Scattered thoughts on Sopranos, Deadwood

A few observations on those fine shows, excerpted from bloggesque conversation with Bill Benzon of The Valve, whose excellent posts on The Sopranos provide the jumping off point, and which you ought to read, you know. I pull them out of the honourable anonymity of the various comments-threads in which they appeared for my own convenience, more than anything, so that I can do something with them if and when I get round to it.
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A starting place: "As the final season of The Wire moved past its midpoint I began reading assertions and arguments that it is one of the three best (dramatic) shows that has even been on TV; The Sopranos and Deadwood are the other two" [Benzon].
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I plump for Deadwood. "One advantage that Deadwood has over the other two (I agree superlative) shows, paradoxically in a way, is that it was cancelled after its third series. By luck or judgment the ending of the third series works, I’d say, on pretty much every level ... as a conclusion for the whole, I mean. Had the show been cancelled after series two it would have been a much lesser text. The Sopranos however was sublime for two series, precisely because it was at its heart a show about Tony’s relationship with his mother. Whilst she was still in the story it was unsurpassed telly; once she died, the show dragged itself through a number of contortions about what its focus now was, and being as popular as it was with audiences and advertisers the makers span it out and span it out. Diminishing returns. The Wire is into, what? Five series now? For me Deadwood wins."
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Mike Beggs disagreed ("I think the end of Deadwood was terrible, a classic case of commerce cutting a work short before the story was done") and that made me think:
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Do you think so, Mike? The ending of Deadwood, I mean? I’d argue it worked perfectly: which is to say, one of the joys of the show was the rich and subtle manner in which it played against the cliches of the Western: subtle in the sense that it wasn’t a simple inversion of the values of Frontier Heroism (ie ‘contrary to every Western ever made the Wild West was shit and everybody associated with it nasty’), any more than it was a simple re-heroising of those values. Instead it was a wonderfully expressive excavation of and ironic restatement of those tropes: the maverick lawman, the villan, the horse, the barfight or street-brawl, the gold mine and so on, all worked through Deadwood in ways that brilliantly played off against our conventionalised expectations. Since one of the strongest formal or narrative conventions of the Western, or popular cinema/TV more generally, is that everything builds to a climactic gunfight, I personally loved the way series three set that expectation up, moved towards it and at the last moment eucatastrophically simply knight’s-moved in a different direction. I don’t see that the planned two additional feature films would have added much. Though I’d have loved to have seen them. The only weakness in the third series, I thought, was the introduction of the strolling players: like Chris’s flirtation with Hollywood in the Sopranos, a slightly strained meta-textual reference to the business of making TV shows itself. Naturally for people who work in the media the processes of the media loom large, and they consider them enormously significant and important. Naturally they want to insert them into their work; but, as it happens, they don’t really fit either Deadwood or Sopranos, I think.

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Two other observations, these ones specifically on the Sopranos. In another post, Bill B. considers the show via some close-reading of series 1, episode 9, 'Boca'. He concentrates in particular on a scene towards then end, when Junior menaces his girlfriend (for revealing in her gossiping that he enjoys performing cunnilingus, and thus degrading his status in the mob) and eventually, instead of punching her, pushes a pie into her face. I said:
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The unfunny pie-in-the-face is interesting, isn’t it? It underlines that for this show the violence is never violence per se (as in, for instance, Clockwork Orange): it’s instrumental. It’s about coercing and/or (usually and) humiliating the other person. When a character in the show pops up who enjoys being violent for the sake of the violence the other mobsters are far from comfortable: I’m thinking of Ralph Cifaretto: Tony [sorry Bill, this is a spoiler for you; look away now] eventually kills him basically because Ralph enjoys killing for killing’s sake. He projects his own self-loathing at the violent life onto this violent other. Speaking broadly, the show succeeds, I think, to the extent that it refuses the standard tv-cinematic Jack-Bauer logic that violence simplifies situations; and in fact the insight that violence complexifies life actually beyond the capacity of the ordinary psyche to cope with is where the show opens. One of my favourite moments from the second series is when I think I’m remembering this right) Tony is talking to Melfi about sitting in his car whilst Furio, newly over from Italy, is sent into a shop to show that he has what it takes to administer an effective beating to somebody who owed Tony money. ‘What were you feelings?’ Melfi asks, as he looks back on this moment--the point being, of course, that Tony is obscurely sad about it. Tony looks wistful, as if remembering when he was young and there was a straightforward joy to be had in just beating people up before the burdens of command oppressed him, and replies: ‘I thought about the beating. I wished I was in there.’ Melfi’s then asks one of her most insightful questions: ‘giving it, or receiving it?’

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Finally one of Bill's best posts on this subject, 'The Sopranos: 5 Easy Pieces', asks a number of central questions, not least:
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What’s a Plot for? Aristotle tells us that a well-formed drama must have a beginning, a middle, and an end. The Sopranos is all middle. To be sure, there is a first episode – for the whole series, for each season – and a last – for the whole series, for individual seasons. But they’re all middle. Does that mean that The Sopranos is without form? I don't think so. But how does that form function. For that matter, if The Sopranos can function without a beginning and an end, then why have beginnings and endings at all? The show is very much about character; those of the central players are contradictory and incoherent. What has this to do with plot?
These aren’t quite the right questions, but I don’t know how to formulate better ones.

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I replied:
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The Sopranos is all middle. This seems to me spot-on, as a description of the show, but also of the show’s appeal. Writing narrative like this flatters the audience (no tedious “for-the-hard-of-thinking” plot-exposition or infodumping for us: we’re clever) and is, I think, aesthetically more elegant ... the beauty of inflections (and just after) and all that. But it’s more than a random thing. This middleness, or this suspension between beginning and end, is kind of the moral point of the Sopranos: the delineation of a world desperately trying to avoid (repress) origins—all the Freudian, psychoanalytic stuf—and trying to avoid conclusions: the consequences of their terrible actions, about which they’re all in denial.

Richard Morgan, The Steel Remains (2008)

