The Importance of Being Earnest

 

Oscar Wilde The Importance of Being Earnest (1895)
It was The Spider's Web by Philip Purser-Hallard, a Sherlock Holmes novel borrowing a few of Wilde's characters, which shamed me into acknowledging that I actually know bugger all about Oscar - despite it having been my nickname at work. The realisation unfortunately obliged me to acknowledge myself as equivalent to a fan of The Confessions of Dorian Gray, a series of seemingly pointless Big Finish audio things wherein Wilde's celebrated creation has spooky yet thought provoking adventures in time and space just like Doctor Who! Brilliant! They're reviewed on Goodreads despite not actually being books, with at least a few of those reviews focussing on what a sexy voice the guy playing Dorian apparently has, which seems to me like another clue as to whether or not said Confessions should be considered books, or are perhaps something else altogether - something which isn't a fucking book, you sad c***s.

Anyway…

It seemed like time I gave the lad a go, so to speak. I found Earnest initially impenetrable, if you'll pardon the expression, and concluded that the time simply wasn't right. Six months later, I come back to the thing and it clicks immediately. Plays were written to be performed and experienced in real time, and I've never found reading them entirely satisfactory, which is presumably why it took me a while to get around to this one; because, just like those Big Finish CDs or downloads or whatever the hell they are, The Importance of Being Earnest isn't really a book.

Nevertheless, trying to read it as a book, I'm struck by both the absurdity of the characters and the powerfully artificial cadence of their discourse and the situations into which they launch themselves. It's hugely entertaining and, in one respect, arguably a precursor to Hancock's Half Hour, amongst many, many others which have made use of this sort of contrarian wit. However, Earnest is significant in striving to avoid realism, instead pursuing an aesthetic of the artificial, and of the ornate social construct as an end in itself as part of the decadent tendency then sweeping Europe; and foreshadowing the exaggeration and absurdity of Jarry's Ubu Roi as performed in Paris just one year later. It's all surface, which is entirely the point, namely that the medium is the message, or at least a demonstration thereof. It's serious about failing to take itself seriously, hence the gag barely concealed by the title.

Above all, The Importance of Being Earnest is still very, very funny, with a voice so distinctive as to inspire me to a certain loathing for those attempting to duplicate the humour whilst inevitably getting it wrong, having reduced the wit to a mathematical formula - looking at you, Douglas Adams.

I think I probably need to see this on a stage.

Annihilation Factor

 

Barrington J. Bayley Annihilation Factor (1972)
Bayley's second novel features one of those star spanning galactic empires loosely resembling Tsarist Russia wherein different planets are ruled by kings and daily life occurs with a sort of imperial elegance, although thankfully not to the point of delineating those most delightful and diverting excursions of a gentleman with an ostentatiously elaborate name who conducts his business whilst rather fancifully attired in a bronze top hat to which the contents of a grandfather clock have been most felicitously affixed.

Ahem.

The presence of Castor Crakhno, a character alluding to Nestor Makhno - a founding father of the anarchist movement - presents the possibility of commentary on either the Russian revolution or some episode of equivalent vintage, as does King Maxim - Maxim being short for Maximilian, because I'm sure there was an historical Maximilian in there somewhere; but it's either way above my head or I'm simply spotting patterns which probably aren't there. The novel seems to be about free will - possibly - in how it may relate to the transcendence of the material plane 'n' stuff.

'You fool, there is no freedom,' Peredan chuckled. 'The material universe is a trap whose meshes we cannot escape, however much we try. Throughout history men have held such ideas as you have belatedly discovered, due to some fastidious aversion you appear to have. But the universe always mocks at these ideas. It always has something more strange, more monstrous than we can deal with—such as the Patch.'

Bayley's novels always seem to be spun upon a single and cinematically weird element - sentient hosiery, war waged between different eras, funny animals piloting spaceships or whatever. In Annihilation Factor it's the Patch, a vast presumably sentient field which moves through space devouring everything in its path. The Patch turns out to be something akin to Phil Purser-Hallard's City of the Saved but spends most of the novel as some remote nihilist force feared from afar - one which can be controlled by masturbation; despite which Bayley still doesn't quite manage to achieve escape velocity with this one.

It may be that I wasted too much time trying to decode Castor Crakhno, leader of a nihilist anarchist movement called Death to Life, which doesn't really work for me because the two tendencies would appear to contradict one another, at least here, and Death to Life sounds a little too close to a Two Ronnies take on placard waving revolutionary politics - Down With Knickers and that sort of thing. Also, the novel is so bogged down with endless exposition of one form or another that it becomes difficult to keep track of who is who and what's happening. It all pulls together in the end as we discover what the Patch is supposed to be, but it's a satisfying ending to an otherwise underwhelming, if mercifully short, novel. I still say Bayley was one of the greats, but Annihilation Factor isn't one I'd put forward in support of the argument, which is a pity because it should have been, given what it tries to do.

The Spider's Web

 

Philip Purser-Hallard The Spider's Web (2020)
I'm really beginning to suspect that Holmes may simply not be my thing. Actually, if I'm honest with myself, I know full well that he never really was, but it seemed worth making the effort here because it's Philip Purser-Hallard who seems more or less incapable of dull or otherwise merely workmanlike prose. Here, he introduces Holmes and Watson to an adjacent fictional landscape inhabited by persons from The Importance of Being Earnest and others, placing me at an additional disadvantage through my being more or less completely ignorant regarding the work of Oscar Wilde.

So I'm not absolutely comfortable with the form - page after page of exposition following the process of deduction, concerning which, objections would probably seem churlish given that The Spider's Web is detective fiction, and I went into this with both eyes open; and I experienced occasional difficulties keeping track of all the various deductive threads and the persons to whom they were referring, which probably wouldn't have happened were I more familiar with Wilde's people.

Nevertheless, it still just about worked for me, being beautifully written, as ever, and while I'm obviously in no position to weigh in on how well Purser-Hallard has captured the voices of Ernest, Algernon and the rest, I sort of suspect that he has because they're a delight to read, and his portrayal of Lady Bracknell is magnificent, uproarious, duly terrifying, and has convinced me that I really need to familiarise myself with Earnest as soon as possible. Even when writing at some distance outside one's comfort zone, Philip Purser-Hallard's work is always a pleasure to read.

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

Arthur Conan Doyle The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892)
I seem to recall that I hated The Lost World and regarded Doyle's Professor Challenger as a massive twat, while Doyle himself regarded The Lost World as one of his proper novels, unlike all that populist detective stuff; and Sherlock Holmes seems to have enjoyed a significant resurgence in popularity of late, most of which I've tried to avoid, the exception being a novel by Philip Purser-Hallard because I'd happily pay full price to read an Andy Capp novel if Philip Purser-Hallard had written it. We've had Cucumber as Holmes on the telly, an ingenious update in which Watson is advised to deal with his PTSD by writing a blog, which is well peng and edgy and shit; and we've had Elementary because apparently we'll now watch any old shit described by Netflix as bingeworthy if there's some homeopathic trace of Sherlock in the mix.

So why did I read this thing again?

Firstly, it was free, something which caught my eye at a lockdown bookswap event when not much else did; secondly, because I loved the Basil Rathbone movies when I was a teenager, and even to the point of reading one of the novels, possibly The Sign of Four, which I seem to remember enjoying; and thirdly, I suppose, to see what the fuss was about.

