Michel Houellebecq - H.P. Lovecraft - Against the World, Against Life (1991)

 

The initial reason for my reading Michel Houellebecq is the general serving suggestion of my supposed peers that I shouldn't read him; and I'm reading him regardless on the understanding that he and I may not agree on absolutely everything, and may even violently disagree on a couple of things. If you're unable to tell the difference between Houellebecq and Nigel Farage appearing on primetime national television to complain about having been silenced, then not only is that hardly my problem but you're a fucking idiot.

Anyway, this lengthy essay almost counts as a debut novel of sorts, and is among the few things I've read about Lovecraft which isn't revisionary bollocks. Of course, the aspect of Howie which has been most subject to revision has been his racism which tends to be downgraded to him being a man of his time, and anyway he grew out of it - which as a view is probably sustainable if you've never read, just off the top of my head, every single paragraph of The Dunwich Horror; and that was one of the good ones. Houellebecq's thesis is that most of what Lovecraft wrote reads as it does for reasons beyond his being a recluse, or technically naive, specifically that the great texts - and it should be easy enough to work out which of the stories he refers to by that term - are supposed to be that way. Lovecraft's characters tend to be generic because they're there entirely to carry the narrative and because Lovecraft was a misanthrope. His values inform what he wrote, regardless of any consideration of who might be reading or even paying for the privilege.

The value of a human being today is measured in terms of his economic efficiency and his erotic potential - that is to say, in terms of the two things that Lovecraft most despised.

It's a very convincing argument, and one that would seem to increase one's appreciation of all those squelchy tales of the super spooky space octopus in so much as that it's consistent with what we know - unlike the proposition that Howard had pretty much transformed into Ben Elton by the end of his life.

More shaky is the notion of there being such a thing as a philosophy of the Cthulhu Mythos - if we're to call it that - which works if you don't understand what is meant by the term philosophy, but here refers to an undifferentiated blast of nihilism as the negation of philosophy. In other words, Lovecraft at his best might be deemed the literary equivalent of listening to Ramleh at full volume; which I can see.

In support of this alleged philosophical quality, Houellebecq also offers the continuation of the Cthulhu Mythos by other authors which, if roughly spontaneous and undertaken purely for the sake of the art, I can't really see as being significantly different to kids growing up with the hope of one day writing the Spider-Man comic and so contributing to that universe; or to Perry Rhodan, Sherlock Holmes, Sexton Blake, Judge Dredd or whoever else. More likely, it strikes me that the significance and enduring appeal of the Cthulhu Mythos is its presenting a consistent cast of collectible characters rendered in primary colours as a ready-made playbox in which persons who like to make lists of things can indulge themselves, and notably the sort of persons who really, really need their content providers to be on their right side of history.

This edition also reproduces in full both The Call of Cthulhu and The Whisperer in Darkness presumably for the sake of comparison; but which unfortunately undermine some of what Houellebecq has written, at least for me. I don't think I've ever been convinced by the telling of The Call of Cthulhu despite that it supports Houellebecq's argument about Lovecraft's structural preferences; and although I found The Whisperer in Darkness effective and reasonably enjoyable, I really have to wonder at my being completely unable to recall having read it before whilst knowing that I read and apparently enjoyed it back in May, 2015. Given that Houellebecq will have read both in French, maybe something was gained in translation. That being suggested, his argument for the carefully directed precision of Lovecraft's narrative structure is surely cast into doubt by The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, produced the same year as Cthulhu and yet reading like the work of a ham-fisted adolescent

Regardless of anything, it's a pleasure and genuinely interesting to read about the man without having to make adjustments for some editorial bias attempting to paint himself as having been just a slightly scarier Lewis Carroll without the kiddy fiddling; and while I don't, for what it may be worth, agree with everything Houellebecq says, he nevertheless makes some fucking great points. In fact, I'm not sure Lovecraft did anything to deserve such a thoughtful and beautifully rendered biography.

The Zaucer of Zilk

Al Ewing & Brendan McCarthy The Zaucer of Zilk (2012)
This was one of those things I missed, having long given up on 2000AD comic. I'd heard of it, but the title sounded like something you would expect to find in 2000AD and thus failed to pique my curiosity; at least until I happened upon this reprint and realised it was by Brendan McCarthy - which changes everything, obviously.

I still don't really know what to call this sort of thing, or even that it matters. The Zaucer of Zilk is Brendan McCarthy doing what he does best, and nothing else has really come close, certainly not Hewligan's fucking Haircut or - ugh - Really & Truly, or even Rogan Gosh for that matter. This, on the other hand, seems to exhibit kinship with Alice in Wonderland, Moorcock's Dancers at the End of Time, Jack Vance's Dying Earth, Windsor McCay, and thankfully none of the also-rans who would give their collective left one to be this strange but just don't fucking get it - looking at you, Tim, Neil, and all of your self-consciously kooky spawn - also anyone who ever mistook the Cure for a wild display of imagination.

The Zaucer of Zilk tells a surprisingly traditional story using characters and settings which wouldn't seem out of place on a Nurse With Wound album, and to similarly disorientating effect but for the presence of a beating heart where one might, under other circumstances, expect to find the usual emotive button pushing. McCarthy has always been in a class of his own, but rarely has it been so obvious as it is here.

Promethea

Alan Moore, J.H. Williams III & Mick Gray etc. Promethea (2005)
There's a book called The Last War in Albion which I vaguely recall having seen pushed as an account of the magical war waged between Alan Moore and Grant Morrison for the soul of England - or something of that general thrust. I haven't bought the book, because I've read a few of the blog posts reproduced therein and have found myself irritated at the presumption of a writer - much younger than myself, fannish, and very obviously American - telling us what it was like growing up in Britishland and getting most of it wrong; nevertheless, although it causes me great pain to admit as much, it does sort of look like there may be something in the idea of Moore and Morrison having spent the last couple of decades taking potshots at each other. There were a couple of points in this one where it occurred to me that Promethea could be Moore's idea of The Unreadables done right, without all the rock star wank and recycled Moorcock; and as Andrew Hickey has pointed out, Morrison's Zatanna was his idea of Promethea done right - or something along those lines. Actually, I've just picked up the collected Multiversity and couldn't help but notice how one chapter - or issue, more accurately - looks a lot like Morrison stood in an upper floor window waving his tool at a passing Alan Moore through the medium of the Charlton comics superheroes which Moore recycled as Watchmen.