We all know that the American edition of Morgan’s last novel was renamed from Black Man to the less shocking Thirteen to avoid controversy. So I’m wondering what the USA will do with The Steel Remains. They can’t leave the title in that form, of course: what with the current dire state of the US Steel industry it would surely be too upsetting for an American audience. So I’m thinking they’ll go with Gay Elf Fucking. But there are various options. They could, for instance, rename it Brokeback Mount Doom. Or Hello I’m Julian And This Is My Friend Sauron. Or I’m the Only Gay on the Pillage. Or Elric of Meli-boner. Or Michael? More Cock! Or Robert Heinlein’s Glory Hole. Any of these would work.
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Well. Maybe not that last one.
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So here we have the first of a projected trilogy of sword and sorcery (via far-future SF) novels. and the first thing to say is that it's extremely good. Morgan is a gifted writer, and his gifts are lavishly on display here.
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What's it about? It's about Ringil Eskiath, a warrior hero swordsman who is gay. Now, one way of writing that last sentence would be Ringil Eskiath is a warrior hero swordsman who happens to be gay, but I’ve never liked that locution—it’s a heterosexual code for ‘… which I’m totally OK with, actually’, which in turn is code for ‘although secretly I think it’s all a bit icky’. If you need to remind yourself that ‘there’s nothing wrong with being gay’ then you are still, to a degree, in thrall to homophobia (nobody beds down with their wife or husband thinking ‘you know what? There’s nothing wrong with being straight … I’m totally OK with that’). Besides which Ringil is not a character who happens to be gay. Ringil is assertively, even aggressively in-your-face gay.
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He is a gay man living in a homophobic and persecutory society (Morgan puts this across well) and his sexuality is a large part of his being. He is gay, actually, in a 1980s stylee—I got the sense, actually, of a distinctly 1980s vibe to Morgan’s invented world, something I took to be a deliberate authorial strategy. What I mean is that, though set in the usual medievalised Fantasy realm, the novel seems to go out of its way to talk about how riverside warehouses have been converted to spacious apartments, or to mention patios [206] (this must surely be the first Fantasy novel to include patios) and merry-go-rounds and museums; to include wine-tasting (‘a dark Jith-Urnetil grape, late harvest pressing, of course, you couldn’t mistake that taste’, 197), and have a character go back to her flat where she keeps what amounts to an enormous, ungainly early-model computer. It’s like a Gay Fantasy Ashes To Ashes. (Asses To Asses, maybe). But this is not random. The point I'm making is that Ringil is not gay like the Spartan warriors at Thermopylae were gay; and he’s not gay like male lovers in the armies of the First World War (this isn’t a novel about the way societies at war become homoerotically obsessed with masculine strength and beauty, like Barker’s excellent 1993 The Eye in the Door and 1995 The Ghost Road). Ringil is gay in a loud-and-proud, vanguard 1980s sense. Plus he can chop your head off if you annoy him. Anyway, Ringil quests through Morgan’s fantasy realm to rescue a cousin who’s been sold into slavery, and along the way he fights, hacks and kills quite a few people, and has a certain amount of sex.
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Ringil isn’t what you’d call a likeable individual. He kills a lot of people, for one thing. Also he spends a certain amount of time posing in a selfconsciously ‘I am a man whose soul has been bruised by the cruel world, see me toss my hair and gaze mournfully away to the left whilst simultaneously noting how fantastically handsome I look in my leather outfit’ way; which struck me as a pretty cheesy pick-up strategy. Still he gets to have sex with the devastatingly good-looking, thrillingly cold-hearted dwenda Seethlaw, so I suppose that works out OK for him. Plus he’s also got a really big sword. No, really. It’s a broadsword called Ravensfriend, a name which should endear it to the Velcro City Tourist Board.
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There are two other strands to the narrative. One concerns Egar the Steppe Nomad, who used to fight alongside Ringil but now has returned to the Steppes to rule his people, where he is having a sort of mid-life crisis. The other is about Archeth, a half-human half-Kiriath woman acting as a sort of technical adviser to a very central casting Decadent Hedonistic Young Emperor. I took the Kiriath to be sort-of-elves, but this may not be right. Anyway these three strands come together, as we know they will, and the three former friends reunite to fight off an incursion by the Dwenda, superpowered fighters from another dimension. I took the dwenda to be sort-of gods (in the logic of the novel, I mean). Or maybe another kind of elves. This may not be right either.
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This is what I liked about the novel: I liked its excessiveness. I liked its edge of strangeness, something not easy to achieve in a genre as clotted with priors as heroic Fantasy. It’s as well-plotted, well-written and well-conceived as any Morgan novel, which is saying a lot. That said, I didn’t enjoy the first half of the novel so much as the second: there’s too much shuffling of narrative feet, and setting of scenes; a sense of Ringil and Egar being giving things to do (which is to say, given monsters to fight) to keep them busy whilst the novel beds itself in; and Archeth’s third of the book never really gels, since she mostly spends her time in lengthy plot- and background-expository conversations with her Decadent Emperor. But once we meet the dwenda things improve enormously. I particularly liked Ringil’s prolonged visit to Fairyland, a sort of ‘what if our world were their hell’ trope which works brilliantly.
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Here’s what I didn’t like. The tone has a sort of uncertainty to it. Don’t get me wrong here: Morgan is an excellent stylist, and his overall approach to the book is fine. What he tends to do, as a writer, is to work a sort of Velvet Underground or Pixies loudQUIETloud aesthetic: layering nicely understated pastels:

The sun lay dying amidst torn cloud the colour of bruises, at the bottom of a sky that never seemed to end. Night drew in across the grasslands from the east, turned the persistent breeze chilly as it came. [17]

with more crashing sections of scarlet and black:

The first runner took the lance full in the chest and fell back … scrabbling and spitting blood. Egar reined in hard, twisted and withdrew the lance, quadrupled the size of the wound. Wet, ropelike organs came out on the serrated edges of the blade, tugged and tore and spilt pale fluids as he ripped the weapon clear. [22]

Speaking generally, this is a very canny stylistic strategy. But as the book goes on I felt the crashing starts to drown out the crowded moments, and by the time of the climactic battle I felt a little numbed to it all.
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Of course Morgan is an extreme writer, and objecting to the extremes would be to miss the point of what he’s doing: if you don’t like ultraviolence, ultrasex and ultra-swearing maybe you should think about reading another novel. Nevertheless I thought his extremism wasn’t as well handled here as it was in Black Man/Thirteen. The swearing grates; instead of creating an emphatic and aggressive idiom of its own, after the manner of (say) Scarface or Deadwood, it feels forced, and overused, and on occasion even wincingly adolescent. The violence is very full-on all the time, which erodes its capacity to shock us with its visceral intensity. The sex, on the other hand (and despite what I’d heard by way of rumour before actually reading the book) is a more contained portion of the whole, and works much more effectively.
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But in places I wasn’t sure of the tone. The naming seemed a little off. So, Ringil fights hideous monsters called corpsemites, which I kept reading as corp-semites, which struck the wrong note with me (and wouldn't endear the book to the Jewish Chronicle). And then there’s Dwenda. I couldn’t work out if Morgan had picked that name precisely because it has a girly, Wendy or Glinda vibe to it: which is to say, because it sounds a bit Friend of Dorothy. Which I could understand, in a book like this, although tonally it seems wrong to me.
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It could be that I wasn’t tuning-in to the author’s sense of humour, my own sense of humour having, I regret to say, largely atrophied. When Ringil fights an urban thug who is armed only with a fruit knife, I wondered if it was a deliberate allusion to the episode of Blackadder 1 where Brian Blessed uses just such a utensil to fight his way back from the crusades, and if so, to what end. Is that funny? I don't know. I do know that the novel isn’t above channeling Calculon:

‘Nooooooooooooooo!!!!!!’ [217]

(Really? All those exclamation marks?) And I also know that occasionally the novel succumbs to a key danger of its genre—namely that individual sentences start out in English but end up sounding like the Swedish Chef from the Muppets:

Ringil thought back to the Kiriath he had known; Grashgal, Naranash, Flaradnam, Kalanak. [105]

Bork bork bork. Morgan goes to such lengths to subvert the clichés of Heroic Fantasy that the ones that still remain (‘a dark lord shall rise’) jolt a little. What else? Here’s how milkmaids talk in actual folk art:

‘Oh don’t deceive me.
Oh never leave me.
How could you use a poor maiden so?'

And here’s how milkmaids talk in Morgan’s universe:

‘Fuck it, I was on my sky-fisted way to your fucking yurt when I passed him. And, like I said, he just fucking shoves right past me. Face fucking screwed up like he’s pissed off about something.’ [152]

Which has, perhaps, slightly less charm. Plus I was puzzled by the way Ringil flourishes his broadsword like a fencer’s foil. [My puzzlement may be a simple expression of ignorance; check out the comments below, after which you may prefer to disregard the following sentences] Broadswords are very heavy objects indeed. They were used in battle as, in effect, big clubs, for battering more than chopping; and just being able to lift one up takes considerable strength. There’s some chaff about how kiriath blades are lighter than regular blades, but it didn’t persuade me. Gene Wolfe talks about how Severian’s broadsword is hollow and filled with mercury, to facilitate it being hefted and swung about. But this is to grumble unnecessarily. None of this detracts from the impact the book makes, which is considerable.
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The Steel Remains is not the first Fantasy book to make a big deal out of the homoerotic, homosocial and homosexual aspects of the genre. Delany’s Nevèrÿon books are more radical in their excavation of the sexual politics of Fantasy. Barker’s Eye in the Door, as I mentioned above (not a Fantasy novel, of course) does a better job of anatomizing how a society at war is inevitably interpenetrated by homosexual fascination and desire in ways it, or portions of it, cannot be comfortable with or acknowledge. But The Steel Remains remains a powerful turn-everything-up-to-eleven reading experience. It’s the most impressive Fantasy novel I’ve read in a very long time: a big, brave, bollocks-out and often brilliant novel. It’s not perfect, but it’s a major novel for all that. I can’t wait for vol 2.

Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (1880-81)

Critics like to challenge the reader’s automatic assumption that the lady of the title is Isabel Archer. Might we not (they say) take the lady to be Madame Merle? How might the novel read if we read it under the assumption that she is the heroine? But just for a moment I want to ponder a different emphasis embodied in the title—that the book is a portrait. That it is, in other words, about portraiture:
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I’m a recent convert to this novel, incidentally. When I first read it, as an undergraduate, I hated it. It ends well, but starts glacially, awkwardly and uninvolvingly, and the whole is vitiated (I used to think) by one huge flaw, Archer herself. What I mean by that is that everybody in this novel, male or female, but especially all the men, falls immediately and deeply in love with Isabel. I simply don’t believe it. As a younger reader, less wary of essentialism, I put it to myself this way: James as a gay man just doesn’t get what it is about some women that makes heterosexual men fall desperately in love with them. He thinks it is a mix of prettiness, sharpness of wit, and brightness of demeanour. It’s not. Actually this may not be as essentialist a way of looking at the question as all that. Proust, by contrast, was a gay man who very evidently did understand what it is about some women that makes some men fall crazily, stupidly, headlessly in love with them. Isabel Archer is very nice, and possesses many charms, but she is no Odette. She’s not even an Albertine. She's rather annoying.
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On the one hand, everybody has to fall in love with Isabel in order for the machinery of James’s plot to work: for Ralph to want to give her a fortune, for Warburton, Goodwood and Osmond to propose marriage. It is supposed to add piquancy to the tragic dilemma in which the book winds-up that such a thing could happen to an individual so delightful, with whom we (as readers) are so in love ourselves. But, on a first reading, I was much more annoyed than enamoured of Isabel Archer. It seemed a make or break feature of the book; more so than the equally annoying but savingly marginal couple of Pansy and Rosier, as irritating a pair of Dresden china figures ever lifelessly adorned a novel.
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I’ve just reread the novel, and I liked it much better this second time around. Having laboured a little establishing his artificial arrangement of individuals, James manages some smooth and rather wonderful effects later on. I still found Isabel entirely resistable, to the point of being actively irritating, but I was much more drawn-in to the central portions of the book. The way James writes Isabel falling in love with Osmond is, indeed, brilliant. Where another writer might portray Osmond as a charming man who only after marriage reveals his charm to be superficial, James shows the appeal of bachelor (widower, I should say) Osmond at the same time as showing him to be a selfish egotist more interested in possessions than people. It’s a tremendous sleight of hand, because we do believe that Isabel could fall in love with him, just as we do believe that she could later hate him. The latter half of the novel, with its exquisite handling of the woe that is in marriage—that in itself a remarkable thing in a High Victorian novel—is simply wonderful. We watch Osmond’s cruelty to Isabel with a fascination grounded in part by how elegantly it is prosecuted: no raised voices, no physical violence or loss of control. Maintaining self-control is the mainspring of the man, of course. And yet he continues cruel, and she continues to pretend to submit to him whilst constantly—of course we might wish to say heroically—resisting him, passive-aggressively. Here they are fighting chillily over whether Pansy (Osmond’s daughter, Isabel’s step-daughter) should marry Rosier, whom she loves, or Lord Warburton, whom she doesn’t but whom her father prefers on account of his wealth and title.
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“I have sent little Rosier about his business.”
“You were afraid that I would plead for Mr Rosier? Haven’t you noticed that I have never spoken to you of him?”
“I have never given you the chance. We have so little conversation in these days. I know he was an old friend of yours.”
“Yes: he’s an old friend of mine.” Isabel cared little more for him than for the tapestry that she held in her hand; but it was true that he was an old friend, and with her husband she felt a desire not to extentuate such ties. He had a way of expressing contempt for them with fortified her loyalty to them, even when, as in the present case, they were themselves insignificant. [622-23]

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I’ll come back to that tapestry in a moment. But there is something excellent in the way James makes clear that Isabel likes Rosier because her husband dislikes him. Which is to say --because this is the more important point -- that she is with Osmond because he thwarts her. That she loves him because of, not despite, the fact that she dislikes him.
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“My daughter has only to sit still, to become Lady Warburton.”
“Should you like that?” Isabel asked, with a simplicity which was not so affected as it may appear. She was resolved to assume nothing, for Osmond had a way of unexpectedly turning her assumptions against her. [623]

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There is a deal of misery for Isabel in this, of course; but it struck me reading the novel that this is also the reason she married Osmond in the first place. More importantly, this is why she returns to him at the end of the book: not out of a sort of deontic, Kantian über-duty, but because she wants to. She is in love with the miserable existence she has with Osmond – a state of psychological plausibility much more effectively rendered than the states of mind of any of the many men supposedly smitten with her. The essentialist way (again) of putting this would be to say that James understands, in a deep way, what it feels like to be in love with an impossible man; he understands how love can make you miserable without ceasing to be love. A less essentialist way of putting it would be to say that Isabel falls in love with Osmond because he is oblique; because he cannot be immediately fathomed and understood: “Osmond had a way of unexpectedly turning her assumptions against her.” The problem with her other suitors is that they are all too straightforward, too open, too foresquare. This, for her, won’t do. Like James himself (of course) Isabel is in love with implication and elegance; she prefers the beauty of inflections, even bitter ones, to straightforward statements. She prefers her conversations to be chess games. She loves depth. Who has depth in this novel? Not many people.
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[Isabel] was not indifferent to [the Countess Gemini], however; she was rather a little afraid of her. She wondered at her; she thought her very extraordinary. The Countess seemed to her to have no soul; she was like a bright shell, with a polished surface, in which something would rattle when you shook it. This rattle was apparently the Countess’s spiritual principle. [653]

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Not all the characters are as brittle as this, but all of them lack soul in this postmodern shifting-gleaming-surfaces way—except, perhaps, Osmond himself. Isbabel trapped in a world of surfaces, either the superficiality of the Countess or the deadening wysiwyg honesty of Warburton, of course falls for the man who has depth, even if (or perhaps precisely because) much of that depth is filled with a bulging 3D egotism.
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This is a roundabout way of coming at the distinctiveness of James as a writer. He is a writer famous perhaps above all for creating the illusion of depth, particularly, of course, the sense of hidden depths—of much more going on than first meets the eye. Profundites the reader can only infer because they are never spoken about directly. The important thing about this is not that it isn’t compelling (because it is), or not that it isn’t expertly done (because, again, it is) but that it is precisely an illusion. It is the use of perspective and shading that implies depth. Like a painting the world of the novel seems round but is actually flat: a glorious, rich, scintillating flatness, a tapestry or brocade. (It’s not exactly a criticism of James to say this, of course). As with any work of the visual arts the flatness is revealed when we tilt the canvas. From this perspective (Isabel’s paradoxical love for horrid Osmond) mirabile! It looks deep! But from this one (say the fact that all the men in the novel fall instantly and improbably in love with Isabel at first glance) aha! It’s a flat board with gorgeous designs upon it.

