guilty go unpunished (save, perhaps, the odd nip on the schnozz); this, I guess, is the world Littell is painting.

I think what I’m trying to get at is the way Littell negotiates the borderline in The Kindly Ones between pseudo-documentary verisimilitude and phantasmagoria. Often the line is drawn clearly: Aue is dreaming, say; he’s just been shot in the skull; or he is suffering from a head-spinning fever. But then there’s all the goings-on in Air—did he actually kill somebody in that section, do you think (a peasant woman, perhaps, who wandered into his path), or only imagine doing so? What’s going on with all the imaginary people there?

And then there’s a particular sort or class of character in the novel. What do we make of the obese Bond Villain Mandelbrod, with his trio of identikit pneumatic blonde assistants? What I mean is: in a book that accumulates so much specific realistic detail, with respect to characters as well as actions, isn’t Mandelbrod too obviously a grotesque, a caricature? Like somebody who has wandered in from another novel. The two detectives, Weser and Clemens, seemed to me similar, if not so extreme, cases.

I can’t shake the sense that Littell is trying something really quite ambitious in mixing an emulsion of Realism and the hallucinatory like this. I guess, if he has done it successfully (really not sure if he has) then each should act as a gloss upon the other. I’ll also stoop to autobiography for a mo: I’m not Jewish but my wife is, which means our kids are. Last Saturday but one we all went off to synagogue (I don’t usually go) for a blessing ceremony for the kids, which involved standing on the bimah with Rachel and our two kids reading stuff out to the congregation, and having the Rabbi say some stuff. It was all very nice, actually, and everyone there was perfectly welcoming. Now it so happened that I was, at that point, just finishing off the last section of Littell’s novel (I don’t mean I was reading it in the synagogue .... actually you know what? I don’t think I’d feel very comfortable even carrying a copy into the synagogue. But I’d been reading it the night before, and finished it that afternoon). Now whilst my attention was mostly on the service, at one point it wandered sufficiently for me to have this vertiginous sense of the fundamental oddity of the Holocaust—surrounded as I was by a group of thoroughly nice people having spent the previous week putting my head imaginatively into the mental space of an ideology that wanted all of them dead. I don’t mean to be facile here; and most of the time it’s easy enough to hold in one’s head (indeed, hard enough to avoid thinking about) the lengthy and murderous history of European anti-Semitism. But at the same time it’s a phantasmagoric, peculiar and surreal business. That, I take it, is one of the effects Littell is going for by mixing in so much that we might call SF, or Pulp, or Noir-crime, or whatever.

Andrew: Part of the disjunction or simple queerness of the novel (in the non-gender/sexuality sense of the word, though that would be interesting to add to this discussion) is that the particular brand of realist/fantasy emulsion that Littell employs is not really similar to the other “brands” of fiction dealing with fundamental horrors through surreal or fantasy elements: a creature like Mandelbrod would not really fit either in a magical realist novel or in a novel we’d call “Kafkaesque” (I’m not trying to say that Kafka himself maintains this particular emulsion, but that the books which are called Kafkaesque generally do, and generally do in similar ways).

Nor are these elements fully like any avant-garde writing I know; I suppose a reading of Bataille (again) could recuperate a lot of the dream sequences and maybe a lot of “Air,” but I don’t really see affinities or even attempted affinities between the class of characters you mention and someone like Bataille, or really even someone like (W.S.) Burroughs, though I can’t say that for sure because I haven’t read very much of him. But generally, while a character like Mandelbrod seems like a clump of narrative excess, it’s a very different kind of excess from the intentional excesses of avant-garde art. And if we can talk about the non-realist elements of magical realism or Kafkaesque novels as being excesses (which I think is a very reactionary way of thinking about them), then it seems to me that Littell’s varieties of excess are further away still.

The necessity of specifying which Burroughs I was referencing, though, does lead right back into SF, I think--would it be flip to call Littell’s work “hard history,” sort of like “hard SF” in that the author is imposing constraints on his creativity which are given by currently existing structures, but which do not completely exclude pockets of the stuff that makes it sciencefiction? I’m not sure how much interpretive work this term, “hard history,” actually does, but it certainly seems to me that reading Littell’s book as part of one of the other (non-SF) genres which narrate mass death or mass misery doesn’t really do that work either.

