Inherent Vice – Thomas Pynchon

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If anybody tries to tell you that Inherent Vice is “Pynchon-lite” or a good “way in” to his unforgivably dense and complex early books, don’t believe them.  It’s not that Inherent Vice isn’t light-hearted or readable or particularly insouciant, it’s just that: it’s not really Pynchon. I can’t recommend it as any kind of gateway novel to the harder stuff of Gravity’s Rainbow or Mason & Dixon (or whatever), simply because it carries none of the postmodernist leanings, esoteric vocabulary or anti-structural abandon that so pervades those earlier works.  I can, however, recommend Inherent Vice as one of the better examples of the hardboiled revivalism that’s currently so modish and en vogue.  Usual comparative touchstones for reviewers of Pynchon are the higher echelons of the modernist cannon – you know, all those extremely long and opaque novels rampant with metaphysical concerns (Joyce, Kafka, Forster, Wyndham Lewis et al and etc.) – but the genre brothers of Inherent Vice are strikingly more low-brow, even pulpy (a term I use without prejudice): Dashiell Hammet, Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, Elmore Leonard.  The significant point of difference being that Pynchon re-appropriates the stylistic and aesthetic mores of noir fiction that saw their hay day in the late twenties/early thirties and sets his novel instead in 1969. All of the narrative hallmarks of the hardboiled remain intact; the cold and apathetic portrayal of hard violence, the playing-it-fast-and-loose-with-the-law/whatever-it-takes approach to solving ‘the case’ and the iniquitous relationship between the police and certain individuals: but here they’re augmented by contemporary 1960/70s issues: recreational drug use, a free and easy approach to sex, bad haircuts and, er, surf rock.

Inherent Vice entails a characteristic hardboiled plot that’s so convoluted and tricksy as to make the act of précis fundamentally reductive and unhelpful.  Furthermore, and requisite of the book’s enormous cast, I had to maintain a system map of characters and their relative relationships (see my scan below) as an aide-memoire for reference during reading.  I also worry that giving a convoluted blurb will destabilize the fine tightrope that Inherent Vice walks between homage and pastiche by impressing on you good readers a sense that the book is either i) entirely parody or ii) the opposite: utterly serious; and I wouldn’t want to give the impression that the narrative leans heavier to one side than the other, so masterfully balanced is Pynchon’s prose. Very briefly then: Doc Sportello is an L.A. P.I. inconveniently tasked with several simultaneous missing persons cases, one of which forces him to abandon the ideal disconnect between his work and personal life coming, as it does, at the behest of his ex-girlfriend.  Predictably, all the cases are soon revealed to be eerily interconnected.  Oh, and Doc’s also a massive stoner.

This isn't even the entire cast...

I’ve always had a critical blind spot when it comes to noir; the private-eye-as-social-outlier trope, functioning beyond the law yet ironically working to uphold its vagaries, appeals to me on some level that transcends the technical flaws or problems any given work within the genre might possess. Yet for all its preoccupation with the ‘cool’ of neo-noir, Inherent Vice is equally concerned with the ironies and moral inconsistencies of the genre. There’s a definite tension between the ad hoc, casual hipness of recreational drug use, and the darker truth that such substance abuse offers a mode of escape from the genuine emotional damage that bubbles under the surface of almost every character.  While it’s a blast to read about Doc’s frantic traversal of L.A. as he fumbles his way through various and sundry meetings with contacts and suspects, carried forward more by the impetus of luck and weed than any genuine investigative clout, there’s always an underlying sense of comic pathos due to his “doper’s memory” and the prevailing suggestion that behind his hardboiled, womanising and violent-cool exterior lie the more significant character traits of chronic loneliness, addiction and self-doubt. Beneath every quip, one-liner or somehow hilarious bad pun (Pynchon’s penchant for those remains intact) is Doc’s inveterate concern over where his next hit’s gonna come from.  Inherent Vice marries farce and fun with a nonetheless ubiquitous sense of buried pain and existential despair that permeates the period: drug-fuelled car chases, comic banter with the ‘acid guru’ and constant casual sex occur in scenes deliberately contrived to highlight the emptiness and transience of such encounters, but in such a subtle way that it’s left to the reader whether or not you engage with this narrative depth, or merely read the novel for the bonkers crime caper it is on the surface.  Thus Pynchon forces the same choices upon both reader and characters alike: bury the emotional pain, or set it in opposition to all the psychedelic campness, and thereby potentially expose the wild, neon-lit fun as the shallow cover-up for despair and lack of direction that it maybe, maybe was all along.  That’s not to say that Pynchon denigrates or maligns the sixties/seventies; he’s clearly enamoured and much in love with the decades of his youth, as made clear by his meticulous attention to the details of fashions, pop-culture, language etc. The onus of the story is ‘the sixties were free, fun and amazing’ the subtext says ‘but we’d be foolish to want it back’.  It’s a lament, more than a love letter.

