A. Merritt - The Fox Woman & Other Stories (1949)

Just for the sake of a recap in the event of your having forgotten who he was - which is understandable given that most of us apparently have - if you're into the weird stuff, then Merritt was probably your favourite author's favourite author. He collaborated with Lovecraft and was a legend in his own lifetime, but a legend which faded with surprising haste, possibly due to the popularity of the sort of thing he wrote having likewise faded. It was fantasy, often drawing on myth and legend but from a twentieth century perspective, and with the influence of H. Rider Haggard very much in evidence. Merritt made a name for himself in the genre with unusually baroque prose which might have verged on the purple had he not applied it with such elegance.

That said, a little sometimes went a long way with Merritt, with the most loquacious application of bon mots suffocating the narrative in ebullient flourishes of topaz more languid than even the silken robes of Lao-Tzu as he rises to greet the crimson morn etc. etc., and his characters can be occasionally somewhat stereotypical. When everything's working as it should, this isn't a problem, but they can't all be classics. Actually, for all those of his books which I've read have going for them, I'm not convinced any of them are truly classics; and I'm not sure about this lot either.

The Fox Woman itself is a mostly elegant excursion into Chinese mythology which surely didn't need to be fifty pages; and perhaps may not have been in an ideal world, given that it's an unfinished piece published posthumously, along with a couple of other sketchy fragments featured here. Three Lines of Old French is one of those deals where some saucy bint you meet in a dream sends you a letter through the actual real world postal system, and it features a line describing military casualties as dregs of a score of carryings to the red-wine press of war, which is probably overdoing it a bit. Two of the stories are related by groups of chaps sat smoking cigars by the fireside, each consecutively out-doing the previous guy's tale of strange animal transformations, concluding with some bloke turning into a bee. You really get the impression that it was written in full confidence of this expression being welded firmly onto the reader's face for the duration.

In Merritt's favour, the ideas are nice and the imagery is often vivid even where they amount to less than the sum of the parts. Through the Dragon Glass and The Women of the Wood are decent, as is The Last Poet and the Robots which succeeds if only through the sheer force of its own weirdness, notably seeming very much a potential precursor to Michael Moorcock's Dancers at the End of Time. So that's a thumbs up even if I seem to be pulling a face.

The Dreamthief's Daughter

Michael Moorcock The Dreamthief's Daughter (2001)
I had no plans to read beyond the first six tidily collated Elric books given that everyone's favourite albino sword swinger sits at the very edge of my field of thematic interest, and wouldn't get a second glance from my direction were it anyone other than Moorcock; but I had four of the six and needed to fill the gaps, and this was on the same eBay page as the other two, so fuck it, I thought.

The Dreamthief's Daughter turns out to be a big, fat novel rather than short stories welded together in a slimmer volume, but serves as a good example of Moorcock's tendency to stretch genres beyond breaking point in the name of keeping things interesting. This one inhabits his celebrated and frequently imitated multiverse, without which we probably wouldn't have had the Moore or Morrison versions, and the camera is pulled back so as to reveal Elric as inhabiting just one segment. Another segment, which may or may not be where we live, is occupied by Ulric von Bek, an Elric variant who has the misfortune to witness the rise of Adolf Hitler, which is itself tied in with goings on in the war between the forces of Law and Chaos. If this is sounding a bit familiar, you're possibly thinking of one of numerous cheap, less satisfying imitations, because Moorcock merely joins dots while resisting the temptation to reveal that Hitler was actually working for those outer space robot people, or Cthulhu, or the three-legged bloke on the Manx flag. Nope - these Nazis are the real thing, driven by exactly the same bullshit which seems to have enjoyed a recent resurgence in popularity out here in the real world. This presents a canny balancing act given the celebrated Nazi love of mystical bollocks remaining bollocks in the context of a novel featuring actual magic swords.

Perhaps my overfondness for reading, as a child, had made me too familiar with all the old arguments used to justify the mortal lust for power. The moment the moral authority of the supernatural was invoked, you knew you were in conflict with the monumentally self-deceiving, who should not be trusted at any level.

Thus we get an Elric book which seems to channel Abraham Merritt - given how much time is spent underground - gets the absolute best from its genre, has quite a lot to say, and keeps Nazi Germany in horrifying perspective without turning the fuckers into generically cool bad guys to be booed and hissed like the empire in Star Wars. Possibly ironically, given my opening paragraph, this may even be the best Elric book I've read.

Stormbringer

Michael Moorcock Stormbringer (1965)
My general view of Moorcock's Elric books has been subject to a seemingly endless cycle of re-evaluation, as follows:

• Suspected that, being fantasy, they were probably shit.
• Read Moorcock and realised they might be all right after all.
• Was told Moorcock wrote them purely for the money, meaning they were probably shit.
• Read the first one anyway and realised that it was actually pretty decent, regardless of having possibly been written for the money.
• Read the next few, and sort of enjoyed them but nothing like so much as Moorcock's other novels. Ho hum.

Stormbringer is the final novel of the original six volume series. I get the impression it was intended to be the final Elric book, but the popularity of the series obliged a continuation. Of the first six, it's the one which reads like a proper novel rather than a series of short stories bolted together. Moorcock's brief introduction introduces it as his first attempt at a full-length book, then thanks David Britton for hanging onto the magazines in which it was originally serialised, and Wikipedia claims it was yet more short stories bolted together, so I guess the conclusion here is that nobody fucking knows.

Anyway, I suppose my problem with the Elric books - not that it kept me from reading these first six - is a certain absence of humour, possibly aside from the sort of humour which occasionally smashes wooden flagons of ale together with a hearty ha ha! Then again, I can see the sense in preserving the mythic thrust of these tales by avoiding knowing winks to camera, and they're all about the mythic. Stormbringer wraps everything up nicely by pushing its mythic agenda to the border of philosophy, or at least something deeper than routine chivalry and stuff about dragons. It draws back a little, at least compared to the others, to reveal the bigger and significantly weirder picture, and in doing so making Tolkien seem positively pedestrian. I now understand that Jack Vance's Dying Earth books may have been an influence, and this feels very much like a distant relative inhabiting the other end of human history, or prehistory to be specific.

So what I'm saying here is that, Stormbringer really is sort of mind-blowing by some definition, and if the previous four weren't quite so startling as the first, this grand finale rewards the effort of having read them. Even if Moorcock's principal motivation was paying off the mortgage, it doesn't really matter because this one justifies the hype.

The Naked Lunch

 

William S. Burroughs The Naked Lunch (1959)
This was probably the third or fourth Burroughs I read, back in the first flourish of youth when I was reading everything I could find by the man. I therefore suspect I may not have read it since the early eighties, which would at least explain the deficit between what I've read just now and what I vaguely remember.

I'm sure you all know what Naked Lunch does and I don't see much point going over it yet again; but for what it may be worth, it's essentially a written equivalent to one of those Heironymous Bosch paintings commenting on the questionable state of his society by showing a thousand tiny figures with foreign objects projecting painfully from their bumholes. I'd somehow forgotten that it slightly predates Burroughs' use of cut-ups, so although we have random narrative swerves and streams of consciousness implied by Céline's three little dots, it's muted compared to the impersonal onslaught of undifferentiated meaning we find in subsequent books. Mostly we have routines and dialogue, essentially similar to what we read in Junky and Queer but without the linearity.

Much to my surprise, and regardless of whatever I thought first time round, Naked Lunch is a transitional novel wherein the author is still very much finding his feet; and it feels as though those feet were mostly trudging. Of course, it throws up plenty of interesting ideas, but nothing which wasn't better expressed to greater dramatic effect in the novels which followed, most of which additionally benefit from a greater variety of narrative techniques. While Naked Lunch is arguably important, its reputation refers mostly to it having been unlike anything published at the time. This particular edition commemorates this by reproducing three or four months worth of sniffy editorials and related correspondence from the Times Literary Supplement on the subject of how Naked Lunch was either disgraceful or the bestest best thing ever. Both Michael Moorcock and Anthony Burgess chip in for the defense but no conclusion is reached, and the strangest realisation is how closely this lengthy exchange - beginning in November, 1963 - resembles the incoherent slanging matches seen on Twitter whenever someone points out that women don't usually have cocks. The language may be elevated and the sentences constructed as though by Renaissance architects according to the golden section, but the arguments still amount to burrows is shit LOL #cantfuckinwrite followed by a string of those horrible crying with laughter emoticons, which I feel sort of proves Billy's point about one or two things.