Adam: I’ve enjoyed this exchange very much, and it has helped me get, I think, a better sense of the book. So for instance it has brought into focus for me a sense I had ofevasiveness in the text itself (which may in turn explain why the book has so markedly polarised opinions); not evasiveness in a straightforward, Albert Speer: His Battle With Truthway (self-delusion, or -exculpation), but something more deeply bedded in Littel’s project. I like ‘Hard History’, actually, on the model of ‘Hard SF’, in part because the claims of Hard SF to ‘objective truth’ are just as illusive as the idea that Kindly Ones accesses some sort of objectivity about the holocaust ... of course Littell isn’t trying to do that. I don’t mean ‘evasiveness’, then, in terms of a simple truth-function. I mean it, I think, in some relationship to your more general angle re: work and death ... work and sex as well. The designedly workmanlike descriptions not only of dying, but of all Aue’s sexual kinks and excesses, the way ‘Air’, say, is such a slog to get through: it’s as if the point is to lay bare the fundamentally boring nature of pornography. It’s possible to consume pornography without clocking just how repetitive and dull it is because arousal distracts the consumer; by stripping away the possibility of arousal (I find it hard to imagine many readers getting aroused by Aue’s shenanigans) Littell lays bare the substratum of tedium. Something similar is going on with the larger focus of the book: refusing to present, or re-present, ‘the glamour of evil’, refusing to take the Holocaust as an Adornoesque ultimate that baffles all signification, refusing even to gesture towards Death as a profound transcendence ... actually ‘evasion’ isn’t really the right word for this.

I’m curious, though, that you think reading Kafka’s novels in terms of ‘excesses’ is ‘a very reactionary way of thinking about them.’ Why reactionary, exactly? (Do you mean, regarding their excesses from a sort of antibody perspective, as problems to be isolated and ‘solved’?)

Andrew: I guess what I meant by saying that reading Kafkaesque non-realist elements as “excesses” was a reactionary attitude was that assuming that these elements are flourishes or more generally anything added to a basic realist plot (and therefore extractable, less necessary) is a way of treating reality as something inexcessive, as something which generally seeks or maintains an equilibrium. I think that is very reactionary, and very inaccurate.

I actually really wanted to talk more about sex in the post I wrote about work and death: I particularly wanted to try to gloss what was for me one of the most interesting passages of the book, but I ended up leaving it out because it just wasn’t fitting very well. The passage was:

“For man has taken the coarse, limited facts given to every sexed creature and has built from them a limitless fantasy, murky and profound, an eroticism that, more than anything, distinguishes him from the animals, and he has done the same thing with the idea of death, but this imagination, curiously, has no name (you could call it thanatism, perhaps): and it is these imaginations, these forever rehearsed obsessions, and not the thing itself, that are frantic driving forces behind our thirst for life, for knowledge, for the agonizing struggle of self. I was still holding L’Education sentimentale, set down on my lap almost touching my sex, forgotten, I let these idiot’s thoughts dig into my head, my ears full of the anguished beating of my heart.” (883-4)

The Freudian eros/thanatos dialectic is strangely under-determined (I think) for a book that deals with sex and death so much; except in this section, the two drives seem almost decoupled, which I read as being the result of an extreme division between work and the private life, or between one’s professional activities and one’s interior thoughts. Even in this section, Littell seems to be suggesting that the death drive is capable of overwhelming the sex drive ("my sex, forgotten") simply because it is not as regulated by the work of constructing fantasies and naming them, taxonomizing them. Because there is not really an orderly pornography of death in the same way that there can be said to be an orderly pornography of sex, because there is no thanatism as there is eroticism, the death drive is ultimately the stronger and the more uncontrollable.

The implications for the book as a whole seem to be rather obvious, so I won’t elaborate on them, but this is (equally obviously) a really icky line of thought. I don’t think that the book is meant to fulfill this work of constructing a “thanatism,” although in a way, this has been how Littell’s critics have been reading it. I guess I just don’t see the same kind of commitment to the depiction and imagination of death in the novel as we find in, say, Ballard or the section of Bolaño’s 2666 that deals with the femicidio of Santa Teresa/Ciudad Juárez to make me believe that Littell really intended to create a “thanatism.”

Jonathan Littell, Kindly Ones (2009), 5

2011-08-26T01:54:00.000-07:00

Onward. Kindly Ones fifth section ‘Menuet (en Rondeaux)’ is the longest of all: pp.535-863, and now that I’ve polished it off (or now that I’ve trudged, with increasing sense of weariness, through its snow wastes) only two brief sections stand between me and finishing this big book. I don’t feel I need to apologise for my exhaustion; Littell’s narrator concedes the point, more than once.

