Fantasy has always had its moralizers and its mischief-makers, those who use the symbolism of magic to create instructive fables, and those who use thFantasy has always had its moralizers and its mischief-makers, those who use the symbolism of magic to create instructive fables, and those who use the strangeness of magic to tap into the more remote corners of the soul, and then obscure their transgressions behind the fantastical facade. Like Moorcock, Leiber, and Vance, Harrison is playful, he is rebellious.
Indeed, in his swift, pulpy approach, Harrison very much resembles those authors, but his voice sets him apart. There is a scintillation, a sophistication, a turn of phrase which shows a practiced hand, and unlike many fantasy authors, Harrison's voice is very consistent. He is aware of what he is doing, the effect he means to produce, and he generally succeeds.
Moorcock was fond of saying that he was a 'bad writer with big ideas', and the same can be said of many genre writers, from R.E. Howard on, but Harrison is not a bad writer, and it's enjoyable to see someone of his skill take up the torch--leaving no doubt why he was so successful in inspiring New Weird authors like Mieville and VanderMeer to tear into genre (with varying degrees of success).
He had already made a name for himself as an editor and ruthless critic working at Moorcock's New Worlds, often lamenting the shallow predictability of genre fiction (his critical work has been collected in Parietal Games), and this is clearly a stab at trying to break out of that monotony--to practice what he had been preaching. It is rather less wild and experimental than his later works, but there is something very effective in the straightforward simplicity displayed here.
The most obviously groundbreaking aspect of the work is his setting (not, as Harrison would insist, his 'world'). He combines science fiction and fantasy tropes quite freely, but with much greater success than Leiber's clunky attempts, and much more overtly than Moorcock's nods to quantum physics in Elric. It acts as a reminder that despite all the purists trying to drive a definitive wedge between the genres, they are really doing the same thing: creating physical symbols through which to explore ideas (it's Clarke's Third Law again).
An easy example is Star Wars, a fantasy story about wizards, prophecy, spells, magic swords, funny animals, good vs. evil, and the monomyth which adopts science fiction only as an aesthetic, a 'look'. It isn't forward-looking, it's mythical, which is why the laser beams only shoot at a fixed point in front of the ship, like World War I biplanes. Nowadays, the concept of mixing fantasy and sci fi has trickled down into the public consciousness, showing up in cartoons like Adventure Time--and to a large part, we have Harrison to thank for that, because his version (complete with laser swords) came years before Star Wars, and also presents a much more nuanced view of the world.
On the surface, Harrison's rusted-out future world resembles Vance's, but it's much closer to fellow New Wave Britisher J.G. Ballard (or Le Guin): a fantastical headspace of extremes, when everything is dying and collapsing around you, and yet life goes on--dwindling, certainly, but fundamentally not very different from how it has always been. It’s a portrait of existential dread, our fear of being alone, our foolish habit of nostalgia, of seeing the past not as it was, but as a sort of promised land, a missed opportunity for our neurotic brain to cling to.
The dying world is the legacy of poets (at least, of the Victorians, who have the most influence on our modern notions of the poetic self), from Byron’s Darkness to Shelley’s The Last Man and the mythology of Blake--and of course arch-pilferer Eliot’s The Waste Land. Indeed, in this post-modern world, it’s become almost trite to riff on The Waste Land and it’s world built around the sad, intellectual man who regrets that all meaning has been stripped away, and he’s left to figure it out on his own.
However, fantasy has long been lagging behind, particularly highly-visible epic fantasy, like Tolkien’s, which behaves as if existentialism and skepticism never happened, instead inundating the reader in a top-down, authoritative voice full of message and allegory and obvious symbolism--though Tolkien himself often denied that this was the case, as a believer, to him the real world was a symbolic allegory.
The 'dying Earth' is the same old trick of fantasy, to take a state of mind and literalize it, to produce a setting that reflects it, and through which the author can explore it. It's like how in a Gothic novel, it rains when people are said, and lightning strikes as the villain observes the results of his cruelty.
Sure, it's also what a comics writer does when he puts the fate of the world at stake to increase the tension--but I won't say it's a bad trick, or a dirty one--it all depends on the magician who is using it. Are the a con artist, trying to win us over and sell us something, or are they a trickster like Houdini or James Randi, forcing us to confront the fact that we can so easily be fooled--indeed, that we may want to be fooled.
I find Harrison to be a trickster, an invoker of our better nature, if only because he realizes that the mind can be unsure--it can change--so, what happens to a world founded upon a changing mind? It's a question Harrison only touches on here, before diving in headlong in the next book, and finally getting a grasp on it in the third and fourth.
Unfortunately, one area where Harrison fails to meaningfully improve upon earlier genre outings is the portrayal of women. They are rarely present, and when they are, they tend to the weak and distant. We don't get inside their heads as we do the male characters, and so they do not really feel like complete characters, but objects of focus and motivators for the men around them. I mean, it's not like we're getting a trite Madonna/Whore love triangle, like Tolkien's, but moving from 'bad' to 'neutral' isn't much of an improvement, especially for a book written in the seventies--and the portrayals don't get much deeper in the later books.
I've often complained that many genre authors (like fellow dying-earther Gene Wolfe) give you two hundred pages of plot buried in four hundred pages of explanation, description, exposition, repetition, and redundancy--but I'm glad to say that in Harrison's case, he's happy to give us the two hundred and leave off the rest.
A lot of fun, much like the stories that inspired them. Though Chaykin's pacing is sometimes choppy, his use of the language is delightfully in-characA lot of fun, much like the stories that inspired them. Though Chaykin's pacing is sometimes choppy, his use of the language is delightfully in-character. It's unfortunate that the series didn't catch on, it could have been a more humorous compliment to the many successful Conan comics.
As usual, Mignola is a delight, though it's amusing to see him at a much earlier stage, where his lines are more sketchy and his angular shading has that definitively early nineties 'edgy' look so favored in comics and Vampire roleplaying books. I love his draughtsmanship, particularly the buildings and statuary, which manage to be intricate and mysterious without relying on the obsessive miscellany of a Bachalo or Darrow.
It's always interesting to see how artists characterize Fafhrd and the Mouser, since they are not as narrowly-defined as Conan or John Carter. The Mouser, in particular, has always been a shifting, undefined figure in my mind, with the sort of average, forgettable face that lets a thief lose himself in any crowd.
Mignola's Mouser is a little more beefy and heroic, with sharp, Eastern-European features, which I found an interesting vision, and fitting for the character. I also appreciated Mignola's range of expression and the pure personality of his characters, something all too rare in comics, where wooden faces scream with an unsettlingly even mixture of joy, hatred, pain, and sorrow.
In the end, there's no replacement for an inspired artist....more
Sometimes it doesn't matter what you hear about a book, all the promise described in glowing reviews--it doesn't matter who suggests it, on what authoSometimes it doesn't matter what you hear about a book, all the promise described in glowing reviews--it doesn't matter who suggests it, on what authority or with what arguments. Sometimes, you're still going to come out the other side disappointed, confused how this could possibly be the book you had heard about, trying to reconcile the words of friends and fellow reviewers with what you have found on the page.
I'm there again. There's something in it reminiscent of the moment after a car accident, where you're sitting in disbelief, trying to make sense of it, half laughing, half shaking your head.
It's not that I don't see it--the book certainly has the right markers: the self-awareness, the meta-fictions, the ironies and self-contradictions, the allusions and in-jokes, the big, rearing ugliness of modern literature. And yet to say that it has those markers doesn't mean much--it's like saying that a math book has equations, it doesn't mean that they add up to anything.