The Eyes of the Overworld

Jack Vance The Eyes of the Overworld (1966)
Excepting Moorcock on the grounds of him being pretty much his own genre, Jack Vance is the first author of unambiguous fantasy to whom I've truly warmed, and by unambiguous fantasy I mean sagas of wizards in pointy hats inspiring quests across hill and dale, and so on and so forth. Actually, he's the second come to think of it, the first being Matthew Hughes whose tales of Raffalon are set against the backdrop of Jack Vance's Dying Earth, and this is one of Vance's Dying Earth novels - so I'm sure the sense of whatever I was trying to say can be found somewhere in that lot.

The Dying Earth is host to a post-technological society vaguely resembling our Renaissance but with magic, all occurring in the improbably distant future, at which point the sun routinely blinks out like aging strip lighting, hence the name. It was a significant influence on Moorcock's Dancers at the End of Time. I could probably leave the review there, but I won't.

Cugel the Clever is discovered attempting to steal certain valuable mystic items from Iucounu the Laughing Magician. Iucounu wraps an extraterrestrial squid around the thief's liver and obliges him to travel to the far north to procure the eyes of the overworld. The eyes of the overworld allow one to see the higher reality, transforming conventional perception of our world of rancid paupers screwing and pooing in stinking hovels into a reality of Disney princesses daintily wafting from one sparkling palace to another. The novel is a quest with a spell or enchantment resolving pretty much every scrape and episodic dilemma strung along its familiar path - and with no greater sense of consequence than in any other magically driven narrative - and yet Vance proves that it really is all in the telling. His fiction is heavily stylised, erudite almost to the point of shameless ostentation, and feels fresh and lively - more so than anything involving wizards surely has the right to be. I'd be surprised if he hadn't influenced Pratchett to some extent - although his wit is possibly sharper and less obviously satirical - and he assails the reader with a disorientating barrage of peculiar ideas and images to incredibly surreal effect - somewhat like Cordwainer Smith, but - frankly, better done. I don't know if The Eyes of the Overworld exactly says anything, but then it doesn't have to. Sometimes the mood, spectacle, and delightful confusion can be enough by itself.

The Vanishing Tower

Michael Moorcock The Vanishing Tower (1970)
This is my fourth Elric book and I realise that I've been going at it all wrong. It isn't that I haven't enjoyed them, but I expected to enjoy them more than I have done. I'm not automatically well-disposed towards anything involving either spells, wizards or castles, so I need my occasional fantasy novel to do a bit more than the usual. Elric does a bit more than the usual, but nothing like so much as Moorcock's other novels tend to do. This would be fine in itself but for the scrappily episodic feel of short stories welded together, one quest after another, mystic day-saving gemstone after mystic day-saving gemstone…

Well, it seems these novels actually are short stories welded together, but short stories of such length as to be further subdivided into portions by my customary reading habits - an hour when I wake up and another before I go to sleep, which usually works out at about fifty pages a day with most books. Anyway, being as these things are pretty breezy, I made the effort to read each of the three short stories into which this one divides in single hour-long sittings, and suddenly they were a whole lot more enjoyable. I guess the existence of all those droning fifteen volume sword and sorcery epics has fooled me into the belief that I need to treat this kind of thing as a saga, accordingly remembering all the unpronounceables with walk-on parts for when they turn up later to reveal they still have such and such a mystic dingus in their possession.

It seems that reading each Elric episode in one go without worrying too much over minor points of continuity is the key, additionally meaning one is less likely to be distracted from the profoundly atmospheric weirdness; which is the main reason for reading these things.

So, it seems it wasn't Michael Moorcock after all. It was me. I still say he's written better, but then even the fruits of his occasionally phoning it in tend to be way above the average.

The Weird of the White Wolf

Michael Moorcock The Weird of the White Wolf (1977)

There were six books in this first cycle of the Elric saga. I'd read the first two; then tracked down the three I didn't have with plans to read them in order, one through to six, mainly because it's been a couple of years since I read Elric of Melniboné and The Sailor on the Seas of Fate and felt I should get reacquainted. The books are mostly slim, about one-hundred and fifty pages give or take - about as long as they need to be. So I re-read the first two then tackled this one, and realised that a little goes a long way where Elric is concerned. The first book is mostly wonderful. Sailor has its moments but is somewhat episodic with our boy moving from one scrape to another without it really feeling like it's adding up to anything in particular, and The Weird of the White Wolf is the same.

This isn't to say that the saga ever begins to bore or tread water, because Moorcock always kept things lively, avoiding almost all of the clichés we've come to expect from sword and sorcery, writing as fiction should be written rather than just recycling the usual bollocks about persons who do aquesting go. So regardless of ghastly apparitions and soul-stealing swords, the Elric books have a distinctly punky edge which really keeps you on your toes; and the magic is that this spikey, almost post-modern quality somehow emphasises the mythic power of the tales - as distinct from being mechanically reclaimed Tolkien with Star Wars jokes bolted on*. Elric works like the real world, albeit under extraordinary circumstances, and not even mythology itself is beyond scrutiny.

Elric Smiled. 'Oh, it's nothing more than a folktale, probably, the story I told you. This Saxif D'Aan could be another person altogether—or an imposter, even, who has taken his name—or a sorcerer. Some sorcerers take the names of other sorcerers, for they think it gives them more power.'

Both Sailor and White Wolf, it could be argued, have a rhythm more closely resembling real life than those housebrick sagas of persons seeking specific mystic items - digressions occur and not everything adds up as it might in a novel written with reference to a wall laden with post-it notes. Of course, I now realise this is also due to a few of these novels comprising sequences of short stories woven together; but for all the many, many, many, many, many faults of Lord of the Rings, it does at least have momentum driven by a coherent goal somewhere near the end of the third book. That which drives Elric onwards is less obvious, at least here, meaning I probably didn't need to re-read the first two, and I'll probably wait before tackling the other three because they seem to work better in short, sharp doses.

Beyond the above observations, Elric remains arguably one of the few things in the fantasy section which is worth reading. It's weird, scary, occasionally disturbing and the thematic opposite of all those cosy quests, bursting with peculiar ideas, like a sleeker, sharper, more chilling heir to Clark Ashton Smith. Each time I pick up a Moorcook I've never read, I notice just how much of the landscape of contemporary science-or-otherwise-fiction has come from him, and in forms which are never anything like so powerful or honest as the original.

*: Referring here to Randy Henderson's Bigfootloose and Finn Fancy Free which remains more or less the worst thing I've ever read, or at least tried to read. It still hurts three-and-a-half years later.

The Making of the Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle

Joel McIver
The Making of the Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (2005)
Here's an oddity, one of a series of books examining classic movies - classic movies such as Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Scarface and er… The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle.

Me neither.

I guess the general public must have been similarly mystified given that I picked this up cheap from a remaindered section somewhere in the general vicinity of its publication date. It's been sat on my bookshelves ever since, five different bookshelves given the number of times I've moved house since my presumed purchase - presumed because it's a vague impression rather than a definitive memory. I assume it's been there sandwiched between Lydon and Milligan all this time, somehow eluding even those sweeps deliberately intended to select volumes I never got around to reading. Similarly, I've seen The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle and don't remember much about that either. I rate the soundtrack album quite highly, and even Moorcock's bizarre pseudo-novelisation of the film is pretty great, but the movie itself…

McIver's autopsy handily includes a scene by scene synopsis, thus allowing me to remember why I've failed to remember the thing, specifically that it was mostly existing footage cobbled together like a last minute homework assignment which cleverly admits to being crap in the hope we won't notice that it is, in actual fact, crap; plus it was McLaren's vision of the Pistols and therefore pretty much a complete waste of time.

Nevertheless, in discussing a movie which wasn't anywhere near as amazing as I hoped it would be when I was fourteen, McIver pulls together all sorts of fascinating historical details which somehow failed to make it into other Pistols biographies, or were else so underplayed that I didn't notice. Sid, in particular, comes out of it quite well, and actual light is shed upon why he almost certainly wasn't responsible for killing his girlfriend, which is good to know; and crap as the film was, Julian Temple's justification is interesting. Even Russ Meyer comes out of it well enough to suggest his version might have been worth a look, had it been made.

It's surprising that anyone should have found something new to say about punk rock in 2005 - or if not new, at least something obvious which hadn't been said before - but McIver pulled it off. I'm still not too bothered about watching the movie ever again, but I'm glad this thing found its way onto my shelves.