Where will it all end?

Did we learn nothing from that thing with 'Pac and Biggie?

On the other hand - momentarily leaving aside that none of it actually matters anyway - some of this may simply be my reading certain things into certain patterns, or things resembling patterns from a certain angle; which neatly and coincidentally brings us to Promethea, because that's mostly what Promethea is about. I never read it at the time so I've been catching up with the collected editions. I read the first two, with volumes three to five still to go, and so I've read the whole lot this time, start to finish, hoping that this concentration of my attention might allow me to make more sense of what is at times a fairly unorthodox narrative in comic book terms; and so as to avoid repeating myself here, churning out another three variations on a review I already wrote back in December.

As someone pointed out to me, Promethea goes on a bit, particularly the visionary journey along the various nodules of the tree of life, an interlude which goes on for something in the region of four million issues. Admittedly each of these issues has a page or two set back in the material world, someone telling a joke or punching a copper or something just to keep us grounded - or possibly interested - but the whole distended guitar solo at the half way point really is a slog, feeling a bit like Alan Moore has you by the shoulders and is shaking you, asking if you get it yet, and for a long, long, long, long time*. It reminded me of the story you always used to find in the Rupert Bear annual where Rupert travels to some improbable realm - fairyland, underground kingdom, floating metal city or whatever - and so we get several pages of the obligatory kindly wizard showing Rupert around, pointing at things and describing what they're for; except here, there's more of a page count and we keep bumping into Aleister bloody Crowley. Qué sorpresa.

Of course, in the context of the entire story, the magical interlude is arguably essential, carrying the main point of the enterprise; and in some respects it's nice how for once we get a version which takes its time to explain in full, and to explain what is meant clearly, at least allowing us to rule out the possibility of it simply being an author picking out which is the coolest t-shirt to be seen in down the sportsfield that evening; and it's a good explanation, well argued and readable with beautiful artwork.

On the other hand, just as I reached my limit for problem children with mutant powers back in about 1993, I'm now rapidly approaching saturation point for:

•  Comic book characters who know they're comic book characters.
• Authors turning up in their own comics.
• Aleister Crowley.
• Coincidences reliant upon numbers.
• How quantum theory is a bit like what a traditional Shaman does.
• Fiction is real.

Seriously, people - I love the Illuminatus! trilogy as much as the next man, providing the next man regards the Illuminatus! trilogy as quite good but a bit long; and I'm very happy for Huitzilopochtli to be real by all terms that make any sense; but a lot of this stuff was yellowing around the edges even by the time Porridge took to ripping it off and claiming it for his own work back in 1982. It's fun and it's diverting and I suppose it's probably of arguably greater moment than Spiderman in yet another sense-shattering punch up with the Juggerynut; but simply pointing out that pomegranates are mentioned in the Book of Kings, and that Pom is Australian slang for an English person, and that Australian aborigines believe in the Dreamtime, and that the Dreamtime is a bit like what Alice experienced in Wonderland, and that Lewis Carroll was a Pom - deep fuckin' breath - doesn't actually mean anything out here in the material realm, regardless of how many kiloblakes of poetry may be generated by the suggestion; and after a while it all starts to remind me of the wisdom of the Sphinx in Mystery Men.

When you doubt your powers, you give power to your doubts...

 

I get how fiction is as much entangled with the cause and effect of our reality as anything, but the relative value of that fiction is a different, possibly subjective matter; and whilst Promethea may blush, shuffle her feet and mumble well, I was just saying, in concession to the subjective nature of her experiences, it feels as though we're being told how it really is. This bothers me, it being the how it really is of a very specific perspective, and probably not one that ever had to hold down a job at fucking Burger King for fifteen long years. Similarly, the post-apocalyptic liberty at which the narrative eventually arrives is a very specific kind of utopia, namely the same old thing in which we all throw off our hang ups and shag the neighbours, and Albert Einstein and Timothy Leary were essentially the same kind of dude, y'know? It's more or less the same place to which all those pre-pubescent Gernsbackian supermen once aspired to lead us, just cooler and better read, with more pairs of those little round Lennon specs, and lesbians who don't get all freaked out and uptight when you ask if it's okay to watch. It all seems very familiar.

Promethea is a decent story, well told and well drawn, and with poetically philosophical truths coming out of its arsehole. I'm just not convinced it's inherently any more profound than the antics of Retarded Hitler in Johnny Ryan's Dry Gulch Follies 2005.

*: I think it may have been Blair Bidmead who made this observation.

The Umbrella Academy: Apocalypse Suite

Gerard Way & Gabriel Bá
The Umbrella Academy: Apocalypse Suite (2008)
To cut to the chase I really enjoyed this, which I mention so as to save readers the effort of skipping down in search of the point at which I'm not slagging something off. However, a huge rant came to me just as I finished reading, inspired by but only indirectly relating to The Umbrella Academy - actually no more than an expansion upon themes found in my usual rant - and I really need to get it out of my system so here we go. We will return to The Umbrella Academy following the next couple of paragraphs.

There's a dominant aesthetic which has emerged from western culture at the end of the twentieth century which I'll refer to as Titterism for the sake of convenience, and Titterism because its lowest forms suggest a person tittering as they photoshop, for example, a robot riding a penny-farthing whilst somehow imagining themselves to be a font of creative wit. I could be wrong but I suspect it all started when the Cure, having recorded the excellent Seventeen Seconds and Faith, turned to shit, although this may simply be when I first began to notice. I suppose it might be dated to the time Robert Smith spent playing guitar for Siouxsie & the Banshees then presumably came back with the wrong end of their aesthetic stick to record shite like The Love Cats and The Caterpillar. Titterism seems to have been born through a recontextualisation of Lewis Carroll, and in the wake of Robert Smith's pioneering work found expression in the art of Vaughan Oliver who famously set Victorian typefaces across blurred photographs of someone's grandma using a mangle. This led thematically to Dave McKean using rusty screws purchased from an antique shop to fix dead leaves to the cover of Sandman comics, and arguably to the stories contained in those comics and written by Neil Gaiman; and then to everything else whipped up from some tastefully blurred aspect of Victoriana or its associated images of childhood - Harry Potter, Doctor Who, steampunk, Peaky fucking Blinders, Tim Burton, you name it...