Indeed, markers are the easiest things to fake--we all know what a piece of literature is supposed to look like, and so we can take the right words and the right techniques and include them. But of course, you can use a word without understanding its definition, and you can adopt a technique without ever considering why a great author used it.
The most obvious marker, at first glance, is the self-awareness of the text, what the kids these days call 'meta'--where not only are you writing, you're also commenting on the fact that you're writing, making jokes and references, reminding the reader of the artificiality of what they are reading.
It's a trick at least as old as Ariosto and Cervantes, but which has become especially popular in this Post-Modern Age of Skepticism. After all, we're not supposed to trust authority, we now take it for granted that the book is not the 'Logos', the Word of Truth, and so it makes sense for the author to step out occasionally and acknowledge that. And yet, since it is the default now, it's really not enough simply to be self-aware, just to poke at the fourth wall for the sake of doing it--that's played out. Hell, even Ariosto had more purpose and direction to his fourth wall breaking, using it to comment on social mores of the time.
Much of the self-awareness takes the form of a jokey, silly tone, and much like in Iain Banks, it seems to be an ill fit for otherwise dire and serious stories. More than that, VanderMeer is constantly harping on it without much payoff--there are some truly clever pieces of wit, here or there, but for every one that hits its mark, we have to wade through ten others that don't.
It starts to feel like being at a party with a guy who has to make some comment about everything, who keeps mentioning that people think he's funny, who tells you how funny his jokes are before he tells them, says 'wait for it!' before each punchline, and then explains the joke once it's done.
In King Squid he writes:
“... six hundred continuous pages of spurious text that no true squidologist can read today without bleeding profusely from the nose, ear, and mouth.”
And it just feels like a bad internet comment--it's edgy, full of hyperbole, and so non-specific that it could have been appended to pretty much anything. That lack of precision makes humor impossible--because being funny means hitting your target right in the heart, not just pelting some refuse near it. From the same story:
“... the Society ... was unwise to choose as observers the Fatally Unobservant.”
The observers were unobservant. That's not even wordplay, it doesn't even reach to the level of the humble pun--and it's giving me unpleasant flashbacks to early Discworld.
In his introduction, Moorcock compares VanderMeer to Peake, but he just lacks any subtlety, and it all smacks of trying too hard, just worrying incessantly at the edges until they all begin to fray. When he mentions the Borges Bookstore (on Albumuth Boulevard, natch), which he does in every story, it's a nudge that threatens to bowl the reader over, a wink by way of facial spasm.
It's not only with his jokes and allusions that VanderMeer leaves nothing to chance, he has characters tell us in footnotes when we are supposed to think they are funny, he mentions when a certain part is deliberately over-written, or that we shouldn't trust some character, or that this point-of-view shift indicates a change in the character's personal identity.
Yet this is a book that people say is challenging, is intellectual and mysterious, something you have to put together yourself, piece by piece. My idea of a challenging book is one that trusts the reader to come to their own conclusions, to figure out the themes for themselves, and to find humor where it lies, not one that leads them along by the hand. Sure, sometimes his instructions are contradictory--we're told at first that something is important, and later that it's not trustworthy--but the real problem is that we're being told outright at all, that even irony and contradiction are not allowed to play out, but must be explained and noted.
A lot of this self-awareness takes the form of self-deprecation, as in this line:
"Throughout the story, X communicates to the reader "between the lines" in a rather pathetic manner. Such self-consciousness has clearly corrupted his writing."
But self-deprecation is only effective when it is honest, when it acts as a genuine reveal of character, not just a sarcastic defense mechanism--a schoolyard dodge, 'if I say it first, then they can't make fun of me for it'.
Self-awareness needs to be more than just a pose, like a teenage rebellion, where it becomes an excuse, a way of distancing one's self from the reader, and from judgment--'Yeah, I know--Did you think I didn't know that? Everyone knows that.' It becomes a crutch to fall back on, an attempt to regain some semblance of control, all these explanations of just what the reader is supposed to be getting out of this.
Certainly, VanderMeer set himself a great task, and there's something admirable in that, but it isn't one of those great, inspirational 'troubled experiments', like Moby Dick or A Storm of Wings--in large part because Harrison already achieved in Viriconium everything that VanderMeer can't seem to do here. However, Harrison always lets the story stand on its own, he gives no excuses, nor does he spell out what we're supposed to take away from the book.
It's a lesson all artists need to learn: if you're going to be brave and create something, then be brave all the way through. Don't stop halfway to explain yourself. When you hand off your work for others to enjoy, don't include qualifiers and excuses--even though the urge to do so will be strong. You have to let the work stand on its own, and if you aren't willing to do that, then don't take on a monumental task, because the meddling will ruin it.
And VanderMeer set a monumental task for himself--there are a lot of moving pieces here, and keeping them all spinning is a master's work. The structure itself is obsessed with metafiction, all of these 'in-world' documents that are supposed to come together and produce a greater whole: a scientific article about squid, a series of art critiques, a pamphlet about the history of the city, an asylum doctor's interview, letters, a story written in secret code, &c.
Yet, I rarely found that these metafiction elements were well-written enough to merit inclusion--they certainly paled in comparison to his pure fiction. Indeed, there seemed to be a sense that they were all extended jokes--in An Early History of Ambergris, the fact that there were more footnotes than actual text, and the same in King Squid, except this time it was the bibliography that was longer than the story, or in The Release of Belacqua, mocking the fact that art critics can often only guess at their subjects' motivations.
But all of these jokes relied on their great length, the need for the author to just keep at them, to keep extending them ever longer, which only actually works if the joke is funny enough in the first place to survive such a stretching on the rack. What marks great lengthy jokes is the author's ability to keep raising the stakes, to keep making things more ridiculous and involved, to drop the other shoe--and then another--until it's all piled on top of itself, redoubling its own absurd premise. Instead of this, VanderMeer keeps the same pace throughout, merely adding on more of the same, and so the last line holds no more humor than the first--indeed, rather less by way of attrition.
The central story that connects all of these it The Strange Case of X, which literalizes the fiction process, writing the author into the story, making him the god who creates the world, but is also trapped by it, by his own obsessive imagination. Again, it's an old trick--I found it trite when Grant Morrison first pulled it out (not to mention the third, fourth, and fifth times), and I still think it's something rather difficult to do well. It forms a sort of 'answer' to Harrison's conclusion to his series, 'A Young Man's Journey to Viriconium', but again lacks the necessary subtlety and conviction.
Comparing Sartor Resartus to A Brief History of Ambergris, for example, a great deal of what makes the former successful is that our crazed academic takes himself so seriously even as he spouts the most absurd nonsense--indeed, we almost feel we believe him. In contrast, VanderMeer's is constantly telling us how funny and silly he is, and as such, he feels less wonderfully absurd and more 'look at me being wacky'.
I got the impression that The Strange Case of X was supposed to be a sort of surprising twist story, forcing us to question our assumptions about the nature of reality versus fantasy. However, right from the beginning, I assumed the twist--I’m not saying I cleverly figured it out, but that it never occurred to me that the story might end any other way. It would be as if a story ended with the revelation ‘he was a dog all along!’, when earlier stories were all from the point of view of dogs, and the story in question kept mentioning leashes and chew toys. Perhaps if it were read in isolation, it would work better, but when collected alongside other Ambergris stories, it's hard to imagine reading it any other way.