The Empire of Glass

Andy Lane The Empire of Glass (1995)
Simply, I was in the mood for more Hartnell and had no memory of having read this - although obviously I did - thus allowing for the possibility of pleasure taken in trying to work out what the fuck is going on. Going back to old Who things which I thought were amazing all those years ago has bitten me on the ass more than once, but thankfully this turned out to be one of the good ones.

By one of the good ones I mean it's a respectable science-fiction novel in its own right, albeit one which just happens to make use of characters and situations from a television show; and, as with Perry Rhodan, Doc Savage, Sexton Blake or any other star of the written serial, the author gets to play with an existing universe without feeling obliged to spend half the page count explaining it because if we're reading, we probably already know what we're dealing with.

Of course, it all falls apart when you get a writer with nothing to say, no ambition beyond adding to the ugh - franchise or brand or property or whatever the well-dressed product-sponge-cunt about town is calling it this year; but happily, that isn't what we have here, and I'd say that The Empire of Glass dates from a lost golden age when quality still had the edge over quantity most of the time.

Our man travels to Venice in the early sixteenth century, and we learn a lot about Venice because Lane does his research and additionally bothers to make it interesting, which is nice. The environment of our tale is solid and well grounded, evocatively described without any hint of box ticking, and so much so as to support an ambitiously ludicrous narrative juggling alien incursions, extraterrestrial espionage, Venetian politics, Galileo, William Shakespeare's career as a spy for the court of King James, and a flying island drawn indirectly from Jonathan Swift. There's one passage where Galileo's biography shows through with more fidelity than we really need…

As he watched, entranced, a small shape like a flattened egg that glinted like metal rose up rapidly from the far side of the island, moving upward as smoothly and inexorably as the ebony balls that he had dropped from the tower of Pisa to test Aristotle's theory had fallen.

All the same, in the context of a novel which gets so much right, it amuses rather than annoys. Credibility is stretched to such a point as to border on the sort of thing Moorcock used to write, and yet everything holds, amounting to a substantially satisfying read of the kind I wish more science-fiction authors could achieve, not least a few of the better known guys, Alastair Reynolds and others.

As with John Peel's rendition of The Chase, it's been nice - even oddly life affirming - to find myself reminded of Who as something weird and exciting and not entirely predictable.

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.

Norstrilia

Cordwainer Smith Norstrilia (1964)
It's taken me a year to get through this one. I started it in April last year, failed, read something else instead, tried again, failed again, read a different book, then came back to this one and returned it to the shelf in defeat, telling myself I would get through it when the time was right.

This time, I cracked it. I even enjoyed some of it, although it remains painfully apparent why I stalled and stalled again back in 2021. Cordwainer Smith spins a wild yarn informed by Chinese folklore, amongst other things, not in terms of characters and situations but in the general rhythm of his fiction, the way in which it feels a little like a parable and makes narrative twists and turns with the cadence of a dream. In practical terms, this means we have something which very much foreshadows Moorcock's Dancers at the End of Time in relating only loosely to the rest of science-fiction as a genre, and generally doing its own peculiar thing in the expectation of the reader being able to keep up.

Norstrilia begins on a planet which is essentially a colony of Australia complete with all the stuff about hats with corks dangling from the rim. Rod McBan is a sheep farmer, tending flocks of giant immobile sheep which exude some substance that bestows immortality. One night he's gambling on his computer and wins so much money that he comes into possession of planet Earth, to which he then travels disguised as a cat person - you get the picture.

It's all very entertaining, and it doesn't quite feel like the series of random twists of gratuitous surrealism possibly implied by the above description, but Cordwainer Smith tends to jabber, and all it takes is one paragraph's worth of lapsed concentration and you're fucked, with no idea of what's going on or who the hell these people are supposed to be.

Anyway, I did better this time around - although I've no idea why. I hung on tight and discovered the first half to be massively entertaining as well as impressively weird. The appendix refers to Norstrilia having originally been broken up into two parts and published as separate novels with the addition of supporting material, so my guess would be that the first of the pair was the strongest. I didn't have so much trouble with McBan's travels on Earth as I did with the first half back in April, 2021, but it felt a little surplus to requirements, possibly because by this point the reader has come to expect the arbitrary swerves as a matter of course. Given Smith's background, it seems fairly likely that Rod McBan is intended to be a sort of rough edged Buddha or Christ figure coming in from the wilderness, then walking amongst mankind, anonymous and yet heir to all the riches of heaven; but unfortunately, I found it hard to care, and if anything profound was said, it wasn't said in any language with which I'm familiar. It's not difficult to see why this guy has such a reputation, but for my money he works best in short, sweet bursts.

The Sex Shops of Sherman Oaks

SJXSJC The Sex Shops of Sherman Oaks (2021)
To kick off at something of a tangent, back when I was a self-involved teenager and my mother was doing a literature degree of some description at Warwick University, she often dropped me off at the university's expansive library so as to keep me occupied for an hour or so. I expect she hoped I'd discover Dickens but I usually ended up browsing the William Burroughs shelf. I'd just discovered his writing and the university kept original hardbacks of all the obscure out of print books, a few of which I hadn't seen before and have never encountered since. A couple of these were illustrated with collages by Burroughs himself, or Brion Gysin, or somebody else - stark black and white things, often jarring cut-up images very much belonging to the same lineage of juxtaposition and dissent as Steven Purtill's illustrations for The Sex Shops of Sherman Oaks, which similarly reminds me of that initial thrill of discovering Burroughs for the first time. This one comes from Amphetamine Sulphate's science-fiction imprint. As may be obvious, it's more Burroughs than Asimov and as such falls under the heading of things which approximately continue the experimental thrust of Moorcock's New Worlds.

That being said, while I presume the influence of Burroughs may figure in there somewhere, and the occasional passage suggests something of his voice, this is nevertheless something new, or at least new to me. The narrative is delivered in short, functional sentences, sometimes without verbs, and with an overpowering tendency towards what may initially seem like the sort of random digression which results from cut-up texts. There's a fairly high degree of repetition, and while some of it may indeed be derived from the cut-up technique, the whole seems quite carefully directed towards specific effects and is therefore a long way from comprising random phrases plucked out of a top hat.

Human as alien as animal as transformative substance. My gills again. My lungs left behind. The anti-intro that discusses mutations only. New genes discovered in the side streets of North Inglewood. My personal mental fitness … a direct agency to despair. Psychedelic mathematics … the double helix … organisms occur as new species … desirous selection.

It's all like this, nearly two-hundred pages, and the cumulative effect is akin to a wall of noise with little variation in tone. Nevertheless the reader will begin to notice patterns emerging from the static, not unlike images seen flickering within flames, and after a short time it feels as though you're reading something with a conventional, if not exactly traditional, narrative hidden within the information overload. Much of the content contradicts and even skewers attempts to make sense of what may or may not be happening, not least occasional half-glimpses of cyborgs and flying saucers intruding on whatever reality our narrator occupies, and yet the suggestion that we're reading something more structured persists.

I'm not sure what to make of this, but I suppose it could be viewed as narrative which gives equal emphasis to experienced reality, stray thoughts and memories, and even alternatives occurring somewhere within the many realms of possibility. Our narrator is involved with someone named Madhab, or maybe he's Madhab, but the perspectives remain fluid to the point of even gender drifting back and forth. They or he or she or whoever move around from place to place, brains fried by chemicals, engaging in auto-erotic asphyxiation amongst other pastimes. It might almost be a road movie with the first few Chrome albums on heavy rotation, but one where that which is described represents a mere fraction of the greater reality as though we experience only the sharp peaks of something otherwise too vast to operate as text in a meaningful way.

As will hopefully be clear from the above - keeping in mind that this is just my interpretation - The Sex Shops of Sherman Oaks really isn't much like Burroughs aside from the short-circuiting of consensus reality which it effects; and surprisingly, it's not even a difficult novel once the reader has dispensed with any of the usual expectations. I remain confused but am nevertheless violently impressed.

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.

Rhialto the Marvellous

Jack Vance Rhialto the Marvellous (1985)
This one is part of the Dying Earth series, as it's called, which I picked up purely because Matthew Hughes cited it as a significant influence on his Raffalon stories - which I can see now that I know what to look for. I tend to avoid anything involving wizards as a general rule, but as with Hughes' writing, this is clearly something else. More than anything it reminds me of Moorcock's Dancers at the End of Time in being set in the improbably distant future amongst a community of peculiarly eccentric beings with strange powers. That being said, it's quite different to Dancers while being similarly distinguished as betraying no tangible influence from Tolkien or any of the usual pointy-hatted suspects.