Gadzooks, chaps - why methinks 'tis one of those computing engines so fashioned as to resemble a gentleman and - oh my - he's riding a jolly old boneshaker! By the Lord Harry, what a to-do! What will they think of next?*

The appeal of Titterism - as I will continue to call it until it feels right - is not difficult to appreciate. We respond for the same reason we still respond to Dada and Surrealism, art movements to which much Titterist work appears to aspire. It looks interesting because it seems incongruous in the age of computer-driven mass communication. It looks incongruous because it looks conspicuously hand crafted and hints at values with which we are no longer fully connected; so contrast is the key element - hence what you get when you google steampunk Dalek. It's a space age robotic alien from the future, and yet it's powered by - tee hee - cogs and flywheels, so let the titters commence. No creative ability is required, just the capacity for standing an object next to its thematic opposite. This is probably why this whole thing has come about now, scored to the rise of information technology which allows those without clearly quantified artistic vision to endlessly quote, cut, paste, and rearrange what has gone before. Dada and Surrealism did the same but in sharp contrast to still strongly defined aesthetics of craft and beauty which modernism had only just begun to address, so the act of collage was itself a statement even before we consider any philosophical dimensions invoked by Tristan Tzara, Max Ernst, André Breton and others. The collage served subversion rather than tittering novelty the appeal of which is that it looks funny innit! Like everything, the subversion has been stripped of content and commodified as Titterism. It's old and weird and it reminds us of that which had content beyond the basic aesthetic, which saves us the trouble of thinking about it for longer than it takes to read this sentence.

So that is why I dislike Titterism. For every individual who understands exactly what they're doing and is able to offer art of some intrinsic value beyond mere collectibility, there are a million other cunts busily dangling Bulldog Drummond from a dirigible and expecting to get paid for it. This is partially why I browsed The Umbrella Academy in the book store two or three times before actually buying it. It looked potentially intriguing, but it looked like Titterism, a bit Tim Burton in places. I've tried with My Chemical Romance but I never really understood that emotional children music - as it's called - and The Black Parade still sounds like a noisier, more whiny Bay City Rollers to my ears; so the appeal of a Titterist comic book written by their singer did not seem obvious; but, I'd still have bought the first issue of the new Doom Patrol comic a couple of weeks back had it been written by Ben fucking Elton, never mind Gerard Way; and it was good, so of course I just had to read this.

The Umbrella Academy is a group of seven, slightly bizarre super-powered children, and whilst it skates close to the edge, occasionally threatening to slide over into a full blown Titterfest of monocles, penny-farthing bicycles, and Christmas puddings with sixpences in the middle - it has enough momentum and weird invention to get away with it, and ultimately to succeed with flying colours. On the surface of it, it's almost a homage to Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol - and if you enjoyed that you'll almost certainly enjoy this - but maintains its own distinctive voice through, oddly enough, a seemingly more pronounced European aesthetic, or enough so as to imply that Way has sat through more than his fair share of bewildering black and white films with English subtitles. So it manages to feel significantly less mainstream than Morrison's Doom Patrol, thanks in part to Gabriel Bá's wonderful artwork falling somewhere between Tintin and Ted McKeever.

Aside from some muted wibbling noises about shitty parenting, it admittedly doesn't actually do a whole lot beyond looking amazing, but that doesn't have to be a problem, and it does more than just titter. If you really need it, The Umbrella Academy's surrealist short-circuiting of expectation might quite easily be taken as an end in itself. It throws interesting shapes, and is at heart deeply fucking stupid, but then all the best comic books usually are.

*: I could churn out this shit all day if anyone's interested: five cents a word but all reasonable offers will be considered.

Disney Alice Through the Looking Glass

Kari Sutherland & Linda Woolverton
Disney Alice Through the Looking Glass (2016)
I'm going to work with the assumption that this is a novel about a woman named Disney Alice, that being how her name appears on the cover and title page. I refuse to acknowledge Disney as referring to an author or authors because it would be undignified, given how the name of Lewis Carroll appears only once as small print, a creator credit, as though he were just one of the team, because Disney Alice Through the Looking Glass definitely wasn't written by Carroll. Its authorial heritage in full is given as adapted by Kari Sutherland, based on the screenplay by Linda Woolverton, based on characters created by Lewis Carroll, produced by Joe Roth, Suzanne Todd, Jennifer Todd, Tim Burton, and directed by James Bobin. The corporate efficiency of the list presents a stark contrast to the appearance of the book, a lavishly bound hardback with a colour plate on the cover and wonky pages of hand-knitted paper cut to uneven sizes. It's a real quality product, and I'm willing to bet that each copy was individually hand-crafted by authentic crofters living on the Arran Islands - which is over there in Englishland, which you probably didn't know; and it's been brought to us by the Disney Press - not Disney Books or Disney Publishing, but the Disney Press. I expect their head office is the stone hut next to the one with the artisan crofting craftsmen who didst forge the tome by the very sweat of their honest brows.

To get to the point, this isn't Through the Looking Glass, Carroll's sequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, as is probably obvious. Through the Looking Glass opens with Alice, who I would guess to be about eight, possibly younger, playing with her kittens in front of the fireplace in view of a large mirror through which she will soon travel. By contrast, here we meet Disney Alice as an adult, the feisty captain of a sailing ship returning to port from a series of adventures, and despite having been the presumably successful captain of her own ship for three years, returning home she is preoccupied with thoughts of her father and whether he will at last give her the blessing of his approval, because he's one of those bad dads who never said anything nice about us when we were young, which is why we now require analysts.