Not much, as it happens. Adventures collects a load of the short stories from The Strand or whatever it was in which they were published, and they're very short - mostly twenty pages or so, which doesn't really allow much room in which anything can happen. That said, Doyle's Holmes is more engaging than his Challenger, and it's quite nice to read something of modest narrative consequence; and they're nicely written with an elegant turn of phrase.

The problem is that at this length, these stories don't have the space in which to be anything more elaborate than crossword puzzles, and so become repetitive very quickly as one proceeds through the collection - possibly depending upon how much one enjoys crossword puzzles. Typically, most of the story is anecdotal, reported to Holmes, or to Watson, or else by one to the other. Usually someone or something will be missing and the details will seem almost ostentatiously resistant to analysis, which of course guarantees that they'll yield in about another fifteen pages; then we find out that Holmes was right, and why, and onto the next tale, repeat to fade…

I'm sure these tales had their charm when in isolation in whatever periodical, but the cramming only serves to expose their flaws, how thin they actually are, how absolutely lacking in ambition they were, wishing only to divert the reader for thirty minutes or so. Here and there we have glimpses of Doyle's thoughts on detection, even how we perceive the world around us, what we notice and what we miss, but in each case, just as it gets interesting, space demands we suddenly think about an intriguingly shaped stain on some cunt's trousers for the next few paragraphs. Being as I don't actually sploodge in my pants every time someone mentions Victorian England, top hats, or most exceedingly delightful difference engines, the appeal of these things began to wear thin for me after the first hundred or so pages, and by the half-way point I was no longer able to keep my concentration affixed to whatever inconsequential observation of nothing particularly interesting was being made upon the page; so I gave up and read something better.

Lesson learned.

The Vanishing Man

Philip Purser-Hallard The Vanishing Man (2019)
I loved the films with Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce when I was a teenager, and so much so that I have a vague memory of checking one of the Conan Doyle novels out from my local library, but otherwise I couldn't really care less about Sherlock Holmes. This is one of an ongoing contemporary series relating further adventures of the great detective which is distinguished through having been written by Philip Purser-Hallard, who is great, so here I am with what may be the first book I've bought new rather than second hand this year.

The last Conan Doyle I read was The Lost World which I actively hated, so I'm not sure whether Purser-Hallard gets Holmes right to the standard a Holmes purist would expect, but it feels right to me. My only raised eyebrow was hoisted during a few of the more dialogue heavy chapters, page after page of exposition which is something I've never liked because it always feels as though the author would rather be working on a television series; but on the other hand, I suspect this may simply be part of the Holmesian territory, so it's not a problem.

Most appealing of all from my point of view is that this is definitively a Purser-Hallard novel, as such returning to themes which run through his previous works, notably those of transcendence and spiritual evolution, even to the point of bringing Gideon Beech, the playwright modelled on George Bernard Shaw, back from Peculiar Lives of 2003.

It's not difficult to see why this one held such appeal for Purser-Hallard given the setting of an era during which a number of his thematic preoccupations were in the ascendant - the birth of science-fiction from nineteenth century spiritualism, new ideas about God and humanity and our place in the universe, and a chance to play around with all of this in The Vanishing Man; so we additionally get a stand-in for Madame Blavatsky, proposals hinting at the cosmology of C.S. Lewis' cosmic trilogy, passing references to Hy-Brasil, and an occult detective named Constantine - although patently not the one famed for hanging out with Swamp Thing. Purser-Hallard accordingly stretches the limit of Holmes' universe as far as it will go in the general direction of the fantastic without quite jumping the shark, then bursts the bubble, returning us all to Earth in elegant fashion and no pandering either to expectations of steampunk cliché or any other attempt to jazz things up by turning it into something else entirely.

I'm still not convinced we need new Sherlock Homes in 2019 - although I'll concede there's no harm in it - but if we really must, then I'm very happy to have Philip Purser-Hallard writing it.

Peculiar Lives

Philip Purser-Hallard Peculiar Lives (2003)
At the risk of repeating myself, I sometimes find it quite difficult to maintain warm, fuzzy thoughts about Doctor Who fandom, which is awkward because I used to quite enjoy Doctor Who and would like to be able to continue to do so on some level without inadvertently finding myself reminded of the toxic idiocy practised by about 85% of the shitehawks who will inevitably turn up to pitch in at the faintest whisper of its name. When I say Doctor Who, I really mean the novels, and mostly - although not exclusively - the novels published after the show was cancelled but predating its resuscitation as an advertising franchise in 2005. As with Who itself, there was something progressive about those books, an exploration of relatively new territory, an expansion of horizons, and I vaguely recall someone suggesting that the New Adventures were intended to bring new science-fiction authors to the fore. The New Adventures ceased in 1997, but their momentum was sufficient to spawn entire series of related novels with the serial numbers filed off: the Bernice Summerfield books, Time Hunter, and of course Faction Paradox. This seemed like a positive development to me because I was quite keen to read more by the people who had brought us Christmas on a Rational Planet, The Death of Art, and others; but it seems that I've been out of step, and the thing Who fans really want is more Doctor Who, or anything which we can pretend is Doctor Who - cosy adventures in time and space reminding us of teatime all those years ago, an endless string of quirky time-travelling eccentrics having scrapes and solving crimes and occasionally cracking a joke which we'll all recognise as a cheeky reference to something which happened in episode three of The Dalek Masterplan.

Tee hee.

Did anyone here buy the adventures of the time-travelling police station? Me neither. It was like Dixon of Dock Green from when we were kids, and the building itself jumped backwards and forwards in time, and it was populated by these really barmy characters, yeah?

I have nothing specific against pulp adventures, or cliches, or corporate entertainment, or even things which - God help us - aspire to corporate entertainment, and it doesn't all have to be Crime and Punishment - which is handy because I find Dostoyevsky unreadable; but I despair at how few of those surfing this tsunami of increasingly repetitive time travel thrills and spills aspire to anything greater, and how the few who do tend to get lost amongst the many who just want to see what would happen if something a bit like the Daleks encountered something a bit like the Ice Warriors.

Time Hunter was born from a Doctor Who novella called The Cabinet of Light, written by Daniel O'Mahony and published by Telos Books. When the BBC reeled in all of its most lucrative licences, Telos elected to continue their series of novellas with the lead transferred to that mysterious traveller in time and space known only as Honoré Lechasseur. I've read both The Cabinet of Light and now this one, and I still don't really understand what the deal is, why the title identifies him as a Time Hunter, or why I should care; but it doesn't matter because Telos always seemed to favour authors with some genuine ability to write, as opposed to simply publishing anything by anyone who liked Doctor Who a very, very lot.

Nothing if not ambitious, Philip Purser-Hallard's second novel takes on the eugenic elephant in the historical room of twentieth century science-fiction, daring - where many have preferred to mumble something about people being of their time before wandering off to see whether Neil Gaiman is still signing stuff - to draw attention to certain themes common to all those futuristic Gernsbackian supermen, and the Third Reich; and in a display of prowess bordering on the ostentatious, he writes it as a sort of sequel to Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men, and writes it in a pitch perfect homage to Stapledon's style, and the bad guy is George Bernard Shaw in a false beard. So there's a lot which could have gone horribly wrong, particularly given the subject, and yet the narrative is all nuance, not one slogan or generalisation, and a beautifully rendered and atmospheric period piece.