What actually seems to distinguish Vance from everybody else - at least everybody else that I've read - is the language, ornate, luxuriant, decadent and never afraid to use an archaic term if it suits the sentence, or even to just make something up. With that which is described being at least as strange and ornate as the composition of its description, Rhialto is a delight to read, resembling surrealist fiction as much as fantasy, conjuring images as much resembling traditional Japanese art as Heironymous Bosch as Yellow Submarine; and it's nothing if not witty.

A big-bellied old man with grey wattles sidled a few steps forward. He spoke in a wheedling nasal voice: 'Must your disgust be so blatant? True: we are anthropophages. True: we put strangers to succulent use. Is this truly good cause for hostility? The world is as it is and each of us must hope in some fashion to be of service to his fellows, even if only in the form of a soup.'

The only downside here is arguably that the language is such as to require the reader's full and undivided attention, because it can be otherwise quite easy to lose one's footing and slip, mid-narrative, and a little of Vance's prose goes a long way. Then again, if that seems like it might be a problem, you should probably stick to Terry Brooks or one of those guys.

The Damned Busters

Matthew Hughes The Damned Busters (2011)
I've been reasonably knocked out by Hughes' pseudo-Rennaissance Raffalon stories in Fantasy & Science Fiction, and enough so as to find his name imprinted on my admittedly short mental list of authors whose work I look out for when in Half Price - Murray Leinster, Katherine MacLean, Moorcock, Robert Moore Williams, and those six A. E. van Vogt novels that I still haven't read; and so it was that I came to The Damned Busters, which is actually the first part of a trilogy in an approximately contemporary setting; so it wasn't quite the Hughes I was looking for, or at least which I expected to find, but it seemed worth a go.

The Damned Busters is, of all things, a superhero novel, sort of, although you could probably call it urban fantasy if you felt so inclined. Our guy acquires his powers when accidentally summoning a demon and inadvertently driving all the minions of hell to industrial action, resulting in a period of nothing bad happening anywhere on Earth, which turns out to be disastrous; and the aforementioned powers come as part of the settlement deal. Thus does he embark upon a career fighting crime, inspired by a favourite comic book - naturally - and thus does his life become greatly more complicated than he could have anticipated.

It's an odd book in that it reads nothing like you would expect from the description, or how you might imagine superhero prose fiction would read for that matter. Our man is a high-functioning autistic and might therefore be described as tightly wound - which hopefully isn't too insulting to anyone - and although the story isn't directly told from his perspective, his somewhat analytical tone informs the narrative, lending everything an unusually even pace. This apparently put some readers off, but I personally found it quite refreshing to read this kind of story without having to wade through the sort of overwritten gothic melodrama which may as well have been Bauhaus lyrics. It also helps that Hughes is witty without feeling the need to crack jokes all the time, so The Damned Busters feels like a distant relative of Pratchett, albeit with aesthetic parallels to certain Vertigo comics from the nineties. Most surprising of all are interludes of philosophical debate on the nature of morality - amongst other ideas pertaining to the field of sin and punishment - with some depth, or what felt like some depth to me - certainly very satisfying and without assuming the reader needs everything spelled out in primary colours. I'm looking at you, John Bunyan.

If I have a complaint, it's probably that the book could have been a little shorter; but The Damned Busters was otherwise highly satisfying, quietly impressive, and I'm now particularly looking forward to the Raffalon book which Mrs. Pamphlets gave me for Christmas.

The Sailor on the Seas of Fate

 

Michael Moorcock The Sailor on the Seas of Fate (1976)
I don't know that I really have anything to say about this second book which I didn't already say about the first Elric title. It's maybe marginally less engaging due to the initial shock having worn off and is perhaps less self-contained than Elric of Melniboné, but Moorcock continues to piss over anything Tolkien - off the top of my head - ever wrote in producing something so resolutely of its genre yet encompassing random swerves and unexpected elements which probably wouldn't have occurred to lesser authors. The influence of Abraham Merritt seems tangible, unless it's just me, and I'm now on the lookout for the third in the series, which must count for something.

Elric of Melniboné

Michael Moorcock Elric of Melniboné (1972)
Much as I loves me some Moorcock, I had no real intention of going anywhere near these. I've never been particularly big on sword and sorcery or sagas amounting to a million volumes, the existence of which seems to imply that you need to collect the whole fucking set because one on its own won't make any sense, and I'm sure I'd heard somewhere that Moorcock had churned out his Elric books to a formula mainly for the sake of getting paid. Also, I recall a ton of these things hogging a certain corner of the bookstore during my seventies childhood, and suspected Elric to be the first step on a slippery slope which would inevitably lead to Sven Hassel, Pan horror anthologies, and more Judas Priest albums than I really had use for; but there it was for just a couple of dollars, and being the first one it would surely be obliged to make some sort of sense without my having to take a degree in Elric Studies, and - fuck it - it's Moorcock, so how bad could it really be?

Actually, it's great, and great beyond my expectations. I suppose I should have known, what with it being Moorcock and all. Even if this was his crowd-pleasing money spinner, he still had to keep himself sufficiently interested in writing the thing and so we have sword and sorcery which inhabits the familiarly mythic language of the genre but otherwise shoots off in all sorts of weird, wonderful, and entirely unexpected directions, and accordingly very much distinguishes itself as massively superior to the usual bumbling Tolkien karaoke turns. Elric manages to be both faithful to the genre, and yet completely fucking weird, and therefore healthily and spikily at odds with the usual stumpy twats who do a-questing go.

Every time I read a new Moorcock, my estimation of the man's talents - and of the extent of his influence on all which has come since - goes up, just a little.

The Lord of the Rings

J.R.R. Tolkien The Lord of the Rings (1955)
I suspect this one may take some time so, as I did with both Philip K. Dick's Exegesis and Alan Moore's bloody awful Jerusalem, I'm going to write the review as a diary.

As a child, The Lord of the Rings appealed to me because of its apparent sense of scale, and because of its drawing so heavily on a mythology so firmly rooted in the world I saw outside my window, a mythology which seemingly redefined the trappings of modern life as ephemeral and therefore lacking substance. The world outside my window was almost oppressively rural, beginning on a farm, then moving to a small market town when I was eleven; and in a shire, specifically Warwickshire - half a day from the Oxfordshire landscape which so obviously inspired Tolkien. Reading the opening chapters of this book, I couldn't help but see the fields and villages I knew growing up. I suspect I'd either read The Hobbit - or it had been read to me - and I'd seen Ralph Bakshi's animated adaptation at the cinema in Stratford-upon-Avon, so I'd been thinking about the book when I was awarded some sort of school English prize in what I assume would have been the Summer of 1979. I've no idea why I was awarded the prize, and suspect it said more about the standard of the competition than any real aptitude on my part, but anyway, they asked what I would like, so I said The Lord of the Rings. I recall my parents being required to supplement my prize money which didn't quite cover the full cost of the three paperback volumes published by George Allen & Unwin, which would have come to a whopping £3.75. When we went on holiday that year, I took the books with me for a fortnight in either Wales or Cornwall.

I read the first two, then began the third in the car as we were coming home, but lost interest. It felt as though I'd spent the previous couple of days reading nothing but descriptions of battles, and I'd lost track of who was fighting who and why. I never got any further, aside from following a radio adaptation in 1981, of which I have no actual recollection and only know because I wrote it down in my diary.

I had no further thoughts or opinions on The Lord of the Rings for a long time, at least not until the Peter Jackson movies came out. The first was sort of watchable in so much as that they had clearly spent a shitload of money on the effects. It did it's job, beyond which I found it difficult to get that excited about it.

My cousin and his wife, on the other hand, got quite evangelical, as they often did about anything harking back to a tweedier, more rustic age when it was a whole lot easier to be middle class. I met them in a pub in West Dulwich immediately following their having been to see the second movie, and they talked about nothing else. I explained, and at diplomatic length, how I'd stalled on the third volume, hoping to communicate that I didn't actually care about the thing one way or the other and would be happy to move onto almost any other topic of conversation.

'If you like,' proposed my cousin like a genial form master, 'Andrea and I could put in a good word when we return it to the library, and they may set it aside for you.'