On April 9 … ah but what’s the point of relating all these details, day by day? It’s exhausting me, and also it’s boring me, and you too, no doubt. How many pages have I already stacked up on these uninteresting bureaucratic epidoes? No, I can’t go on like this anymore. [778]

But he lies. He does go on. And then he goes on some more.

There’s a good deal more of the novel’s studiedly surfacing and over-surfacing of detail, Aue’s day to day routines and experiences, layered as thickly on here as ever. He becomes closer to Himmler, and becomes almost friends with Eichmann, who’s a major character in this section. I say major character, although as with most of the players in this text, and I’m sure by careful authorial strategy, I should glue on inverted commas to the small-backed c and the hanging penile r whenever I break that word out. None of these guys are characters. All of them are ‘characters’. That, I suppose, is part of Littell’s larger point.

Aue’s irresistible rise continues: he is promoted and given his own department, to supply Speer with slave labour for war production. This means butting heads with other departments, who are keen to pursue the Final Solution to its final, uh, dissolution. So Aue visits Auschwitz, and other camps, attempting to pry out workers for the German war effort. Mostly he fails.

What else? He is strangely drawn (strangely for him, I mean) to a kind if rather distant beautiful young German widow, and goes so far as to fantasise about settling down with her, living an ordinary life, having kids and so on. She—Helene is her name—seems to reciprocate his attraction, and for a while they have what amounts almost to a romantic idyll, though a chaste one, as the RAF’s daytime raids on Berlin start smashing the place up. Then Aue suffers a prolonged fever, and as she nurses him through it he tells her (hoping to drive her away, or just wound her) all the horrible things the Germans have been getting up to in the East and in the camps. This has the effect, naturally, of shocking her. He apologises after he recovers, but it puts a distance between them.

We also learn, in this section, more about Aue’s matricide. Littell comes at this from two flanks. On the one hand he introduces two rather clumsily drawn pursuant policemen who are convinced of Aue’s guilt and who refuse to let the case go: Weser and Clemens (‘Laurel and Hardy’, Aue calls them). They dog Aue. He uses his influence to have the charges dropped. They carry on hounding him. The judge dies and the case is reopened, so they come after him again. With Himmler’s help it’s shelved once more, but still they hound him. (It’s almost as if they are, like, furies, or something). On the other Aue discovers some news about what his long-lost father got up to (agitating on behalf of the Right in the 1920s and early 30s) after he abandoned his family. This affects Aue deeply. Oddly, he is reticent, in narratorial terms, about his dad’s Christian name. Here he is in conversation with a Judge called Baumann:

“Excuse me, but did you father fight with the Freikorps Rossbach, in Courland? I remember an officer called Aue.” He said the Christian name. My heart began beating violently. “That is my father’s name …” [752]

What is his name, though? Agamemnon, presumably.

This emphasis on the faceless, nameless father (Aue is given a photo of his Dad, but the face is just a blur) speaks, I’m thinking, to a broader attempt by the novel to torpedo too-pat or facilely explanatory models of psychological explanation (the most obvious question the novel sets out to address: why did these people do these terrible things?). Neither depth, nor depthlessness, but a partial corrosion of psychological meaning, or orientation, to do with the shaping culure, or family, of volk of a person. Or something.

The SF angle isn’t neglected either. As he convalesces from his fever, and because his mind is too shattered to read ‘serious’ books, Aue reads ‘the Martian adventures of E. R. Burroughs’ [822]. When he first encountered these Plup SF-romances as a lad, we’ve already been told, they inspired him to masturbatory excesses. Now, though, they have a different effect:

I sent for a typewriter and wrote a brief memo to the Reichsführer, quoting Burroughs as a model for the profound social reforms that the SS should envisage after the war.Thus, to increase the birthrate after the war and force men to marry young, I took as an example the red Martians, who recruited their forced labour not just from criminals and prisoners of war, but also from confirmed bachelors who were too poor to pay the high celibacy tax which all red-Martian governments impose; and I devoted an entire chapter to this celibacy tax that, if it were ever imposed, would put a heavy strain on my own finances. But I reserved even more radical suggestions for the SS elite, which should follow the example of the green Martians, those three-metre-tall monsters with four arms and fangs: All property among the green Martians is owned in common by the community, except the personal weapons, ornaments … their mating is a matter of community interest solely …

And so on. We can take this as rather one-tone satire (‘Nazi philosophy was no more than Pulp SF nonsense magnified into world tragedy by being put into practice on such a huge scale…’) or as a sign that Aue has lost his mind (or if that is long gone, then his sense of political self-preservation); or perhaps even as something a little more sincere. But something’s up, here. My hunch is that SF is much more important to this whole novel than I previously thought.