Then there's the fact that these metafictions tend to fall into worldbuilding cliches, where the author literally sits you down and dumps a huge pile of exposition on the reader, not only explaining the history of the city, but also giving comments along the way suggesting how you should feel about it. It struck me that one of the only times I've seen this done well was in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and that's only because it was clever and witty enough that the worldbuilding didn't matter, it was completely secondary--indeed, if you took any one of those entries completely out of context, it would still be amusing by itself.
Susanna Clarke managed to do the same thing with her footnotes, and it's a lesson all authors should learn: always be putting on a show, make your words do double duty. Don't just be self-aware, be self-aware and funny, don't just be funny, be funny and thoughtful, don't just be thoughtful, be thoughtful and exciting.
Otherwise, it becomes the equivalent of Gene Wolfe's New Sun books, where there's supposed to be this huge, complex, interesting meta-story behind the real story, as long as you reread it and carefully put together all the pieces--but why would anyone want to reread a dull story over and over in hopes that it might become interesting? It becomes the equivalent of the epic fantasy standby: 'You have to keep reading until the fifth book, that's when it gets good. A good author ensures that the story is intriguing on both the small and large scale.
Also like Wolfe (and Banks again), there are some very cliche problems with character and point-of-view. Just like in bad Steampunk (meaning most of it), where authors completely forget the 'punk' and make all of their characters upper class and educated, VanderMeer doesn't give us any views from oppressed or minority classes. It's all about the difficulty of being a smart, middle-class white male artist (or scientist).
Women are largely absent, except as objects of desire. We're not allowed into their heads, to see their point-of-view, we aren't asked to explore their struggles or concerns. Even as objects of desire, there's never any relationship or intimacy, just distant, creepy obsession. Indeed, the only genuine, long-term romance represented in the book is between two men.
The title character of Dradin, In Love is typical of such, being an obsessive creep who fantasizes about a woman he's never spoken to. Dradin is an ass of a character, but this isn’t the worst crime--many such asses in fiction offer amusing, insightful depictions, even as we roll our eyes at their foolishness or cringe at their cruelty. We laugh and even sympathize with figures like Flashman or Steerpike. Dradin’s true sin is that he’s both unpleasant and dull--I don’t mean merely unassuming, like Chekhov or Kafka’s quotidian characters, but flat.
However, there is an implication that this is all on purpose, that he's meant to be this way--but of course, doing it on purpose isn't a justification, any more than being 'self-aware' is--so, why is he this way, is it a parody of such characters in fantasy? The problem is a lack of change: Dradin starts off an obsessive creep, and only grows increasingly obsessive and creepy as the story goes on, demonstrating it twice and three times over.
Perhaps it's written for the reader who will, at first, assume that Dradin is a genuinely nice guy, and who will then be shocked and appalled at his later behavior? If so, then all VanderMeer has really done is write a fable for the naive--what does this present for a reader who dislikes him from the start? Not very much, I'm afraid, which is why it's important to make sure that a story works on multiple levels, such that it can interest various audiences at the same time.
There is a point, in any piece of art, when to add a further stroke would worsen it, making it too busy, destroying the careful balance of fluidity and gesture. Every artist knows this point exists, but for most of us, we only recognize it once it has passed, once we have already ruined it, and it becomes abundantly clear that we should have stopped a moment sooner.
Yet, there is a need in us to keep going, to keep carving away at our work--especially when we see the errors in it, which we always do. Once you've passed that point of no return, where each additional mark just muddles it a little bit more, it can be almost impossible to stop, to salvage something from it. Much easier to start over--and usually, to make the same mistake again.
An embarrassment of wealth becomes a wealth of embarrassment so easily when we overreach ourselves, when we are striving for something but cannot shake the feeling that the thing we desire is too far beyond us even to approximate it. VanderMeer's work is full of reaching, and full of self-corrections, of tiny modifications in the course--because he is steering by the bow of his ship, not by the horizon.
Markers are easy to imitate, which is why VanderMeer can write
"On the thrice chime, a clerk ... came forward"
And if you weren't paying attention, if you didn't quite know what to look for, it might seem somehow interesting to mistake an adjective for an adverb--to use an odd word without really understanding the definition. What a shameful, whence the thrice badly book failure the aspiringly author....more
Kraken marks a digression for Mieville from his familiar madcap style. Where before we had come to expect moody, slow-burn plots interrupted by suddenKraken marks a digression for Mieville from his familiar madcap style. Where before we had come to expect moody, slow-burn plots interrupted by sudden action, and just as suddenly back to introspection, we now get a story that is dramatic, unbroken, and streamlined in punchy chapters and theatrical quick-cuts.
His vibrant, poetical asides into mad science and techno-thaumaturgy have been toned down: no longer a virulent undercurrent, twisting and shaping his world, they have become curiosities and explanations. He has been careful to ensure that he never loses his audience through obscure complexity.
In Kraken, most of the asides outline a freewheeling Kantian magic system built on belief and symbology, the other asides are fodder for his plot twists, which are somewhat obvious, if only because he has avoided the swirling eddies of uncertainty that would otherwise hide their trail.
Like his magic, his world is overtly symbolic, and as his magic is an allegory for the act of writing. We could describe his symbols as structuralist, because their meanings are open to interpretation. Unlike esoteric and hermeneutic magics, which are based upon knowledge, history, and the discovery of secrets, Mieville's system is built around free creation of meanings.
Like Grant Morrison's 'Chaos Magic', his rituals and spells could be anything you make of them. Morrison took this to an extreme in his own London-based Contemporary Fantasy, 'The Invisibles', flooding his plot and characters with so many meanings, traditions, and details that he often loses the thread of his story completely. Contrarily, Mieville never loses the thrust of his story, because his magic is not weighted down with the compulsive details of history.
And yet it has always been those details that subgenre-defining authors drew on to create their vision of a magical London, from Gaiman to Milligan to Moore. Mieville uses historical elements, but never interweaves them through the convolutions of history--the externalized structure of his magic doesn't require it. He does use historical details, but since power comes from reputation, not lore, he need not delve too deeply.
Yet in many ways, his is the same system Gaiman often uses, in American Gods, for example. But for Gaiman, the power of a symbol is not merely the sum of its reputation--it also retains the accrued power of its history and influence. There is an interwoven foundation of esoterica in his magic, even when he bases the power of his magic on modern concepts, as in Neverwhere.
Kraken often evokes Neverwhere, whether by converging influences or homage. The violent, intimidating villain duos who chase the protagonists throughout both books share styles, descriptions, roles, and ironically erudite soliloquies.
The plot-driving behind-the-scenes villains are both incomprehensibly powerful, mysterious, unknown figures, though in Gaiman you do get a motive. Mieville's has no lines, a technique which tends to work better in cthonic horror. He's chiefly a plot-mover, and there is an impressive amount of plot-moving to be done to keep a five-hundred page book steaming along at a clip.
Mieville keeps his plot aloft, and there's never a dull moment, though there are a number of artificially dramatic moments, his short chapters often ending in sudden twists and evoking the cliffhangers of a radio melodrama "Will Abigail survive? Tune in next week!" (cue organ)
This pacing leaves little room for introspection, psychological progression, or denouement, but Mieville's quirky melodrama is no place for psychological sketches, he's writing characters, not people. Like his magic, his characters are symbolic, and chiefly important for their surface qualities. In this book, first impressions will never let you down, so don't look for subtle internal conflicts or psychological shifts.