'Set what aside?' I wondered out loud, absolutely lost. 'What are you talking about now?'

'The Lord of the Rings trilogy - the original books.' He spoke as though addressing a person who hadn't realised that the film he'd just seen was based on a novel.

'I've read them,' I said, slightly shocked, 'or at least the first two.'

'Oh - you've read them?'

'Yes. That's what I've been telling you for the last ten minutes. What the hell did you think I was talking about?'

He didn't answer and looked a little awkward as he sat there, five years younger than myself, puffing away on his fucking pipe. I could feel blood rushing in my ears, such was my anger. Here was proof that the fucker never listened to a word anyone said, and I was additionally niggled by the idea that he presumed to have a word on my behalf at the local library, apparently imagining himself a nineteenth century philanthropist encouraging the rest of us serfs to read a book every once in a while.

This doesn't really have much bearing on anything beyond my cousin being just the sort of individual I've come to associate with The Lord of the Rings - deeply conservative despite certain folksy affectations, a group encompassing everyone from the aforementioned cousin to fannish types who dress as elves and attend conventions.

I saw the other two movies, or possibly just the second one, but my inability to summon enthusiasm had turned to active nausea. They were too long, too much time spent on lingering homoerotic glances shared between Sam and his beloved Master Frodo, their eyes CGI-magnified into moist blobs of Hallmark sentiment. The movies were a series of explosions and flashing lights, twinkling Thomas Kinkade paintings stretched out to four hours of screen time; and The Hobbit was even worse, or the first part was. I never bothered with the other two, because I'd enjoyed the book and could still recall having enjoyed it. Paul Ebbs, an author of Who fiction who once penned an episode of Casualty and therefore knows all about how to do writing and that, opined that the only possible reason anyone might dislike the Peter Jackson movies could be that they simply didn't understand Tolkien; you know, like how some people don't understand fucking Schopenhauer.

By around 2005, my admittedly increasingly vague opinion of The Lord of the Rings had settled into a state approximately summarised by my facebook friend Tommy Ross, who wrote:

I'd really loved The Hobbit, so I had high hopes when I picked up Lord of the Rings from the town library and read it, with great concentration, in the space of three weeks.

I thought it was fucking dreadful, but I didn't really trust my original impression, so I renewed it and read it all again. Was my first impression all wrong? No - it was rubbish.

All the characters in it are boring. Everything they do is either egotistical, ill-advised, pointless or in some way accepting of a shitty situation. The only vaguely interesting characters are Gandalf (an old man who is sort-of-Jesus) and Sauron, who arguably doesn't exist at all - the book would make just as much sense if he was a shared hallucination.

The evils in the book are so paltry, a few little hairy-footed people can defeat them by the power of daggers and resting their heads in each other's laps. There are a load of side-stories that don't go anywhere, save for Pippin coming back with some sort of potion to throw the naughty humans out.

Sauron could motivate armies to fight, but surely that was going to happen all the time anyway in a feudalist crapsack world where there's nothing to do but wage wars, especially when the main enemies are orcs. Mount Doom is the kind of hacky bullshit name you'd expect from a Scooby Doo cartoon, not a classic novel. The battle scenes, intended to be epic, are so badly written they end up conveying nothing much at all - the sentence he hit things with a sword conveys all the weight of a Tolkien fight scene. Then there's all the fucking awful singing and poetry, which are at least picked out in italics so you can skip past them with a minimum of effort.

Finally, the moral heart of the story, as I recall, is that it's a complete waste of time doing anything, going anywhere or trying to change, because all we should be doing is living in holes, eating sausages and smoking pipes. Now come on, that's piss poor!

Nevertheless, here I am, giving this thing another crack of the whip after all this time, partially feeling that I somehow owe it to myself to at least finish what I began on that Cornish (or possibly Welsh) holiday forty years ago.

We kick off with The Fellowship of the Ring (1954), which I've now been reading for three days and am very much enjoying, much to my surprise. Very little has happened beyond that the hobbits have arrived at some spooky woodland as the author laboriously extricates them from their comfort zone at a bumbling pace entirely absent from the Peter Jackson version, despite whatever Paul Ebbs may have told you. Michael Moorcock famously described Lord of the Rings as Epic Pooh in a critical essay* of that name, presumably because, as with Milne's Winnie, our point of view is equivalent to that of a child and is similarly fixated on comfort, security, and whatever may threaten either - albeit restated in terms of a mythic saga. The hobbits are children without the burden of actually being children, so they can smoke, drink, and probably screw without destabilising the narrative beyond its already stretched credibility.

The landscape is, as I said, familiar from my own childhood, and I presume this has been equally true for many readers over the years. Where Tolkien invokes his setting with a degree of rustic whimsy, it never quite becomes cloying, but is balanced with a degree of wit which has been entirely absent from any of the adaptations. Admittedly it's a parochial wit, the sort of thing I recall from  childhood, observations made by old farts outside the pub as you pass en route to the village shop, the stock of which probably depends on whether you found such observations funny at the time.

I've heard it said that Lord of the Rings is an allegory for the rise of Nazism and the second world war, although Tolkien denies this in his introduction and - seven chapters in - I'm not finding it a convincing comparison. If anything, the story seems a broader parable about how we relate to the wider world and that which may intrude upon our sense of security. The comforting familiarity of the hobbits' world is established in these opening chapters, and gives contrast to their fear of the unquantified and unknown; but I'm not yet convinced of Tolkien's motives being entirely conservative. Rather, I suspect they constitute a dialogue concerning the same. Frodo, for example, is at least able to see some way beyond his own love of home and hearth.

'I should like to save the Shire, if I could - though there have been times when I thought the inhabitants too stupid and dull for words, and have felt that an earthquake or an invasion of dragons might be good for them. But I don't feel like that now. I feel that as long as the Shire lies behind, safe and comfortable, I shall find wandering more bearable: I shall know that somewhere there is a firm foothold, even if my feet cannot stand there again.'

Gildor the elf seems to have an ever better view of the bigger picture.

'Others dwelt here before hobbits were; and others will dwell here again when hobbits are no more. The wide world is all about you: you can fence yourselves in, but you cannot forever fence it out.'

Of course, he might be talking about Hitler, but if we accept hobbits as at least childlike, the mood of these opening chapters seems more likely to be drawn from a child's conditional sense of security along with its knowledge of a generational horizon beyond which life will become inevitably complicated and characterised by the unfamiliar and presently incomprehensible.

Day 4. Frodo and pals spend an entire chapter in the company of Tom Bombadil. Tom Bombadil seems to be the mythic green man, give or take some small change, and the chapters which feature him have the rhythm of fairy tale, as distinct from the cosy realism of preceding chapters, and are accordingly a bit on the twee side. This section has a slightly Victorian feel and I guess it's significant that Tolkien admired William Morris. Nothing much happens aside from feasting and the singing of songs about how much they've enjoyed the feasting, seguing into some random scrap with a bunch of ghosts, the point of which seems to be to furnish our lads with mystic daggers. It feels a little arbitrary, almost as though Tolkien suddenly noticed how much wasn't actually happening in his epic saga.

Tolkien was a scholar of language, poetry, mythology, and all of that good stuff. I get the impression that his main passion was the construction of languages, notably those spoken by elves and the like, complete with the mythological, pseudo-historical, and geographical background which would account for their evolution; and Lord of the Rings is, very roughly speaking, his attempt to describe those constructions by moving little men up and down the landscape so as to reveal its shape. Hence the questing aspect, and the difficulty he has in giving his hobbits anything to do of real consequence beyond moving them all to another part of the map.

This is probably most likely why, as Mr. Ross observes, they don't really have much in the way of character, unless stuffing your face counts as a personality trait, and they make their way as would children, complete with moments of bewildering petulance - notably when Frodo gets pissy with the busy landlord of the Prancing Pony for failing to dutifully forward an email from Gandalf due to his already having a full time job and not actually being a postman; and we've already established that Middle-earth has postmen in the first few chapters, in case you were wondering.

'He deserves roasting. If I had got this at once, we might all have been safe in Rivendell by now.'

Nevertheless, this isn't actually inconsistent with the narrative having begun to carry a certain je ne sais quoi of Daily Mail readership - nothing overt, or at least nothing quite so strong as the shit my dad comes out with, but it's there.