Jonathan Littell, Kindly Ones (2009), 4

2011-08-25T01:53:00.000-07:00

Kindly Ones part 4 ‘Sarabande’ (pages 431-534) has the feel of marking time; a pause in the narration during which, at least until the end, little happens. Our man’s skull was wholly bisected by a Russian bullet, a wound which, perhaps surprisingly, failed to kill him. Evacuated from Stalingrad, he wakes in a German hospital and pieces his consciousness together. Himmler visits to award him the Iron Cross. He moves, when he’s well enough, to a hotel in Berlin to convalesce. There’s a lot of wandering around the city. Otherwise, Littell uses this section to elaborate upon his Ulysses-style mythical underpinning: in this case an Orestes schema, as the Aeschylean title tells us, complete with sister-incest and matricide.

A number of things struck me, and a couple of those struck me as good. One is Aue’s reaction to a party at 2am: ‘Even in my hotel, first class though it was, quiet eluded me: the floor beneath mine was having a noisy party, and the music, shouts, and laughter rose up through the floorboards and seized me by the throat’ [446]. He feels a murderous rage at being disturbed, but instead rings his friend Thomas (‘I explained my homicidal urges to him’) who advises he go downstairs and talk to them.

I easily found the right door and knocked. A tall, beautiful woman in somewhat casual evening dress opened the door, her eyes shining. “Yes?” Behind her the music roared, I could hear glasses clinking, mad laughter. “Is this your room?” I asked, my heart beating. “No. Wait.” She turned around: “Dicky! Dicky! An officer is asking for you.” A man in a vest, slightly drunk, came to the door; the woman watched us without hiding her curiosity . “Yes, Herr Sturmbannführer?” he asked. “What can I do for you?” His affected, cordial, almost slurred voice conveyed an aristocrat of old stock. I bowed slightly and said in the most neutral tone possible: “I live in the room over yours. I’ve just come back from Stalingrad, where I was seriously wounded and where almost all my comrades died. Your festivities are disturbing me. I wanted to come down and kill you, but I called a friend, who advised me to come and talk with you first. So I’ve come to talk with you. It would be better for us all if I don’t have to come down again.” The man had turned pale: “No, no …” He turned around: “Gofi! Stop the music! Stop!…” As I was climbing back up, vaguely satisfied, I heard him shout: “Every one out! It’s over. Out!” I had touched a nerve, and it wasn’t a question of fear: he too, suddenly, had understood, and he was ashamed. [447]

I liked this, I think because—and it’s a vanishingly rare thing in this book—it’s quite funny. Who hasn’t wanted to break up a noisy part with ‘I wanted to come down and kill you’?

Otherwise Aue mooches about for a bit, and then meets up with his sister. This leads to detailed reminiscences of their childhood incest together, which she (she is now married to a crippled, famous musician) has grown beyond, although he hasn’t. She asks him whether he killed civilians in Russia. ‘Once I had to give the coup de grâce,’ he replies. ‘Most of the time I gathered information, wrote reports.’ This isn’t true, or at least isn’t quite consistent with his earlier narration (to be fair, Littell puts in several unreliable narrator markers—or more precisely ‘memory’s-a-tricksy-thing’ markers), but never mind that. I’m more interested in how this sister-brother exchange goes on:

“And when you shot at people, what did you feel?” I answered without hesitating: “The same thing as when I watched other people shoot. As long as it has to be done, it doesn’t matter who does it. And also, I consider that watching involves my responsibility as much as doing.” [482]

This goes back to something I wondered about in my first post: the (sur)veillant aspect of Les Bienveillantes. This is a book about being a spectator to horrors—one that makes us into spectators of horrors—that is nevertheless based upon the position that performing evil and watching others perform evil is ethically equivalent. I’m really not sure about that.