Orlando Furioso in English Heroical Verses, by John Harrington (1591)

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[Frontispiece to Canto 41: 'the Tempest'. Click thumbail for bigger image.]
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I read Robert NcNulty's edition of Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, Translated by Sir John Harrington (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1972), and found myself particularly struck by the illustrations: each canto is faced by a splendid frontispiece. Now, what I’m interested in here is the possibility that this text, and specifically its pictures, was one of the inspirations for The Tempest. The proposal is that Shakespeare saw these images, and that they, rather than (or in addition, but prior, to) verbal sources, lie behind his ideas for the play.

This is an unconventional way of considering the inspiration behind Shakespeare’s play. Frank Kermode runs through various proposed sources for the Tempest by way of arguing that none of them seem very likely: a German play called Die Schöne Sidea by a fellow called Jakob Ayrer who died in 1605, in which the beautiful Sidea (a sort of Miranda-figure, daughter of a displaced mage) puts a young prince through various tasks such as log carrying to prove his worth in marrying her. But Kermode rather severely says: ‘the similarities between the two plays are not as striking as their advocates have suggested … there is no Caliban in the German play; no shipwreck; no significant system of magic … and the whole play is so naïf and buffoonish as to be beyond the possibility of serious consideration as the reflection of an important source.’
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He goes on: ‘Since Ayrer failed to give complete satisfaction, rival sources were bound to be proposed.’ He notes two Spanish works: Antionio de Eslava’s Noches de Invierno (1609) and Diego Ortunez de Calahorra’s Espejo de Principes y Caballeros (1562). ‘For a while there was keen interest’ in these, Kermode says, but he is unimpressed. Of the second he says ‘there is not a single feature of the Spanish story that has a unique similarity to The Tempest’; and of the former he is even more dismissive: ‘this tale has not even an island to recommend it’ (the magician in it builds a palace underneath the sea).
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Kermode’s overall point seems straightforward: The Tempest ‘draws its stories from a vast reservoir of primitive fiction’ [lxiii]; and whilst ‘analogues of the Tempest fable are, inevitably, quite plentiful’ [lxx] that’s not the same thing as saying that there is one source text which Shakespeare read and then adapted for his own play. Specifically, although Kermode can find various source stories containing some elements of the Tempest, he can find none that contains them all: the opening tempest; the ship containing ordinary seaman and various noble passengers, the nobleman who swims alone from the ship, thinking the others drowned, the ship that continues on its way; the island; the deposed magician-king and his daughter; Caliban; Ariel; the entire kit and caboodle.
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So, here’s a story; see what you think of it: a ship containing noblemen and kings, and a valiant young Prince called Rogero, sets sail upon the Mediterranean. It encounters a fearful tempest, described in vivid terms that contain a good deal of specific nautical language and terminology. The crew struggle to keep the ship afloat, the passengers fear for their lives; Rogero, thrown overboard, swims heroically through the raging seas and makes landfall on a desert island. Against the expectations of the passengers the ship survives the storm, and sails on. On the island Rogero meets an old man who possesses supernatural wisdom, and who lives in a cell or cave. The old man’s business is to work Rogero round to a condition in which he is worthy of marrying the beautiful Bradamant—which he (the old man does) does. The story ends happily when Rogero is reunited, on the island, with various noblemen from whom he had previously been separated.

[Differences: the noblemen with whom Rogero is reunited are not the same ones he travelled with on the ship--they all drown (despite the fact that the ship is ultimately unharmed by the storm; they panicked and got into a longboat which was overturned by the sea). Bradamant is not the magician's daughter; she is unrelated. The magician's task is to convert Rogero to Christianity, not have him carry some logs about. But these strike me as small differences when stacked up against the major similarities listed above.]
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This is Orlando Furioso cantos 41-43. —‘Rogero’ is Harrington’s version of the more usual Ruggiero. Now although I haven't been able to find scholars who have explored the possibility, I'm assuming it's taken for granted in Shakespeariean scholarship that Shax. at least may have had a read Harrington's Orlando Furioso in English Heroical Verses, published as it was in 1591. More specifically what I'm imagining is that he saw the illustration of the tempest and was struck by the imaginative possibilities it opened in his mind.
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Other names from Harrington’s Ariosto sounds familiar too: there’s an Alfonso King of Sicily (Shakespeare’s Alonso, we recall, is King of Naples) whose son is called Ferdinand—and, moreover, Ferdinand becoming afterwards King of Naples [Ariosto: 33:23] Ariosto includes no Gonzalo (‘an honest old Councellor’, says the Folio), but he has no fewer than ten Gonzagos, amongst them Cardinals and counselors. There’s also Miranda-esque ‘Mirra’ (‘Mirra, in love with her father’ 25:36)
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And Caliban? The plate of the tempest (the frontispiece to the 41st book, reprinted at the top of this post), is one of the more striking ones in the volume; but the plate to the 42nd book is even more interesting.
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I'm particularly interested in this detail:

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The name there is 'Malagigi', in case you can't read it. Picture Shakespeare looking at that: a nobleman (see how he is dressed) on an island, standing before the mouth of his cell, conversing with a beast-man, or devil. Let's say this image sticks in Shakespeare’s mind. He starts to imagine a story. Perhaps he leafs through the canto itself, looking for the text that underpins this image. Actually the story, in Ariosto's poem, concerns the mage 'Malagige' (as Harrington calls him) who inter alia summons a devil to find out what one of the protagonists, distant from him, is doing; but Harrington's translation is less than clear on this. Indeed, the 34th stanza sounds rather more like Prospero conjuring Ariel:
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And straight from thence he go'th unto the place
Where he was wont the spirits to conjure,
A strong vast cave in which there was great space
The precepts of his Art he put in ure.
One spright he calls that of each doubtfull case
Of Cupids court could give him notice sure;
Of him he askt what bred Renaldos change;
By him he heard of those two fountains strange.

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Spright, no less. Doesn't that sound to you like a scene from The Tempest, save only for the name of Renaldo and the fountain? The image from Canto 42 (nobleman conversing with beast-man/sprite before an island cell) and Canto 41 (violent tempest at sea) are clearly connected; so Shakespeare thinks. He begins to piece together the sort of narrative that this might be. Look again at the individual swimming away from the wreck in the frontispiece to 41, reproduced at the top of this post. This is how Harrington describes him:
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21
...
Rogero for the matter never shranke
But still above the water keeps his hed,
And from farre off he sees that rockie banke
From which in vaine he and his fellowes fled.
He thither laboureth to get with swimming
In hope to get upon the same by climing.

22
With legges and armes he doth him so behave
That still he kept uppon the floods aloft.
He blowes out from his face the boistrous wave
That readie was to overwhelme him oft.
This while the wind aloofe the vessell drave
Which huld away with pase but slow and soft
From those that while they thought their death to shun
Now dide perhaps before the glasse was run.