The Shire-hobbits referred to those of Bree, and to any others that lived beyond the borders, as Outsiders, and took very little interest in them, considering them dull and uncouth. There were probably many more Outsiders scattered about in the West of the World in those days than the people of the Shire imagined. Some, doubtless, were no better than tramps, ready to dig a hole in any bank and stay only as long as it suited them.

Remember how I mentioned growing up in a part of the country upon which Tolkien's Shire was most likely modelled? Well, that's why I moved away just as soon as I was old enough and never went back.

There was trouble away in the South, and it seemed that the men who had come up the Greenway were on the move, looking for lands where they could find some peace. The Bree-folk were sympathetic, but plainly not very ready to take a large number of strangers into their little land. Middle-earth is full up, they protested.

I may actually have added that last sentence for the sake of emphasis and because it amuses me. Reading up on the man, there can be little doubt that Tolkien was essentially decent, and was in addition at least as vocally opposed to racism and xenophobia as he was to the modern world, but he was unavoidably a man of his time and culture in certain respects, and even though we've already met the Black Riders and understood them to be dark, vaguely supernatural figures, it's still a bit weird when the pub landlord comes out with, no black man shall pass my doors.

Day 5. More trecking yonder. We've made it to where the fairies live, so it's mostly another round of feasting and singing songs. I've tried to read a few of the songs but I still can't see the point of them. I'm now half-way through Fellowship and it's difficult to miss that not much has happened, besides travel from one place to another interspersed with songs and feasting. What few dramatic encounters have occurred have been resolved by dumb luck or things occurring in the nick of time, almost as though the author resents the dramatic conventions of conflict in tales such as the one he's decided to write; and yet the specifics of travel and landscape are pored over with laborious attention to detail, even to the point of Tolkien describing, for example, what someone would see were they to climb such and such a hill and look west, even if they don't, meaning the information related has no actual bearing on anything. Fellowship is thus far reading a lot like an afterthought to the world Tolkien built for the sake of accounting for his invented languages, and now that he's actually sat down to write the story, it feels as though he doesn't know what to do with it, having been happier describing it in mythic terms as something which occurred off camera, so to speak; which leaves us with somewhat repetitive sentiment for the pre-industrial landscape.

It occurs to me that at the core of this thing is something which isn't so different from people learning to speak Klingon, and Middle-earth seems to be very much a precursor to the whole shared universe deal of Marvel, DC, Star Trek, Doctor Who and so on, hence its appeal to the same sort of individual. It's a faux-mythology based on collectibles, albeit as ideas rather than action figures and plastic bobble-headed monstrosities at the time of publication. In keeping with the nerd credentials, by page two-hundred, it's not even that well written - not terrible, but workmanlike and with very little genuine poetry for something with such a William Morris fixation. Even the wit has sunk to the level of generic cracks about whether or not it might be time for dinner and - oh look - Sam's stuffing his fat fucking face again. Ha ha.

Day 6. We've made it to Rivendell, so that's pretty much an entire chapter of elves, dwarves and others stood around explaining the plot to each other, mostly things we haven't yet seen and which is therefore a bit more interesting than the previous couple of chapters. Sam stuffs his face with cakes, breaks wind, and everyone laughs, and we learn that Saruman, the wizard Prime Minister, has gone over to the dark side of the force, just as Darth Vader did many centuries before in a galaxy far, far away.

In truth there was too, much more song,
Rendering the tale so overly long,
The author methinks sought to add a touch of class,
But really it's just a pain in the arse,
For no cunt wants to read that shit,
Unless they're mental, at least a bit,
Tis like unto being stuck in a lift with some wanker,
Who doth sup his ale from pewter tankard,
All the while singing a-hey-nonny-plughole,
One finger lodged so surely in his lughole.
Pootle-pottle-poo and a ninny-nonny noo.

Otherwise it was okay, nothing mind-bending, and once they've had their conference, they head for the hills which is a bit more interesting than it has been for a few days.

Day 7. The gang take a shortcut through a mountain hollowed out by dwarves, Gandalf seemingly pegs it, and I realise that Star Wars was basically Lord of the Rings but with robots. I'm not sure why I've only just noticed this. Anyway, despite any reservations I may have, or may have had, Fellowship is fairly readable at the moment, at least providing you skip all the fucking singing.

Day 8. A domestic difference of opinion over dishes left me without much enthusiasm for yet more Lord of the Rings at bedtime, so I've only read half the usual page count. Anyway, they've made it out of the mountain. Gandalf hasn't yet come back to life, so I expect that will happen later. Surprisingly they've ended up in yet another Elven realm, meaning lots of stuff which probably seems awe-inspiring if you're easily swayed by overstated mystery and speeches wherein deeds are doth rather than did or done, and not much in the way of wisecracks or funnies excepting the usual stuff about how much Sam has eaten. Galadriel, whom I assume was probably Gwyneth Paltrow in the movie, shows Frodo - or possibly Sam during the three seconds when he's not stuffing his face - a magic mirror, revealing that the Shire has become subject to urban renewal in their absence. Everyone agrees that they miss home, and not for the first time. Also, it turns out that Frodo is wearing some kind of mystic vest of power. I suppose it must have been mentioned earlier, although I don't remember it at all.

Day 9. I finished the first one, and it was generally okay, really just an exercise in establishing a landscape by moving figures from one end to the other so as to give us an impression of shape; and I'm reminded how the book seems secondary to its own mythology. I suspect its author was a big fan of lists and sets and tallies.

All hobbits were, in any case, clannish and reckoned up their relationships with great care. They drew long and elaborate family-trees with innumerable branches. In dealing with hobbits it is important to remember who is related to whom, and in what degree.

Four-hundred pages is one fuck of a long haul for what little actually happens within those pages, but it wasn't a chore given that I've committed to reading this thing even if it kills me. Unfortunately though, it does rather build up one's expectation of something occurring in The Two Towers (1954) which has started off well, at least with an increased sense of purpose. Boromir is dead, although he was never really established as a personality beyond the usual generic warrior shite - lots of valiantly being, swearing fealty, gazing grimly at the northern weald and all that sort of thing, so I'm not sure how much it matters.

The names are beginning to grate a little as I've never found them convincing, and certainly not Legolas who sounds like a plastic brick themed member of the Legion of Super Heroes. There was a pony named Bill at the end of the first book, so I don't see why J.R.R. couldn't simply have used familiar and therefore more plausible names which at least don't get in the way of the story. Then again, I've always thought elves were a bit wanky so I don't suppose it matters.

Day 10. Book two seems to get off to a good start, picking up the pace which the first one lacked, with a much stronger sense of forward motion compensating for a continued lack of clarity regarding the direction in which we're actually heading. Also, they've now split into three groups which makes it a bit more engaging. It has occurred to me that orc sounds somewhat like oik, and accordingly - now that we actually spend time with them - they're an uncultured, loutish rabble, as distinct from our heroes who seem much more akin to the chaps one may recall from one's jolly old varsity days. I'm not sure whether there's much point in reading anything into this, or into the suggestion that Saruman may actually be a foreigner from across the sea and not from around these parts, but it's there if you want it. The theme of progress, or more specifically industrialised society, as a bad thing is reiterated in passing - Saruman is described as having a mind of metal and wheels, and the land clearance campaign of his orcs - trees cut and burned with belching flames and black smoke aplenty - is hardly ambiguous in its symbolism. Taking this theme to a potentially ridiculous limit, we also meet the ents - tree spirits who have, as one, lost their wives and have thus failed to produce a younger generation. The wives, we are told, had all sorts of fancy ideas about growing fruit and farming, so I guess even agriculture represented the first step on a slippery slope for Tolkien.

Day 11. As the sun was westering, I turned once more to my book, yet found its tale as unto the ascent of a mountain made in heavy boots, mayhap resulting from the path which did lead to this divertment being paved with a long and tiring day. Returned to the book did I once the sun rose again and I had revived from slumber, and to a refrain similar to that already sung in these very pages, that nature shalt rise up from the depths to smite the folly of human progress, and that nature's sword shalt be swung by the ents, the people of the trees.

Delivered this message was by Gandalf, returned from that which we had taken for his certain death without an overly generous helping of surprise, but neither with much of an explanation as to why the daisies in the field must yet push themselves towards the light unaided by his wizardly hand. More better was this tale told even by George fucking Lucas, or at least with greater veracity and from a cloth less easily rent asunder by disbelief.

