Lanark

Alasdair Gray Lanark (1981)
Generally speaking, I've grown a little jaded with novels featuring characters who are aware of inhabiting a work of fiction, because the conceit seems to have become so ubiquitous of late as to suggest that shitheads are getting in on the action. It's one of those post-modern tricks that fucking everyone does because it's easy, and it suggests philosophical depth without the pesky requirement of actual groundwork undertaken, and anyone pointing out the emperor's lack of clothing will usually find themselves branded a thickie. Each new example of a character turning to the imaginary camera to directly address an audience now reminds me of my stepson assuming he'll blow our minds by explaining how Deadpool, a Marvel superhero from the nineties, breaks the fourth wall. I wouldn't mind but he hasn't even read the comics, just watched some green haired YouTube gamer twat opining about them.

For anyone who didn't get the memo, or who may still be buzzing from the euphoria of this amazing discovery and the attendant honour of getting to tell the rest of us about it, fictional or metafictional characters who don't occasionally address the reader - or wink at the camera or otherwise comment on the story in which they have become involved - have been with us since before the novel was even a thing. It might even be suggested that characters who remain unaware of someone else writing their lives are the more recent anomaly in terms of literary history. I assume that at least one of you will have heard of William Shakespeare…

Anyway, I'd been wondering about all this after Lance Parkin wrote about what he termed - by his own admission, for the sake of convenience - the Gray Tradition, a genre encompassing writers such as Philip K. Dick, Alan Moore, Grant Morrison and others known to turn up within their own narratives. Of course, terming it the Gray Tradition might seem akin to proposing that Don Quixote belongs to the Deadpool Tradition but, as Parkin explained, he was mostly just thinking aloud, and his model arguably incorporates more than just the basic furniture of Menippean satire, hence his efforts to map it out, whatever it is.

Lanark figures here for a number of reasons, not least being the chapter wherein Lanark meets the author who then describes some of what he's been trying to do with this book. Lanark is himself also a pseudo-autobiographical stand-in for the author. His story, one which spans from youth to old age, takes place in the city of Unthank, which may or may not be an afterlife of sorts. Lanark, hardly likely to miss the suspension of normal laws of cause, effect, and common sense, speculates that Unthank may even be Hell - although it seems to bear closer resemblance to the frozen underworld of many pre-Christian cultures, albeit with a generous helping of Kafka - but the precise nature of Unthank isn't so important as what it says about our own world.

Our own world, or at least Alasdair Gray's experience of the same, is detailed in the two central books of this four-ish part novel as the life of Duncan Thaw, a young Glaswegian who attended art school in the late fifties. Thaw paints murals - as did Gray - but finds himself at odds with his tutors, his contemporaries, and much of his social environment; and his life culminates in his painting the book of Genesis across the interior of a church scheduled for demolition. Thus, much like humanity born in the Biblical garden, the great work is doomed before it's even started.

Very few men are as nasty to their children as you are to yours. Why didn't you give me a railway station to decorate? It would have been easy painting to the glory of Stevenson, Telford, Brunel and a quarter million Irish navvies. But here I am, illustrating your discredited first chapter through an obsolete art form on a threatened building in a poor province of a collapsing empire.

Thaw's mural seems to echo both the history of Glasgow, and by association the history of human civilisation, and the writing of the novel itself; and this was the point at which I noticed just how much Lanark foreshadows Alan Moore's Jerusalem - which now strikes me as amounting to Lanark rewritten with more ornate guitar solos and very little of the actual heart or soul.

As to what Lanark is about, it's about everything, or is at least about more than can be summarised in a single paragraph; but if there's truly any overarching theme, its constitution is touched upon when Lanark argues with Ozenfant in the final chapter.

'You are a liar!' cried Lanark. 'We have no nature. Our nations are not built instinctively by our bodies, like beehives; they are works of art, like ships, carpets, and gardens. The possible shapes of them are endless. It is bad habits, not bad nature, which makes us repeat the dull old shapes of poverty and war. Only greedy people who profit by these things believe they are natural.'

It's a long book - nearly six-hundred pages - because it's about everything, stated in organic, evolving terms rather than just ticking all the salient points one by one from a list, Alan. Much of it is frankly fucking peculiar, but it's all familiar. Some of it drags, just as real life occasionally drags, but it's all part of the process, making Lanark as much of an essential read as anything can be described as an essential read; and even if whatever conclusions we draw may seem pessimistic or depressing, there's a great joy in embracing something which is at least truthful.

Without Feathers

Woody Allen Without Feathers (1972)
I have no illusions regarding the possibility of Woody Allen having turned out to be an absolute shocker - before anyone feels compelled to begin a sentence with don't you realise that... but I remember when he was funny, and I remember reading this book when it had cartoon Woody as a plucked chicken on the cover and laughing my ass off.

I have decided to break off my engagement with W. She doesn't understand my writing, and said last night that my Critique of Metaphysical Reality reminded her of Airport. We quarrelled, and she brought up the subject of children again, but I convinced her they would be too young.

It still makes me laugh, even that punchline. I'm still not sure that I believe in cancel culture as an actual thing, but I sure am tired of new puritans attempting to police my reading habits, almost to the point of actively seeking out that which has inspired a thousand whiny blogs; but, as I said, I'm here mainly because I wanted to find out whether it was still funny, and whether it had ever been funny. I have some vague recall of Allen's Love and Death being side-splitting when first I saw it, and yet it barely raised a smile during a more recent viewing.