The characters are vibrant, interesting, and flawed, but not human, they are too perfectly constructed and unchanging. Like figures from Greek drama, we do not get men who are cowards or men who are intelligent, we get characters whose intelligence or cowardice continually define them and establish their roles in the story.
Such characters can grow tedious: their conversations progressing in the same ways, their particular strengths, weaknesses, and insights reappearing over and over. One example is the fish-out-of-water protagonist who spends the first hundred pages belaboring his confusion at the incomprehensible world he has been thrust into. His undifferentiated complaints soon form a somewhat irritating leitmotif. Some character progression and transition wouldn't have run amiss, or, barring that, at least using that reminiscent dialogue to explore new, subtle angles in the world Mieville was building for us.
More than his other books, Kraken shows the pulp roots of New Weird, a genre he has helped to define. The quick, action-packed plot, the melodrama, the cliffhangers, and the idealized characters are all familiar to any pulp fans. The length, however, is not, and Mieville shows the difficulty of trying to stretch his comparatively straightforward story and characters to the length established by introspective novels.
As Hitchcock pointed out, you have to repeatedly build and break a story, or it begins to bloat and sag. With a bit more of the subtlety, introspection, and wild, sensory-overload fervor I've come to expect from him, Mieville might have put his own idiomatic stamp on the Contemporary Fantasy, instead of giving us a fun and light (if unusual and well-written) pulp adventure.
His entrance to the subgenre intives comparison to the giants who have come to inhabit it in its recent boom years. He's written a mature Harry Potter, an intellectual's Dresden Files, a devilishly eccentric Anita Blake. His is a strong, intelligent, and literate vision of the growing and popular subgenre of modern-day magic. Yet we are still waiting for a novelist who can use the strengths of their medium to revolutionize the original vision of the comic book authors who have defined this subgenre for thirty years.
I would like to thank Goodreads and Del Ray for sending me an uncorrected proof of Kraken through the Goodreads First Reads program.
The Gormenghast books are considered to be the beginning of the 'mannerpunk' genre, and along with Tolkien, Moorecock, and Howard, Peake is one of theThe Gormenghast books are considered to be the beginning of the 'mannerpunk' genre, and along with Tolkien, Moorecock, and Howard, Peake is one of the fathers of the modern Fantasy genre. Mannerpunk is a genre typified by complex psychology, plots driven by character interaction, and a strong sense of mood.
It is also notable for the characters rather than the world being fantastical. In this sense, mannerpunk, and certainly the Gormenghast books, work in the vein of surrealism (meaning not 'unreal', but 'more than the real'); not unlike the Russian Gogol. The genre is based upon the works of authors like Jane Austen, the Brontes, Baroness Orczy, Swift, de Cervantes, and Dumas pere.
Peake himself was a polymath, excelling not only as an author, but a poet and artist. He is the only self-portrait in Britain's National Portrait Gallery. As a poet, he has a mastery of language and conceit that places him above popular 'jingle man' Poe.
This makes him quite unlike Tolkien, whose long stretches of verse tend to be stilted and unfeeling. Then again, Peake is more passionate than than Tory Tolkien.
Despite his mastery of language and evocative characterization, Peake is not an easy read. Indeed, his thick prose and slow pace can quickly tire the mind. Like a skillful chess opponent, Peake demands much of his reader. He is not content to let the reader be a passive escapist, so his work engages and challenges. It would take a great and knowledgeable mind to meet each of these challenges on equal footing, but even we lesser minds may find amusement, shock, and beauty.
Peake's original idea was to chronicle the life of a character from birth to death. The first book deals with infancy. The second takes him into adulthood in a sort of bildungsroman. The third involves the adventures of young adulthood. Unfortunately, Peake's slide into dementia prevented any furthering of this vast and witty trove.
In literature, Peake may have come the closest to completing a book which balances complex psychology, deep character, poetic style, exploration of reality, and a surreal mixture reality and fancy. Peake's books were very audacious, and though he sometimes fails to reach his own lofty ideals, the really remarkable thing is that sometimes, he doesn't.
I know of no author in all of the English language who is like Peake, or who could aspire to be like him. His voice is as unique as that of Milton, BiI know of no author in all of the English language who is like Peake, or who could aspire to be like him. His voice is as unique as that of Milton, Bierce, Conrad, Blake, Donne, or Eliot, and as fully-realized. I am a hard and critical man, cynical and not easily moved, but there are passages in the Gormenghast series which so shocked me by the force of their beauty that I would close my eyes and snap the book shut, overwhelmed with wonderment, and take a moment to catch my breath.
I would drop my head. My eyes would search the air; as if I could find, there, the conclusion I was seeking. My brow would crease--in something like despondency or desperation--and then, of its own accord, a smile would break across my face, and I would shake my head, slowly, and laugh, and sigh. And laugh.
Peake's writing is not easy fare. I often needed room to breathe and time for contemplation, but he is not inaccessible, nor arduous. He does not, like Joyce or Eliot, require the reader to know the history of western literature in order to understand him. His story is deceptively simple; it is the world in which he sets it that can be so overwhelming.
Peake writes with a painter's eye, which is natural enough, as he is more famous as an illustrator than a writer (the only self-portrait in the National Portrait Gallery). He paints each scene, each moment, in such careful, loving, playful detail that it can only be described by the original definition of 'sublime': a vista which is so grand and beautiful that it dwarfs our humanity, evoking a wonder akin to fear.
But Peake's writing is not so entirely alienating; on the contrary: he is vividly concerned with life. Gormenghast is the story of a life starting at birth, though our hero only got as far as the cusp of manhood before Peake was seized by malady and death. Each character is brightly and grotesquely alive. The 'fantasy' of this book is not, like so many epics, magic signifying some allegorical moral conflict. The magic of Peake's world is the absurdly perfect figures that people it.
They are stylized and symbolic, but like Gogol, Peake is working off of his own system of symbology instead of relying on the staid, familiar archetypes of literature. Unusual as they may be, there is a recognizable verisimilitude in the madness imbued in each. Their obsessions, quirks, and unpredictability feel all too human. They are frail, mad, and surprising.
Like the wild characters of his sketches, Peake writes in exaggerated strokes, but somehow, that makes them more recognizable, realistic, and memorable than the unadorned reality of post-modernists. Since truth is stranger than fiction, we find reality in his off-kilter, unhinged world. This focus on fantastical characters instead of fantastical powers has been wryly dubbed 'Mannerpunk' or a 'Fantasy of Manners'. It is a much more enveloping and convincing type of fantasy, since it engages the mind directly with visceral artistic techniques instead of relying on a threadbare language of symbolic power. Peake does not want to explain the world, but paint it.
Tolkien can certainly be impressive, in his stodgy way, but after reading Peake, it is difficult to call him fantastical. His archetypal characters, age-old moral conflict, and epic plot all seem so hidebound against the wild bulwark of Peake's imagination. The world of Gormenghast is magical and dreamlike, without even needing to resort to the parlor tricks of spells, wizards, and monsters.
Peake's people are more fantastical than dragons because their beings are instilled with a shifting and scintillating transience. Most dragons, fearsome as they may be on the outside, are inwardly little more than plot movers. Their fearful might is drawn from a recognizable tradition, and I question how fantastical something can really be when its form and behavior are so familiar and predictable.
Peake's world--though made up of things recognizable--is twisted, enchanted, and made uncanny without ever needing to stretch our disbelief. The real world is full of wonder, confusion, and revelation, so why do authors think that making it less real will make it more wonderful? What is truly fantastical is to find magic in our own world, and in our own lives.