Where Through the Looking Glass is a beautifully-crafted nonsense tale based on the game of chess, this thing simply employs some of the same characters, additionally drafting in half the cast of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland to tell an entirely different story; and familiar persons such as the Mad Hatter and Cheshire cat are given full names, families, motivation, resumes, and history. In this story, the Mad Hatter becomes a boring old square, thus significantly reducing his appeal. Something has turned him into a man with opinions about income tax and who no longer dreams crazy, magical dreams full of magic and wonderment. Alice therefore travels back in time to change the past so as to restore the Mad Hatter to his former magical state of magic, wonderment and crazy imagination. When I first read that Alice travels back in time to change the past, I assumed the reviewer was taking the piss, but no - that really is what happens, because they've invented a completely new kind of story.

I'm being sarcastic.

Anyway, we learn how the Mad Hatter's father once made some dismissive remark criticising the quality of a hat the boy had made at school and brought home hoping to impress his dear old dad. 'That's fucking shit,' the busy, working man observed whilst nevertheless holding down a job so as to put food in the mouths of his family and maintain the roof over their heads, which traumatised the junior Mad Hatter. To be fair, the hat he made at school sounds rubbish to me as well, but there's a lot to be blamed on shitty parenting in this book. The Red Queen for example is a bit of a cunt, but this is due to a bollocking from her parents, a bollocking resulting from her once having been charged with the spillage of some crumbs and a pie crust, which was actually her sister's doing. Apparently that's quite similar to how Hitler got started.

I haven't seen the movie, but I'm guessing this book more or less faithfully recreates both the story and the sense of constant motion, people falling out of the sky and catching a stray yardarm just in time, just like in a game, all in relentlessly screaming 3D for a couple of hours. The proto-Dadaist nonsense of Carroll's creation is implied with the usual blend of dollar store steampunk bollocks and low-calorie corporate surrealism with shitloads of cogs all over the shop, the sort of thing you will immediately recognise from whenever you last saw a commercial for anything remotely related to Christmas, this sort of deal:

He picked up a floral teapot—one of many on the table—and poured some tea into Time's cup.

'If you're really Time itself, or himself, or whatever you are, perhaps you can answer me this,' Hatter blathered on as he served their guest. 'I've always wondered when soon is.' He set down the teapot only to snatch up a plate of scones and shove it into Time's face. 'Is it before in a few minutes or after a little while?'

See, that's not actually the brain-wrecking psychedelic conundrum it seems to believe itself to be so much as just a fucking stupid question. Millions of years ago when I was at school, someone brought in their copy of Blondie's Parallel Lines album. A kid we knew as Trev - although that wasn't actually his name - got hold of it and was reading the back cover.

'Look at this,' he chortled, eyes wide, mind about ready to blow. He held up the record sleeve for us to see and pointed to the title of a song - I Know But I Don't Know, because for poor Trev that was the full Syd Barrett meeting André Breton at the Château de Lacoste; and most of Disney Alice Through the Looking Glass stays at more or less the same safe level of crossword puzzle surrealism. There will be no minds blown today, is the promise, just good value entertainment.

Elsewhere in the chamber, the Tweedles were also hugging.

'Let's never fight again,' Tweedledum said.

'Were we fighting before?' Tweedledee asked. He stared at his brother in puzzlement.

'No, so why start now?' Tweedledum said.

Gazing across the room, Alice watched her friends reunite with their families. Everyone seemed so happy, all their former fights—big and small—swept away. With a pang, she thought of her mother, wishing she were there to hold her close. The world had nearly ended, and Alice and her mother had not parted on good terms.

The formerly evil Red Queen is revealed as simply being in a lot of pain over the crumbs and a pie crust incident. She's really quite nice once you get to know her. Everyone makes friends, and we all learn a lesson about the importance of family. Alice's family have attempted to have her committed at one point, but it was just a misunderstanding or summink, because fambly. Alice has spent much of the book bemoaning the stifling influence of family, sexism, the glass ceiling, forces which would keep her from having adventures or spontaneous displays of imagination because she's just a girl or because she should maybe grow the fuck up, but nothing is as important as fambly. So the book or the film or whatever the fuck it is spends a couple of hours blasting us with messages about the madcap importance of breaking free, of wondrous imagination and magic and daring to dream and being a little bit crazy even if it means people think you're a bit weird; then it does an about face and tells us family is more important than anything, even if they've had you committed to a loony bin, even if they've dedicated their lives to shitting on your dreams. It's good to dream and to experience wonderment and to be like totally zany and shit, but only if you have your feet on the ground, if you show some responsibility, only if you honour your family; but in your own time - no pressure or anything.

Personally I don't believe in conspiracy theories, including the one about a corporate cabal of neofeudalist robber barons for whom capitalist society is one big chess game arranged so as to keep us docile and economically productive from behind the scenes, and that's because I don't believe those on the upper balconies have the intelligence or resources to organise such a thing or to keep it running. On the other hand, I do tend to believe that something which very much has the appearance of the same is in charge, roughly speaking, even if its organising principle is an unconscious process rather than a group of individuals. Corporations seem as much subject to Darwinian laws as any of us, so it may be helpful to regard them as organisms inhabiting a financial and political realm, their success determined by what they can get away with, how freely they are able to act and to establish themselves as intrinsic to the society they inhabit. So in other words, this probably wasn't even a conscious act, but there is a limit to the ways in which the machine expresses itself. There is a limit to what it is able to say.

The aspect of Disney Alice Through the Looking Glass which I dislike the most is the arrogance of the idea that an entertainment committee can improve on Lewis Carroll's original. It represents not an empowering fountain of imagination, but an attempt to colonise the same. It's a hostile commodification of superior art to which the company itself can only aspire, something it could never create because there is a limit to what it is able to say. It is designed to keep you dumb, insecure, and reliant upon its own product. It triggers all the familiar entertainment synapses - so thanks a fucking bunch for that, Neil Gaiman, J.K. Rowling, Stephen Moffat, Spielberg, Tim Burton, and all you other peddlers of twee content-free wonderment. It's a proven seller, and a light sprinkling of generic unwanted-child angst gives us that warm feeling of value for money, just like the book packaged so as to pretend it wasn't made by robots, or if it was, at least they're zany steampunk robots.

So no, I didn't enjoy it very much.