Revisited in 2021, Without Feathers reveals itself as surprisingly formulaic with most of these reprinted New Yorker articles reliant upon the same peppering of the grandiose with small change absurdities as has served Monty Python, Spike Milligan, Vic, Bob and many others so well. Allen has a good sense of conversational dialogue, so mostly it works without the author grinning, winking, and digging you in the ribs every thirty seconds - which you wouldn't want, for obvious reasons. I've seen it suggested that Allen is essentially a creep, and that even this persona of the nerdy autodidact who ain't getting any represents a calculated projection designed to lure the vulnerable with their defences duly lowered; which may well be the case, but has no bearing on the fact of Without Feathers being still mostly funny. Furthermore, both The Whore of Mensa and Death, his Kafka-inspired one act play, are surprisingly profound, and enough so as to inspire the wish that things had turned out different - even with the possibility that maybe we're only talking about his later films being a bit more watchable.

For what it may be worth, Off the Wall is still a great album.

Cock & Bull

Will Self Cock & Bull (1992)
I've always regarded 1993's My Idea of Fun as Self's debut novel, but coming back to Cock & Bull after at least a couple of decades, I realise it was this. It's actually a pair of novellas, Cock and Bull - hence the title, and even without a recurring character, the two comprise the yin and yang of a central theme which might be seen to lack balance were it further bifurcated. That theme, for what it may be worth, is genitalia - the organs which have driven human society forward from the very beginning by one means or another. No-one could possibly accuse Self of lacking ambition, but how the hell does one write about cocks and fannies without all the centuries old accumulation of bullshit, porn, and ideology getting in the way and defeating its own analysis? Self deftly defuses context by shifting everything a few feet to the left, and so we have Carol who finds she has grown a penis in Cock, and the eponymous star of Bull who wakes one morning to find a working vagina has opened up behind his knee just above the calf - the placement seeming necessary so as to circumnavigate the possibility of anything so reductionist as straightforward transgender fiction, Cock & Bull being closer in spirit to Kafka's Metamorphosis. It's about the smelly, wrinkly biology and how we deal with it, how we square it up with the fictions by which we've deodorised our toilet parts.

'There is that horror and its interaction with another horror. The bloody horror of gynaecological fact. Modern horror films are all blood and the membranous stria of bio-goo. But really they have simply rendered external what is at the core of our dearest friends. They have just turned inside out the sock of feminine biology.'

That being one perspective given herein, specifically by the Oxford don who narrates Cock to the author as they meet on a train like characters in a Graham Greene short story; but not even the bias of the author himself, the one recording this narrative, is exempt from scrutiny as the don seemingly glares out of the page to observe:

'You're typing me, boy, aren't you? You're turning me into something that I'm not. An amusing character, an oddity, a type!'

A couple of pages later we read that:

Carol and Dan's life was thus exactly like literature: thin and pulped into existence. They floated in vacuou, cut off from parents, isolated from one another. Since there was no other conduit to direct them into the corpuscular circulation of society, while the current was on they flew like filings towards the healing magnet.

This tendency to populate the novel with smaller models of itself achieves an admittedly gruesome climax in the person of Razza Rob, the foul stand-up comic.

'Razza is an ironist. You probably didn't notice' - but naturally, Bull gritted mentally, you did - 'but all these cunt jokes are just that: cunt jokes. They aren't jokes about women at all. They have nothing to do with women. Razza is cutting the archetypal cunt out of the woman - and displaying it for the world to see, and appreciate, that it's just a cipher - an empty category on to which people project their own distorted attitudes. After all, what's a hole once one removes it from the ground?'

Naturally, with horrible inevitability Razza Rob is subsequently revealed as entirely bereft of irony, and Juniper's somewhat forced rationalisation seems particularly timely given certain contemporary narratives wherein sexuality - and usually female sexuality - is divorced from biology in resumption of nineteenth century ideas about those feminine lady-brains.

Self's conclusion seems neatly summarised by the pejorative meaning of the title, although this is hardly a neatly binary discussions drawing yes, no, good, or bad conclusions, and as such it might arguably provide clues as to where so many of us get it wrong. The novel is an illusory medium which probably shouldn't be too easily mistaken for either anything directly allegorical or even conclusive regarding human society, but Self's satire comes about as close as we're likely to get in this instance, and it also helps that it's fucking funny for reasons which Razza Rob wouldn't have understood.

Genocide

 

Paul Leonard Genocide (1997)
I know I'm only going to end up writing the same review I always write of underwhelming Doctor Who tie-in novels, but what the fuck, why not? Maybe something nice will happen.

As I've stated on several occasions, I used to be addicted to these things. There were two published each month for a while and I bought and read every single one of them without fail, not quite to the exclusion of anything else, but with hindsight I really wish my focus had been a little wider. My subsequent tendency to sneer is therefore derived from my eventually having realised that quite a few of these books were pretty poor, which is massively embarrassing given how amazing I once believed them to be. This possibly informs my tendency to overreact when writing reviews of Who novels. I additionally tend to throw babies out with whatever bathwater happens to be available because I dislike almost anything which calls itself fandom, and I'm disappointed with anyone who can claim such a fervent degree of allegiance to bland, button-pushing generic entertainment product; and I'm disappointed with them because that was me a couple of decades ago.