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And here’s Francisco’s account [II:i] of Ferdinand’s swim:
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Fran. Sir he may liue,
I saw him beate the surges vnder him,
And ride vpon their backes; he trod the water
Whose enmity he flung aside: and brested
The surge most swolne that met him: his bold head
'Boue the contentious waues he kept, and oared
Himselfe with his good armes in lusty stroke
To th' shore; that ore his waue-worne basis bowed
As stooping to releeue him: I not doubt
He came aliue to Land

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And here, finally and at greater length, is Ariosto/Harrington’s description of the tempest itself, signaled in the text by a marginal gloss: ‘A description of a tempest’
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9
From the poop it changed to the side,
Then to the prore; at last it wherled round
In one place long it never would abide
Which doth the Pilots wit and skill confound
The surging waves swell still in higher pride,
While Proteus flocke did more and more abound
And seem to them as many deaths to threaten
As the ships sides with divers waves are beaten.
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10
Now in their face the wind, straight in their backe,
And forward this and backward that it blowes
Then on the side it makes the ship to cracke.
Among the Mariners confusion growes,
The Master ruine doubts and present wrack,
For none his will nor none his meaning knows.
To whistle, becken, crie, it nought availes,
Somtime to strike, somtime to turne their sailes,
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11
But there was none could heare nor see nor marke,
Their ears so stopt, so dazzled weree their eys
With weather so tempestuous and so darke,
And black thicke clouds that with the storm did rise
From whence somtime great ghastly flames did spark
And thunder claps that seemd to rend the skies,
Which made them in a manner deaffe and blind
That no man understood the Masters mind;
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12
Nor lesse nor much lesse fearfull is the sound
The curell tempest in the tackle makes,
Yet each one for him selfe some business found
And to some speciall office him betakes:
One this untied, another that hath boynd,
He the Main bowling now restraines, now slakes
Some take oare, some at pumpe take paine
And power` the sea into the sea againe.
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13
Behold a horrible and hideous blast
That Boreas from his frozen lips doth send
Doth backward force the saile against the mast
And makes the waves unto the skies ascend;
Then brake their oares and rudder eke at last.
Now nothing left from tempest to defend
So that the ship was swayd now quite aside
And to the waves layd ope her naked side.
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14
Then all aside the staggring ship did reele,
For one side quite beneath the water lay
And on the tother side the verie keele
Above the water plaine discerne you may.
They thought they all hope past, and down they kneel
And unto God to take their soules they pray.
Worse danger grew then after this when this was past
By meanes the ship gan after leake so fast.
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15
The wind, the waves to them no respite gave
But readie ev’rie houre to overthrow them.
Oft they were hoist so high upon the wave
They thought the middle region was below them.
Oft times so low the same their vessell drave
As though that Caron there his boat would show them.
Scant had they time and powre to fetch their breth,
All things did threaten them so present death.
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16
Thus all that night they could have no release,
But when the morning somewhat nearer drew
And that by course the furious wind should cease,
(A strange mishap) the wind then fiercer grew,
And while their troubles more and more increase,
Behold a rocke stood plainly in their view,
And right upon the same the spitefull blast
Bare them perforce, which made them all agast.
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17.
Yet did the master by all meanes assay
To steare out roomer or to keepe aloofe
Or at the least to strike sailes if they may
As in such daunger was for their behoofe,
But now the wind did beare so great a sway
His enterprises had but little proofe.
At last with striving, yard and all was torne,
And part thereof into the sea was borne.
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[Marginal gloss: They that have beene at the sea do understand these phrases]
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18.
Then each man saw all hope of saftie past.
No meanes there was the vessell to direct.
No helpe there was, but all away are cast
Wherefore their common saftie they neglect,
But out they get the ship-boat, and in hast
Each man therein his life strives to protect.
Of King nor Prince no man takes heed or note,
But well was he could get him in the bote.

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Here’s the famous opening scene of Shakespeare’s play:
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A tempestuous noise of Thunder and Lightning heard: Enter a Ship-master, and a Boteswaine.
Master. Bote-swaine.
Botes. Heere Master: What cheere?
Mast. Good: Speake to th' Mariners: fall too't, yarely, or we run our selues a ground, bestirre, bestirre.
Enter Mariners.
Botes. Heigh my hearts, cheerely, cheerely my harts: yare, yare: Take in the toppe-sale: Tend to th' Masters whistle: Blow till thou burst thy winde, if roome enough.
Enter Alonso, Sebastian, Anthonio, Ferdinando, Gonzalo, and others.
Alon. Good Boteswaine haue care: where's the Master? Play the men.
Botes. I pray now keepe below.
Anth. Where is the Master, Boson?
Botes. Do you not heare him? you marre our labour, Keepe your Cabines: you do assist the storme.
Gonz. Nay, good be patient.
Botes. When the Sea is: hence, what cares these roarers for the name of King? to Cabine; silence: trouble vs not.
Gon. Good, yet remember whom thou hast aboord.
Botes. None that I more loue then my selfe. You are a Counsellor, if you can command these Elements to silence, and worke the peace of the present, wee will not hand a rope more, vse your authoritie: If you cannot, giue thankes you haue liu'd so long, and make your selfe readie in your Cabine for the mischance of the houre, if it so hap. Cheerely good hearts: out of our way I say.
Enter.
Gon. I haue great comfort from this fellow: methinks he hath no drowning marke vpon him, his complexion is perfect Gallowes: stand fast good Fate to his hanging, make the rope of his destiny our cable, for our owne doth little aduantage: If he be not borne to bee hang'd, our case is miserable.
Enter Boteswaine
Botes. Downe with the top-Mast: yare, lower, lower, bring her to Try with Maine-course. A plague --
A cry within. Enter Sebastian, Anthonio &.
Gonzalo. vpon this howling: they are lowder then the weather, or our office: yet againe? What do you heere? Shal we giue ore and drowne, haue you a minde to sinke?
Sebas. A poxe o'your throat, you bawling, blasphemous incharitable Dog.
Botes. Worke you then. Anth. Hang cur, hang, you whoreson insolent Noyse-maker, we are lesse afraid to be drownde, then thou art.
Gonz. I'le warrant him for drowning, though the Ship were no stronger then a Nutt-shell, and as leaky as an vnstanched wench.
Botes. Lay her a hold, a hold, set her two courses off to Sea againe, lay her off.
Enter Mariners wet.
Mari. All lost, to prayers, to prayers, all lost.
Botes. What must our mouths be cold?
Gonz. The King, and Prince, at prayers, let's assist them, for our case is as theirs
Sebas. I'am out of patience
An. We are meerly cheated of our liues by drunkards, This wide-chopt-rascall, would thou mightst lye drowning the washing of ten Tides
Gonz. Hee'l be hang'd yet, Though euery drop of water sweare against it, And gape at widst to glut him.
A confused noyse within.
Mercy on vs. We split, we split, Farewell my wife, and children, Farewell brother: we split, we split, we split
Anth. Let's all sinke with' King
Seb. Let's take leaue of him.
Enter.
Gonz. Now would I giue a thousand furlongs of Sea, for an Acre of barren ground: Long heath, Browne firrs, any thing; the wills aboue be done, but I would faine dye a dry death.

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And from a little later in the play, Ariel’s account of the same scene:
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Pro. Hast thou, Spirit,
Performd to point, the Tempest that I bad thee
Ar. To euery Article.
I boorded the Kings ship: now on the Beake,
Now in the Waste, the Decke, in euery Cabyn,
I flam'd amazement, sometime I'ld diuide
And burne in many places; on the Top-mast,
The Yards and Bore-spritt, would I flame distinctly,
Then meete, and ioyne. Ioues Lightning, the precursors
O'th dreadfull Thunder-claps more momentary
And sight out-running were not; the fire, and cracks
Of sulphurous roaring, the most mighty Neptune
Seeme to besiege, and make his bold waues tremble,
Yea, his dread Trident shake
Pro. My braue Spirit,
Who was so firme, so constant, that this coyle
Would not infect his reason?
Ar. Not a soule
But felt a Feauer of the madde, and plaid
Some tricks of desperation; all but Mariners
Plung'd in the foaming bryne, and quit the vessell;
Then all a fire with me the Kings sonne Ferdinand
With haire vp-staring (then like reeds, not haire)
Was the first man that leapt; cride hell is empty,
And all the Diuels are heere

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There’s a good deal of similarity of mood and tone: that a tempest is described, that a lot of nautical jargon is used ('They that have beene at the sea do understand these phrases'), that the prince escapes, that the boat which seemed sinking is spared. But there are relatively few specifically linguistic parallels. But that, I’d argue, is because it was Shakespeare’s visual imagination that was engaged by the book under his hand, rather than his verbal one; he was struck by the image—Prosperous nobleman, beastial caliban.