Once he’s recovered from his wound Aue wants a posting in France, and gets his friend Thomas to help him out, but a senior Nazi called Dr Mandlebrot has already earmarked Aue to help with the ‘final solution’ so this comes to nothing. After initial resistance Aue agrees. Before he does, though, we get to one of the book’s ‘look how oo-shocking-oo I can be!’ moments. After not having seen them for many years, Aue travels to Italy to visit his mother and stepfather. The vitriol of his hatred for them both, his mother especially, is laid on pretty thick. Both are killed: the mother Althusserianly strangled (Littell’s Aue makes no reference to Althusser, of course), the stepfather chopped up with an axe. Although Aue has no memory of this murder the inference is pretty unavoidable that he committed the crime. He leaves the murder scene, returns to Germany and joins Himmler’s personal staff.

So, yes, shock tactics. To continue the tradition of quoting Proleptic ‘And I Haven’t Even Read The Book!’ Rich’s comments, on this occasion quoting this very good New York Review of Books review by Daniel Mendlesohn: ‘Mendelsohn traces the vaguely pornographic part of the book to a “literature of transgression” that vaguely runs from de Sade through Bataille, Sartre, Blanchot. And, to expand on my previous comments, that line has required, in the 20th century, a good dose of othering, hasn’t it?’ Yes, the othering is, I guess, inevitably tied to the whole theme of a book about and embodying Nazism. But I’m just as interested in the dilution of shock implicit in that ‘literature of transgression’ canon. Shock is a relative, not absolute, quantity; and it is more susceptible to diminishing returns than other aesthetic effects. De Sade is more shocking than Bataille; Bataille is more shocking thatSaw IV. And so on.

As a consequence, Littell’s account of incest and matricide here is really not all that shocking really. So, for instance, on p.491 Aue remembers visiting ‘a kind of Torture Museum’ in Nuremberg with his sister and bribing the museum guard to leave them alone in the guillotine room. He puts his sister into the device, ties her hands (‘she was panting’), and has anal sex with her, threatening the while to release the mechanism and decapitate them both. ‘I came suddenly,’ he notes, adding one of the worst orgasm-similes I have ever read: ‘a jolt that emptied my head like a spoon scraping the inside of a soft-boiled egg.’ But in this (and in a couple of similar things in this section) Littell is simply trying too hard to be outrageous. I mean: taking your own sister up the Gary whilst her head’s stuck through the business end of a working guillotine? I ask you. (Littell adds a moment of backpedalling, where Aue immediately doubts this memory: ‘but this memory is dubious, after our childhood we had seen each other only once, that time in Zurich, and in Zurich there was no guillotine, I don’t know, it was probably a dream’).

Maybe it’s a function of reading this large novel relatively quickly, but I’m starting to feel tired of it. I can believe this is a deliberate consequence of the thing’s designedly monotony-of-evil focus; its studied excessiveness—excessive detail, excessive length, exceeding conventional fictive morality—but it’s hard to take comfort from that as I trudge into the lengthy fifth portion.

One more thing: I’m not ‘getting’ Thomas at all. He seems to exist not as a character in his own right, but as a narrative get-out-of-jail-free card: his influence puts Aue in all the dramatically interesting postings, saves him when he need saving, moves the plot on when it needs moving. [Original plus comments here]

Jonathan Littell, Kindly Ones (2009), 3

2011-08-24T01:52:00.000-07:00

After Toccata and Allemandes we get Courante, running (ha!) from p.339 to p.427: the Stalingrad chapter. For most of its length this is pretty impressively done: lots of evocative, vividly horrible details about the winter 1942-3 horrors, the cold, the lice, the danger, mutilation, cannibalism and despair. Some of this was familiar to me (there’ve been no shortage of books about this siege, after all); some weren’t, though I don’t doubt their historical veracity. I was struck, for instance, with the ‘Oberstleutnant from the Forty-fourth Division who had demolished an entire isba [wooden hut] where a dozen of his men were sheltering, to heat water for a bath, and then who, after soaking for a long time and shaving himself, had put his uniform back on and shot himself in the mouth’ [386].