Nevertheless, given the tonnage of eighties X-Men comics I've purchased over the last couple of years, I'm not really in any position to disparage the Doctor Who novel on the grounds of it being either juvenile or mass produced, because - aside from anything else - I still fucking love some of this shit even if I don't necessarily want to hang around with anyone dressed as one of the characters; so I'm going to try to break it down a little further.

Mark Hodder has observed that the once considerable popularity of the fictional detective Sexton Blake seems to have waned roughly correspondent to the rise in popularity of Doctor Who, prompting Hodder to further speculate upon their similarities, and how it could be argued that the two characters have occupied more or less the same cultural niche at different ends of the century*. Blake was initially a response to Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, an arguably more egalitarian interpretation freed from the limitations of single authorship, and even if Blake was more product than Holmes, he benefits from being born to an era prior to the full mechanisation of the production line, figuratively speaking, meaning even serials such as those featuring Blake, Doc Savage, Perry Rhodan or whoever else, might showcase the singular vision of an individual author rather than a committee or a fucking focus group. In writing terms, we're talking craft more than art but this isn't to say that we're talking artless, and for my money, the best Sexton Blake has been equal to or superior to Conan Doyle's antecedent. In other words, pulp - as is generally applied willy-nilly by persons who rarely seem to understand quite where the term came from - doesn't have to mean low quality.

I see something of this as being applicable to Who, and to how Who has evolved over the years into something which is more or less all product. Of course, it's always been a mass produced and undeniably populist deal, and anyone who ever mistook Who for handwritten Kafka manuscripts unpublished during the author's lifetime is a fucking idiot; but mass production tends to be corporate, and the nature of the corporation has changed from something which may once have supported stables of semi-domesticated creative weirdos to what it is now, wherein marketing has become so invasive as to infest every stage of the allegedly creative process to a degree which seems almost comparable to ideology. In terms of Who, both televised and written, this means we've gone from slightly cranky but occasionally inspired outsiders who drew their influences from across the board, to persons who are usually fans with all the brand loyalty implied by the term, whose inspiration is mostly self-referential, and who have been hired to fill a quota and tick certain boxes. Doctor Who went off the air in 1989 when it was discovered that only seven people were still watching. It returned as a one-off special in 1996, which - for me - approximately represents the corporate singularity, the point beyond which the whole enterprise became more akin to product than anything derived from even a diluted artistic vision. It was specifically designed to capture an audience, to corner a market, and creative considerations were subservient to this goal.

Going back a couple of years, Virgin Books took it upon themselves to publish novels continuing the series in print alone once the TV show went tits up. The series was called the New Adventures and they were mostly pretty good, or at least that's how I remember them. Having been pitched at what was by definition a dwindling audience, none of whom were children - at least not physically - the authors were free to go wild, to come up with all manner of crazy shite which we never would have seen on the screen. So even those who might be deemed slavering continuity obsessed fans occasionally shone brightly, and as a result, many of the New Adventures worked as science-fiction novels in their own right.

Then someone presumably noticed the success of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and figured it might be worth giving the Who goose another squeeze just in case there were a few more golden eggs still to be popped out; and so it came back, as described above, and because we didn't want to take any chances, we got all of our best people on the job, the award winners, the proven sellers, the stars of the marketing department. We held meetings and asked the kids what they wanted, then pulled our findings apart so as to work out what they really wanted even if they didn't know it. We published our conclusions. We talked to the shareholders. We got a great deal.

So where the Virgin books had been mostly decent, occasionally exceptional, and at least aspiring to something other than text which asks us to imagine we're watching a TV show, the BBC novels which supplanted them were patchier, with occasional flashes of inspiration arising apparently in spite of the general thrust rather than as part of the strategy; and Genocide seems sadly illustrative of this.

I remember liking it a lot but seem to have outgrown the form, I suppose you might say; and it's not even a bad book. Paul Leonard wrote a lot of these things and was generally competent, able to string a sentence together and good for just the sort of weird, screwy ideas upon which Who first built its reputation. Here we have time trees - and you can probably guess what they do from the name - which facilitate the unfortunate extinction of the entire human race thanks to a species of four-eyed horses - all of which seems to hint at the influence of Larry Niven, at least from where I'm standing. His prose is mostly workmanlike and efficient without being truly dull, and he occasionally slips into clipped cinematic non-sentences for the sake of drama or pacing without ending up looking like a wanker, as so many others often do.

This was enough for me back in 1997 but this time around, I can't quite get past those elements which seem to betray the overbearing hand of editorial direction. We're clearly reading something aimed at a younger age group, and someone at head office doubtless thought we'd identify with Sam and all of her modular teenage concerns; and we're reading something which quite clearly aspires to viewing as an imaginary television show on our mind's inner screen, right down to entire alien races represented by just three actors in funny costumes.