Practically speaking, the story falls somewhere between Wyndham's Chrysalids and Theodore Sturgeon's More Than Human and, as befits both the subject and the genre, is mostly a discussion of morality, transcendence - a theme which runs through much of the author's other works - and how these relate to evolution and the mythology of the same. For the purposes of the reader who just really, really, really, really needs someone to have an adventure in time and space just like on the telly, this kind of leaves Honoré Lechasseur without anything much to do, arguably sidelined in his own novel, but with this being due to the novel's great success at doing what it sets out to do, no-one with a brain could reasonably object.

Even now, with Purser-Hallard's Devices trilogy on shelves in actual high street book stores, he seemingly remains a best kept secret, but one day the reading public will surely catch up, and they'll go back to this one - if they can find a copy - and realise that it was obvious all along.

The Exegesis

Philip K. Dick, Pamela Jackson (ed.) & Jonathan Lethem (ed.)
The Exegesis (2011)
Today is the first day of my reading Dick's Exegesis, specifically a thousand-word volume distilled from a much longer, rambling text most likely destined to remain unpublished. It's the size of a house brick and could be used to stun cattle, which is why it has sat untouched upon my to be read pile alongside Alan Moore's similarly hefty Jerusalem for a good couple of years. I generally prefer to read books which can be digested in three or four days - allowing for the fact that I tend to read for an hour in the morning, then another before I go to bed. Anything of greater length becomes a more immersive, demanding experience, one that isn't quite like reading a book, which additionally means that it really, really has to be something worth reading; which Jerusalem probably wasn't.

Jerusalem is informed by its author having discerned patterns which would seem to place his home town, and by extension himself, at the absolute centre of reality; which is fine, except Moore tends to avoid discussion of the possibility of his understanding being a simple matter of perspective and therefore fairly common - unless he saved that for pages following the point at which I lost interest and stopped reading. Everyone is at the absolute centre of their own reality, and it will always seem more significant than mere coincidence. My wife is related by marriage to Johnny Cash; a friend of her previous husband vividly recalls what a pain in the ass George W. Bush was as a child; my mother's school friend married the brother of a Beatle; my previous girlfriend was related to Charles Darwin; I used to enjoy a regular correspondence with Cosey of Throbbing Gristle; and there's this guy Ben who lives in Arizona, whom I know through the internet. We're about the same age, and had known each other, or known of each other for maybe five years before he realised I was an admirer of Philip K. Dick, with whom - it turned out - his father had been fairly close friends. Ben recalls Dick stopping by for dinner when he was a kid. At one point Ben sent Dick some of his own juvenile short stories, hoping for feedback. I can't remember whether Dick replied directly, but it seems that his quoting Robert Herrick's An Ode for Him - a poem beginning with the address, Ah Ben! - in the opening pages of The Transmigration of Timothy Archer was an affectionate acknowledgement; and I myself am at the centre of all these connections, or so it seems to me. I am therefore at the centre of modern culture which in turn stems mostly from myself, which I'll admit to finding endlessly surprising.

See?

It's not a big deal.

It's also sort of what the Exegesis is about, specifically Dick attempting to make sense of his reality as shaped, or at least informed by visionary - or hallucinatory, if you prefer - experiences arising from what were probably episodes of frontal lobe epilepsy. The difference between what Dick experienced, Alan Moore talking about himself for 1,266 pages, and my knobbing Darwin's great grand niece - or whatever the proper familial term would be - is that Dick investigates the convolutions of his own perception without ego, and with some understanding of all the philosophical gubbins necessary for getting to grips with the nature of reality.

I tried reading this before but only got so far, finding it incomprehensible; but apparently I'm more intelligent than was once the case because now, if not exactly light reading, it seems to have a more conversational tone and Dick's argument really isn't that hard to follow. This itself seems to relate to the ideas he discusses as the book opens, namely information travelling back to us from the future as tachyons - as consistent with the idea of a universe which emerges from entropy to achieve order and complexity.

The Constitutional guarantees of our country have been suspended for some time now, and an assault has begun on the checks and balances structure of the government. The Republic is in peril; the Republic has been in peril for several years and is now cut away almost to a shadow of itself, barely functioning. I think they are carving it up in their minds, deciding who sits where forever and ever, now. In the face of this no one notices that virtually everything we believed in is dead. This is because the people who would have pointed this out are dead: mysteriously killed. It's best not to talk about this. I've tried to list the safe things to talk about, but so far I can't find any. I'm trying to learn what the Lie is or what the Lies are, but I can't discern that anymore. Perhaps I sense the Lie is gone from the world because evil is so strong now that it can step forth as it is without deception. The masks are off.

He wrote that in July 1974. I am able to read it in 2018 either as a chillingly prescient prediction of the present, or an indication that nothing much has changed. Either way, I'd argue that it proves that Dick achieved a perceptive and lucid understanding of the world, regardless of where that understanding came from, and regardless of delusional episodes.

Day 2. Phil discusses the possible origin of the voices he hears in his head, usually delivering fragmented messages in Greek, often quoting maxims subsequently found in texts he's never read before, which proves that it's really happening. This reminds me of the incident with my friend Nelly and her narrowly avoided car accident. The accident was narrowly avoided through Jesus Christ levitating her Mini Cooper at the crucial moment and then gently placing it down, unharmed, on the other side of the crash barrier. This happened at two in the morning during one of her not infrequent manic episodes.

'How can you be sure it really happened?' I asked.

'Well, summink must have lifted me car up and put it down on the uvver side innit. How else do you explain that, eh?'

'And you say it was Jesus?'

'Well I dunno who the fuck else would of done it.'

Phil identifies one of the voices as being that of Asklepios, Greek God of Healing, and whom he describes as his tutor. He also discusses the Essenes, a pre-Christian sect of which Jesus Christ was reputedly a member. This information seems to be coming from the past, although there may be some subtlety of Phil's model of time which I've failed to grasp.

His testimony becomes a little more manic, reminding us that voices in the head are generally diagnosed as something akin to crosstalk between the two hemispheres of the brain which have ceased to communicate as they should, either through some naturally occurring condition or by taking a ton of drugs - as discussed in A Scanner Darkly which he was about to start writing. Phil seems to believe that this division is the normal default state.

This isn't to say that what he writes is without value, and it's certainly more than random gibberish. His discussion of the division of idios kosmos and koinos kosmos reminds me a little of Debord's description of the Spectacle, and then there are examples such as this which somehow feel right regardless of objective reality, and which neatly provide the building blocks of Phil's universe.

Sometimes for extended time periods the person (any given person) must of necessity be placed on hold - he must mark time until the rest of the cosmos is ready, since everything has to be coordinated. If it were not this way, we would soon have no cosmos. This is why we sometimes have the deep and acute intuition that we are accomplishing absolutely nothing, and no matter how hard we try we can't overcome what we call inertia. Actually, somewhere in the world other pieces of the puzzle must work out their paths so that we can join them; there is no other viable way to handle these things.

I also quite liked this one:

I submit to you that this entire cosmology which I've presented to you in these pages bears an organic relationship to my entire body of writing, to my basic theme of what is reality? I think I have transliminated - coughed up into consciousness - my subcontinent which has given rise to all my work and to all my theories and thinking.

Even though he says it himself, this at least underscores why the Exegesis is significant in terms of the body of his work, rather than simply being the bit where he lost it at the end.

Day 3. Last night I was too tired to read anything more demanding than Sir Les Patterson's Traveller's Tool, having been taken out by a combination of cold weather and Chinese food. I read the usual twenty-five or so pages this morning. I considered reading fifty for the sake of catching up, but it seemed like twenty-five was more than enough given that the material is fairly repetitive.