Tik-Tok of Oz

L. Frank Baum Tik-Tok of Oz (1914)
Being absolutely and without ambiguity a children's book, this seemed perhaps a little out of my way, but what the hell, I thought, I read Adventures of the Wishing-Chair not that long ago and there's a robot on the cover. Tik-Tok isn't actually a robot, historically speaking, because the term derives from Karel Čapek's RUR which was written in 1920. Here he's referred to as a mechanical man. Mechanical men and related automata have been turning up in western literature at least since Homer's Iliad, whenever that was. Tik-Tok himself first turned up in Baum's Ozma of Oz of 1907 and his genesis probably began even further back in 1899 with the Cast-iron Man from Baum's A New Wonderland. What makes Tik-Tok interesting is that he's clearly identified as something manufactured, essentially a consumer product designed to perform with no agency of magic as was the case for at least a few of his forerunners; so he's a robot by modern standards.

I gather this probably shouldn't come as much of a surprise given Baum's attempt to revise the established tradition of children's fairy tales - excising much of the violence, the romance which he doubted held much appeal to his readers, and presenting an arguably more pragmatic take on the form than seemed traditional. Baum's narrative - at least here - is roughly a mash-up of the Brothers Grimm with some of the nonsense of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, whilst additionally being substantially more than just the sum of those two parts. From what I can tell, Baum seems to have been a politically progressive individual, which is at least how it looks from reading this one. His world and its characters - notably the likes of Dorothy and Betsy, seem removed from the sort of class hierarchy into which Carroll's Alice was firmly cemented, and his royals are judged by their actions rather than hereditary or special endorsement from God, which seems happily appropriate for an American author.

'Most noble Private Soldier, I must inform you that by the laws of our country anyone who comes through the Forbidden Tube must be tortured for nine days and ten nights and then thrown back into the Tube. But it is wise to disregard laws when they conflict with justice, and it seems that you and your followers did not disobey our laws willingly, being forced into the Tube by Ruggedo. Therefore the Nome King is alone to blame, and he alone must be punished.'

I gather Ruggedo was more or less the villain of the Oz books, and that he came back to piss everyone off time and again, so it's interesting that even he comes to his senses and says sorry at the end of this one. This dispenses with the traditional absolutes of the form wherein evil is both remote and beyond redemption, instead replacing it with something a little more realistic with which the audience can identify because no-one is really too much worse than the kid who steals your pencil, pulls your hair, and then sticks his tongue out at you; and further to the whole spirit of keeping it real, or at least vaguely rooted in the modern world, even Thomas Edison gets a mention, as does radium - as discovered in 1898; and famously, it transpires that Baum, during a moment of particularly Gernsbackian inspiration, foresaw the mobile telephone:

At first they could not understand it at all; but presently Shaggy suspected the truth, and believing that Ozma was now taking an interest in the party, he drew from his pocket a tiny instrument which he placed against his ear.

Ozma, observing this action in her Magic Picture, at once caught up a similar instrument from a table beside her and held it to her own ear. The two instruments recorded the same delicate vibrations of sound and formed a wireless telephone, an invention of the Wizard. Those separated by any distance were thus enabled to converse together with perfect ease and without any wire connection.

I could probably get carried away and speculate as to whether any of Tik-Tok of Oz was informed by then ominous warlike rumblings across Europe, but I suspect any points made which may seem related with hindsight were probably more general. Further to the theme of not letting ourselves get too carried away, it struck me that at least some of Baum's narrative seems woven from the same broad thrust of ominous surrealism which informs Germanic or Slavik folk tales - the sort of thing involving huts strolling around on chicken legs; which leads us to his gnomes, or rather nomes. My knowledge is somewhat sketchy at this point but there seems to be some vaguely anti-Semitic implication to those races of little subterranean men hoarding their gold and precious metals, and then we come to the expulsion of Ruggedo, king of the Nomes:

'Again I beg to differ with Your Majesty,' said Quox. 'The great Jinjin commands you to depart instantly from this Kingdom and seek the earth's surface, where you will wander for all time to come, without a home or country, without a friend or follower, and without any more riches than you can carry with you in your pockets.'

I suspect this was simply Baum borrowing from the folk myth of the Wandering Jew rather than anything approaching any kind of racial allusion, given that the same would contradict the generous spirit of the book as a whole. Baum's only noted posthumously contentious observations on any matter of race seem to have been a couple of editorials written for the Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer which appear unusually harsh and written from a position of substantial ignorance, but which are difficult to characterise as directly racist in any meaningful sense; not that this has much bearing on Tik-Tok.

So, you may be wondering, did I actually like the fucking thing?

The prose is of a kind written so as to leave behind as few children as possible, and I suppose lacks the poetry of Alice; and the story is fairly thin, the usual deal with a whole bunch of people going off to do something or other whilst accumulating increasingly weird pals on the way, but then if you're reading this expecting anything else, you're probably a bit of an idiot. The point of Tik-Tok of Oz, at least besides the conduction of any low-level lessons in morality, is to entertain small children with a bewildering array of bizarre characters, corny jokes, and general insanity; and it does this extremely well, and without quite pandering as Enid Blyton did from time to time. Personally I could have done with a little more Tik-Tok given that his name appears in the title, and I occasionally had a vague sensation of this having been but number eight to roll off the L. Frank Baum assembly line, but otherwise it seems a good-natured little tome and it's hard to find fault with it. I would have liked a little more description, or at least enough to keep me from visualising that guy out of Insane Clown Posse every time Shaggy Man gets a mention, but that's hardly Baum's fault.

The Nargun and the Stars

Patricia Wrightson The Nargun and the Stars (1970)
Back in the 1970s when I was a kid, Australia was England's closest neighbour - closer than France, closer than even Wales - and so I grew up enjoying the many benefits of Australian culture. I have a vague memory of some huge antipodean anniversarial celebration which would presumably account for that year when you couldn't turn the telly on without seeing either Dame Edna or Norman Gunston, and even the BBC's Jackanory - a fifteen minute daily broadcast of a book read by somebody vaguely famous - joined in with its recital of Patricia Wrightson's The Nargun and the Stars, an Australian children's classic. Weirdly I can find no reference to this hypothetical anniversary year through Google, so perhaps I imagined it and all that Australian culture was actually filtered across from the neighbouring farm, seeing as they had family somewhere down there. Frustratingly, internet memories of The Nargun and the Stars as featured on Jackanory are similarly scant beyond a handful of accounts in which people in their fifties recall it having scared the living shit out of them.