But then, it is not an easy thing to do. Authors write in forms, cliches, archetypes, and moral arguments because it gives them something to work with; a place to start, and a way to measure their progress, lest they lose themselves. To write unfettered is vastly more difficult, and requires either great boldness, or great naivete.
Peake is ever bold. You will never catch him flat-footed; his pen is ceaseless. He drives on in sallies and skirmishes, teasing, prodding, suggesting--but always, in the end, he is an electric presence, evading our cumbersome attempts to catch him in any one place. Each sentence bears a thought, a purpose, a beauty, a consciousness. The only thing keeping the book moving is the restless joy of Peake's wit, his love and passion for his book, its places, characters, and story.
He also has a love for writing, and for the word, which is clear on every page. A dabbler in poetry, his careful sense of meter is masterful, as precise as Bierce. And unlike most fantasists, Peake's poetry is often the best part of his books, instead of the least palatable. Even absent his amusing characterization and palpable world, his pure language is a thing to behold.
In the introduction, Quentin Crisp tells us about the nature of the iconoclast: that being different is not a matter of avoiding and rejecting what others do--that is merely contrariness, not creativity. To be original means finding an inspiration that is your own and following it through to the bitter end.
Peake does that, here, maintaining a depth, pace, and quality that is almost unbelievable. He makes the book his own, and each time he succeeds in lulling us into familiarity, we can be sure that it is a playful ruse, and soon he will shake free again.
Alas, not all readers will be able to keep up with him. Those desiring repetition, comfort, and predictability will instead receive shock, betrayal, and confusion. However, for those who love words, who seek beauty, who relish the unexpected, and who find the most stirring sensation to be the evocation of palpable wonder, I have no finer book to suggest. No other fantasist is more fantastical--or more achingly human.
In his introduction, C.J. Henderson expresses a disappointment that Lovecraft's heroes are never able to fight back, that they never just get a gun anIn his introduction, C.J. Henderson expresses a disappointment that Lovecraft's heroes are never able to fight back, that they never just get a gun and start shooting at any otherworldly interdimensional beasts that show up. Perhaps he also feels a disappointment that more people don't fire their guns to fend off encroaching lightning bolts or tornadoes. Lovecraft's entire point is that there are some things larger than the human arsenal.
Beyond that, there are a multitude of stories featuring more stalwart heroes facing the horrors of the mythos. Firstly, there's Lovecraft's own 'The Case of Charles Dexter Ward' which features a remarkably complex protagonist surviving in the incomprehensible world of the elder gods. There are also Alan Moore's 'Yuggoth Cultures' and Neal Gaiman's 'Only The End of the World Again'. Lovecraft often corresponded with R.E. Howard, whose Conan the Barbarian provides an excellent example of a hero who faces the cyclopean horrors and comes away relatively unscathed.
Conan also provides many parallels with the classic hard boiled detective, the other genre from which Henderson draws inspiration. Conan's no-nonsense machismo and sense of self-preservation in the face of the unknown could have served as an excellent mold for a detective protagonist.
Hard boiled detective fiction meshes rather well with Lovecraft, as the protagonists must know not to get in too far. Private eyes know there is such a thing as knowing too much. That's why we have a witness protection program. Henderson could have created an interesting setting by pointing out the similarities of both genres, especially being 'drawn in too far' and 'losing one's humanity'.
However, despite wanting a strong hero, and drawing from a genre renowned for men who place survival above all else, Henderson instead creates the most cheery, incautious detective he can. While both Lovecraft and hard boiled fiction depend on mood to create a sense of depth and danger, Henderson's book has none.
Though claiming Detective fiction and the Mythos for inspiration, he instead writes a rompy adventure. While Douglas Adams was able to pull humor from detective fiction, and Joss Whedon managed it with otherworldly horror, Henderson is, unfortunately, neither funny or quirky, despite numerous attempts.
The book doesn't fit with either the horror or detective genre, it is almost pure monomyth adventure. The soft boiled protagonist is a literal 'chosen one' with magic powers, and the cast is filled out by a beautiful damsel-in-distress with zero personality, an 'average guy' and two 'magical minorities'.
The latter two are both apparently American-born, firstly a black voodoo weaponeer, and secondly a mystical Asian psychic with the requisite chilled emotions. Though she does not seem to be an actual foreigner, Henderson still describes her by the racist 19th-century epithet 'an oriental'.
The Mandingo is suitably oversized and laconic, and apparently able to get his hands on the most unlikely of weapons. They will certainly need them, if they want to shoot that hurricane before it has a chance to kill them. Besides land mines and rocket launchers, he gets the whole party a set of Pancor Jackhammers, which are fully automatic shotguns. Unfortunately, these weapons were never actually produced, except for two prototypes.
Only gun nuts and fans of certain classic VRPGs would know this fact, so it would only harm disbelief in a small percentage. But then, why add a small detail that will be meaningless to most of your readers, who won't get it, and faulty to the few who will?
The weapon also brings up both the question of how the guy got a hold of them in the first place and why he would give unique weapons to some guy for free. The answer to the latter point is that everyone in this book intuitively knows whether anyone else is telling the truth. It's never explained whether that's a characteristic of this particular magical world, or whether Henderson thinks that's actually how human beings interact, but it certainly saves him from having to write multi-syllabic dialogue or portray human conflicts.
Our weaponeer (who Henderson once describes as shushing the hero with 'a thick black finger') also bores out the middle of the shotgun slugs and puts nitroglycerin inside of them. Nitro is the most unstable explosive we have, meaning these slugs would explode if you dropped them on the floor. Let's all imagine what would happen if you suddenly set off a firing pin next to one. That's right, exploding gun. Now lets imagine you have a whole clip full of these things. Take that, you damned flash floods!
Our Celestial psychic serves the purpose of introducing us to the main mover of this books' plot: the intuitive message from beyond. Nearly every problem Henderson sets before his characters is solved within the next half page, and usually by some sudden epiphany from out of the blue. Whether it's simple mistrust or the secret location of the bad guys, nothing is too small or too large for the author to simply put directly into his characters' brains.
Ironically, this bypasses any thought or emotional strength that would make the characters 'strong in the face of overwhelming odds', as he originally envisioned them. By removing any purpose or will, he ensures that the characters can have no personality, growth, or ability to actually overcome challenges.
At one point, the protagonist begins to doubt, falling into an uncharacteristic moment of introspection, which is then rudely interrupted by a magical voice in his head saying 'believe' and removing all his doubts in one fell swoop. Apparently, Henderson has to personally enter his books and bully his characters back on track, because not even they can believe how poorly-written their world is.
This book also gives an opportunity for him to represent his lack of understanding in the areas of science and mathematics when he begins to explain all about the world of the elder gods. While explaining that the evil only comes at times of grand syzygy (no cliche left behind) he suggests that planets are kept in motion by their own gravitational wells, which is the opposite of true. Gravity saps away energy.
His original suggestion that the placement of planets allows the otherworldly creatures to enter our world is likewise fraught, since the effect of gravity quickly diminishes over distance For example: the gravitational pull of Jupiter on you at its greatest is about equal with the television set across the room. If you really want to stop the elder gods, just rearrange the furniture.
He then misquotes 'A Brief History of Time' concerning the expansion and contraction of the universe. Between that and the Pancor reference, I expected this book to have been written circa 1987, not 2006.