Richard Morgan, Black Man (2007)

Here's what I think: there’s a reason why a certain breed of hard-boiled thriller is called noir.

Morgan’s Black Man is a near-future tech thriller/adventure yarn, like all the other titles on the Clarke 08 list. It's the most thrillery of these thrillers, though, and earns its thrillerishness (its, dare-I-say, thrillerocity) not just by providing actual readerly thrills but by making a formal and aesthetic virtue out of its generic necessities. This is a book that works as thriller and simultaneously as a deconstruction of the logic of the thriller. It provides excitement, and levers open the disconcerting space between our enjoyment of that excitement and our unease at the being-in-the-world that generates it. Clever, that.

Morgan’s titular protagonist, Carl Marsalis, is a former genetic infantryman (known in Morgan’s universe as a ‘thirtreen’, or more derogatively as a ‘twist’) now working as a deromanticised James Bond. To be more precise he's a James Bladerunner, for his job is hunting down other rogue thirteens. Supercompetent, intelligent and good at his violent job, Marsalis is sometimes physically shaken but never emotionally stirred--until, that is, he teams up with sexy hardboiled Turkish-American cop Sevgi Ertekin. Together they cross continents to track down a rogue thirteen serial killer. They chase clues, gets into fights and have a quantity of squelchily described sexual intercourse, until she suffers the generic fate of the love-interest in this sort of story, and Marsalis is given sufficient if not necessary cause for his big finale. This perhaps makes the books sound formulaic; but at every point in this familiar narrative trajectory the writing is canny enough to excavate what lies beneath his popular narrative conventions, and to consider what made it popular in the first place.

The deal with Marsalis, and with his kind, is that they are genengineered throwbacks to an earlier, tougher, less sociable model of homo sapiens: an individualistic human type effectively bred out of the gene pool twenty-thousand years ago because they didn’t fit the new logic of social civilization. ‘It’s only once humans settle down in agricultural communities that these guys start to be a problem,’ one character notes. ‘Why? Because they won’t fucking do as they’re told. They won’t work in the fields and bring in the harvest for some kleptocratic old bastard with a beard. That’s when they start to get bred out, because the rest of us, the wimps and the conformists, band together under that selfsame kleptocratic bastard’s paternal holy authority, and we go out with our torches and our farming implements and exterminate those poor fuckers’ [279].

Most hard-man thrillers and adventures simply take their premise—the valorization of the self-sufficient individual male hero—for granted. Morgan doesn’t. The point of his novel is to unpack what being that sort of person actually entails: Natty Bumppo, John Carter, James Bond, the Man with No Name, Jason Bourne. This goes beyond making plain that violence does damage to the perpetrator as well as victim. It becomes a critique of masculinity itself, a dramatization of the notion that contemporary society has committed ‘virilicide’ by purging itself of the hypertrophic vir in favour of more socially skilled individuals. Our's, as one of the novel’s character notes, is ‘a world in which manhood’s going out of style. Advancing wave of the feminised society, the alpha males culling themselves through suicide and … drugs’ [113]. These ideas aren’t original to Morgan—he cites Richard Wrangham and Matt Ridley in his acknowledgements—and Black Man isn’t the first novel to dramatise them: it was also the theme of, for example, Pahunik’s Fight Club. Indeed, in a broader sense, this conflict between these two modes of life, solitary man or social animal, is behind Scott’s Waverly novels, and goes back at least to Homer—whose Achilles is one prototype for Morgan’s Marsalis.

Morgan does a thoroughgoing and rather brilliant job on this idea. Testosterone, he tells us, is a dangerous and even malicious chemical. Undeniably it provides us with thrills and a vicarious sense of kicking against the pricks, but this book never lets us forget the malice. Pride, sex, patriotism (one memorable aperçu: ‘anyone who’s proud of their country is either a thug or just hasn’t read enough history yet’ 299), alpha-male social rituals. Pff. I tell you what: I’m an adult male, six-foot-two in my socks. I work out: free weights mostly. I can handle myself. I could totally make my way in this alpha-male world, man. You know? Well ... I would, except only that my wife won’t let me. Apparently I’ve got to finish the ironing first. But the principle is the same, yeah?

In the more race-sensitive US Black Man has been retitled Thirteen. Some critics have derided this, but in some ways I prefer the American title. It is more evasive than the UK title, and in that sense it doesn’t fit a book that is one of the least evasive, one of the most fist-in-the-reader’s-face, I have ever read. (It's one of the joys of Morgan’s writing that he always turns it up to eleven all the time. In the hands of a less skilful writer that would lead to gush, sprawl or pseudo-Tarantino excess; but Morgan’s broader theme is precisely excess, and he knows how to operate the heavy machinery of his own fiction). But one thing the US title does is highlight just how North American a book this is. Marsalis himself is British, and the novel flaps its wings from Turkey to Latin America via Mars, but its soul is America: a future Disunited States that has broken into two chunks: the Rim States on the western coast and the northeast and the unpleasant, fundamentalist Red-State Jesusland in the middle. Thirteen is an unlucky number (another slang term for the likes of Marsalis is ‘unluck’); but thirteen is also the number of orginal American colonies, and one of the more subtly woven threads running through the book is the notion of the Thirteens as a new human endeavour, a sort of genetic new found land. The old world views them with hostility, yet women (it seems) find them irresistible; and to a certain extent the book itself, and many of its readers, follow the women in this--a minor flaw in the overall pattern of the book is the way almost all the characters are revealed to be genetic variations on the baseline human model by the end. But otherwise, as with Dick's original androids, it's hard to shake a sense that violence notwithstanding these people are better than old humans.

Yes? Maybe not. Thirteens tend toward the sociopathic, it is true, and leave a trail of injury and death in their wakes; but then again in Morgan’s universe pretty much everybody is like that. As a South American gangster points out to Marsalis, when the Conquistadors swarmed over the Aztec empire they slaughtered so many ‘the ground was carpeted with corpses and the condors fed for weeks on the remains … soldiers tore nursing infants from the breast and tossed them still living to their attack dogs, or swung them by the heels against rocks to smash their skulls… These were not demons, and they were not genetically engineered abominations like you. These were men.’ [333]. Well, quite. And the 23rd century seems no better: crammed with the criminal, the violent, the exploitative, the religiously-bonkers, the psychotically unhinged. In such a world, Marsalis (as the conventions of this mode of writing require) is more likeable and less violent than the various horrid people up against which he comes.

There are some problems with Black Man/Thirteen as a novel. For one thing it is too long: 647 pages in the bound proof I read (546 pages in final mmp form). It starts with a 'before the Bond film credits sequence', in which Marsalis assassinates a rogue thirteen and ends up in a Jesusland jail, that, whilst perfectly efficiently done, doesn’t really grip. Only when its Roy-Batty-a-like villain hijacks a Mars-Earth spaceship (eating the passengers en route) and begins a north-American killing spree, and Marsalis is recruited by the authorities to track him down, does the book really get a grip on a the reader’s throat. Even then, the denouement is dragged out a little two long, through nearly two hundred pages of twist, counter-twist and final wham-bang. The relentlessly technicolor kiss-kiss bang-bang sometimes loses, or perhaps overloads, our attention. That said, the writing is of a very high calibre. Morgan is as good a stylist as anybody on the Clarke 08 list (Sarah Hall perhaps excepted; although's he's more consistent than her, and knows better how to subordinate style to overall project): the action is efficiently and viscerally described; description is evocative; explication is always to the point and never infodumpy; the dialogue is good (people don't actually talk that way in, like, real-life; but then again people don't actually talk that way in Dickens, Proust or Beckett: what I mean is that Morgan's dialogue is perfectly fitted to its various roles: plot motion, character, flavour and atmosphere).