To the court of the Horse Lords did the company then go, where the regent is found to be under the devious spell of a man known as Wormtongue who bends the king's ear with only fake news and its like. Most strange it doth seem that none should wonder at the testimony of a man so named, but then these were the olden days many centuries before moving pictures brought forth the image of the scheming fellow who twirls his moustache between forefinger and thumb as he secures a young lady before the advance of an iron carriage.

Then did they wage war at Helm's Deep, the first of the great battles, sending my thoughts back to that Welsh (or possibly Cornish) holiday of my youth when first I roved my eyes upon this page and found it less than toothsome.

Day 12. I'm sure I recall this part of the second book shrugging off my attention span during one of those battles where I lost track of who was who, but it doesn't seem to be here; so either I've remembered wrongly or Pippin's laborious account of everything that's ever happened was simply too much for me at the age of fourteen. Anyway, the gang trounce Saruman, driving him from Isengard, a realm written as what I assume would be Tolkien's idea of a hellish industrial wasteland, at least allowing for the fact that we're probably not going to find cellphone towers in Lord of the Rings; so, you know, progress is bad and stuff, yeah?

Much is made of the friendship of Gimli and Legolas, and to the point at which it becomes a bit tiresome. Gimli is a dwarf and Legolas is an elf, so they're natural enemies who've overcome their mutual antipathy, and boy - don't we know it. There's actually an entire chapter, The Door of Flangelfoom, where Gimli and Legolas each insist that the other go through the named door first.

'After you, my very good friend.'

'No - after you, I must insist, my dear sir.'

It goes on like that for fifty pages, or it would do had it been written by Tolkien and included in the book, which it wasn't; although it sort of feels as though it was.

Day 13. We're back with Sam and Frodo for the second half of Two Towers as they trek across the mountains, which I vaguely remember from the movie. Thankfully Tolkien's Sam is merely an unusually loyal and slightly basic friend to Mr. Frodo, unlike in the film where it looks as though he's about to start rummaging down the front of his pal's trousers any minute. I found some of those lingering glances really hard to watch. All I can recall of this section, aside from the homoerotic subtext, is the two hobbits crossing the mountain range with Gollum in tow before getting caught by a giant spider. Flipping through the rest of the book I see they don't actually encounter the giant spider for at least another four million chapters, so I assume there's going to be a fuck of a lot of singing in the mean time. I'm beginning to wonder why Lord of the Rings needed to be three books, but then I suppose scale is the whole point.

Day 14. I only managed a handful of pages due to a dental appointment impinging upon my customary reading time, but Sam, Frodo and Gollum have made it to somewhere a bit more pastoral, which I don't remember at all from either being fourteen or the more recent movie - although that's probably not too surprising given that I was bored shitless more or less for the duration of both.

Day 15. Now they're hanging around with Faramir, brother of Boromir, for no immediately obvious reason. Possibly the point of this interlude is so as to increase our sympathy for Gollum whom Faramir regards as monstrous; in contrast with Frodo and possibly also Tolkien's view of Gollum as a victim of the terrible power of the ring more than its agent; or it could be for the sake of delivering this line which, if not a flat out condemnation of industrialisation, is arguably concerned with associated aspects of progress.

'We are become Middle Men, of the Twilight, but with memory of other things. For as the Rohirrim do, we now love war and valour as things good in themselves, both a sport and an end; and though we still hold that a warrior should have more skills and knowledge than only the craft of weapons and slaying, we esteem a warrior, nonetheless, above men of other crafts.'

In unrelated news, I came across this from Roger Ebert's review of Kyle Newman's Fanboys.

A lot of fans are basically fans of fandom itself. It's all about them. They have mastered the Star Wars or Star Trek universes or whatever, but their objects of veneration are useful mainly as a backdrop to their own devotion. Anyone who would camp out in a tent on the sidewalk for weeks in order to be first in line for a movie is more into camping on the sidewalk than movies.

Extreme fandom may serve as a security blanket for the socially inept, who use its extreme structure as a substitute for social skills. If you are Luke Skywalker and she is Princess Leia, you already know what to say to each other, which is so much safer than having to ad-lib it. Your fannish obsession is your beard. If you know absolutely all the trivia about your cubbyhole of pop culture, it saves you from having to know anything about anything else. That's why it's excruciatingly boring to talk to such people: They're always asking you questions they know the answer to.

I'd say this applies, or at least explains some of the continued appeal of Lord of the Rings as something with an inordinately complex and arguably extraneous backstory over which fannish types may work themselves into a lather, just like all those people who learned to speak Klingon; and as with Star Trek and others, this is how it was designed, rather than simply being something tagged on as an afterthought by persons with too much time on their hands.

At least Star Trek is fun.

Day 16. I'm now onto The Return of the King (1955) so the end is in sight, not least because half of the final volume comprises background material, essays and lists which I have no interest in reading. The Two Towers closes with a scrap between Frodo and a giant spider whom I recall not so much from either the movie or the last time I tried to read this thing, as from my friend Carl's startling recollection of a Joy Division gig, reproduced here in full because it's arguably more entertaining than Lord of the Rings:

At the Music Machine they were chugging along through their impressive ska set when Ian Curtis announced a special guest during an instrumental break whilst all the band members were doing a jazz improv piece. Imagine my surprise when the special guest turned out to be celebrity spider Shelob!

She grabbed the microphone stand and roared out Slade's Get Down and Get With It with the band tearing into the song displaying incredible gusto. I swear Stephen Morris' drum kit caught alight from all the heavy pounding, he ended up playing a set of oil drums with lump hammers. By this point Ian Curtis was completely naked and hurling his stools at Shelob, he somehow managed to fit an entire fire extinguisher into his anus, much to the approval of the mainly teddy boy audience. After this they performed the entire Slade catalogue with Shelob wading into the crowd wearing a giant necklace made of television sets.

If I remember correctly the concert ended up later than usual by a month or so due to the airforce bombing us out of the venue. They don't do gigs like that anymore.

Actually, the closing chapters of The Two Towers are fairly readable, conspicuously lacking those lengthy descriptions of battles wherein I'd lost track of who was fighting who and why, as mentioned above; so I don't know what happened there. I assume it was simply all a bit above my reading age when I was fourteen, given that I was more acclimated to the somewhat lighter fare of Terrance Dicks and 2000AD comic, which is embarrassing because there's nothing deep about Lord of the Rings. Mostly it's simply long-winded and self-important, stylistically speaking.

Anyway, as I say Two Towers is approximately readable, and there's a nice little aside in chapter eight where they all take to wondering whether anyone will eventually tell Frodo's story, just as Frodo and pals themselves do tell of those even more ancient sagas which Tolkien invented in much the same spirit as whoever it was who came up with the reason for the Klingons in Patrick Stewart's version of Star Trek being significantly hairier and lumpier than those encountered by William Shatner.

Contrasting with the close of The Two Towers wherein we overhear orcs conversing in the manner of pie-scoffing working class types, The Return of the King opens with a resumption of courtly language as Gandalf and Pippin arrive in Gondor, the realm from which noble Boromir didst sally forth, so we're back to page after page of Marvel Shakespearean old timey talk with lots of things being yonder. It's tempting to interpret this as some sort of class deal with regal types from better homes who've had the benefit of a proper education set in contrast with orc chavs who probably voted for Hitler because they're a bunch of fucking thickies, but the whole world war two analogy still seems a bit thin beyond the general mood of conflict on an epic scale.

By the same token, I've had occasion to wonder at Gollum, the hunched subterranean troll who creams his loincloth over the precious. Specifically I've wondered at his originally being identified with the superficially Semitic sounding name of Sméagol, where other hobbit names mostly sound vaguely faux-Celtic; but if there's even a thing here, it seems most likely that Tolkien may have simply been drawing on existing mythology rooted in old racial stereotypes, because otherwise I'd say you would probably have to dig so deep as to start tunnelling in search of any dubious subtext. Gollum may even be the most interesting character in the book. He's revolting yet with faint glimpses of former redeeming features, and even Gandalf speaks in his defence when someone suggests that Gollum deserves death back in the second chapter of Fellowship.

'Deserves it! I daresay he does. Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.'

So that's nice.

Day 17. Well, I definitely read another fifty or so pages and had things to say about them, but that was this morning and now it seems to have gone, so fuck knows what happened. The chapters I read mostly covered the two lesser hobbits hanging around with kingly types and everyone getting ready for a punch-up with Mordor. I suspect this was the section I found so dry and hard to process with my fourteen-year old attention span that I've remembered it as nothing but descriptions of battles, and I'd lost track of who was fighting who and why. On the other hand, it's nice to know I was actually right about something at the age of fourteen.