Phil reconciles how his visions of times past can be considered information travelling back from the future, although I didn't really understand the explanation. Nevertheless it seemed to work because I don't really understand quantum theory either, or orthogonal time, and his testimony now seems to impinge on both, although it's hard to tell whether or not he was entirely aware of this.

He also writes about Enough to Scare the Dead, a novel in progress which I guess he never finished. It was, or would have been, built on the usual themes, all the stuff we find in VALIS and The Divine Invasion, but the window dressing seemed at sufficient variance to suggest it would have made an entirely respectable novel in its own right.

There's also some speculation about the relationship between the Greek God Zagreus, and Jesus Christ - one for the old school Who fans there. Talking of Who, Dick mentioned some guy called Philip Purser in the pages I read yesterday. I wonder what Philip Purser-Hallard made of that passage, if he's read it.

Day 4. Once again I was too tired to read last night, having been to see Bohemian Rhapsody, the Queen biopic - never really my favourite band. The film was riddled with gaffs and even outright lies but was otherwise hard to dislike, like a big, amiable goofball of a movie. Meanwhile Phil continues to ramble on about time travelling backwards without the argument ever quite seeming to connect to anything external to itself until it stumbles on a reference to Phil having photographs of Victoria Principal, star of Dallas, taped all around his house; which seems oddly reminiscent of Zippy the Pinhead fixating on Loni Anderson in Bill Griffith's newspaper strip, somewhat tipping the precarious balance from ontological analysis over into just plain nuts. Once again I am reminded that my working model of seventies Phil as an enquiring and rational mind analysing its own madness by way of a thought experiment - a self divided with some potential irony in much the same way as is the world Dick perceives around him - is probably either wrong, or overly generous. There may actually not be a whole lot of difference between the Exegesis and George's notebooks in Peter Bagge's Hate comic, and it's only Dick's way with words which make it seem otherwise.

Day 5. Phil ruminates on the possibility of his religious visions being characteristic of a superman in the van Vogt mold, and that the question may actually be not so much why he received this specialist insight as why the rest of us haven't. The fact of the voices in his head being messages spoken in Greek, a language he doesn't understand therefore necessitating translation by someone who does, prove that they are real, he says, and so we're back to the mysterious force which levitated Nelly's Mini over the crash barrier, and how it must have been Jesus because she dunno who the fuck else would of done it. For a moment it occurred to me that it must surely be considered significant that nutcases - to use the accepted medical term - rarely seem to suffer from scientifically inspired delusions, but then of course I remember Andy with the mathematical equations and statistics of planetary rotation scrawled all over his wall in marker pen; and to be fair, Phil's musing gives a good impression of at least having its own internally consistent logic, which I'm not sure is true of - for two examples - either Richard S. Shaver or Robert Moore Williams.

After fourteen months all I really know is that I don't know anything except that it happened to me, and what I saw during that short time was real. That's not much to come down from the mountains with, for the edification of my people. Maybe there just is no common language between our space-time universe and the Eternal World.

Day 6. Once again, I was too tired in the evening to cope with Phil as bedtime reading, so I opted for something hypothetically less demanding. I chose Laughing Matter II, a 1977 anthology of mostly British humour edited by Kay Batchelor and Keith Maylin. Someone gave me the first Laughing Matter collection one Christmas, and even at the age of ten it struck me as kind of laboured, utilising material recycled because someone had noticed how well those large format Monty Python tie-ins were selling. I bought Laughing Matter II because it was in some second hand store for a dollar - seemingly a strange thing to find here in America - and I was curious because I was surprised that they had managed a second book; which suggested that maybe I'd missed something and the first one had been better than I remembered, or else that I'd simply been too young to appreciate it at the time. Anyway, it seemed less demanding than the Exegesis, and I hadn't actually got around to reading the thing beyond a quick skim.

It seems my initial assessment made at the age of ten had been pretty much on the money. No-one could possibly accuse Laughing Matter II of aiming too high. The humour is mostly based around comic misunderstandings experienced in a dizzying variety of situations - on the golf course, whilst out motoring, in the pub, or when discussing insurance at the office. There's a page of Irish jokes, because why wouldn't there be? There are excerpts from books published by comedy celebs of the day, Tommy Cooper, Harry Secombe, Patrick Campbell and so on, mostly stuff which probably worked a whole lot better on either stage or screen, the most depressing of which is an attempt to novelise a scene from Hancock's Half Hour by Tony's wife, an effort which well and truly kills the wit and timing of the original. Elsewhere we find zingers from The Wheeltappers and Shunters Social Club, as hosted by Bernard Manning and Colin Crompton, a show which I recognised as being shit even as a kid. The zingers take wry sideways glances at the lighter side of sexual harrasment, amongst other subjects, and are helpfully illustrated with photographs of our hosts embellished with badly drawn pints so as to further invoke the side-splitting hilarity of the show.

Then we come to this:

Once you're done rolling around, hammering the floor with a fist and screaming with agonising laughter, there's a whole page of these, kindly supplied by the genius who brought us Fred Basset. The joke in this particular example seems to be the displeasure of the man whose grandchildren have just discovered his strawberries, and this one is the closest we come to an actual gag. The others mostly depict people noticing objects or other people whilst describing this act of observation. Graham, as he signed his name, presumably made a living out of this stuff.

As this digression doubtless will indicate, I am perhaps beginning to experience some Dick fatigue, if you'll pardon the expression. I've made it to page two-hundred of the Exegesis, and it's becoming thematically repetitive, even though he continues to examine the subject from different angles, at least not quite repeating himself in that respect. More frustrating is that he seems to accept the possibility of his mania being a self-sustaining delusion and therefore something he will probably never understand. The arguments constituting his continuing dissection of the nature of reality remain philosophically interesting in isolation, but the more one reads, the clearer it seems that it isn't adding up to much.

Also, it's probably not a great sign that I've started reading the editors' footnotes. I ignored them at first, resenting any break in the flow of the text, but the break has become necessary. On the other hand, Laughing Matter II didn't suddenly read like a sparkling treasury of repartee and chuckles in comparison, so at least that's something.

Day 7. It's starting to pull back together once more, which is nice. I suppose I'm at something of a disadvantage in that I'm not widely read where philosophy is concerned - although thankfully I've apparently read enough to be able to just about make sense of this, although I can never quite tell whether what I'm reading is profound or merely gibberish. It feels profound, but then what do I know? In places it also reads like certain pieces I've read in New Scientist and which I've mostly dismissed as meaningless quantum bollocks - the quantum computer which gives you an answer even without your needing to turn it on, the universe is a hologram, the electric universe blah blah blah… I suppose what matters is that it felt profound to Phil, in so much as that the composition of this great work did a job.

What I must realise is that it is a bourgeois prejudice to suppose that for something to have worth, there must be a practical application. The ancient Greeks knew that pure [philosophical] understanding for its own sake was, even just in terms of the quest, the highest value or activity of a man: Homo sapiens: man who knows.

However, look what this three year ongoing quest to understand, learn and know has done for me: joy, awe, peace, tranquility, a sense of purpose. Of personal worth - and above all meaning, from my awareness of God.

The essays which follow the above quote are particularly enlightening in examining Phil's mental state as patterns thrown up by a chemical imbalance whilst concluding that regardless of root cause - whether any of what he has experienced is real by some definition - the outcome is the same in terms of his own personal development; and that his revelation of March 1974, the event which the Exegesis attempts to explain, left him a different, probably better person in providing an arguably healthier purpose than deducing which secretive agencies were trying to get at him.