I can still see why, although I'm reading this as an adult. It's a children's book with the usual, logical concessions, placing its young protagonist at the centre of the action and not obliging him to think too hard about anything too utilitarian like how the hell his uncle manages to make a living out on that farm in the middle of the outback; but it's a children's book which nevertheless assumes its reader to be in possession of both a brain and an attention span longer than that of a kitten, so I didn't find it necessary to get in character by dressing up as a schoolboy or eating instant mashed potato drowned in ketchup or anything.

The Nargun and the Stars is experienced through the eyes of the recently orphaned Simon as he is shipped off to live with rural relatives and encounters a surreal panoply of native Australian elementals presumably from Aboriginal lore - tree spirits, the aquatic Potkoorok, and the terrifying Nargun of the title, essentially a living and very much disgruntled boulder. The Nargun has been, so it seems, displaced from its homeland by the march of progress, and now rolls around the hills of Wongadilla, crushing sheep and farm machinery in the dead of night.

Oddly, not very much actually happens in this novel. Events unfold at a leisurely rural pace with breaks for tea every five or so pages, and yet the low incident narrative never drags, being borne along by its wonderful attention to quiet detail - One of very few books that successfully depicts silence, as one Goodreads reviewer puts it. Truthfully, the book doesn't really need to jump through narrative hoops because atmosphere alone does most of the business. This seems to work well as a means of dealing with Simon having recently lost his parents without needing to spell anything out - a canny choice, I would argue, given that spelling things out to children regarding such a ruthlessly subjective experience as losing one's parents is probably asking for trouble, and a road ultimately leading to books with titles like My Dad, the Sex Criminal.

More interesting still is that our Nargun isn't really evil so much as simply misplaced, which in turn serves as a faint echo of the Nargun being only the latest intrusion on the landscape, the previous one having been made by Simon's new family on the realm of the Potkoorok and the rest. This could have resulted in sermonising but instead Wrightson takes a more philosophical tone on the subject of change, impermanence, and so on - all of which is of obvious relevance to Simon's unfortunate situation.

The Nargun and the Stars is a quietly intelligent children's book and as such richly deserves to be remembered as a first division classic alongside the works of Lewis Carroll, Tove Jansson, Roald Dahl and others.

Adventures of the Wishing Chair

Enid Blyton Adventures of the Wishing Chair (1937)
As a kid I led a sort of double life divided between home and the house of my grandparents. Whilst I've no reason whatsoever to criticise anything my parents did or didn't do, it was my grandparents who - presumably through having more leisure time and a slightly better budget - bought me books and encouraged me to read. My parents also bought me books from time to time, but otherwise generally left to my own devices. Of all the books I recall having read with my grandmother, Adventures of the Wishing Chair looms pretty large, at least equal to Brer Rabbit's a Rascal and six little Sir Prancelot picture books published by Collins. Naturally when I saw a copy in some junk shop in Shipston-on-Stour a few years ago, it was like the memory sherbert equivalent of a Diet Coke-Mentos explosion; and with it even being the same edition, I just couldn't not buy the thing. I'm not really in the habit of reading books aimed quite so squarely at those still half a decade short of being able to form dirty thoughts, but I refuse on principle to own anything purely for the sake of having it, and so...

As an adult, I've never been quite sure what to make of Enid Blyton or her work, and by weird coincidence I spent ten years of my life living across the road from her birthplace, as distinguished by the inevitable blue plaque on the wall above Plough Homecraft, from which I made regular purchase of screws, nails, tools and the like. I am aware of Blyton's oeuvre having accrued an unfortunate posthumous reputation for racist caricature, although I don't specifically recall anything of that sort in any of the books I read, at least nothing worse than the typical reinforcement of certain colonial-era values you find in children's fiction of a particular vintage, Rupert the Bear, Dan Dare, or whatever. This isn't to say that the casual racism didn't exist, only that I don't recall having directly encountered any of it.

Blyton's oeuvre also acquired a reputation for being of a low standard, one book churned out after another at the rate of something like fifty a year - formulaic, unchallenging, and lacking the obvious literary merit of a Winnie the Pooh or Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Whilst there may be some validity to this accusation, it may equally be a case of condemning a horse for not being a cow given Blyton's aims and methods of composition:

I shut my eyes for a few minutes, with my portable typewriter on my knee. I make my mind a blank and wait, and then, as clearly as I would see real children, my characters stand before me in my mind's eye... The first sentence comes straight into my mind, I don't have to think of it. I don't have to think of anything.

And whilst we're rummaging around in Wikipedia:

If I tried to think out or invent the whole book, I could not do it. For one thing, it would bore me and for another, it would lack the verve and the extraordinary touches and surprising ideas that flood out from my imagination.

This presents the startling possibility of Enid Blyton having been the A.E. van Vogt - or even the André Breton - of children's fiction, and it is almost certainly to account for the appeal of Adventures of the Wishing Chair - that dream-like quality of casual surrealism splashed around all over the place without any obvious concessions to established narrative traditions.

The story begins with two very young middle-class children, Mollie and Peter, out on a mission to purchase a birthday present for their mother - all very commendable until, having bought a vase from a peculiar junk shop, they encounter the Wishing Chair. The chair sprouts tiny wings from its legs and will fly you wherever you wish to go, and because the wizard who runs the shop is freaking them out somewhat, they hop into the chair and fly away home. Reading this as a forty-nine-year old man, I must admit I found this blatant act of shoplifting a little weird given that neither the wizard nor his assistant - apparently a pixie - seem particularly malevolent or deserving of having their stock nicked by kids, and yet the chair is repeatedly referred to by Mollie and Peter as our chair from that point onwards.

Next they make friends with a pixie called Chinky - thankfully lacking obvious Asiatic characteristics, although the name still seems a bit of an odd choice to me - and Chinky serves as their intermediary with the realm of fairies, pixies, giants, and other mysterious creatures somehow inhabiting the castles of a world also including planes, buses, and trains to London. As intermediary, it is usually Chinky who presses the proverbial magic button, providing the means of escape from whatever situation the children find themselves in, which in turn most often results from the theft or appropriation of their magical chair - consequences here tending to be those which occur to would-be chair thieves, but not so much to the children themselves; so this is something in the tradition of a fairy tale without quite being one. The children are as isolated in their adventures as they appear to be at home with their play room at the end of the garden, kept far away from the adult world. Their adventures occur mostly as diverting novelties equivalent to play, incurring few serious consequences and requiring minimal agency on their part.

