Spiral Scratch

Gary Russell Spiral Scratch (2005)
One thing I took from Harold T. Wilkins' Flying Saucers Uncensored, and probably the only thing, was that I should probably get around to reading Spiral Scratch. Wilkins' book refers to a folk tale about a couple of mysterious children who turned up in rural Suffolk back in the twelfth century. They spoke a language no-one could understand and had green skin, so the legend has it, and I recalled this particular piece of Forteana from the opening pages of Spiral Scratch, a Who novel I'd started three or four times but never actually read beyond the first chapter; and the reason I'd never got around to reading it was because it can be unfortunately difficult to get excited about anything written by Gary Russell.

As Doctor Who obsessives doubtless recall, the television show went a bit wobbly back in the second half of the eighties, resulting in Colin Baker being unceremoniously replaced by Sylvester McCoy as lead actor, meaning Baker never had a proper on-screen swan song. Unsurprisingly there have therefore been a number of fan-generated versions of Baker's final story, thus attempting to send off the sixth version of the character with a bit more dignity than Sylvester McCoy in a blonde wig. Craig Hinton and Chris McKeon took a shot at it with Time's Champion which, as I recall, was pretty bloody awful, and there's also this.

Spiral Scratch is one of those alternate realities deals. Something called the Lamprey is consuming variant universes and only Colin Baker and Bonnie Langford stand in its way, with chapters all named after songs by the Buzzcocks, which is at least less obnoxious than the usual roll call of Morrissey b-sides. It's not the greatest thing I've ever read, although it's probably amongst Russell's better efforts. His prose tends towards workmanlike descriptions of occurrences one can imagine happening on the telly without too great a stretch of the imagination. There's a little more reliance on sentiment than I generally enjoy, and too many nominal sentences as bloody usual, but Russell is far from the worst offender in such respects, and almost gets away with it here. If the story was a little more coherent he probably would have got away with it, but it's a little too easy to lose track of who is doing what and why. Oddly, the end result is vaguely reminiscent of Moorcock's occasionally free range or otherwise impressionist narratives, which is no bad thing, and the dialogue is likewise not without a certain wit.

So it's nothing amazing, but neither is it irredeemably terrible, and the main problem is that it avoids irredeemable terribility for more pages than you really need when the best that can be said is that it's approximately readable. I've read better, but I've read much, much worse, so I suppose that's a recommendation on some level.

The Silkie

A.E. van Vogt The Silkie (1969)
Including a couple of short story collections, this is my twenty-seventh van Vogt, and the one in which I finally understood what he was trying to do, or possibly what I think he was trying to do; by which I mean that I believe he was trying to do more than simply tell a natty tale or predict futuristic things.

As you may or may not be aware, Alfred Elton wrote some pretty strange stuff, so strange in fact that first impressions can often be massively unfavourable, as was mine. Initially he reads like a man drunk in charge of a typewriter with his weird, ugly sentences full of jarring images. The stories never quite add up, and are spattered with preposterous occurrences which don't always make sense or even go anywhere. In chapter two of The Silkie we learn that Cemp, an example of the species for which the novel is named, enjoys more than the usual five human senses, meaning that he has not merely a sixth sense, but an additional 184 senses; and if it were anyone other than van Vogt I probably would have thrown the book across the room. He pulls a similar stunt in chapter twenty-two during an episode in which the solar system is spontaneously gifted with a number of new planets, specifically 1,823 new planets.

I've witnessed a few van Vogt first-timers protesting that the guy can't write, or that he writes like a twelve-year old, or that he's making it up as he goes along. The last one is arguably true, and whilst the first two are understandable, I'd suggest that such criticisms are unsupportable given how much he wrote over how many years. If he really couldn't write, he would surely have improved at least a little during those four decades, therefore the reason that his books read as they do must surely be deliberate. That's how they're supposed to be. I've read plenty by authors who can't write, and it all tends to blend into one undifferentiated body of inept crap with the same mistakes repeated over and over, none of which resembles the writing of A.E. van Vogt.