Paul Leonard does as good a job as he can within the limitations of the revised form, and it starts well and doesn't read like fan fiction - as was often the case; but once the big ideas have been delivered, there's not actually a lot of story to be had. It certainly didn't need three-hundred pages and sags horribly after the first hundred or so, descending into inconsequential scrapes and running around until it's time for The Generation Game. It really feels as though these BBC novels were the last good thing, or at least the last with any potential beyond mere sales figures and pushing that consumer loyalty button. Genocide had potential, but time was running out.

*: Unfortunately I can't remember where he made these speculations, so it was probably some private correspondence or other.

The Dark Knight Returns

Frank Miller, Klaus Janson & Lynn Varley The Dark Knight Returns (1986)
As for Pow! the comic book growing up, I guess this was approximately where it all started, at least in terms of public perception. Watchmen is better remembered but this came first by about six months. Excepting Viz, I'd stopped reading comics, having given up on 2000AD back in 1980 and not really thought about it since. I found it odd when I overheard my friends Charlie and Garreth talking about comic books, specifically Batman of all things. What the fuck? I opined, and so Garreth lent me a prestige format issue of Frank Miller's version of Batman so as to impress upon me that it was significantly different to the version of Batman who routinely found himself caught in giant mousetraps; so that was probably the start of my comic book habit, or a significant contributing factor.

I haven't read this in probably twenty years, and have been reluctant to do so of late for fear of what I might find, given Frank Miller's apparent recent transformation into Ron Swanson; but Kafka was boring me shitless, and I'd already resorted to Grant Morrison's All-Star Superman by way of light relief, so Batman seemed like the next logical step. As everyone in the universe knows, The Dark Knight Returns is essentially grittily realistic Batman or, to fine tune the definition, if Batman were a real person, then he would almost certainly have to be something in this direction and the most pertinent questions would be whether there's any real difference between a homicidal maniac and a homicidal maniac claiming to be the good guy. All the moral baggage - or absence thereof - one might anticipate given that it's Frank Miller at the typewriter is already there and very much packed, which I probably didn't notice last time around, being a bit slow on the uptake for most of the eighties; and yet The Dark Knight Returns remains as powerful as ever because Miller's view of the world is, at worst, simply massively pessimistic, and is communicated without even hinting at any sort of agenda. Batman fights crime, as we would expect, but is himself a criminal as he freely admits, and a particularly violent one. Everything else is on us, depending on whether or not we're cheering every time he kicks someone's head in or breaks their fingers. Miller isn't suggesting that any of this is good so much as that there's a certain inevitability which comes with certain situations, and particularly so when we start asking questions about morality, justice and all that good stuff. The Dark Knight Returns is therefore a post-Vietnam Batman, one left permanently changed by a conflict which blurs established notions of what the right thing may be. It's dark and unpleasant because anything else would be dishonest, and maybe you're not actually supposed to be cheering along like some fucking simpleton.

So never mind Batman, this really was a whole new deal, not least in terms of how the story was told, further distancing the familiar names from their primary colour origins. If not conventionally beautiful, it's difficult to look away from the scratchy expressionist lines, with the story structured just loosely enough as to feel organic, quite unlike the rigidly mathematical progression of Watchmen, and hence somehow more truthful regardless of the presence of the guy from outer space. I've never been a massive fan of Batman or his specific type - the freelance cop who beats up the ne'er do well and returns the stolen wallet to the millionaire - but just for once someone actually got it right, and this was that book, and I suspect Frank Miller is probably a more complicated individual than we realised, at least in so far as that he's since apologised for Holy Terror.

The Trial

Franz Kafka The Trial (1914)
I'm sure we all know about this one, it being the book which seems to have given us the term Kafkaesque, describing actions where the mechanism or structure of what occurs is so ludicrously convoluted and confusing as to negate whatever the original point may have been; so here, as you may already know, we have Josef K who faces trial without ever quite discovering what he's supposed to have done. I assumed it would be a courtroom drama, albeit more by way of a written equivalent to expressionist cinema than Perry Mason, but we don't even get that far. Josef is arrested, and there's something approximating a conclusion at the end, but the intermediate chapters mostly comprise impenetrable conversations with his friends, relatives, acquaintances, and colleagues as he prepares himself for whatever may lay ahead, and these chapters are such that it doesn't really seem to matter which order they appear in. I liked Metamorphosis a lot, but Metamorphosis was relatively snappy compared to this which, despite some nicely made observations, never really adds up to anything and is thus something of a slog, possibly because I suspect the whole point was specifically its failure to add up to anything.

The introduction explains how The Trial was one of a number of unpublished works found amongst Kafka's belongings following his death in 1924, and he requested that it should be burned. Obviously it wasn't, and so we have this, a work with which the author himself was presumably unhappy, and I can see why. Without bearing the burden of any specific flaw, The Trial is simply a better idea than it is a novel unless you really, really love the fuck out of Kafka. For my money, it's readable, but then that album which Simon Napier-Bell once patched together out of Marc Bolan outtakes and offcuts is probably listenable by some definition.

The Overcoat and other Tales of Good and Evil

Nikolai Gogol The Overcoat and other Tales of Good and Evil (1842)
Gogol is one of those authors upon which I took a chance, despite having no strong reason for wanting to read his work beyond the vague possibility that it might be decent. I haven't read too many Russian writers, and nor am I excessively well read once those cinematic pages float up onto the calendar to reveal that we're now back in the nineteenth century; so I'm out of my depth here, and that itself is enough to inspire curiosity.