I can see the appeal of Blyton in how she speaks very directly to her intended audience and in their own terms. Adults remain principally remote figures not directly involved with the narrative, aside from a couple of chapters in which Mother briefly becomes yet another threat to Mollie and Peter's continued ownership of the Wishing Chair. The morality of the tales are fairly vague and rudimentary, mostly to do with the basic manners of those whom the children encounter, and with the children themselves held to slightly less rigorous standards.

The point here is, I guess, to engage with the very young audience without it feeling like a lecture, and I suppose this is where the accusations of poor literary merit come from. I can sort of see it, in so much as Adventures of the Wishing Chair commits most of the same crimes currently perpetrated by a certain telly show about a man in a blue box, although that isn't the same as saying that it doesn't do its job, or that it is without purpose of some kind. For all their potential flaws, Mollie and Peter come across as essentially likeable, even noble, and the tales for all that they may lack any overtly educational element, are engrossingly weird without too much to give young minds either a headache or nightmares.

Enid Blyton got children reading, and doubtless got children reading who might not have otherwise bothered. This was at least my mother's verdict, having herself been raised on Enid Blyton, so I guess my later introduction to Adventures of the Wishing Chair was simply a continuation of the family tradition. She knows they were terrible, as she has told me more recently, but loved them regardless. Bums on seats is never an indication of quality, but then neither is mass appeal necessarily an indication of its absence, and on the strength of this one I would say that Enid Blyton did what she set out to do very well.

Destiny Doll

Clifford D. Simak Destiny Doll (1971)
Destiny Doll is a quest and is as such one tale of a particular type which Simak clearly enjoyed writing at this stage of his career as he assembled peculiar bands of misfits and sent them off in search of something that was usually allegorical to a greater or lesser extent. He'd already done this in Out of Their Minds and would do it again in Enchanted Pilgrimage, The Fellowship of the Talisman, and others. I tend to dislike quest narratives on principal as they always seem to derive from authors who can't be arsed to come up with an actual story, but Simak always tackles the form with such vivid imagination as to sidestep most reasonable objections, and his quests feel more akin to The Wizard of Oz or even Alice in Wonderland than Tolkien and his legacy of grizzled ale-quaffing tedium.

Here a group of humans, one of whom is Friar Tuck - although no direct link to the Robin Hood legend is stated - all set off in search of a lost traveller and Roscoe, his telepathic robot. Along the way they encounter a race of probably robotic aliens resembling rocking horses, and Hoot, a sort of land-bound squid who joins their more-argumentative-than-merry band. Similarly askew with narrative convention, Ross our intrepid main man, is either a bit of a dick or at least significantly more cynical than the traditional hero, and treats Friar Tuck with near limitless contempt for reasons which remain unclear to the reader, at least unclear unless we simply accept that Ross is a bit of a dick. The quest itself is conducted in search of  some vague higher knowledge or understanding of the universe as supposedly achieved by the aforementioned lost traveller and his robot, and there seems to be a possibility that Simak himself either wasn't sure what they would find, or had no clear idea how best to express it. Ross and Friar Tuck respectively may represent cynicism and faith, and Tuck vanishes before the group come to the end of their quest, perhaps suggesting the view that the goal of a quest must by definition be unattainable, the journey being the point.

But there was no way to turn it off; for some reason I was committed and must keep on and could only hope that at some point along the way I could reach a stopping point—either a point where I could go no further or a point where I had learned or sensed all there was to learn and sense.

On the other hand, the disappearance of Friar Tuck may serve to highlight the supposed redundancy of blind faith, as Ross sees it in contrast to his own realism. Whichever the case, it becomes clear that Destiny Doll is an allegorical journey in the general tradition of David Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus, similarly impenetrable in places, but generally more readable.

The goal, when they get there, turns out to be an illusion - a 1960s Star Trek-style idyll complete with toga dress code concealing rot and decrepitude. At this point the choice becomes whether to accept the illusion as valid and hang around, or insist on the smellier, less pleasant reality. Ross initially opts for the latter, which may be where the Destiny Doll of the title comes in - a wooden fetish found by Friar Tuck which seems to represent utter despair, with destiny as that which will be, namely the inevitability of death, termination, confusion and so on - or realism as Ross would have it. All of this is debated within the greater environment of Simak's version of dualism, roughly speaking fellowship and the bond of all that lives in opposition to solitude and loneliness.

The conclusion, if there really is any one single conclusion here, depends either on the reader or repeat reading, this being the sort of novel which invites further investigation and poring over the subtle, more mystifying elements; not least because it's also a lot of fun, and certainly more successful than the next one, A Choice of Gods which attempted to take some of these ideas further.

After that issue of Granta, it's quite a relief to find that I am indeed still able to enjoy science-fiction, and so - as I suspected - Simak was a good choice as I clambered back into the saddle, so to speak. Destiny Doll is bewildering in places, but probably amongst Simak's more consciously literary efforts, and as such serves as a good example of why this author really deserves to be remembered with a little more fanfare than presently seems to be the case. Spaceships, gnomes, rocking horses, and folksy ontology - what's not to love?

The Engineer Reconditioned

Neal Asher The Engineer Reconditioned (2006)

I'm not exactly sure why, but this one - collecting an early short story and two novellas - dragged a bit, particularly towards the end. This is annoying as I tend to read for an hour before going to sleep and then again for another hour before I get up in the morning, and plodding through a less than enjoyable book can sometimes cast a bit of an unsavoury tang over the rest of the intermediary day, particularly if that day is already spent enduring minor pain in the shoulder, the mystery of where all the sodding flies in the kitchen keep coming from, the fact that it's still fucking nippy outside despite living in south Texas, the water being cut off for a few hours by the utilities people, realising the milk has gone off, and opening a random page in a self-published book that I've been over a million fucking times to find yet another typo I've somehow missed.