The last quarter of this section is dominated by two things: first one lengthy conversation (notionally an interrogation) between Aue and a captured Soviet Commissar called, maybe a little allegorically-clumsily, Pravdin (that is, ‘Truth man’). I’m getting used, now, to Littell’s habit of simply inserting lectures (often many pages long) into the body of his text; and that’s what we get here. I suppose I’m about one-quarter against, three-quarters in favour of this strategy. The one-quarter is reminded—and this, obviously, is not a good thing—of John Galt’s interminable lecture at the end of Atlas Shrugged. But the three-quarters is compounded partly of (usually) engagement with interesting content, and mostly of admiration for what is evidently a broader aesthetic strategy. This is the idiom of Science itself; telling you a whole bunch of interesting stuff in a way that not only makes no attempt to pander to readers with short attention spans, but which also deliberately disconnects itself from moral judgment. Which is to position the novel, I suppose, as the conceptual child of Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Englightenment argument: the broader cultural idiom of Enlightenment rationality leads directly to the door of Auschwitz. Littell elaborates that throughout the book. In this chapter, for instance, Aue makes friends with a doctor, called Hohenegg, who’s been sent to check out the general health of the Sixth Army.

”I’ve already conducted about thirty autopsies and the results are irrefutable: more than half present symptoms of acute malnutrition … but the curious thing is that despite the reduction in rations, it’s still much too soon to have so many cases … the metabolism itself is affected by the cold and fatigue and can no longer function properly.”—“And fear” [the interlocutor is Aue]—“Fear too, of course. We saw it during the Great War: under some particularly intense bombardments, the heart fails; we find young, healthy, well-fed men dead without the slightest wound. But here I’d say rather that it’s an aggravating factor, not a preliminary cause. Once again, I have to continue my investigations. It won’t be of much use for the Sixth Army. I’m sure, but I flatter myself that it will serve science, and that’s what helps me get up in the morning.” [382-83]

His research has not immediate practical use, but he pursues it anyway, for the sake of this abstracted ‘science’. That’s exactly the tone of Aue’s own narrative project: he’s not telling this story for any immediate purpose. It’s in the service of some chilly, rather pointless abstraction.

The Aue-Pravdin exchange is interesting, although a little sixth-form-debating-society: Pravdin considers National Socialism ‘a heresy of Marxism’ [395], comparing the Soviets to the Jews and the Nazis to the Christians. Aue, in turn, delivers a long speech about the Soviet system as a political iteration of humiliation (‘but one can humiliate only those who can be humiliated; and in turn, only the humiliated humiliate. The humiliated of 1917, from Stalin down to the muzhik, have done nothing since then but inflict their fear and their humiliation on others.’ Russia is ‘this country of the humiliated.’ He goes on:

In Germany, and the capitalist countries, everyone says communism ruined Russia; but I believe it’s the opposite: it’s Russia that ruined communism. It could have been a fine idea, and who can say what would have happened if the Revolution had taken place in Germany rather than Russia? If it had been led by self-assured Germans, like your friends Rose Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht? [Pravidin boasted about liaising with these famous German revolutionaries before the war: that’s how his German is good enough to sustain this exchange] [399]

The second thing that dominates the last quarter of this section is very different: an unusually extravagant sort-of dream sequence. Aue is shot in the head, which in turn mutates his narratives into an elaborate phantasmagoria: he walks through Stalingrad, and swims for a long time under the ice of the Volga (‘the air lasted in my lungs … I kept swimming, passing sunken bargesful of handsome young men sitting in rows, their weapons still in their hands, little fish threading through their hair agitated by the current’). Eventually he surfaces and climbs aboard a strange airship piloted by a Nazi scientist called Doktor Sardine, presumably to remind us of the Sardinenpackung in the Ukraine—Herr Doktor is certainly intemperately anti-Semitic, and accuses Aue of being ‘an accomplice of Finkelstein! Of Krasschild! Those envious Yids … Squids! Dwarves! Boot-polishers! Falsifiers of diplomas and of results … [419]. Sardine believes the world to be cone-shaped, and is taking his airship off to explore the flat base, even though ‘beyond the Edge, there is no gravitational field’ [421] (the machine, apparently, will turn into a sort of mechanical spider to cling to the surface). From the airship Aue sees his sister on the steppes below—we’ve learned, in this section, that he considers an incestuous liaison with his sister when they were kids the expression of the great love of his life. Escaping the airship he winds up inside a kurgan with some physically dissimular brothers: a potbellied dwarf and a tall thin man. Aue’s sister is being brought to be married to them. When Aue objects, the dwarf insists he play nardi. ‘“If I win, I kill you, if I lose, I kill you.”’ ‘Fine,’ says Aue. ‘That’s no problem, let’s play.’ [426]. The chapter ends as the sister approaches, parading naked towards the kurgan on foot, Aue fretting about her public nudity.