As a sort of final insult, Henderson indicates that Lovecraft's own works were the result of him psychically connecting to the coming horrors which occur in this book. This is like saying that the Bible was only written so it could eventually be a footnote in the Da Vinci Code (not that Dan Brown actually cited references).
The title of the book really says a lot more than it means to. It evokes the Lovecraft story "The Things That Should Not Be", except Lovecraft's title is frightening. We are naturally afraid of things that should not exist, but things which don't exist are understandably less threatening.
The title clearly doesn't refer to the monsters themselves, which show up early and often, and leave their very corporeal body parts all over. Rather, it refers to the fact that this book is without many things, including mood, tone, character, humor, suspense, fear, conflict, research, or editing. Henderson misuses numerous words and metaphors throughout. One example is using 'sweating bullets' to indicate lots of hard work, instead of anxiety over the fast approach of death.
Finally, the book bears as much resemblance to Lovecraft's work as a Michael Bay film. The hero even talks to 'Cthulhu' at length, showing that Henderson has never come close to comprehending Lovecraft's style or philosophy. The very thoughts of these creatures are too complex for the human mind to comprehend. Just as no single person could memorize all the books that have been written, so too we could not comprehend such complex, alien minds.
Instead of blasting the hero's brain with unbelievable thoughts, 'Cthulhu' prattles on about death, sounding like a child paraphrasing Sauron from Lord of the Rings. Then Henderson puts into effect the threat from the introduction of taking on incomprehensible forces of nature with blazing pistols.
It's much easier to shoot them once Henderson makes the naive mistake of creating a theological pseudoscientific explanation to make the creatures small, simple, and understandable. At which point, nothing remains at all which ties this book to Lovecraft's legacy.
In the end, Henderson is not creative enough or experienced enough to produce anything new or interesting, even when mixing two such promising and interesting genres. One comes away with the sense that his personal experiences with fear, human conflict, and the insurmountable are so limited that he couldn't imagine anything that would create more than a half-page's difficulty for his characters.
This book achieves about the same level of horror, plot, and character depth as your average made-for-TV sci fi channel movie. His monsters even feel rubber-suited, which is odd, since books don't have limited CGI budgets. I hope Henderson's Kolchak novelizations are better than this, because one man shouldn't make fodder out of two previously enjoyable worlds....more
In writing, pretension is the act of pulling your hamstring while lifting your pen. It is that sudden, clear, and unfortunate. It should also be avoidIn writing, pretension is the act of pulling your hamstring while lifting your pen. It is that sudden, clear, and unfortunate. It should also be avoidable, but anyone gifted with a grain of brilliance is tempted to extend it as far as they can, like Donne's speck of dust stretched the length of the universe, one is left wondering whether it was more ludicrous or thought-provoking.
Calvino's 'Invisible Cities' is a series of descriptions of mythical, impossible cities told by Marco Polo to Kublai Khan. Each short description is like one of Donne's metaphysical poems: presenting a philosophical argument or idea and then turning it on its head. As an Italian, Calvino drew his inspiration from the same source as Donne: Francesco Petrarch.
Petrarch is the innovator of the modern sonnet, the modern love poem, and 'confessional' poetry. However, before you all wish him dead(er), his 'love' and 'confessions' were only the cover for his philosophical explorations. Like Sidney, Shakespeare, Wyatt, and the Victorian poets (Keats, Browning, Byron), the surface of the poem is not the whole story.
Also like Petrarch, Calvino's short pieces all work together to create a grander story, using repetition and developing symbols to create webs of meaning from one story to any other. Both Petrarch and Calvino take a narrow view for their collections, one Love and the other Cities, but Petrarch does more with his.
Calvino's repetition is sometimes interesting and meaningful, but often, it seems like he's still trying to hash out his ideas. Some of the cities are remarkable and poignant, but others somewhat scattered and redundant.
The frame story of Polo and Kublai also vacillates in profundity. At it's best, it questions the nature of human relationships, interaction, understanding, and language barriers. At other times it descends into New Age metaphysics and solipsism: endlessly wondrous, endlessly pointless, and perfect for capturing the imagination of the first-year philosophy major.
These moments of overextension are balanced by some truly thought-provoking and delightful observations and questions about the nature of the world and the senses. The book is truly dreamlike, in that one dream may alter the way you look at life, while the next one will be about bass fishing with Julie Newmar in your underwear; fun perhaps, but not lasting.
Calvino has a great talent, and a remarkable mind, but it's clear that he was bent on transgressing and ignoring boundaries, and hence often crosses the limits of his own skill. This uninhibited exploration is truly something every author and artists should aspire to, but the false leaps should be left behind in editing.
As redundancy and vagueness builds up, we can see the areas of difficulty and obsession for Calvino, for these always end with a shrug instead of the final thrust that carries us over his more salient points. While in these cases he might have made the journey itself the important part, he tends to concentrate on the ends, even when he proves incapable of reaching them.
Walking the same roads again and again looking for something and failing to find it is not the mark of the fantastical fabulist, but of the minute realist. Calvino's story is never small and personal, even when detailed and nostalgic, it is hyperbolic and magical.
When he dances around some vague point, he is not Ariosto, presenting the limits of mankind: Calvino gives us his own limits. The descriptions are far-flung and often set the mind reeling with humor or more poignant observation. That he sometimes overextends himself is not such a crime, when occasionally, he does reach those heights.
It's true to say that this book is not any one thing, that it defies description and draws from many sources and traditions, but neither do these varying and disparate influences coalesce into some wholly new vision. The closer he comes to any climax or conclusion, the more he grows uncertain.
I'm not suggesting that such a climax is necessary--indeed, in a loosely-structured work like this, where the most effective aspect is the comparison and contradiction between each individual piece, shoehorning in such a convenient conclusion wouldn't really work--neither Petrarch nor Borges needed one. In their great collections, one could start almost anywhere, and end almost anywhere, without having lost the thread of their thoughts.
What frustrates about Calvino is that he's constantly pushing towards conclusion, and harping on it despite the fact that such a conclusion is not even necessary--indeed, a work like this achieves its effect by the questions it asks, not the answers that it tries to give. So, Calvino ends up giving us numerous empty answers when simple silence would have been far more provocative.
Is it ever really meaningful to end by stating 'maybe it is this way, maybe it is that way, maybe nothing exists at all'? What do we gain by saying this that we would not have by simply leaving it unsaid? The author who imagines stating that his own ignorance is profound is simply exercising the vanity of false humility.
Better to let the observations and moments of wit speak for themselves. If the reader is not reminded of his own short-sightedness by these, then telling him he is short-sighted certainly won't help.
I must say that these moments of falling flat could have been a subtlety of William Weaver's translation, but since such an issue is beyond my meager means to fully explore, I felt it better to tender my review to the book I read, rather than to the book that might exist out there, somewhere....more
Mervyn Peake was, by all accounts, a powerful presence, an electric character, and a singular creative force. While Tolkien's poetry is the part everyMervyn Peake was, by all accounts, a powerful presence, an electric character, and a singular creative force. While Tolkien's poetry is the part everyone skips, Peake's invigorates his books. His voice and tone are unique in the English language, and his characterization is delightfully, grotesquely vivid. As an illustrator, he was perhaps somewhat less precise than Dore, but more evocative than Beardsley.
His life and his vision were singular, from his birth in China to his years on the channel island Sark, and finally, his slow deterioration, until he was unable to speak, and drew only clowns in profile, capped as dunces. Though many suggest this deterioration marks the perceived failing of Titus Alone, Peake would complete his final illustrations more than a year later, and did not succumb to death for another decade.