Happily, I've found that I like Gogol. His writing is funny without cracking jokes, jovial without any Stilgoe-esque nudging or winking, and the stories he tells are fucking peculiar with a gentle absurdity which seems to foreshadow Tony Hancock, Monty Python, Samuel Beckett, Kafka, Dadaism and possibly even Reid Fleming - World's Toughest Milkman. His stories tend to be monologues, direct addresses given by the author and accordingly subject to the whims of idle conversation; so he'll change his mind, or tell you something didn't happen despite previous claims that it did, or not to worry if you don't understand the story because neither does he and he wrote it. His descriptions fly off down all manner of blind alleys to no obvious narrative purpose except perhaps for sheer delight in the absurdity of the appearance of a policeman somehow ending up as an anecdote about a neighbour's dog.

Having only a vague idea of what was happening with the novel during the nineteenth century, I don't really know where Gogol fits for sure, but I gather the folksy quality of his narratives may relate to a more general swing towards realism in literature, as distinct from tales of the comings and goings of Lords and Ladies. Indeed, Gogol's labouring over plausible itinerants, losers, and failures approaches grotesque levels of detail equivalent to the drawings of Hogarth, not least thanks to his apparent fixation on biological transmogrification, the old man scrunging into the sorcerer of The Terrible Vengeance, the roving eyes of The Portrait, or the star of The Nose which takes leave of its face to become an important man about town. It's satire which pushes and pulls at the limits of reality to see if it will break, and in doing so echoes our own unsteady relationship with those institutions which comprise society, but without sloganeering or, for that matter, the joyless grunting and grimacing of Dostoyevsky.

I liked both Dead Souls and The Nose, - which I have in the form of a chapbook - so it's good to know that they weren't in any way anomalous, and that there's a lot more where they came from,  most of it seemingly at least as weird, perhaps even weirder.

Anachrophobia

Jonathan Morris Anachrophobia (2002)
Regardless of all of the usual claims made on behalf of Doctor Who, most of which tend towards hyperbole, its appeal and its greatest strength is to be found in its sheer weirdness, in my opinion, and by weirdness I mean that which unsettles and borders on horror rather than mere whimsy. My earliest memories of the television show are of scenes which disturbed me because they were unlike anything else I'd seen either on the box or out here in the real world - Pertwee menaced by a flapping gargoyle and the weird electronic visual effects of innocents zapped by nightmarish beings. Although my oldest memory is of that particular scene from The Daemons of 1971, I'd presumably already watched bits and pieces of the show because I recall informing my mum that it'll be okay for me to watch this from now on because it doesn't scare me as much as it used to, which was probably a lie. I was five, and from then on I kept watching until it was no longer practical to do so, and its greatest appeal remained, for me, in just how fucking weird the thing often was. Not even the less adventurous, more generic stories were quite able to diminish this aspect, for even when we were reduced to the primary colours of our jolly adventurers being chased along a corridor, the collaborative effort of the show had developed this back story of which we never truly received more than tantalising glimpses, ensuring that new revelations served only to increase the mystery.

So we had this race of near-omnipotent semi-immortals who may or may not have engineered the development of the universe for reasons we couldn't even understand, and in doing so had reduced themselves to sterility, even something akin to senility; and the Doctor is quite naturally one who chose to flee from this awful society. They routinely travelled in time, changed history, and their people were grown from looms, and so this was a civilisation genuinely beyond our imagination, revealed by means of hints rather than anything so reliable as a statement, generally foiling attempts to consolidate any of this back story as canon, canon being something which usually matters most to those who have missed the point and would prefer neatly modular adventures in which escapade five neatly concludes just in time for escapade six and everything remains the same. This is why it all went tits up around the time of that half-human on my mother's side bollocks. It wasn't that the idea contradicted an established continuity so much as that it was blatant button pushing targetted at those whom some focus group had identified as being in the market for a fun time travelling Byronic dreamboat; and, like the notion that David Tennant and John Simm could have attended the same time-kindergarten, it was an attempt to root the whole thing into something more familiar, something safely quirky like one of those cool Tim Burton movies.

Anyway, it seems the viewing public didn't really want Who as dreamy Mr. D'Arcy after all, at least not back in 1996, so the property - as marketing executives and twats so charmingly refer to it - crept back to the book shelves, notably less weird than it had been, but still trying, and nothing like so bland as it would become once it got back on the box.

I was a sucker for this shit up to the age of forty, dutifully buying a couple of these things a month, and I distinctly recall this one being amazing; except my reading age has increased since then just as my tolerance for foolishness has decreased, so revisiting Anachrophobia has been a mixed pleasure.

To first dispense with initial objections, Anachrophobia really picks up in the last five or six chapters, meaning that it's a bit of a slog up until that point - hundreds of pages of a base under siege, running down corridors, doors slammed just in time to shut out slow moving monsters, essentially all the cliches.

But he had to look back. He glanced back up to where the creatures were standing.

As one, they turned to look at him.

Unfortunately this means it reads as a book which would rather have been a television show, and to such an extent that there were passages during which I swear I could sense Moffat feeling pleased with himself. Of course, some will doubtless regard a book which captures the atmosphere of a television show as a triumph, to whom I'd say you might be better off watching the box instead, maybe leave the books to those of us who actually enjoy reading, yeah?