As with earlier forays into borderline magical-realism (although I suppose this one can be contained by bracketing it under an it’s-all-a-dream rubric), I really wasn’t sure about this last section. It lacked the discipline, in writerly terms, of the historically anchored stuff. It plays a little too ponderously with key themes and tropes: underwater monstrosity; Jules Vernean machines; insects; defecation; dwarfs; sites of death. It’s not that its ineffective; it’s just that it reads a little by-the-numbers.

I suppose giving a chapter set in the seige of Stalingrad the sprinting, onward-moving title ‘Courante’ counts as ironic. And in that sense this sudden fantastical opening up of vistas, this swimming, running and flying onwards at the end, struck me as a false step; a kind of underselling of the ironic potential. In other words I’m echoing something Rich said in the comments to 2: ‘As an aesthetic effect, monotony can be very effective. But for it to work, it has to deliberately refuse to satisfy the reader with some kind of drama, some kind of catharsis. That’s what the Lovecraftian-dream and magical-realism sequences seem to be, at third hand, to be; signs that the author isn’t really committed.’ That, I think, puts its finger on what is wrong with the conclusion of this section. [Original plus comments here]

Jonathan Littell, Kindly Ones (2009), 2

2011-08-23T01:50:00.000-07:00

On with Jonathan Littell’s Les Bienveillantes. The first section (‘Toccata’) was only twenty pages; the second (‘Allemandes I and II’) takes us all the way up to page 337. The ‘I’ part of that title is I take it Aue’s experiences in newly conquered Ukraine, where SS units are going about pacifying the territory and murdering a large number of undesirables: mostly Jews, of course, but also inmates in mental asylums, tubercular kids, partisans and the like. This is all described in meticulous, repellent detail, and makes for thoroughly distressing reading: a function both of the methodically neutral tone and the horrible details. Aue himself finds all this murder thoroughly unpleasant, but he doesn’t question (and in fact he repeatedly asserts in conversation) the racist beliefs underpinning the actions. He perseveres in what he considers an onerous but necessary duty. Nevertheless, particularly once the mass-murder moves from adults male Jews to all Jews he suffers increasingly from psychosomatic nausea and vomiting and comes close to nervous collapse.

He is sent to the Crimea for rest and recuperation; and this leads us into what I take to the ‘II’ of the title: his reassignment into newly captured Georgia, and further SS work. Here, in a similar methodical, piling-up-the-details mode, we get extensive sections of (effectively) travelogue, and personal philosophy. Fewer Jews are killed in this portion of the narrative, although a lengthy chunk of it is given over to a debate between the SS and the Wehrmacht as to whether a population of Jews living in the mountains—known as the Bergjuden—are really Jews or not. By ‘really’, of course, these Nazis mean ‘racially’. One of the book’s more attractive characters is introduced: an academic linguist who specialises in the languages of the region, and given a lengthy speech rejecting the whole concept of race as unscientific [300-03] but apart from that it is all ghastly Nazi pseudo-science and an enormous amount of spurious research (experts are flown into the region) to determine whether the Bergjuden are ‘actually’ Jews, or whether they have been assimilated so thoroughly into the region’s racial makeup, their Jewish blood sufficiently diluted, that they are no longer a threat (‘The Bergjuden are of Caucasian, Iranian and Afghan descent and are not Jews, even if they have adopted the Mosaic religion’, 296) . Practically the SS want to liquidate the Bergjuden (I was going to add: ‘because…’—but really there’s no ‘because’ about it); whereas the Wehrmacht want to keep them alive, to avoid souring the generally pro-German vibe of the region. After long sections of genuinely upsetting detail about mass murder in the Ukraine, this whole ‘are the Bergjuden really Jews?’ section—it’s pretty much 50 pages long—comes over (deliberately, I suppose) as insanely pettifogging and bureaucratic.

Meanwhile we discover more about Aue’s past; his homosexuality (or bisexuality, heavily slanted on the homosexual side) and some details about his broken upbringing. And we get a sense of the prosecution of the war in the East. At the start of section 2 the Germans are rolling fluidly into Soviet Russia. Towards the end of the section the winter has kicked in, and things have started to go bad for the Germans: Soviet counterattack locks the German Sixth Army in Stalingrad (‘The decision not to evacuate the Sixth Army was made by the Führer himself ... The surrounded divisions now formed a giant Kessel, a cauldron as they said, cut off from our lines’, 307). This, we know, is not going to end well.