Day 8. I'm at page three-hundred, therefore nearly a third of the way through without any obvious ill effects as yet. I gather the editors have imposed some sort of thematic order on Phil's otherwise random musings. It works and the text seems to progress with some semblance of internal logic, or at least without anything which jars, which is helpful. Yesterday, for example, I came across the suggestion that where all of Phil's writing up until March 1974 should be considered as akin to the gathering of evidence, the books written after that date were mostly analysis - which seems a useful way of putting it.

On the other hand, there was also this. The symbol on the left is a variation on the ichthys, a symbol adopted by early Christian sects.

All this did was remind me of Was God an English Astronaut? by Tim Brooke-Taylor, a fake bestseller excerpted in The Goodies' Book of Criminal Records so as to take the piss out of Erich von Däniken's ancient astronaut theory.

See what I mean?

Day 8. First mention of Terrance fucking McKenna, but never mind. The holographic universe is apparently because holograms are formed from the interference pattern of two lasers, and our universe is formed from the interference pattern of two real universes, except one of them might be dead, which is where the Black Iron Prison comes from. Pages 300 to 350 seem unusually coherent given the subject, and are probably the pages you should read if looking for specific insight into the novels. I'm also interested to note how Dick's higher and lower realms - as David Gill describes them - of empathic and unpredictable man over unfeeling programmed machine - so closely mirror those of the Nahua cosmos as inhabited by the Mexica with its duality of heat and animation over cold and inertia. Equally worth noting is that Dick was already aware of the meme before it became common knowledge - specifically meaning self-replicating ideas rather than amusingly captioned pictures of Donald Trump.

Can anti-info have a life of its own? The problem of spurious info. The lie - look at the level it's raised to. It's pure death - but where does it originate? Does it have its own radio station? Yes - that's the first thing: I picked up. It yammers at us all the time. We are the battlefield.

It's possibly significant that he'd been reading William Burroughs.

Perhaps inevitably, the more I've read of this collection, the more I begin to see myself in there. I assume this will probably be the same for everyone. I'm now at about the same age as Dick when he was writing the Exegesis, the age of the mid-life crisis, the point at which sufficient time has passed for one to be able to look back upon formative years as though they were a foreign country, a perspective which tends to inspire an urge to dissect and examine and ask what the hell was that all about? I myself have memories of peculiar occurrences or realisations which probably would have seemed just as spectacularly apocalyptic as Phil's revelation had I been taking the same drugs.

Day 9. I'm particularly struck by how these points resonate with Nahua cosmology - a correlation which I noticed only yesterday. From our modern perspective, one of the oddest, most obvious peculiarities of Nahua cosmology - as distinct from Abrahamic equivalents - is its bifurcating into hot and cold rather than good and evil, and here Dick seems to have discovered a possible relationship between the two seemingly quite different models.

(19) The adversary of the brain, something which repeats itself; i.e., is static and not growing. The adversary is heavy, inert, and warps thought (and so actions) in dead circles around it. The brain is in dialectic interaction with it, freeing minds from its tug.

(20) Those minds warped into dead circular thinking imagine their thoughts still progress in a straight line. But in fact nothing new ever occurs to them. They therefore represent a reversion to fossil forms.

(21) Unfortunately, these people have been woven by the "magnet" into the power centers of mankind; this has long been so. They rule by lies and coercion.

Which again brings us back to the reality of wor Donald and those who got him where he is today. The thing with all of this is that had Phil genuinely been taken over by something masquerading as a first century Christian so as to expose the illusory nature of our reality, the Exegesis is exactly the text he would have written, for whatever that's worth. Whilst this may be the same argument as it must have been Jesus because I dunno who the fuck else would of done it, I'd argue that it's the same argument sent through college to emerge with a first class degree and then on to win a Nobel for discovering something weird and terrifying in the field of astrophysics.

Day 10. Phil now feels that he has answered the questions posed over the preceding pages and accordingly solved the mystery of just what happened to him in 1974. Needless to say the answer is itself of such complexity as to rule out the applicability of exclamations along the lines of I knew it!

Day 11. Half way though and approaching the material leading up to Phil writing VALIS - he may have solved the mystery but naturally there's still plenty to discuss - no well, I'd say that just about wraps it up for this guy. Erik Davies elegantly summarises this aspect of the Exegesis in his footnotes.

Just as Wagner philosophised through music, Dick philosophised through fiction - and in the Exegesis, made philosophy a kind of transcendent punk-rock machine music: repetitive, incessant, sometimes hysterically Romantic, but also a work that can be appreciated, not as a rigorous argument, but as a flowing pattern of variation, affect, rhythm, and return.

Day 12. Passages of VALIS begin to emerge from the text, although I only actually recognised one of them. Steve Erickson, one of the group who have helped edit and provide annotations to the Exegesis, notes the elegance of a particular sentence whilst admitting that he has no idea what it actually means, which is reassuring.

Day 13. Apparently what I'm reading represents about a tenth of the material, the rest being mostly paranoid ranting which is as such likely to remain unpublished; so that's good to know.

Day 14. More and more I'm beginning to find the Exegesis a bit too chewy to digest before bed, although for some reason I still find it quite engrossing in the morning over toast and coffee. Today I found this passage particularly thought provoking:

[47:696] This is world self-caused and self-generating and self-moved: what the Milesians sought as cause and origin of the world. There is no external deity and nothing prior to the world. This is God in Spinoza's sense. The pre-Socratics drew the right conclusions: if there was no adventitious deity to cause, control, drive and direct the world, then the world itself possessed sentient or quasi-sentient faculties and volition, "and [was] responsible for its own growth." What has happened is that religion - especially Christianity - restored the nonexistent adventitious anthropomorphic deity, the artificer-artefact model, so world was again not seen organically, as self-governing and alive and responsible for its own growth. Otherworldliness returned, and the Christians were "in but not of" world; they were hostile to world and saw world as hostile to them. they located God in a mythical place called "the pleroma." So world is depreciated and devalued and it is stripped of its life and volition. The work of the pre-Socratics is undone. God is not sought in world but over and against world, and he is sought in an alleged spiritual realm. Weird concepts such as "original sin" are brought into existence, and ideas of reward and punishment, turning the clock back to before the Milesians. The supernatural is evoked to explain phenomena, and the dark ages begin.

Day 15. It has occurred to me that what we regard as entropy may actually be the universe - which is an intelligence in its own right - assembling itself, but seen in reverse if time is, as Dick seems to suggest, travelling backwards. I'm not sure whether this means that I'm beginning to understand this stuff - because the Exegesis is beginning to seem more coherent than it has been - or whether it means anything at all. For what it may be worth, this passage from Folder 49 reminded me of Martin Bladh's Marty Page:

This is the essence of tragedy: the collision of two absolutes. Absolute suffering leads to—is the means to—absolute beauty. Neither absolute should be subordinate to the other. But this is not how it is: the suffering is subordinated to the value of the art produced. Thus the essence of horror underlies our realisation of the bedrock nature of the universe.

Day 16. I've just realised that Enough to Scare the Dead was Radio Free Albemuth; also, I've made it to page six-hundred. I'm finding some passages a bit chewy, depending on my mood, and have begun to alternate with P.J. O'Rourke's Republican Party Reptile which is lighter with better jokes. This is a reflection on myself rather than on Philip K. Dick.

Day 17. Phil believes that Christianity is the content of a system rather than the system itself, which is interesting. He thinks his own worst novel was Deus Irae, which seems like an odd choice.