So the previously mentioned Cemp is a Silkie, a shape-shifting creature which can take one of three forms - something close to human, an aquatic body with gills, and a presumably insectoid living spaceship with the ability to negate gravity. Cemp seems to be something like a secret agent in so much as that he has superiors and he works to counter the actions of those against whom he is in opposition, so on one level this is James Bond as one of the stranger Residents albums. As is often the case with van Vogt, the peculiar suggestion of constant motion combined with bizarre images and dramatic random narrative swerves made it very difficult for me to keep track of what was actually happening; but as is additionally at least sometimes the case with van Vogt, it didn't seem to matter because I was getting something from it, even if I can't quite describe what that was.

Except this time I think I've cracked it, and the understanding somehow presented itself during Cemp's speech in chapter eight:

'Entirely apart from my feelings of loyalty to Earth, I do not believe the future of life forms will be helped or advanced by any rigid adherence to the idea that I am a lion, or I am a bear. Intelligent life is, or should be, moving toward a common civilisation.'

A.E. van Vogt liked to keep his readers on their toes. He wrote using a narrative technique by which he purposefully introduced some new element or seemingly random change of direction to the story every eight-hundred words, and he wrote using images from his own dreams, communicating with sentences specifically tailored so as to leave a question in the mind of the reader. For the sake of argument, this might be termed a form of divination and as good a means of predicting the future as any. Where Asimov thought really hard about science and came up with rocket ships and space stations, van Vogt was essentially drawing random images from a top hat, composing the narrative equivalent of the automatic poetry of the Surrealists, or even William Burroughs if you like; and I believe he did this because the future is essentially impossible to predict, and all we can say for sure is that it will contain elements of something we don't immediately recognise.

However, there's more than mere prediction going on here. Given his interest in Korzybski's General Semantics, I suspect van Vogt saw the path to the future as necessarily psychologically distinct from human history up to the twentieth century; in other words that we would require new ways of thinking, just as Cemp believes we need to leave behind rigid adherence to certain ideas. So just as that which lays ahead is by definition unknowable beyond our capacity for prediction or preparation, and hence chaotic, we need to adjust the methodology by which we go forward, because black-white, on-off, up-down, beginning-middle-end thinking will be useless. Therefore van Vogt writes as he did because he's toughening us up, hoping we might learn to think in terms more ambitious than just building a few robots which make the same mistakes we've made; and I suspect he was hoping that in achieving a more flexible understanding of language and reality, we might begin to understand how the two could be related:

As Cemp remembered his universe, it began to interact with him, to become in essence what he knew it to be. And there it suddenly was, a dot of golden brightness.

Of course, this could simply be my imagination, my perception of a pattern which may not be present in the novel, or in the other novels; but it works for me, and it helped me get something out of The Silkie which might otherwise have seemed a complete dog's dinner. So that's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Dorian

Will Self Dorian (2002)
I should probably point out that I've never read Oscar Wilde's version, and I use the term version because it seems there are a million riffs on The Picture of Dorian Gray out there - as Google is my witness - not least being a series of audio dramas released under the banner of The Confessions of Dorian Gray. The series in question comes from Big Finish productions and not only features former Doctor Who actors but they've managed to coax none other than Gary Russell to write a few of these tales which, from what I can work out, delineate the adventures of that mysterious traveller in time and a bit of space known only as Dorian Gray, for example:

Taking a much-needed trip to the coast, Dorian finds himself intrigued by two old men playing a peculiar game of chess along the pier. However, it isn't long before he finds himself caught up in a long-standing family feud, and becomes embroiled in a far greater game…

No honestly - I'm sure they're absolutely tremendous. Really.

Anyway, this version began life as a screenplay which was eventually finished as a novel for reasons I can't be arsed to look up a second time. I gather Will Self had the manuscript laying around for a while before its full potential dawned on him. Of course, the mere notion of a contemporary update of The Picture of Dorian Gray hardly constitutes a stroke of genius, but Self goes one better, pinning the established narrative to the brief period of the celebrity of Lady Diana Spencer and, by association, all else which amounted to English culture during that era; and the fit is perfect. It probably helps that a significantly apposite segment of that era saw the rise of AIDS with all its attendant media hysteria; and the reason for the fit seeming so perfect, at least to me, is the shared theme of Aestheticism, Dorian's pursuit of sensuous pleasure as both ideal and end in itself in both incarnations of the novel. The Aesthetic ideal of surface as content, medium as message, seems particularly relevant to the AIDS hysteria of the late eighties given that the stark imagery and invocation of just deserts delivered unto those who hath sinned more or less became its own incorporeal phenomenon, almost entirely divorced from the community to which it referred. So this time, whilst Dorian remains pure and gorgeous, the terrible cost of his lifestyle is confined to his image as captured in the form of Cathode Narcissus, a video piece by the up and coming Baz Hallward, and this image is mainly what the rest of us saw for most of the decade, particularly in the right-wing press.