Also there's the additional problem of occasional touches of what reads like fiction aimed at young adults - because apparently they can't handle proper fiction and need to feel that what they're reading somehow includes them, addresses their concerns as young people; so rather than simply describing something, we're told how Anji feels about it. It reminds her of her granny's kitchen, because we all have grannies, and many of our grannies will have had a kitchen. It suggests Geoffrey from Rainbow smiling and suggesting, 'maybe you too sometimes feel a bit grumpy like Zippy?'

However, as with a few of the shitier shows on the telly, we have that weird back story to compensate for failings of the author's imagination. The back story running through these Who books as of 2002 was that the Doctor's entire race had been erased from history leaving him without a memory and in a very different universe, again relayed as rumours and vague mythology, and it was more than enough to keep things interesting. On top of which, Anachrophobia - once we're done with all the corridors and Doctor, look out! - is a genuinely peculiar allegorical novel almost in the vein of Kafka. Here we have two societies at war, purposefully kept at war for awful reasons which would have doubtless warmed Ayn Rand's objectivist little heart; and this is told in terms of what might almost be surrealist cinema between the wars, which is at least preferable to imitating something from the telly. Once it gets going, Anachrophobia is sufficiently gripping to erase the awkwardness of the earlier chapters, and actually reads like a book rather than a book impersonating some other medium, so that's good, and means I didn't entirely imagine having once enjoyed this one.

Solaris

Stanislaw Lem Solaris (1961)
I've always avoided Tarkovsky, and by association, his adaptation of Solaris. I'm sure he's a cinematic genius, but I was introduced to his work as just the sort of thing you like. This is usually the kiss of death for me, almost always amounting to it being just the sort of thing I hate because the recommendation has come from an idiot who doesn't know me anything like so well as they think they do. The second occasion of my being told that Tarkovsky was just the sort of thing I like was facilitated by [name withheld in case he happens to be reading] who expressed this idea by lecturing me at length for a full twenty minutes before I was able to interrupt, pointing out that actually I had a hunch Tarkovsky's work probably wasn't my bag at all. He droned on regardless for another twenty minutes before I was again able to get a word in edgeways, this time attempting to diffuse the increasingly uncomfortable situation with levity.

'Go on,' I quipped, 'push your glasses up your nose and say, as my producer said to me…'

He spared me a stony glance then continued his monologue. I suppose it's possible that he'd never seen The Two Ronnies, just as I'd never seen Solaris.

Anyway, no-one ever described Lem's original novel as just the sort of thing I like, never mind acknowledging its existence as an early version of Tarkovsky's film taking the form of printed words describing what would eventually appear on the screen; and I gather he was pals with Philip K. Dick by some definition, so it therefore seemed to be worth a punt. Unfortunately, according to Mark Hodder, what I have here is a fairly poor translation.

Solaris presents some wonderful ideas, particularly regarding extraterrestrial life, here imagined in such a way as to reduce most other authors to hacks busily sticking lumps of plasticine to the foreheads of underpaid extras. The afterword describes it as something in the tradition of Swift, although it reminds me more of Kafka's more understated sense of parody. Accordingly, it's a philosophical novel about our place in the universe, our ideas regarding God and so on, all of which is regrettably rendered far too mysterious for its own good by the translation, or so I assume. I mean it's readable and doesn't come across as necessarily garbled, and the imagery works fine, but this telling of Solaris is in all other respects on the wrong side of ponderous by a good couple of miles, which is most likely why my eyes kept skidding down to the foot of the page. I just couldn't keep them pinned to whatever the fuck was failing to happen in narrative terms.

This was sort of a relief in so much as that after [title withheld in case its editor happens to be reading] I thought maybe my reading glands were broken. Time to look for a better translation, I guess.

Catch-22

Joseph Heller Catch-22 (1961)
I guess I shouldn't feel so bad about failing to connect with yet another supposed classic of twentieth century literature given that a significant quota of the reviews I've found posted online seem to express a general sense of bewilderment, and actually I liked it more than most of the people who actively hated it, so I suppose there's that.

It's beautifully written, but extraordinarily repetitive. There's a point to the repetition but acknowledgement of the fact doesn't really help. Unless you've been living in the proverbial cave since 1961, you will almost certainly be aware that Catch-22 is about absurdity and contradiction, or rather it dissects the second world war in terms of these qualities. The catch of the title is the idea that Yossarian - around whom the novel revolves - aspires to get out of flying yet another bombing mission on grounds of insanity, an aspiration which unfortunately proves him to be entirely sane; and almost every page is crammed with actions rendered meaningless by this sort of circular logic, and there are nearly five-hundred pages. Harold Pinter employed similar devices, but usually required only an hour or so of our time to make his point. Kafka also managed it with greater brevity. My guess would be that Heller was simply hammering the point home, striving for a sort of scale vaguely analogous to a Rothko painting wherein no part of the canvas draws greater focus than any other; or if you prefer, the book is kind of boring, but maybe it's supposed to be boring, like Tony Conrad drawing a single note from his violin over the course of an hour because, as Eno puts it, repetition is a form of change. Maybe I'm getting carried away with the analogies, but I'm guessing the point is boredom plus absurdity times scale in contrast to the horror of the details, the bombing, the severed limbs flying all around, even the rape, all reduced to the absurdist wallpaper of conversations about shoes; for, as Kurt Vonnegut also discovered, war eludes description because the actual experience cannot be replicated, so it's easier to describe its psychological habitat.