Day 18, the day upon which I had presumed I would finish reading the Exegesis, based on my reading about fifty pages a day, half of that in the morning and the other before I go to sleep; but I've missed a few evenings so I'm still two-hundred and fifty pages short, but never mind. Here Phil acknowledges that his analysis of 2-3-74 has been going around in circles, and so turns his attention to what this repetition might say about the nature of reality and where he himself fits in. Following a fairly pleasing account of a discussion between himself and God on this very subject - written up as a conversation as though in a novel - he begins to wonder what role Satan may have had, and even whether he himself has been inadvertently praising the man downstairs all this time, having mistaken the devil for something more benign.

In other news, Jonathan Lethem's footnote discusses micropsia, a powerful hallucinatory episode common among children, rare in adults, in which the body is experienced as a vast, inert form over which a shrunken-to-pinpoint consciousness roves, as a Lilliputian roves over Gulliver. The sense of detachment from the physical universe, and a vast reorientation of scale, has a cosmic, trippy quality. Except when it's a symptom of something dire, micropsia is harmless; it can be terrifying, but also enthralling. This is mentioned as a potential medical explanation for some of what Dick experienced, and I'm inclined to wonder how this may relate to Return to Lilliput, reputedly Dick's earliest but subsequently lost novel, written when he was about fourteen.

I found this interesting because I too experienced micropsia as a kid, and this is the first time I've seen it acknowledged as a thing and given a name. It's also nice to know that it wasn't just me.

Day 19. Another interesting observation from David Gill in the footnotes - Phil's recurring discussion of empathy or the lack thereof may relate to guilt over what he perceives as his own possible inability to empathise in certain situations. This would explain his occasional tendency to be a bit of a tosser at times.

Day 20. I began to alternate with one of the Lemony Snicket books, The Bad Beginning, borrowed out of curiosity from my mother-in-law, a former teacher, but I don't think it's something I can really throw myself into. It's unambiguously a children's book, and specifically for small children, although exceptionally well written, witty and original, and lacking any of the cloying sentiment which often spoils the form.

Meanwhile, Phil's latest conclusion is that his Exegesis has failed, although it sounds like he means it this time, and as is noted in one of the salient annotations, this is one aspect which distinguishes Dick from other possibly manic theorists, namely that he seems to remain aware of the possibility of it all being bollocks - unlike Shaver, Robert Moore Williams and others if we're to pretend they're comparable. Indeed, Phil's analysis is often astonishing in its perception.

[75:D-9] I have been looking over Scanner, the intro to The Golden Man and VALIS. The continuity is pain, emotional pain; this goes back to Tears. It is obvious that I have no defence against pain, that I am a—lunatic, one driven mad by—not pain—but by a comprehension of pain (like the Buddha). Comprehension of pain (spiritual and mental, especially) is the basis of my writing, as is my awareness of the frailty of life and how easily it passes over into death.

Additionally he discusses the idea of himself as wise fool - one of those archetypes which occur throughout his fiction - and further examines the nature of reality in terms which, as it is pointed out in the footnotes, significantly arrive at the same place as certain ideas within the field of quantum theory. He sees himself as having uncovered some potential universal truth and accordingly laments his own inability to quite get to the bottom of it, writing that someone must come along and play the role of Plato to my Socrates.

I doubt that's going to be me, although I'm damn certain it wasn't William Gibson or Ridley Hovis advert Scott.

I should probably also mention that I've discovered Tessa B. Dick, Phil's fifth wife and author in her own right, to be a facebook presence. I sent a friend request along with a predictably nosy enquiry about The Owl in Daylight, her version of the book her husband was in the middle of writing when he died, and she responded and even answered my question, so I'm now virtual pals with the wife of the guy who wrote this thing; which is weird, and a kind of weird which has probably already been explained by what I've read so far. It's as though the Exegesis pulls you into its reality.

Day 21. The Exegesis remains a little too chewy to be read before bed, and now I've switched to Marvel comics, specifically the 1987 limited series pitching Mephisto against the Fantastic Four, X-Men, and other caped types. It's by Al Milgrom and John Buscema, firmly predates the comic book having grown up, and is therefore full of panels in which superheroes describe what we can quite clearly see them doing whilst explaining what they hope to achieve. It's doubtless artistically worthless but I'm nevertheless enjoying it tremendously, which - and I realise this may be reaching somewhat - puts me in mind of Dick's idea about God speaking through trash, pulp, or pop culture, and the value of that which we tend to ignore. That said, I have nothing interesting to conclude from this parallel, and it could simply be that I'm actually still an eight-year old boy.

Next morning I return to find Phil back to discussing quantum theory and how it may relate to his vision, a discussion which leads into his proposing that only a mad person could have experienced what he has experienced, and yet mad people don't generally consider themselves mad. I've actually known a good few exceptions to this, but the point was nevertheless worth making.

Zeno, the Sophists in general, saw paradox as a way of conveying knowledge—paradox, in fact, as a way of arriving at conclusions. This is known, too, in Zen Buddhism. It sometimes causes a strange jolt or leap in the person's mind; something happens, an abrupt comprehension, as if out of nowhere, called satori. The paradox does not tell; it points. It is a sign, not the thing pointed to. That which is pointed to must arise ex nihilo in the mind of the person. The paradox, the koan tells him nothing; it wakes him up. This only makes sense if you assume something very strange: we are asleep but do not know it. At least not until we wake up.

In light of observations such as the above, my take on the Exegesis is similar to my view of religion, or at least certain aspects of religion, namely that is any of it real? may not be a meaningful question and tends to miss most of the points that matter. Discussing whether 2-3-74 actually happened is probably as pointless as asking whether Philip K. Dick really experienced the events he designates 2-3-74.

That said, it's still tough reading in places, although that's probably inevitable given the subject; but on the other hand, as a body of work it either succeeds in what it sets out to do, or comes so close as to make no difference. Oddly, as an autobiographical autopsy on the nature of existence, it shares some common ground with both Grant Morrison's Supergods and Alan Moore's Jerusalem, both of which look for God in low and unlikely places; but where those two lack either humility or perspective, essentially being authors talking about themselves for way too many pages, the Exegesis - which isn't anything like so reader friendly - succeeds without ever seeming particularly self-indulgent.

Day 22. We're now mostly focussing on post-match analysis of The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, which is fairly interesting and brings the revelation that Angel Archer is Dick's own twin sister, the one who died at the age of six months, even though Phil didn't realise this while he was writing the novel. His musings now appear to be leaning a little more towards 2-3-74 having been an unambiguously religious encounter with not much ontological wiggle room, which makes for marginally less engaging reading. He mentions The Weaver's Shuttle as his first, presumably lost, novel, which is yet another one I hadn't heard of, and which Andrew M. Butler doesn't seem to have heard of either.

Day 23. It turns out that Dick was offered a small fortune to rewrite Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? as a novelisation of Blade Runner, which would have meant Androids as it stood being withdrawn from print, and probably that he would never have gotten around to writing The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. He turned the deal down and instead wrote Archer for substantially less. He made the right choice.

We're now up to June 1981, and he's had a dream wherein he is given a prescription drug called Diatheon, a name plucked from the subconscious but which Phil believes refers to his ideas regarding theological duality; which inspires lengthy examination of the notion, concluding that Jesus exists as living information formed by the proximity of two persons inhabiting his brain at the same time, these being Phil himself and, I suppose, Bishop Pike who was the inspiration for the character of Timothy Archer. It's a bit heavy going in places.

