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.

Pendulum

A.E. van Vogt Pendulum (1978)
I think this is the third or possibly fourth collection of short stories by A.E. van Vogt I've read. Deriving from much later on in his career than Away and Beyond and the others, this collection lacks anything in quite the same league as Black Destroyer or The Great Engine, but nevertheless has merit. Both Pendulum - the title track, so to speak - and The Male Condition are at least as insane as any of his more bewilderingly surreal efforts from the 1950s, and other tales of that era are nicely invoked in The First Rull.

I found Living With Jane and The Non-Aristotelian Detective almost completely incomprehensible, but then there's always a couple with this guy. Well - strictly speaking it's the point of The Non-Aristotelian Detective which seems incomprehensible rather than the actual narrative, it being something to do with Korzybski's general semantics, of which van Vogt was quite the fan; and when he writes about it I can never quite tell if the point really is as basic as it initially seems or is else way over my head. Here our detective solves his case by the supposedly non-Aristotelian means of deciding which suspect seems most likely to have done it, so as I say I can't tell whether or not I've missed something here.

Further triangulation of whatever lurked within the mind of Alfred Elton is afforded by the inclusion of variant works - a highly readable collaboration with Harlan Ellison and a rare example of journalism in the form of van Vogt's report from watching the launch of Apollo XVII. The collaboration with Ellison seems to revise a typical van Vogt narrative into more traditionally readable English grammar, which is all very nice, and also makes it perhaps a little clearer as to just why Philip K. Dick cited the man as a major influence. The report from the rocket launch, mostly derived from van Vogt wandering around conducting oddly Pinteresque interviews with bystanders, is initially revealing only in regard to the unorthodox psychology of its author, but comes together to make a point worth making at the conclusion.

There are certain aspects which jar somewhat throughout the book, mostly through the author belonging to a particular generation with particular views on sex and race; but although the means of expression is odd in places, notably during the interview with a Black - as the gent in question is termed and capitalised in the piece on Apollo XVII - the sentiments conveyed are generally noble if a little stilted, at least providing reassurance that if van Vogt was a man of his time, his views tended towards the progressive rather than conservative.

Considering he's almost certainly amongst the top ten strangest authors to ever be pulled over drunk in charge of a typewriter, isn't it about time someone wrote the definitive A.E. van Vogt biography? We already have about seven different versions of the life of Philip K. Dick, and I suspect this one could potentially be at least as peculiar and fascinating.

Galaxy 666

Pel Torro Galaxy 666 (1968)
Pel Torro is one of many pseudonyms by which the Reverend Lionel Fanthorpe, more recently the host of Fortean TV, churned out science-fiction for the Badger Books imprint at a reputed rate of one novel every twelve days. Fanthorpe was given title and cover painting, from which he would extrapolate an entire story, apparently hiding himself beneath a rug - presumably for the sake of focus - improvising his narratives onto a tape recorder for eventual transcription by someone with a typewriter. The resulting novels - and there are at least one-hundred and fifty of the things - are distinctive to say the least, plots heavy with laborious padding, random narrative swerves and inconsistencies, and a surreal quality not unlike that invoked by A.E. van Vogt doubtless arisen from similarly automatic methods of composition. Orbit One, written as Mel Jay, for example, is probably one of the strangest things I've ever read, an experience oddly akin to an angry Vietnamese person shouting an Asimov novel at you for a couple of hours; and by the way, I have experience of angry Vietnamese people so the image isn't just thrown out there for chuckles.

The internet generally chortles over Fanthorpe's pseudonymous pulps, treating them as a sort of written equivalent to Plan 9 from Outer Space, a guilty pleasure. Even given the conceit of Plan 9 from Outer Space as the worst film ever made - a consensus with which I disagree on the grounds that it's really just very, very dull - this seems unfair. Lionel Fanthorpe isn't a bad writer, just a very weird one which, given his working methodology, surely isn't that surprising. More surprising is that Galaxy 666 could easily have been the work of someone other than the author of Orbit One - hence perhaps the variant pseudonym - so I suppose it's simply that he enjoyed some commissions more than others. At least, he seems to have written more of himself into this one.

Peculiarly, more than anything else - and including the Star Trek television series transparently invoked by the cover - Galaxy 666 reads like a very weird revision of Plato's Republic in so much as most of it comprises four blokes stood around - or running around - one of them making observations whilst the others agree what good points have been made. Of course it's padding, but given Captain Bronet's tendency to draw comparison with all manner of sources - everything from the bible to The Pilgrim's Progress - as he ruminates on life, the universe, evolution, nature, and almost everything else, it doesn't read so much like padding as simply the work of a someone who is a bit odd. In fact, such is the conversational thrust of the text that comparisons with Harold Pinter and Peter Cook's E.L. Wisty monologues arise before there's any real suggestion of an author reaching out towards a specific page count. Unlike Plato's Republic - which is by the way the one Socratic dialogue with which I am familiar and therefore the one I mention here - the metaphysical musings of Galaxy 666, dispensed as our lads encounter and are taken prisoner by amorphous aliens, are fired off at random and as such don't necessarily follow any subtextual direction given that there obviously isn't one; so whilst the sum of these contemplative parts isn't necessarily anything profound, it does at least serve to keep things interesting.