In the end the Bergjuden are not killed, but Aue—who has made enemies on account of his poorly-concealed homosexuality, and by not prosecuting the SS’s case for the liquidation of the Bergjuden vigorously enough—is sent off by his commanding officer on a plane to Stalingrad.

OK: having finished this section the big question (but, you know, of course) is what to make of the lengthy, detailed descriptions of the murder of many Jews and other people. This, I’d say, is the riskiest part of the narrative, in broader ethical terms; and Littell’s deliberate flattening, almost droning account is presumably intended to address that danger. I suppose the whole thing is recounted with a very deliberate meticulousness and thoroughness precisely to mimic the meticulous thoroughness with which the Nazis perpetrated the greatest of their several crimes against humanity. I can’t really fault the formal fit. Still.

Some of it comes close to Holocaust-cliché (if it’s not too outrageous linking those two words with a hyphen): the 10-year old Jewish boy who’s a brilliant pianist and is adopted by the squad as a sort of mascot (Aue orders sheet music for him) whose death entails sentimental sorrow on Aue’s part (the sheet music arrives too late, hand-delivered by Eichmann, in what seemed to me another central-casting walk-on part: shiny briefcase, little-glasses, petty-bureaucrat mode). Meanwhile the book chronicles the SS’s learning curve: get the victims to dig their own trench then shoot them all in the head—but no, that gets the shooters spattered with blood and brains. So: shoot them in the body—but no, then they don’t necessarily die, and you have to go down into the trench to finish them off. The trenches fill up to quickly, so you try ‘Sardinenpackung’ (horrible word) the victims into the trench and then shooting them. But, look, individual shooting is too inefficient. So you rig up vans as portable gas ovens (adapted Saurer military trucks), but that doesn’t work too well because … and so on. The emphasis throughout is on the holocaust as a series of practical problems to be overcome, rather than as an ethical or even ideological intervention, and the length and specificity is unavoidably deadening. This doesn’t stop the descriptions, particularly the telling details, being genuinely upsetting. But I took Littell’s aesthetic innovation to be not only the flatness of his affective tone, but more significantly the length of it all. Rich, in a comment to the previous post, raises the valid objection to a book like this: ‘the rehearsal of banalities about the banality of evil.’ But—to distance myself from what I said a moment ago about holocaust-cliché—I don’t think Littell does expatiate upon the banality of evil. Rather the impression of this section of his novel is on the monotony of evil.

A friend and colleague of mine (who has already read the novel) is an expert on the Holocaust (he is the author of this book) and from him I learn that a lot of Littell’s material here is recycled, sometimes minimally adapted, from the extensive literature on the topic; and much of this section does read as a slightly ostentatious display of detailed research. But the thing that surprised me is how compelling a read it is, maugre all that.

Two more things: one is that (my ears pricked up sharper than other peoples’ would, I daresay) I noticed allusions to SF. Himmler addresses the SS with visions of the future: each soldier will ‘manage a great rich property’ on captured Russian and Ukrainian land: ‘the labour in the fields would be provided by Slav helots, and the Germans would limit themselves to administering … all these cities would be linked to the Reich by a network of highways and double-decker express trains … [the whole of the Crimea] would become a vacation and leisure territory, directly connected to Germany, via Brest-Litovsk, by an express.’ Aue notes: ‘to me the vision outlined evoked the fantastic utopias of a Jules Verne or an Edgar Rice Burroughs’ [133]. And later on, Aue has a feverish dream in which he is a Lovecraftian squid-monster (‘I was a great Squid God, and I was ruling over a beautiful walled city of water and white stone … I began to thrash violently, churning up the water of the centre with my tentacles’ 151). I’m curious whether Littell does anything more with this Nazism-as-SF trope in the rest of the book.

I could add, I’m not convinced by the dream sequences, generally speaking.

The other thing is a strange interlude in which an elderly though very hale Georgian Jew (and by elderly I mean, somewhere between 120 and 140 years of age) comes specifically to Aue, telling him that he has seen where he (the Jew) is to be buried, and Aue must take him there. This fellow, borm without a philtrum, claims to have had commerce with angels and to be able to see the future. He leads Aue and his orderly high into the mountains, persuades the two Germans to dig a grave, and then stands there whilst Aue shoots him. I wasn’t at all sure about this: the magical-realist aspect of it threw me, and it sorted ill (I felt) with the tone of the rest. Maybe I’m missing something. [Original plus comments here]