Day 24. It's September 1981 and Phil seems to be aware that he is dying. He is preoccupied with the returned saviour whom he believes to be an individual named Tagore living in Sri Lanka. Each time the environment is damaged by, for example, the dumping of nuclear waste canisters in the ocean, a fresh injury appears on Tagore's already ravaged body. Naturally Phil believes himself to be linked with Tagore in some esoteric sense, much as the faithful are linked to Mercer in Androids.

Day 25. Here we're mostly concerned with the Bible as the container of the words which make up our physical reality and how this chimes in with whatever Pierre Teilhard de Chardin said about the noosphere. I'm not sure I understand everything Dick says, but it feels as though it holds together fairly well as an argument, as is true of the Exegesis in general. In any case it at least remains interesting. By December 1981 I gather he's seen rough cuts of Blade Runner and - contrary to the claims of useless fucking wankers on internet forums bleating about how Ridley Scott's movie represents what Dick was really trying to say and anyway movie adaptations shouldn't be the same as the books blah blah blah - he's not happy with it. In fact he describes it as the greatest defeat. There's also this unusually sobering passage:

[62:C-194] I survived 2-3-74 and wrote about it in VALIS and hence made my death my own - by living long enough to write about it, that is, I artistically and creatively depicted my own death, and this is the victory of the heroic over the tragic.

Day 26. Blade Runner is a fascist power fantasy, and God is that which separates us from the world and through which we perceive the same. Phil seems to be back with Tessa on the grounds of it being the right thing to do, despite feelings for some married woman or other. He also refers to The Owl in Daylight in past tense, as a novel he was unable to finish or which broke him, describing it as being about regaining gnosis and liberation. There's also a summary of the plot, although it doesn't reveal much.

Day 27. Here we're mostly concerned with the notion that whatever has been talking to Phil is in some way akin to the invisible Godlike aliens amongst us beloved of pulp writers, Blavatsky and others, which is discussed in scientific rather than theological or philosophical terms. I've realised that the popular idea of Dick's madness is that he spent a day gibbering about voices in his head, then would be lucid and able to discuss it rationally the next day, over and over like a light switching on and off. This is quite wrong as he remains approximately sane and rational thoughout - if the Exegesis is any indication - and consistently aware that whilst examining the fragile state of his reality, the validity of the reality which he proposes as a more plausible, fundamental alternative is itself not necessarily beyond doubt.

[54:K-27] [. . .] Angel Archer, as I recently realised, is the AI Voice directly for the first time expressing itself openly, which is why I can write a novel from the standpoint "of someone more rational, more educated, more—," etc., than I. This mystery is solved: I am nuts, but Angel, the AI voice, is not.

He also explains the phosphene visions of 2-3-74 as a mathematical communication, which actually makes sense. Elsewhere we get a bit more of the plot of Owl, and enough to make me wish the buggers responsible had allowed Tessa B. Dick to keep her version in print.

Also, the problem with Blade Runner came to me as I was making toast this morning - which itself seems a little Dick-esque: the film asks what if the androids are really like us?, where Electric Sheep asks what if we are really like the androids? If you don't see how these are fundamentally different questions - well, I was going to say you have no business working in the movie industry, but it probably means you're ideally placed.

Day 28. Finished at last, and it's interesting that despite the Exegesis being so personal a vision as to be impenetrable at times, and despite it being more or less a nine-hundred page train of thought, it never quite becomes either boring or a chore, unlike - off the top of my head - Alan Moore's similarly distended effort as discussed previously. Possibly this is because the Exegesis is not actually that personal a vision and describes a world which most of us recognise, at least on some level even if the mechanics of the dialogue seem esoteric. The distinction seems neatly summarised in Phil's assessment of his own Galactic Pot Healer.

[54:M-32] This, precisely, is the psychosis that manifests itself in Pot: the effort by a finite creature to suppose the divine without actual experience of the divine ends in disorder and incoherence and, as I so realised last night, the truly desperate. Glimmung is absurd and in fact a travesty and I knew it at the time; never was anyone so aware of the unbridgeable gap between the finite and infinite.

Which is probably why he never felt the need to formally declare himself to be a magician. Yet, the more I've read of this thing, the more I've been reminded of certain Shamanic models of reality, although I'm specifically referring to Shamanic models of reality which themselves seem dimly related to the writings of Plato and the like; so no, despite everything, and despite a few wisecracks earlier in this review - or diary, or travelogue, or whatever it is - the Exegesis is not born directly of insanity. Dick's focus may have been a few sandwiches short of a picnic, but his analysis of what he experienced is otherwise reasonable and occasionally fascinating, with its worst crime being a tendency to ramble.

I feel somehow changed by the experience of reading this, but maybe that's just my imagination.

Le Morte d'Arthur

Sir Thomas Malory Le Morte d'Arthur volume one (1485)
I spent two whole weeks on this one and still only made it to Book VIII, and that's of the nine books assembled in this collection, which is only the first volume. I really don't like giving up on a book, and it's not something I do very often, but considering all of the things I could read from which I might get something, there simply didn't seem to be much point forcing myself. It's not that I found Le Morte d'Arthur impenetrable, because I've read and enjoyed plenty of material of similar vintage. It's not even that it was necessarily either boring or completely lacking anything I found interesting.

That said, I've never been particularly gripped by Arthurian legend in a general sense, at least not until Philip Purser-Hallard's Devices trilogy. Prior to that, it made for a decent Monty Python film but was otherwise - so far as I'm concerned - just one of those things upon which hippies and new age types tended to fixate, and usually the very worst kind of hippie or new age type. I'm thinking here of a specific individual, author of all sorts of dubious Shamanic material with a particular interest in Camelot last seen ranting about how them muzzies are killing our kids but we ain't even allowed to say nuffink because of political correctness innit. What a lovely day that wasn't.

Philip Purser-Hallard convinced me there was something interesting there, so I began working my way backwards. I didn't really get on too well with The Once and Future King, and so assumed I probably needed to go right back to the source. Anyway, it turns out that even Le Morte d'Arthur isn't it, but is rather a number of earlier vaguely related works retold and welded together by someone who lived very near where my father grew up five hundred years or so later.

As I got started, I began to wonder how much of this material might be historical, because it has the feel of something historical. Page after page of knights engaging with other knights reminded me of similarly repetitive passages in Mexican texts of roughly the same era, culturally speaking, and equivalent scraps in their texts tend to serve as metaphor for broader dynastic or regional conflict. Along similar lines, the passage describing competition between opponents identified only as a green, red, or black knight suggested a symbolic record of something which may actually have happened; but whatever the case may be, a quick pog at J.R. Green's A Short History of the English People convinced me of Arthur's entirely mythical composition, there being very few corners of the historical record into which one might shoehorn all that stuff about Camelot. So page after page after fucking page of lists of knights scrapping was presumably written for an audience who enjoy page after page after fucking page of lists of knights scrapping.

Certain passages hold the attention, whereas others tend towards repetitive examples of chivalry, swearing of oaths, loyalty, true love, breasts heaving with admiration for something of a generally chivalrous nature; and I am reliably informed that there are jokes in this text, but I'm fucked if I was able to spot any. What with all the noble brows held aloft and swearing fealty to someone a bit kingy, reading this was like listening to an early Laibach album with a playing time of two weeks; and so I suspect this sort of thing may be what Cervantes was taking the piss out of when he wrote Don Quixote. I suppose it might be said that I'm simply too thick to appreciate Malory, but fuck you - I breezed through the two volume Oklahoma edition of Codex Chimalpahin without breaking a sweat, and I really think this one is just a bit of a dud unless you have some hardcore investment in the subject.