Galaxy 666 is probably unlikely to get a Victor Gollancz reprint in the SF Masterworks series because it's simply too weird, but it's actually a half decent novel considering the circumstances of its generation, and is at least more engaging than a few supposed classics which spring to mind.

The Big Time

Fritz Leiber The Big Time (1958)
What a strange and wonderful world we live in that I who have never brought forth seed unto the world should receive a 1961 Ace Double as a Father's Day gift from a mother-in-law whose existence was entirely unknown to me but a half decade ago in a completely different country; and pertinent for said Ace Double featuring The Big Time by Fritz Leiber, himself a master of stories which ask how the hell did that happen?

There's probably no such thing as a new idea, and Leiber was hardly the first to write about the weirder possibilities of time travel, but nevertheless, anyone familiar with the Faction Paradox mythos of Lawrence Miles and others, specifically the War - as subsequently pasteurised for the back story of the All-New Super Doctor Who Super Show - really needs to take a look at Fritz Leiber's Change War, of which The Big Time is the first book.

The Change War is a conflict the width of the universe, spanning the entire course of history with two equally matched forces continually mucking about with each other's past, changing the present and - oh you must know the drill by now, surely?

The Big Time takes place entirely in a bar, a brothel it could be inferred, a place outside of time and thus immune to the influence of the war where combatants from all across the span of human and even non-human history stop in for a drink and a bit of a rest. The two major powers are dubbed Snakes and Spiders, and The Place is sympathetic to the latter, although it remains in doubt as to whether anyone understands the true nature of these higher powers, even whether anyone has ever directly encountered them. Amongst those patrons ensconced in the bar when it suddenly finds itself cut off from the rest of causality are a Nazi officer, a Venusian satyr, an eight-legged Lunar creature, and a girl from ancient Crete; and so with such emphasis on events occurring elsewhere, it reads somewhat like a stage play - even the work of a weirder, funnier Harold Pinter - doubtless a result of Leiber's theatrical background; so, if the reference means anything to anyone, The Big Time is probably an absentee beat generation father to Faction Paradox:

It's sweet to jigger reality, to twist the whole course of a man's life or a culture's, to ink out his or its past and scribble in a new one, and be the only one to know and gloat over the changes—hah! Killing men or carrying off women isn't in it for glutting the sense of power. It's sweet to feel the Change Winds blowing through you and know the pasts that were and the past that is and the pasts that may be. It's sweet to wield the Atropos and cut a Zombie or Unborn out of his lifeline and look the Doubleganger in the face and see the Resurrection-glow in it and Recruit a brother, welcome a newborn fellow Demon into our ranks and decide whether he'll best fit as Soldier, Entertainer, or what.

The Big Time is packed with mind-bending ideas and heavy with potential subtext - an allegory of the cold war and the machinations of those Leviathan superpowers moving around at impossible distance from all that is human and therefore comprehensible, a novel which sides with the poet for the reason that poets are wiser than anyone because they're the only people who have the guts to think and feel at the same time.

Being Fritz Leiber, there's something of a bebop element: berets are definitely worn, espresso consumed, bongos pounded with gay abandon:

Mark had drawn a Greek hetaera name of Phryne; I suppose not the one who maybe still does the famous courtroom striptease back in Athens, and he was waking her up with little sips of his scotch and soda, though, from some looks he'd flashed, I got the idea Kaby was the kid he really went for. Sid was coaxing the fighting gal to take some high-energy bread and olives along with the wine, and, for a wonder, Doc seemed to be carrying on an animated and rational conversation with Sevensee and Maud, maybe comparing notes on the Northern Venusian Shallows, and Beau had got on to Panther Rag, and Bruce and Lili were leaning on the piano, smiling very appreciatively, but talking to each other a mile a minute.

Some reviewers describe The Big Time as incomprehensible. Although I don't think that's really fair, it does require that its reader pays attention, and in places it feels a little like a conversation with someone who is off their cake and won't shut up. It's disorientating for sure, but if it's a choice between that and space ranger Glenn Tandy scowled with tired eyes at the radar image lit up on his detector screen, I'd rather take the option in which it is assumed I have a brain. It's perhaps not quite so delightfully hatstand as Leiber's A Spectre is Haunting Texas, but neither is The Big Time anything to be sniffed at.