There were some editorial problems with Titus Alone, and though they have been mostly repaired, there are still dissatisfied grumblings about the final form. The ultimate Titus book is not easy to come to terms with, and indeed it took me long thought and consideration. However, I will not coax or argue mitigating circumstances: this book is Peake's vision, and while not as expansive or exacting as the others, it stands as its own work, and completes Peake's philosophical and literary journey as well as we might wish.
Peake was never one to pander. He did not write for any crowd, and he certainly did not write to facilitate escapism. He may have fashioned his work by an aesthetic, so as to mesmerize or mystify the ear, tug at the mind, and certainly to tickle the eye, but he did not give comfortable or simple answers.
The first two books are rather congruous, despite the subtle shifts, the advances and retreats, the many skirmishes Peake engages the reader in, only to return the veil before any clear victory or defeat can be claimed. It was not Peake's intention to stroke and comfort his readers, but to take them from high to low, to present them with wonder and with a vast, unconquerable world of wretched beauty.
Over the long stretch of the first two books, the reader becomes accustomed to the castle Gormengast, to identify with Titus' everyday struggles against plodding tradition. Characters die, others take their place, filling out the ranks, buttressing the ancient walls with their very breath.
There is a safety in tradition, in the comfort we slowly gain from it, as we do in Gormenghast itself: always separate from the world without, unknown and forbidden. Like Titus, we imagine that the outside world must be like the inside one: it cannot be so different, after all, from this crumbling castle, this place which has become another home to legions of awestruck readers.
But any reader content to watch it all play out so familiarly has not been paying attention—has not been listening to Peake. Though there is always the susurrant coo of that comfort, that tradition, we must not forget that, for young Titus, tradition is death, is rot, is black and stagnant waters.
Many readers find themselves utterly thrown when they first begin to encounter the world outside Gormenghast, and realize that it is not what they expected. However, it is difficult for me to imagine how such readers could at once praise Peake for the the singular, spectacular world of the first two books, and then become upset when he continues to expand his vision. They find themselves well-seated by yesterday's revolution, and resent such an unwelcome start.
Peake continues a thread of literary exploration which draws through the great epics, from Homer to Virgil, Tasso, Ariosto, and Milton, to Byron, to Eliot. Like these great works, Peake explores the role and nature of the hero: his connection to tradition, and the purpose chosen for him.
Originally, the epic hero was governed by his own mind, like Odysseus, a mind devious beyond measure, it proved. Then Virgil created his hero of Piety, of submission. Aeneas grasped hold of tradition, trusting in it to lead him. This was a message to the populace: trust in our ways, our traditions, and our Emperor to provide all that you might need. While this message is useful to an empire, it can be rather destructive to the individual, asking that he give up himself to the greater good.
Milton eventually continues this tradition, except he promotes subservience to Church instead of Empire (though there was little enough difference at the time). However, Milton included the old, violent, self-serving hero as a cautionary tale: humility and piety are Adam's strengths, while Satan has the 'false' strengths of warlike might and Odyssean skepticism.
Many later writers, including Byron, found that the Satanic mode of heroism was more appealing to the individual, especially to the iconoclast and artist who was tired of being told to 'pipe down' and 'follow orders'. Nietzsche would carry this sense of heroic individualism to the cusp, when he stated that mankind would have to demolish all tradition, and each individual would have to create a whole philosophy of meaning for himself, and thus become a philosopher of the future known famously as the Ubermensch.
Of course, there is a point when we all must question the whole of tradition, and just as we did when we first learned the art of speech, test what happens when we respond to all questions and demands with a resounding 'no!' These later rebellions, these existential crises can happen at any time, whenever we find ourselves struggling to make a place for ourselves.
Titus leaves home--as he must to become himself. He cannot honestly accept or reject Gormenghast and its tradition unless he can see it objectively, which requires that he develop a more worldly point of view. Like anyone progressing from childhood to adulthood, he questions the fundamental assumptions of his parents and teachers, and by extension, their whole world, and so he sets out on his own. Also, like any of us on the brink of adulthood, he learns that the world the adults promised doesn't really exist.
The real world is stranger, more daunting, and far more vast than the 'right and wrong' of parental morality, or the far-flung imaginings of the child. Even though his readers have been through this shift themselves, and should know to expect it from a changing young man, new to the world, Peake still manages to catch us off guard. Like Titus, the reader expects the world to be different and challenging, but like Titus, they cannot imagine how truly different it will be when it arrives.
Titus Alone has a self-contained plot. It has its own allies and antagonists, its own places, its own conflict, and its own climax. They all add to Peake's running themes of change, growth, beauty, and meaning, but they are their own. However, the climax in Titus Alone is only a dress rehearsal for the true climax, which comes only at the very end, and which remains unsure until then, as pivotal and sudden as the twelfth book of the Aeneid.
This resolution is the culmination of Titus' childhood, of all his former conflicts, of his life and purpose and individuality. It is the thematic culmination of the bildungsroman. It is the philosophical conclusion of Peake's exploration of the role of the hero, the self, and of tradition. It is also the fulfillment of his vision, his unyielding artistic drive. It is the final offering to the reader, his companion and rival on this journey.
He ends with beauty, with questions, with verve, and with a wink.
It still confuses me that many readers seemed to expect Peake to follow works notable for their strangeness and unpredictability with something familiar and indistinguishable. There are many who do this, it is true. There is the revolutionary who topples the regime only to supplant it with his own. There is the mountain climber who tops Everest, and then imagines that the greatest challenge is to do so twice.
You get no higher no matter how many times you climb the mountain. The true visionary adventurer climbs the mountain, and then, as an encore, paints the ceiling of a cathedral. It may not be expected, it may not please those fans who only wanted more of the same, but anything less is an admission of defeat. Peake earned his laurels in the first two books, and while we could hardly blame him for resting on them, he refused to.
Perhaps many readers became comfortable with his rebellion, his iconoclasm. They sympathized with his rejection of tradition, and then happily accepted that rebellion as their new tradition. Like Aeneas, they left crumbling Troy, trusting in their patron deity to carry them through. However, Peake was not content simply to add a new wing to his masterwork. He showed his authorial humility and his commitment to art by razing his own cathedral simply because it was more interesting than leaving it up.
As Nietzsche said: push everything, and abandon whatever topples, no matter how familiar it had become. He who can apply this to himself and to his own works is the only artist deserving of the title--and such is Peake.
This was much better than I was expecting. I enjoy a good pulp now and again, but this nearly reached the mirth and derring-do of Dumas' Musketeers. MThis was much better than I was expecting. I enjoy a good pulp now and again, but this nearly reached the mirth and derring-do of Dumas' Musketeers. Many of these stories were written before those of the first collection. They were short magazine submissions, and it was only later that Leiber thought to write introductory stories.
Being written in the early part of Leiber's career at different times and places, the stories show a great deal of pleasing variance. Each short tale presents its own setting, its own locations, and its own feel. They are all loosely connected into a grander arc, and the reader is invited to draw connections and conclusions about the interstitial parts, evoking real historical accounts.
It's not difficult to see how, writing these stories without a clear path, at many times throughout his life, we get a grander scope of his world, from vibrant, rough stories to more complex, idea-driven ones. This somewhat piecemeal approach is engaging and unpredictable, especially in comparison to Leiber's later work on the series, which is unfortunately repetitive and narrow in scope.