Trojans

Philip Purser-Hallard Trojans (2016)
I promised myself I'd re-read the first two before tackling Trojans, the conclusion of the trilogy and the thickest of the three. The book is heavily populated with a fair few interwoven narrative strands to follow, and I really wanted to go in prepared so as to get the most out of my reading; but in the end, with the to be read pile presently towering above me at a little over fifty titles, I thought fuck it and just went right ahead.

Philip Purser-Hallard's Devices trilogy inhabits a very familiar contemporary England in which certain individuals find themselves possessed - or allied as is the more accurate term used by Alan a'Dale, the narrator - by numerous mythological or pseudo-historical heroes, King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, Robin Hood and the gang, and even the likes of Paul Bunyan across the water. The present day incarnations - or at least expressions - of these archetypes naturally behave in ways consistent with their respective legends; and so the Round Table has become the Circle, and its Knights get around on motorbikes, communicate by cellphone, and yet nevertheless employ sword and shield in their application of justice, honour, and chivalry. It's the kind of story which really could have ended up with a particularly culty egg on its face if mistimed or not handled absolutely right, so it's a testament to Purser-Hallard's not inconsiderable talent that it not only works, but is absolutely convincing.

As we rejoin our tale, Arthur has returned to reclaim the English throne, much to the displeasure of certain royals for obvious reasons - and delightfully plausibly written they are too. Intrigue, espionage, terrorism, and kidnapping ensue, foreign interests decide to involve themselves, and an old mythic pattern strives to repeat itself with those chosen to act out its component parts all caught up in the workings. Described as such it may sound like someone going for the Game of Thrones dollar, or at worst a template for forty-five minute helpings of episodic CGI with mediaeval types composing ironic self-referential facebook posts in between scraps with baddies; but it's really nothing like that, because it's a proper novel.

This also means that it expects the reader to pay attention, which is why I experienced some confusion. It's been a while since I read The Pendragon Protocol and The Locksley Exploit, and I've never been particularly well versed in Arthurian lore, so I experienced occasional difficulties keeping track of certain details through failing to fully appreciate their significance. Nevertheless, this presented no significant obstacle, either to my being able to follow the narrative or to enjoy it, and if anything, the undercurrent of intrigue served as an inducement to read on; so in other words, if I found myself sporadically lost, it remained a pleasure; and it remained a pleasure because Trojans is very conspicuously about something more than just keeping you busy for a couple of hours a day.

Were it a simple matter to summarise what Devices has been about in a few sentences, there probably wouldn't have been any need for it to clock up such a page count, but at the root of it all seems to be a debate about morality, specifically about doing the right thing and whether such choices can be codified as ideology. Here we have the Circle and the Green Chapel as England's two principal upholders of what is generally believed to be right, but they are essentially at odds with one another whilst driven by more or less identical goals. The difference is that one represents ingrained authority, tradition and even perhaps dogma, and as such I'm tempted to regard the Circle as an allegory for certain aspects of organised religion.

'I inherited the code of honour, I didn't make it. But it's the code I have to live by now, or any claim I have to rule this country goes out of the window. And then... there'd be another war, at least. And I honestly think that would destroy us.'

Robin Hood's Green Chapel on the other is wild, anarchic, and pretty much making it up as it goes along.

'People tell stories, not the other way round. The devices forget that we made them, not they us.'

Given the mythological origin of many of the characters manifest here, the Devices trilogy also serves as a commentary upon the quality and value of the tales we tell - a theme which generally seems to have become quite popular of late, but is more than justified here by what seems like fairly profound philosophical depth, or at least more so than Alan Moore recasting Harry Potter as the Antichrist.

In certain respects it might be considered quite a tough book, given all that it has to say about English culture at this end of the twenty-first century, the responsibility of a government to its people and to the individual, and even to those ways of thinking which have fuelled the popularity of Brexit; and yet it's a breeze, and there are even jokes. As someone or other is quoted as having observed on the back cover, Philip Purser-Hallard really is a best kept secret, and I have a feeling it can't be for too much longer.

The Amber Spyglass

 

Philip Pullman The Amber Spyglass (2000)
I probably shouldn't have left it so long. I read the first two of the trilogy back in 2015 and somehow just couldn't quite get around to this one. I generally dislike trilogies, or at least those comprising a single extended story split into three - as distinct from three vaguely related stories sharing either characters, settings or concepts. I generally dislike works of such length because it takes an exceptional author to sustain my interest over so distended a word count, and not many really seem able to pull it off without a degree of droop entering the equation. Michael Moorcock, David Louis Edelman and Peter F. Hamilton have all managed it, as did Stephen Baxter - although the Xeelee books were mostly self contained. C.S. Lewis didn't, and it's probably not fair to comment on Tolkien given that I was about fifteen when I stalled at the beginning of the third volume; of course there are also trilogies by Brian Aldiss and Phil Purser-Hallard, and I still have one book to go in each case.

I had no trouble getting back into His Dark Materials, even if I couldn't quite remember all of what had been before. It opens well, and I had retained enough to keep me interested and not overly bewildered, although I've still no fucking clue who those little people with the dragonflies were supposed to be. Also there seems to have been some kind of switcheroo as to who was the villain, so I read on in the assumption that both of Lyra's parents were probably arseholes, and in the assumption that Pullman had discarded the fantasy tradition of moustache-twirling evil, instead writing something which works more like real life, at least in moral terms.

Lyra travels into the realm of the dead and rescues all of the ghosts for reasons I never quite understood, and the dæmons with which everyone on her world is born seem to be a metaphor for awakening sexuality, or at least the intellectual maturity which hopefully coincides with the advent of the same; and Dust is somehow related, although it's also dark matter - so Donald Trump probably wouldn't have much Dust whilst Carl Sagan would have lived his life enveloped in a cloud of the stuff, or something like that. I don't know. I was a bit lost as to why everyone was doing whatever they were doing and what they hoped to achieve. Like I say, I probably shouldn't have left it so long.

I enjoyed the wheeled beings, but the whole enterprise got bogged down in dreary Tolkienesque battles as the end drew near, so I switched my evening reading session to Lewis Black's Nothing's Sacred for the sake of something to look forward to before I go to sleep. Despite all those sparkling images and delightful sentences, it was ultimately a relief to have finished the thing.

I'd been warned about His Dark Materials being an atheist diatribe, which would have been a problem because I dislike authors assuming their readers to be idiots, but thankfully the warning seems to have originated with someone more sensitive to such things than I apparently am. Pullman clearly doesn't think much of organised religion, and that's fine, but there's no obvious metaphors waggled in our face with the usual qualifier of don't you think this is terrible? If the book has a message, it's more or less delivered by John Parry:

'And this is the reason for all those things: your dæmon can only live its full life in the world it was born in. Elsewhere it will eventually sicken and die. We can travel, if there are openings into other worlds, but we can only live in our own. Lord Asriel's great enterprise will fail in the end for the same reason: we have to build the Republic of Heaven where we are, because for us there is no elsewhere.'

So try not to blow it whilst you're alive, because you almost certainly won't get a second chance. The narrative presents us with examples of those who blow it because they've spent too long worrying over things which don't matter - people who are, as a direct result, generally disagreeable fuckers. The tale works well enough, and it's a good point, and it's told with verve and imagination, but I'm sure it didn't really need to be as overextended as it is. So it's either good but could have been better, or I really shouldn't have left it so long.