On the other hand the fact that Morgan writes as well as he does perhaps disguises how thoroughly cinematic an author he is. He structures his books like a film: a sequence of visual-setups and visual payoffs, paragraph breaks used to punctuate the narrative in a way suggestive of panning and cutting, dialogue written to be spoken: it’s all rapidly kinetic, picturing motion. But this is a mixed blessing: the overall trajectory of the book would work more effectively as a hundred minutes of cinema than it does as several days of reading, something that has to do with the beat and pace of its story. Of course, the danger then is that the story becomes Transporter II instead of the punchily intelligent ideas-driven novel that Morgan has written. Ideas don’t usually play well on the big screen.

It is probably true to say that Morgan’s ideas occupy a different strata of the novel than his action-adventure spectacles. Emotionally, from its Blade Runner opening to its Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid ending, the book marks out one path; intellectually it is pulling, creatively but slightly awkwardly, in another. Many of the action-sequences are extremely and viscerally effective (one in particular, where Marsalis is ambushed at night in the middle of South American nowhere by dozens of armed men, and disposes of them all with a shovel is especially well done). But the novel is what we have; and what's most interesting about the novel is its ideas. These are wrapped in a tooled and polished thriller shell, but live with you after the temporary excitements of that sort of things has faded. Black Man is black gold.

Ken MacLeod, The Execution Channel (2007)

The Execution Channel starts with what appears to be a rogue atomic explosion in a Scottish airbase, and then rifles efficiently through the silverware in the Thriller drawer: threats, paranoia, running-about, chases, guns, spies, secrets, the whole kit and kaboodle. It is well handled, very readable and the raisins in its pudding batter are various canny and thought-provoking political observations about the grim state of the world today generally and the War on Terror in particular. ‘In the long run,’ we’re told, ‘it is impossible to live in peace on the same planet as a rogue superpower.’ [150] I’m prepared to believe it. But then at the last minutes the novel goes all Tales of the Unexpected on our asses, and the reader puts the book down with an ‘er…?’ Or else, judging by some bloggerly and reviewerish reactions, with a whoop of joy. Personally I was on the ‘er’ side, but I can understand why others delighted in it. Graham Sleight has called it the marmite ending. That’s about right. Indeed, it's rather difficult to discuss the novel without discussing the ending, so beware: spoilers below.

Roisin Travis, protesting outside a USAF base in Scotland, sees a strange object (bomb, she thinks) being loaded onto a plane. She gets away before it explodes, or is exploded, although she has to go on the run from the British and American secret services. Her Dad, James Travis, is a computer bod and French double-agent, and circumstances also force him out on the run. Through the windows of this narrative car-in-motion Macleod shows us blipping camoes of a society straining under the burden of hate, religion, economic strain and imperialism. The plot shifts along at a fair old lick.

Well-handled though the novel is many ways, though, I think there are problems with it. In the main body of the work the outrage (justifiable of course) at the human abuses of the present Western hegemony rather distorts, or nullifies, some of the novel’s occasional lighter moments,a and the humour can seem forced. So, Alexander MacIntyre’s code name is SCRAP, and we are told: ‘Scotland had long since run out of dignified cryptonyms like SCEPTRE and SCIENCE for its agents. It was an exhausted running joke that they would soon have to draw the line at SCUM’ [180]. But exhausted is about right for the humour here (other agents have the code names SCRUB and SCROTE). The book is much better when MacLeod plays it straight, as in the chillily understated account of an interrogation midway through the novel:

Paulson asked the questions. Walker indicated the stress methods. The soldiers applied them. Afterwards they stripped the prisoner naked. One of the soldiers washed him down, and bathed his cuts and bruises, with a high-pressure hose. They placed him in one of the two unoccupied cells and left him there. [190]

Also good is Macleod's pinpoint take on his information propagandists: runners of faux-blogs, feeders of half-truth to the press and the like. That the novel is set in an alternate timeline in which Gore won the US Presidential election is revealed a little way in, and makes the point that it is not an individual (George W.) or a party (the Republicans) who are responsible for the War on Terror, but rather a system; and that it is the system that needs to be reformed. But it has the unintended consequence of diluting the force of the political polemic—since, after all, the political scene being attacked here belongs to a different timeline than the one in which we presently live. This would matter less if the novel’s ending didn’t force the narrative through a knight’s-move out of thriller-territory and into space opera. The novel we have been reading, under the impression it was John Le Cliché, turns out instead to be Blish-ish: Euro-Syriana bursts its chrysalis and flies away as a butterfly crying We Shall Have Stars. This twist-in-the-tail ending is certainly prepared-for in the novel—perhaps, indeed it is overprepared. Not only are Heim Theory Ships discussed, and James Blish specifically referenced (‘“Seulement les étoiles, yes,” she sighed. “It is science fiction, but I wish …”’ [133]); but the whole book ties together a bundle of sf in-jokes: ‘Matrix’-style agents called Smith; characters declaring ‘We are now Battlestar America. Watch the skies’ [349] and so on. But the combination of its twist-ending and gratuitous alt-historical contextualising robs the novel of élan vital.

The thing about twist-endings, I’d say, is that howsoever well-handled they are they inevitably say something about the work they bookend. They say, in effect: see? you couldn’t trust what I was saying! They may even say don't you feel foolish now for believing what I told you earlier? By extension they say: you shouldn’t trust to first impressions in any situation. That ought to be a good moral for a novel about the current New World Order, except that MacLeod’s novel does not present the propagandized surface of the current global situation (or more precisely, it presents it only to highlight how risible it is). The bulk of the novel is a polemic about the way the world actually is, not an ironic entry into the world of ideological simulacra. To cap this representation with a twist-ending is in effect to say: you thought the world was a bad place? Well, voilà! it’s not so bad as you thought! This tugs awkwardly against the grain of the novel as a whole. So for me not a marmite ending (since I like marmite): rather a cat ending, a feline, slinky, self-involved, furball of an ending. Others disagree, of course, and perhaps they’re right. De gustibus.

I have another issue with the ending, although this one is more tangential and harder to sustain argumentatively. But, having finished the novel, I find that the ending lives disproportionately in my mind as I look back over what I have read. It's loud, as it were, and drowns out the bulk of the narrative. Endings shouldn’t do that. And there’s a particular mismatch where the subject of this novel is concerned. Endings get too much weight in contemporary practical-political discourse. One of the ideological underpinnings of, for instance, is that the end (let’s say, a western-style bourgeois democracy in Iraq) justify the means (let’s say, the death of up to a million Iraqis and many years of human misery). I don’t mean this to be a cheap shot, and I appreciate it is not a criticism that many would share; but the ending of The Execution Channel is a little too Mission Accomplished for my tastes.

Steven Hall, The Raw Shark Texts (2007)

One initial question about this near-weightless novel. Is it raw? And the answer: by no means: it’s very cooked indeed. It’s the fictive equivalent of a microwaveable meal. Everything in this novel has been boiled and boiled until a great cap of foam crowns the pan and all the goodness has leeched out of the vegetables. This is not to say it’s no fun. On the contrary it is a novel with a considerable fizz; an enjoyably quick read. It's all bubbles, though.
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The protagonist, Eric Sanderson, wakes up at the beginning of chapter one with total amnesia. He sees a therapist who informs him that he’s had a personality breakdown (and not for the first time) following the death of his girlfriend on holiday the previous year. He gets letters from his former self, instructing him in the ways of bizarre protective rituals, and warning him of terrible dangers. He goes on a search to uncover more.
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Of Amnesia as a premise for novel-writing in general and SF in particular Clute and Nicholls have this to say (the entry is actually written by Dave Langford):

Loss of memory, usually inflicted on the protagonist, is a recurring plot device in all forms of fiction .... In genre writing this has become a notorious CLICHÉ: a combined technique of empathy generation and narrative delay, with amnesiac and reader beginning on an equally bewildered footing and together groping towards the character's IDENTITY, empowerment and goals. Examples include Philip José FARMER's The Maker of Universes (1965; rev 1980), Roger ZELAZNY's Nine Princes in Amber (1970), and Colin KAPP's The Patterns of Chaos (1972) -- whose hero's initial amnesia seems arbitrarily imposed and has no particular justification beyond the traditional knock on the head. … A E van VOGT's "Asylum" (1942 ASTOUNDING); Ursula K LE GUIN's City of Illusions (1967); Keith LAUMER's Dinosaur Beach (1971) and The Infinite Cage (1972); Tanith LEE's The Birthgrave (1975 US); Philip E HIGH's Fugitive from Time (1978) and others; the film D.A.R.Y.L. (1985); and Helen S WRIGHT's A Matter of Oaths (1988).