Unfortunately though, the uniformity of absurdist surface texture serving to level everything out to actions of equivalent consequence makes it difficult for the reader, or this reader, to really care about any of it, or about who is even who. Such is the quality of writing, not least the jokes, that it's easy enough to keep on going, and is even a pleasure for the most part, so while I didn't feel inclined to pack it in at any point, I frequently found myself thinking that Spike Milligan's war diaries did pretty much the same thing but were funnier and more engaging, and so made the same points better.

I don't know if Catch-22 is quite a classic, although I guess it must be simply because we've all already agreed that it is - which is possibly ironic given that this is more or less what the book is about, namely a world which behaves in such a way entirely because we've agreed that it is so. I'd dispute its being anything like the roller-coaster described by the cover blurb of this edition. My best guess is that its popularity is in part mainly just numbers, and that it first saw print just as a great many Americans really began to ask themselves what the fuck just happened?; and in that context it's probably a better response than the gung-ho or else purely statistical alternatives.

On the other hand, Slaughterhouse Five is half the length, considerably more confusing, and yet clearly a fucking masterpiece, so maybe the previous three paragraphs really aren't much more than word salad and excuses.

Masque of a Savage Mandarin

Philip Bedford Robinson Masque of a Savage Mandarin (1969)
I bought this specifically because Mark Hodder ordered me to do so. Read this, he barked on my facebook page, it's mental! I'm paraphrasing, but he communicated this recommendation with such conviction that I could only shrug, order a copy from Amazon, and hope that he hadn't been posting whilst three sheets to the wind.

Masque of a Savage Mandarin is the work of an author who otherwise wrote only text books about computers, and does indeed seem to be one of those lost masterpieces you always hear about, just as Mark Hodder said it would be. It's science-fiction in so much as it probably wouldn't quite fit into any other category, but shares some common features with earlier allegorical novels such as Huysman's Against Nature*, or even the work of Samuel Beckett, Franz Kafka, and those guys. The Mandarin of the title is an enlightened individual - at least on his own terms - one who seeks to elevate a neighbour by experimenting on him, by destroying both the man's ego and the societal conditioning which limits his behaviour, effectively performing a lobotomy by means of a pseudo-scientific machine which sends invisible rays through the apartment wall that divides them.

It's darkly comic, thoroughly engaging, and exceptionally well-written - so well-written that the fact of this being Robinson's only novel is baffling. I suppose one distinguishing feature of greatness is knowing to say nothing when you've already said it all, which is at least consistent with the quality of this solitary work. When I say comic, I mean to invoke the kind of wry humour associated with Peter Cook or Tony Hancock, whom I name because Masque of a Savage Mandarin seems similarly tied to its era, and might even be read as a distant, more philosophical relative to Hancock's The Rebel in some respects, not least in its pursuit of the absurd. It appears to represent a response to the decade in which it was written, and specifically to the then recently popularised notion of humanity on the verge of some great evolutionary surge, a mystic revelation to be brought forth in all that stuff about the Age of Aquarius, whatever that was. The Mandarin is in some small way attempting to force this great evolutionary surge on his hapless neighbour, but of course destroys the man in the process, the foundation of his aspiration being built upon an illusory understanding of the world. At least that's how it seemed to me, and it's a lot funnier than I've made it sound.

This really is a wonderful book, and I have no idea why I should only have heard of it this year.

*: As distinct from the one I wrote which is available here and you need to buy right away, unless you've already bought it in which case you probably need a second copy by now; and in case you're "waiting for the paperback" (as were a number of my friends who obviously were no longer quite so close as to bother reading the fucking link), this is the paperback. If you can't be arsed, just say so for fuck's sake. Great news, Loz - I'll definitely want one when the paperback comes out blah blah blah... wankers. Consider yourselves off my Christmas card list, fuckers.

The Metamorphosis

Franz Kafka The Metamorphosis (1915)
The Metamorphosis is, as everyone presently alive probably knows, the tale of Gregor Samsa, a travelling salesman who wakes up one morning as an enormous beetle much to the understandable distress of his family. I seem to recall its having been discussed at length in Trillion Year Spree, Brian Aldiss's history of science-fiction literature, but I can't be arsed to have a look and see what the guy said right now. Clearly The Metamorphosis isn't science-fiction - which probably wasn't what Aldiss said in any case - but it's surprising how many other general categories it resists with equivalent certitude.