There are a few sections which grow a bit silly and stilted, but it is altogether quick and enjoyable, with the vivacity, wit, and creativity to keep the reader occasionally surprised and often amused.
I would enjoy Neal Gaiman more if he were a madman. Unfortunately, unless he starts making bookplates in the Blakean style, I don't think this will evI would enjoy Neal Gaiman more if he were a madman. Unfortunately, unless he starts making bookplates in the Blakean style, I don't think this will ever be remedied. He is a competent writer, and interesting, but rarely pushes the limits. Perhaps this shows that he is wise enough to recognize his own limitations, which is more than I can say for Morrison, especially in 'The Invisibles'.
Morrison never fails to push the boundaries, but this only makes it more and more apparent that he is not a visionary writer. Though he is an avid reader and draws from many eccentric sources, he never seems capable of combining them into something greater than the scattered parts.
Without a greater philosophical cosmology to tie things together, he ends up writing in a hodge-podge which has impressive breadth, but negligable depth. There are little spots now and again which go up to your calf, but the next step always lands on the careless sandbar of Morrison's ego.
The only thing that does connect all the disparate elements is the plot, but that isn't saying much. Morrison wasn't blessed with Alan Moore's ability to make a driving plot out of the bizarre, and Morrison's penchant for writing six titles a month certainly doesn't help anything.
Again, it is a matter of overextension. I am lucky enough to have more than a passing familiarity with a few of the mythologies he references. Unfortunately, this means that I can see the holes in his plots and references. Those with greater experience must find it even more disjointed.
However, for those with much less experience, the text seems revolutionary, since the facade covers much of the bare scaffolding. If you didn't know that he was scraping this all together week to week, you might wonder if the mistakes and confusion was just you 'not getting it'; in such straits, many readers fall back on a cautious sense of awe, not wanting to admit that they don't get it.
His King Mob character is set up to be the cool anti-hero, but since Morrison already finds his character to be interesting and sympathetic, he forgets to convince the reader of this fact. It should be unsurprising that Grant likes his character, since he's writing an author surrogate.
He can never seem to keep himself out of his comics, which is another symptom of his big ego. It was a half-hearted trick when he played it in Animal Man, but making a Gary Stu secret agent with an active sex life is even more cringe-worthy. It might not be so obvious if he didn't mention that 'he's still single!' in every other letters column.
It's been pointed out before that there are striking similarities between King Mob and Spider from Warren Ellis' 'Transmetropolitan'. They are both violent, outspoken anti heroes who look like Captain Picard in sunglasses with body mods.
The comparison favors Spider, who is a strong, entertaining, sympathetic character. This is despite the fact that he never eschews his spiteful take-no-prisoners exterior. Ellis manages to write an outspoken writer character who isn't just a mouthpiece for the author, for which he should win some sort of prize. Meanwhile, Morrison can't separate his authorial voice from a secret agent wizard.
Morrison also adds another protagonist to appeal to the kiddies, namely a troubled teen right out of the monomyth. Like every other monomyth hero, this character is rather empty, serving merely as a central focus for the frenetic action. Knowing Morrison, he's probably another author surrogate of how Grant imagines himself as a child.
Morrison does write interesting turns now and again, though the more he explicates, the less clever he becomes. I keep feeling like I'm going to be forced to rate this book lower, but something generally comes along and saves it.
As it is, I wish that it was more like some of Morrison's other work. He's at his best when he's not investing his ego in the outcome. His one-offs and fun little forays are great, but he takes his magni opera too seriously for them to succeed. Like Neal Stephenson, he's throwing everything he can in there to see what sticks. In the end, he's spending too much time on the peripherals, and not enough on the story and the characters.
It's been a long journey. I wanted to finish, hoping Morrison would be able to pull it out in the end. After all, he's written some very good books, aIt's been a long journey. I wanted to finish, hoping Morrison would be able to pull it out in the end. After all, he's written some very good books, and it was in part because of them that I gave him the benefit of the doubt.
The Invisibles almost turned me off of Morrison entirely when I first started them, and if not for his other books, I wouldn't have attempted it again. It wasn't that this series was insulting, its faults are the product of poor construction, which in turn was the result of Morrison's inability to edit himself.
It didn't help that the final series is numbered in reverse, causing me to read the last three comics as the first three. At first, I'd thought that Morrison's experimental plotting had reached some sort of frenzied climax, where empty symbols had completely taken over any sense of meaning. It was almost exciting.
My error was a bit confusing, but revealed part of why Morrison comes off so flat to me. Morrison's story works like a drug trip (indeed, he utilizes several real-life trips as direct inspiration for his comics), the semi-random firings of neurons brought on by sleep and (hallucinogenic) drugs creates an overlay of sensory and symbolic experience which we then try to comprehend.
Morrison produces a similar effect in this story, except he culls his symbols and sensory experiences not from the recognizable or the metaphorical, but from the theoretical, the metaphysical, even the paranoid. His reality has no focus, and exists in an interchangeable, dreamlike state; and like a dream, all that interconnects it is moment-to-moment continuation.
Yet he is not content for his narrative to take the scattered, multifaceted form of a dream, instead he tries to coalesce it into some holistic truth. But how can a holistic truth be built on an unrelated scree? Discordians adapt it into satire by accepting the absurdism of any notion of truth, but Morrison is too much the believer to take that route.
What sets Morrison apart from both Moore and Gaiman is that he's come to believe in his own bullshit. This story is too close to home for him, and beyond basing it on his own philosophies, he suggests that the whole work is a magic spell that is controlling his life. The end result being that Morrison stops working to make the thing coherent because he believes it will be, no matter what he does.
Unshakable belief in your own work is the death of imagination. Without a constant doubt as to the quality or coherence of the message, the inflow of unchecked ideas quickly fills the work to the brim, crowding out characters or plot.
Morrison wraps it all up with something that looks but does not feel like a climax. Though he sets up evil empires, double agents, monomythic battles against evil, magic items, and monsters galore, he spends his exposition trying to explain this or that 5th-dimensional crystal instead of writing the story.
That being said, it did inspire me to think more about physical exploration and catharsis. The art gets better as the series closes up, though the latter books are a bit annoying in that they switch abruptly from one artist to the next.
I finished the thing. It taught me a lot of things not to do as a writer and helped me to recognize why some of Morrison's stories work so very well and why others are so wacky and confused. I'll have to make sure that if I ever write my dream project--near and dear to my heart--that I have a very smart and very honest editor to stop me from buying my own line of bullshit and trying to sell it to my hapless fans, who would prefer I just wrote well instead of playing the magical messiah.
Morrison seems always to be over-extending himself. The fellow simply does better when he sticks to something more simple. His greatest downfall is alMorrison seems always to be over-extending himself. The fellow simply does better when he sticks to something more simple. His greatest downfall is always his attempts to be meaningful. Morrison seems to always hover around the same level of meaning, the result of which being that the more he tries to be meaningful, the more his ideas become overt and tautalogical.
He also tries to fit in too many sources and concepts without streamlining them, which often results in incorrect facts. He followed the old wive's tale about bats being blind in Animal Man, he Misquotes Oppenheimer in this series, and also indicates that Byron would have known of Blake's work. I know there are some others I can't recall, and perhaps it is the nature of the fast-paced script writing, busy schedule, and ill-health of Morrison which resulted in such oversights, but it breeds little confidence in a reader to give him the benefit of doubt.
J.G. Keely
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Books:
urban-fantasy
(27)