Anyway, setting aside my own first world problems, of all the roughly current crop of British science-fiction writers, Neal Asher has distinguished himself as having both the big ideas and the storytelling ability to get them across without writing like someone aiming at the airport book stands, at least if The Skinner was anything to go by. The promise of that more recent work is found in a few of these slightly more formative efforts from the small press years. He seems particularly adept at writing weird biology of such stomach-churning convolutions as to border on a sort of sciency Lovecraft, which is particularly vivid in the two novellas, The Engineer and Spatterjay, summarised in my notes as having touches of Alice in Wonderland gone horribly wrong and H.R. Giger without the necrosis. Even in the depths of space, Asher's prime fillets always seem to pull you back to the high seas with salt in the spray and faintly disgusting gelatinous things sprouting all over the hull.

Unfortunately for the sake of this collection, whilst he clearly had the recipe even in the early days, it took a while before the pies started coming out right. Some of the narratives here appear strangely lacking in direction, or even story in a few cases. Others I struggled to remember even as I was reading them. Then again, everyone is entitled to turn out a few turkeys, and it's Neal Asher, so it's still worth a read on the strength of the good stuff.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

Alan Moore & Kevin O'Neill
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen volume two (2003)
Another vivid illustration of the Oscar Wilde maxim stating how talent borrows, genius steals - you might argue that not one single original idea is to be found here, and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen succeeds by virtue of how it's put together. Alan Moore once again recycles the characters of every book he's ever read whilst Kevin O'Neill's work grows ever closer to a warped version of the illustrations which graced Punch magazine in the early years of the twentieth century. Not only does this second volume mash up all the usual suspects with Rupert Bear, Tiger Tim, and Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carpenter, all the while telling us with a straight face that Hyde Park was named in honour of Robert Louis Stevenson's transformed misanthrope and H.G. Wells' Dr. Moreau was related to Gustave the symbolist painter; but it juggles all these balls with its entire story bolted onto the underside of The War of the Worlds. It should by all rights be a complete pig's ear, tantamount to the absolute worst crap devised by the sort of moron who would consider Daleks versus Klingons high concept, but somehow it's wonderful, and absolutely original despite being comprised entirely of stolen material. Particularly impressive are the new lives given to these characters beyond the novels from which they derive, particularly Hyde and Mina Harker - the latter having had a somewhat underwhelming minor role in Dracula where her main function was apparently to be ill for a long time whilst failing to suspect there could be anything weird about waking up with a sore neck each morning. Here she's a lot more interesting - blasphemy though that may be - not least during a surprisingly touching erotic interlude shared with Rider Haggard's Allan Quatermain. As a rule I tend to dislike romance or sex in fiction, not through squeamishness but simply because authors so often get it horribly wrong, and it can be difficult to enjoy a book once you've started to feel sorry for those responsible in the wake of some horrendously juvenile attempt to get all sticky and squirty.

Only the inevitable supplementary prose section at the end lets the volume down, as tends to be the case with DVD extras in general. It's a travelogue of every fictional land, city or realm Moore could come up with off the top of his head. Although I didn't notice anything pinched from Tolkein or Clark Ashton Smith, it seems otherwise exhaustive, taking in Alice's Wonderland, More's Utopia, and all those places to which Swift's Gulliver travelled just for starters. It's the sort of background detail that would work in the strip, but is actually kind of dull as a list set down in plodding narrative form when a list set down as a list would have served just as well. More than anything else it feels like an extended exercise in continuity - which is of course precisely what it is - so it probably depends on how many references you get in order for it to work, but even then forty pages of dense text seems excessive.

Still, with a main feature of such quality, I'm not complaining.

Neonomicon

Alan Moore & Jacen Burrows Neonomicon (2011)
I'm pretty sure that isn't how you spell Jason, but never mind...

Alan Moore takes on the Cthulhu mythos of H.P. Lovecraft and others whilst steering clear of anything too obviously resembling a nostalgic retread, the same dressing-up box most authors tend to dig into when doing their own version of Lovecraft. Thus we have Lovecraft filtered - quite intentionally, according to the bearded one - through The Wire, a contemporary setting with the sharp, visceral focus of a crime drama. It sort of does the job, except you can tell Moore was working through some stuff when he wrote this - notably being immensely pissed off at DC comics turning Watchmen into a film - so it's pretty horrible in places. Being a horror, I guess it's supposed to be horrible, but it at least seems to have some point beyond sticking fingers down the reader's throat, fingers only recently extricated from someone's bum...

The most ruthlessly unpleasant passage of Neonomicon has the main character repeatedly raped in sharper focus than might be deemed necessary. One might argue this works by exposing the repulsive details as curiously banal, presenting uncomfortably plausible violence in place of the usual consequence free cartoon variety. One might also argue that Moore goes too far, and I still have no idea what Agent Brears describing herself as a sex addict really adds to the story - unless it's bait for the sort of reader who turned up in the misguided hope of twisted thrills. I'm undecided, but then I've never quite reached a decision regarding the similarly repulsive music of Whitehouse, Ramleh, Consumer Electronics and the like. If horrible, repellent art provokes questions then that's most likely a good thing by some definition; but on the other hand, maybe it's just cheap shock effects perpetrated by arseholes who'd almost certainly shit themselves were they ever caught up in the sort of situations that seemingly inspire their efforts. Also there's the matter of Lovecraftian horror as repressed sexuality, all those throbbing nocturnal monstrosities summoned up by a writer remembered at best as a Victorian prude, Neonomicon being in some sense a Freudian take on Lovecraft; but aside from our model of the poor bugger's sexuality being based solely on the fact that he considered it his own business, who really still gives a shit?

Alice accesses Wonderland by falling down a great big earthen fanny, and all space rockets are atomic powered hard-ons penetrating a somehow vaginal sky. We get it, now piss off.

Aside from moral issues debated at greater length elsewhere, the other problem with Neonomicon is that it just isn't as good as it could have been. It's beautifully drawn, reasonably intelligent, raises all sorts of interesting points about the nature of storytelling, the medium and language itself - but Lovecraftian horror doesn't work as full frontal nastiness; so the fine balance that should have been struck isn't quite there and it reads in places like the writing of an Alan Moore imitator.