The story, which is much shorter than you may realise, focusses mainly on Samsa's physical deterioration, and the breakdown of communications with his sister and parents in whose home he lives as principle breadwinner. As is my custom, I gave this one some thought before reading, anticipating certain themes and by extension what sort of thing I should therefore be looking for. I imagined there might be something to gain from considering the general symbolism of the dung beetle, all the stuff about shit and death, maybe even the sun as a great celestial ball of poo rolled daily across the heavens as it was in ancient Egypt; but I was wrong. Samsa is not, it turns out, a dung beetle. In fact his precise entomological credentials are unclear, perhaps even irrelevant beyond their association with death, decay, and detritus, and the numerous descriptions mostly point to something along the lines of a cockroach. Furthermore, it seems I'm not the only one to get a bit ahead of myself in this respect, and two thirds of this edition are taken up with commentary and related essays to varying degrees of relevance and value. One guy argues that Samsa is in fact a woodlouse, based on his interpretation of a single somewhat vague sentence, although our boy potentially being a woodlouse makes no difference to anything. Another argues that the apple which Samsa's father hurls in anger at his six-legged son must be viewed as an apple from the tree of knowledge of the kind which the Biblical Eve famously found so nummy. This too is bollocks, as are many of the other available interpretations, because all the information you need is already present in the text, and I presume the apple to have been an apple simply because that's just the sort of thing Gregor's father would have had to hand.

Gregor, you see, has a shitty, soul-destroying job and more responsibilities than he can handle. Those of us who have found ourselves in such circumstances will therefore recognise his situation immediately and have no need for further explanation. Life repeatedly kicks Gregor in the sack, then asks him for a contribution towards its next shoe shine, over and over and over; and it isn't so much that he becomes a shit-eating beetle, but that he is revealed as one, or, as Wilhelm Emrich puts it in one of the more helpful essays Kafka does not create "surrealist" phenomena but, on the contrary, creates our reality with utter artistic truth. So it's an allegory, but not one upon which we should get too hung up in view of that which is allegorised, as detailed here in Kafka's diary:

...breakdown, impossible to sleep, impossible to stay awake, impossible to endure life, or, more exactly, the course of life. The clocks are not in unison; the inner one runs crazily on at a devilish or demoniac or in any case inhuman pace, the outer one limps along at its usual speed. What else can happen but that the two worlds split apart, and they do split apart, or at least clash in a fearful manner.

Personally speaking, I've been there. The Metamorphosis rings a lot of bells, although it should probably be noted that the metamorphosis of the title most likely refers to the transformation of Samsa's family near the close of the story, a vaguely redemptive ending which Kafka himself grew to dislike.

The Metamorphosis is good enough to preclude the need for further discussion, and is not a difficult text by any description. Everyone should read it, and not least because even without its saying all that it says, it's also very funny.

Martian Time-Slip

Philip K. Dick Martian Time-Slip (1962)
At the risk of writing the same Philip K. Dick review over and over, and further to the general theme of the disparity between that which Dick wrote and that which everyone seems to think he wrote, we come to Martian Time-Slip, a novel which so impressed me first time around that I actually got my mother to read it, no mean feat given how she seems to regard everything written, painted and performed since about 1400 as probably crap.

Aside from Martian Time-Slip being conspicuously lacking in android bounty-hunters screaming but am I even real? as they fall to their knees, arms cinematically outstretched to the heavens just as it starts to piss down; and aside from the complete absence of hard boiled action heroes - a quality shared with every single story Dick ever wrote - like We Can Build You from the same year, this would be a mainstream novel but for a few scenic details, at least in so much as any of Dick's writing can be considered mainstream. The story revolves around the desperate lives of Martian colonists scratching out a living in a hostile environment which harks back to the old west, or even to the Australian outback; water is scarce, and autism may turn out to be the condition of those with an unorthodox relationship to the passage of time. Of course, such elements constitute narrative language, the means by which the story is told rather than its subject.

Philip K. Dick's novels examine the nature of reality, often from the schizophrenic perspective of there being a different world hidden behind that which all but a few supposedly perceptive individuals can see. This, I would argue, is a structural aspect of Dick's perception rather than its central theme, said theme being truth itself: that which should be rather than that which is, the pure forms of being unsullied by entropic forces, or gubbish as they are rendered in Martian Time-Slip. I could be getting carried away here, but what I take from this, Dick's central idea, is a desire for progression or forward motion which relates to the notion of God equating to change - as I think Octavia Butler put it - change as differentiated from stasis, Dick's nightmare:

It is the stopping of time. The end of experience, of anything new. Once the person becomes psychotic, nothing ever happens to him again.

This passage is quoted in the foreword by Brian Aldiss - which I feel I should probably mention in case it appears that I'm trying to pass this off as some devastatingly original of my own - but it expresses a sentiment with which Dick remained preoccupied throughout his life, one which is restated a decade later in A Scanner Darkly:

That life had been one without excitement, with no adventure. It had been too safe. All the elements that made it up were right there before his eyes, and nothing new could ever be expected.

So, to get to the point - that's what the guy was on about, not all those Blade Runnerisms which are in any case thematically closer to the novels of William Gibson than anything Dick ever wrote.

Just sayin'.

Martian Time-Slip ambles along nicely, chuckling to itself without really trying for comic effect, its characters more in the spirit of Bukowski than Asimov; and like the man's best, it builds up a tremendous head of sorrow without conspicuously rooting for sympathy - a sad and beautiful song where most writers just about manage tunes. Instead of waiting for this to be stripped of all point and character as a shit film with some blandly photogenic cock playing Jack Bohlen - casting with all the sensitivity of Sylvester Stallone as two-fisted Franz Kafka - just read the fucking book, okay. Sometimes the book is how the story was meant to be told all along.