This being Will Self, there's no flinching from the raw material of his subject revealed in his love of grit and texture - as distinct from mere shock effect - from which angle Dorian becomes a near Burroughsian conga-line of buggery, smack, fisting and leather clubs. I must admit to having had initial doubts about the apparent extremity of this aspect of the novel, it amounting to more or less what the Daily Mail told us about those people and what they get up to™ - aside from the obvious fact of there being an element of revelry or celebration in all the sweating, grunting, thrusting, and sharing of needles. Of course, Self was criticised for writing what reads a little like a grotesque caricature. 

Setting my version in the aristocratic, gay, druggie milieu of the 1980s wasn't too difficult, as I'd spent quite a lot of the eighties in – surprise, surprise – an aristocratic, gay, druggie milieu. So it was with considerable annoyance that I confronted a member of an audience whom I read to at last year's Soho festival. This woman said to me, 'I enjoyed your reading, but I find your characters altogether unbelievable. I mean people like Henry Wotton, Basil Hallward and Dorian Gray couldn't possibly exist, could they?' Ignoring the fact that these fictional characters were Wilde's rather than my own, I snarled at her, 'Just how many repressed, homosexual, aristocratic drug addicts have you hung around with in your time?' And when she conceded 'None', I rested my case.

For my own purposes, the case is effectively rested in the novel's initially peculiar epilogue wherein the story so far is revealed as a fictional text read by the real Dorian Gray, a widely admired philanthropist and entrepreneur, a gay icon and dear friend of Tony Blair - actually kind of similar to the fictional Dorian, the squeaky clean, eternal Adonis whose sins are passed on to his own degraded video signal, yet somehow our New Labour Dorian is so much more repellent. I take this as referring to perception of the homosexual in contemporary society, or at least the détente by which we consent to approve, providing we don't have to hear about what they get up to at the weekend. Our new gay friend is sanitised and sanitary, welcomed with open arms providing it's the right kind of gay we're talking about here, because we don't want to know about any of that other stuff, thank you very much; but maybe if we only accept gay as a variation on Pat Boone, we haven't actually really accepted him at all - referring to the masculine here principally because that's what we have with Dorian. Sexuality is defined in part by sex itself, and everyone knows the joke about sex being dirty, or at least it is if you're doing it right. So whilst the gay - and male in this instance - can be about marriage and flowers and sunsets, sometimes it's also about cocks and arseholes and even terrifying clubs, because we don't get to pick and choose just the nice pastel bits to which we lend prissy approval; and if that makes any sense whatsoever, I think it is in part what this Dorian is about.

I was a little confused by the inclusion of a character identified as David Hall, sharing a name but no other discernible qualities with the late pioneer of video art - and my old head of department at college as it happens - so I assume this was either coincidental or nothing more significant than a tip of the hat, given the role of video art within the novel. Equally, I can't quite tell how it all relates to Lady Diana Spencer, although clearly it does by some means. I've come to regard Spencer as the perfect victim in the Pre-Colombian American sense, the innocent who takes on the sins of the world and is subsequently destroyed on our behalf, the role of innocent in this case being something which seems very much to have been imposed on her after the fact, not to be confused with any inherent quality. In real life as in this novel, she led a relatively short but undeniably charmed existence very much in parallel with that of Dorian, but it feels a little like an arbitrary association to me.

Nevertheless, this one does more than most authors manage in a lifetime, which isn't bad going considering it's essentially a slightly fancy cover version, so I'm not inclined to complain; plus, with all it has going on, like Cathode Narcissus, I wouldn't be too surprised if the novel tells a slightly different story next time I pick it up.