Day 18. I couldn't face any more of the behold and yonder last night and switched to the Tintin book, Destination Moon, because I hadn't read it in probably fifty years and didn't realise I actually had a copy. In fact I had the impression that of all the Tintin books I owned as a kid, only two remained, and yet there's a whole stack of them on my shelf neatly filed between Geoff Tibball's Golden Age of Children's Television and issues of To Feet! To Feet! fanzine, and I have no memory of having come by them. They look unread. I presume I must have picked up a job lot on the cheap at some point and forgotten all about it.

Anyway, I came back to Lord of the Rings this morning and we've definitely reached those chapters comprising nothing but descriptions of battles, although this time I at least have a vague idea of who is fighting who; not sure about the why. Reasons why Sauron might desire dominion over all Middle-earth are implied rather than stated, the implication mostly being for he is most dark and such deeds are as unto the doings of those who from the light have turned; speaking of which.

The black rider flung back his hood and behold! he had a kingly crown; and yet upon no head visible was it set. The red fires shone between it and the mantled shoulders vast and dark. From a mouth unseen there came a deadly laughter.

See, setting the words down in the wrong order doesn't necessarily lend the text any greater sense of authenticity, whatever that may be, any more than it leaves the narrative any spookier or more portentous. Upon no head visible was it set, for example, barely makes sense, and this sort of syntax really gets in the way of one's comprehension of chapters which needed all the help they could get. I'm not sure that writing the words upon no head visible was it set in the year 1955 is really much different to introducing a French character who exclaims zut alors and oh la la every other sentence.

Anyway, as to the actual battles described, it strikes me as slightly odd that someone should have been writing anything of such composition so soon after two world wars of such unprecedented brutality, and yet in the wake of the trenches, death camps, shoeless prisoners frog-marched across the entirety of Poland in the snow, here we have swords clashing and noble browed sons of the north wind whom their chins they do steel forth and doth stand fast against the hordes of Mordor.

Day 19. Mostly scrapping embellished with conversations regarding the same, of which those involving hobbits seem marginally more engaging, as though that's what Tolkien really wanted to write but had committed himself to composing the biggest big thing ever, requiring shitloads of grunting men in helmets sternly vowing this, that and the other. Also, I've just realised that beyond the sort of vague animism one might expect in something involving elves, there's no actual religion described in this book, which seems odd. There's a mention of some evil of which Sauron is himself but a servant or emissary, but that seems to be it. If Tolkien is mimicking the narrative form of ancient texts, this seems an oversight to me. I'm pretty sure I recall Arthurian legend featuring some kind of Christian element, as suggested by all that stuff about the grail, although more quantifiable narratives such as - off the top of my head - the epics of Beowulf, Gilgamesh, and pre-Colombian Mexico tend to incorporate supernatural figures - even Gods by some definition - as characters within whatever story is being told; and neither approach is quite the case here. It just strikes me as odd.

Day 20. Couldn't face it last night due to inebriation from tequila ingested so as to dull my anger over Lulu Publishing now requiring book cover files to be uploaded as PDF documents. This morning I find I've made it to book six (or the second half of part three, if you prefer) so we're back with Sam and Frodo, and it's so obvious that this is what Tolkien really wanted to write that it hurts, or at least so it seems to me. Not that the Sam and Frodo chronicles aren't without their sappy tendencies, but I'll take sappy over grunting beardies who talk like Yoda and do face the north wind in their bold metal helms any fucking day. Haven't yet reached the chapter during which Sam is caught parading around in Mr. Frodo's underwear and must be punished, but I'm sure it's coming.

Day 21. The war is at last won, except it all occurs off screen sparing us any of the actual slaughter, which is all very tidy. Sauron has conveniently fled, as have all of the orcs so far as anyone can tell. After however many hundreds of pages it's been, this all comes as something of an anticlimax; and hints dropped during previous chapters about how we were doing quite well but Sauron wasn't leave this feeling somewhat like a rigged match, the point of which - if there is one - being further speechifying about victory, valour, chivalry and nobility from Aragorn and his helmeted pals. This amounting to what I suppose must have been Tolkien's experience of the second world war, real conflict is remote with nothing so messy as to make our desire for happier, leafier times seem self-involved. Gollum is redeemed by having thrown himself into a volcano with the ring, sparing us the burden of thanking him or pretending to be his mate, so that's wrapped up nicely too. Also, Éowyn, a woman who feistily dons a suit of armour and goes to war just like the men and whom I vaguely recall reading about earlier on, now declares that she's into pretty dresses and baking muffins seeing as how all the fighting and grunting are done and dusted, so that's a relief.

Day 22. The hobbits return to the Shire and the slightly cloying, rose-tinted syntax of earlier, but the Shire has been developed by ruffians who speak like villains in Cagney movies, see? Frodo therefore forms something akin to the Countryside Alliance so that they can take their country back, as stated in more or less those terms. Saruman is found to be at the heart of it all and is revealed as an actual Scooby Doo villain with Wormtongue as his loyal Ygor, which highlights one problem of this book, namely that the characters are subservient to the landscape in which they appear, and pseudo-Wagnerian warriors who do raise their swords for to slash and rend them against the terrible canvas of Mordor turn back into something from Enid Blyton in more temperate surroundings.

There was also a hundred pages of related notes and fictional narrative but I couldn't be arsed.

The Lord of the Rings isn't the worst thing I've ever read, but it's massively underwhelming for something routinely described as a classic. It isn't without enjoyable passages, but there's a lot of padding in the form of general mythic huffing and puffing because, as I said, it seems to be about the map more than it is about the story by which the map is described. I wouldn't entirely agree with Mr. Ross's observation of the message at the heart of the book being that it's a complete waste of time doing anything, going anywhere or trying to change, because all we should be doing is living in holes, eating sausages and smoking pipes, but it's certainly something in that direction, and is essentially conservative and insular. As stated, it's been suggested that Lord of the Rings was a metaphor for the second world war, which Tolkien rejected, and which I don't find entirely convincing; but it's absolutely informed by Tolkien's experience of both world wars and the political and social factors which brought them about. Indeed, the parallels are so difficult to miss - right down to Sauron's preference for red and black - as to render Tolkien's protestations at least a little redundant, even if there's not much joy to be had in reading Saruman as Oswald Mosley in a pointy hat; and given Tolkien having served in the trenches, it seems significant that he should have chosen to write about a world of good and evil as easily defined black and white concepts, a world harking back to those unambiguous heroes of myth and legend before Adolf Hitler ruined Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelung for the rest of us.

Tolkien's military career seems to have been patchy. He served as an officer who found his sympathies usually lay with the lower orders more than they did with those of his own background which, I would imagine, informs the world of at least the hobbits. They're good-hearted rustic folk, simple without being stupid, but not massively interested in anything of the outside world. I grew up with these people and Tolkien's apparent view has a taint of the anthropological as he is charmed by individuals I would have habitually crossed the road to avoid back in my own 'shire where, if someone was described as a bit of a character, you could bet your life they were a borderline alcoholic who routinely killed or tortured the local wildlife for the sheer fun of it. I lost count of the tales I heard of fireworks ignited and shoved up the arse of something living, and whilst those untutored wags might be a hoot should one simply be popping into this wonderful little country pub we've discovered just outside of Oxford, growing up with the cunts as your contemporaries was fucking murder.

So the orcs are braying chavs who facilitate the rise of persons such as Hitler, the hobbits are an idealised working class - salt of the earth as Robert Elms would doubtless have it - and the rest are either toffs or, more likely, just Tolkien wishing the world were a simpler, more noble place; which doesn't really justify a thousand or so pages, and particularly not in the expectation of anyone reading the thing. As another one of those things which has taken up weeks of my time, I'm not sure The Lord of the Rings is even as good as Jerusalem - which isn't saying much - and it's nothing like so weird or interesting as The Exegesis. I'd say Epic Pooh is about right.

*: Which I hadn't read at the time of writing so as to avoid potential bias, although I note with amusement that Tolkien's defenders have mostly responded to Moorcock's criticism by suggesting that he simply doesn't understand epic fantasy, foreshadowing Paul Ebbs' more recent defence of Peter Jackson's tiresome movies. The last defence of the barely articulate and fannish is always that you be a hater.