Cliché, yes. Yes. A notorious cliché, yes. Hall is aware that his premise is old, and addresses himself to that fact by flashing his intertexts at us: Jaws! Memento! The Matrix! But this doesn’t address the staleness of his premise; and as it happens the illogicality of his central conceit.
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What conceit is that? Well, Sanderson soon realizes that he’s in danger (here in the actual world) of being eaten alive by a 'Ludovician', a shark-shaped notional entity (‘one of the many species of purely conceptual fish’ 64). Just to run that past you again. Sanderson, who lives in the real world, is really menaced by a purely conceptual shark. How? Well, there’s some handwaving about ‘the flows of human interaction and the tides of cause and effect’, and some more about the physical interstices of the world, crawlspaces, empty carparks, unused alleys and so on. But, no, it makes no sense; and its senselessness robs the book of force. Sanderson goes on the run; hooks up with the sexy, smart, high-kicking heroine 'Scout' (with whom of course he becomes romantically entangled) and tracks down the evil Mr Smith ripoff, who is named, via Sherlock Holmes and Bill Gates, ‘Mycroft Ward’. He runs about, solves a couple of codes Dan-Browny-like, has various hairsbreadth escapes, and ultimately builds a conceptual boat to chase the shark in exactly the way the characters in Spielberg’s Jaws did, except that they were (according to the logic of the movie) in a real boat chasing a real shark, and Sanderson is in a notional boat chasing a notional shark that is also somehow a real shark in the real world. By some means.
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This is crucial, I think. SF is often at its best as an explicitly metaphorical literature. The Matrix itself is an eloquently metaphorical text. That film’s central metaphor articulates the experience of living in our alienating, high-tech world. Hall’s sharky central metaphor doesn’t really articulate anything, beyond the most generic premise of the thriller (‘the bad guys are chasing you’); and, worse, it never escapes muddle in its understanding of how metaphor works.
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The romantic sections between the hero and the heroine are very poorly written; but the mystery of ‘what’s going on?’ at the beginning and the thriller elements of chase-and-search in the middle, are well-plotted enough to keep you turning the pages. Also there are various typographical tricks and embellishments: pictures of the shark made out of characters and so on. This sort of thing:



I find the shine goes off these sorts of typsettery fun and games rather quickly, and the overall conception of the book is too friable, flawed and illogical to leave a solid sense of Good Fiction in the head once the final page has been reached. It’s fun. It’s nothing more.
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Now, there’s been a lot of buzz about the pantechnicons of cash Hall has been paid for the movie rights to this novel. Good luck to him, on that; and there’s certainly a cinematic feel to the book, which many readers will like. But it is, for all that, a book. Books are made out of words, and Hall doesn’t put his words together very well.
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In particular he overwrites; both in the sense that he is unnecessarily prolix and in the sense that his prose is too-too purple. It goes beyond purple, often, into a sort of stylistic shocking-pink. So, this is how Sanderson wakes up:

My eyes slammed themselves capital O open and my neck and shoulders arched back in a huge inward heave, a single world-swallowing lung-gulp of air. [3]

Pretty much everything that happens in the book happens in those terms. People don’t breath in this book, they suck lungfuls of air (‘I sucked a lungful of air’ [99]; ‘I .. sucked air through my fingers’ [198]; ‘my lungs [were] pulling and heaving under my ribs’ [316]). TVs don’t fall over; rather ‘the screen threw itself forward with a screaming electric flash … I tried for silent breaths but my breathing and my thinking were all ripped, chopped, torn-up, ragged.’ [58]
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Hall is aiming for intensity, but he is trying too hard. Less is more. That’s such an important principle of writing that I’m going to put it down here a second time. Less is more. It is more effective to write ‘Increasingly vehement bangs were coming from behind the locked door. They stopped suddenly’ than it is to write:

The banging and slamming, clattering and rattling sounds were coming from behind the locked door, and they were building up, growing more and more aggressive … [Then] deep thick silence thundered from behind the closed door. Pure. Heavy. Pregnant. The sound of being stared at. [52]

By the same token to describe a kiss as ‘a million volts’ and

somebody let off a box of fireworks in my stomach. I was winded. They went up like a million-coloured bomb [212]

is not to describe a kiss very well. Hall’s writing is the prose-style equivalent of adding multiple exclamations marks and underlining a dozen times in different coloured pens. It does not make me like the book. Sometimes his desire for intensity leads him into patches impossible to visualize (‘Dr Randle was more like an electrical storm or some complicated particle reaction than a person’ [7]). Very often it leads him into the Valley of Appalling Pretensiousness:

God my lips said. The word was stillborn and tiny and bundled away in a sweep of the gale. [98]

Many writers have galloped down into that valley; very few have emerged again alive. Hall is MIA. Take this sentence, describing a rainstorm: ‘A dramatic wet sheet broke against the window followed by a haiku of fat rain taps as the wind took a breath.’ [104] You don’t think that reeks of student creative-writing, of trying too hard? I think it does.
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Reading The Raw Shark Texts is a question of the point at which the reader first feels the urge to shout ‘ENOUGH ALREADY!’ Will it be when the literalised-metaphorical rainstorm starts bashing (aggressively banging and slamming, clattering and rattling) at you?

And then it was raining, a heavy downpour of letters, words, images, snatches of events … [61] The rain came down so hard it had a real weight, beating my head and shoulders into a flinch, pouring heavy over my waterlogged clothes and streaming in flukes from my hood and from my elbows and from my etc etc. [98]

Maybe it will be when the queasily staggering prose reaches the following particularly spewy moment? ‘My insides were hanging slack and wet and loose under my ribs and down into my hips. My head felt even worse … bile and matter and juices and oils, jellies and snots of thick green slime reeked and splattered out of me all over the black and white tiled floor’ [146]. Or maybe you’ll make it to the protagonist’s dive into the literalised-metaphorical ocean which is ‘the liquid forever of history’ (‘I tumbled and rolled, pressed and pinwheeled through promises thoughts stories plans whispers lists lies tricks etc etc etc’ [315]). For me it was about halfway through, after Sanderson defeats Mr Nobody, and afterwards picks up his pillbox to discover that this individual (a creature in the real world) is actually a construct.

CONCENTRATION. Four milligrams … STYLE. EXTRAPOLATION. CONVICTION. FRIENDLY SMILE. POWERS OF PERSUASION. The little white pills inside each tub rattled. [179]

I bethought myself: but Neuromancer and The Matrix take the pains to rationalize the medium in which their sharks and enemy simulacra operate. The metaphorical world is one thing; the real world another; it distractingly nonsensical to talk as if a creature from the former can become materially embodied in the latter. But then I thought to myself: I know what this reminds me of: The Phantom Tollbooth. There’s that same childish belief that notional and real are aspects of one another; except that The Phantom Tollbooth is original, charming and winning, and Raw Shark Texts is second-hand, day-glo and deafening.