As you’d expect, Inherent Vice is exceptionally well written, if somewhat of a culture shock in comparison with its more bombastic forebears. Long compound-complex sentences are still the grammatical standard, but here the technical esoterica of Pynchon’s earlier novels is substituted for the slang and cant argot of the sixties’ L.A. idiolect, so expect to read lots of ‘groovies’ and ‘bummers’ along the way; a few too many, in places.  Pynchon also brings forward his lively preoccupation with reproducing song lyrics, this time from the aforementioned surf rock genre. And while this works well in his earlier novels when counterpointed against his other, high culture concerns, here it falls flat: unmitigated by any austere contradictions or oppositions, the constant barrage of bad lyrics is just a bit naff, easily skipped and of mostly nostalgic significance.  The homage to noir also leans dangerously close to cliché in places, never more so than when Doc begins one of his long, clearly well-rehearsed speeches about how much he hates ‘The Man’; a flaw mirrored in its tedium by straight-edged cop Bigfoot’s parallel rants on the subject of hippy hating, and how they all need to “get a haircut”.

But let’s not end on a low note.  Inherent Vice is, above all, just ridiculously good fun.  Sure it’s been somewhat mis-sold as nothing more than a frivolous and psychedelic private eye escapade; there’s definitely more to it than that; but the novel’s ironic handling of genre conventions and its moral examination of 1960s’ social attitudes are threads that’re im- rather than ex-plicit.  If you’re just after a frequently hilarious, convoluted but ultimately satisfying hardboiled crime adventure, then go for it; after all, there’s nothing wrong with that.

Tomcat

Letter to My First Love

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Okay so this is cool.

My friend Carly who works for the San Francisco Ballet (hey, don’t look at me like that – I have cultured friends!), is putting together a characteristically creative and somewhat avant-garde promotional campaign for the up-coming ballet Onegin.  It (the promotion) entails a tumblr feed composed entirely of love letters submitted anonymously by members of the public taking the subject ‘letter to my first love’.  The onus isn’t on the reproduction of actual letters, however, it’s more like: ‘if you could write a letter to your first love, what would you say?’

You can find the promotion here (SFballet.tumblr.com), and while some of the submissions are inevitably a bit cringeworthy and naff, many others are very sweet, even moving.  Several of the letters lean heavily to the comedic (one in particular I find very funny), but more-often-than-not the tone is of clearly genuine feeling and sentiment. I’m man enough to admit that the general standard of writing is much, much higher than I initially anticipated, and some of the letters scan almost like prose poetry, unafraid to leave behind the expected propensity for romanticism and explore, instead, such heavy themes as death, regret and the pathos of chronic lonliness.  It’s powerful stuff.

It’d be great if you could head over there and take a look at the letters people have written, and even better if you submit your own (letters addressed to inanimate objects, songs, T.V. characters, long departed pets or that issue of Sonic the Comic no.1 your Mum unwittingly binned while you were at school that one time (…) are also acceptable (remember, it’s all anonymous)).  Carly’s championed my blog for ages (ardent readers of Tomcat in the Red Room (…if such people exist…ahem…) might remember a review of The Easter Parade Carly was kind enough to write for me last year) –so I’d love for Red Room readers to return the favour by whipping up some support for this.  I can’t offer much incentive other than a guarantee that you’ll be contributing to something genuinely worthwhile – think of it as crowdsourced poetry; very twenty-o-twelve.

Tomcat.

Big Machine – Victor Lavalle

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On the Venn diagram of the New Weird, Victor Lavalle’s Big Machine sits round about where the circles of Michael Cisco and Neil Gaiman overlap those of Thomas Ligotti, Haruki Murakami and even, maybe, Stephen King. Perhaps.  That’s not to say Lavalle doesn’t bring his own keg to the party (and New Weird is nothing if not a party), but readers whose boots are already used to the outlandish soil of Weird should find themselves treading relatively familiar ground here.  Furthermore, Lavalle’s latent preoccupation with contemporary “issues” (addiction, terrorism, racism, religious hysteria, and the ennui of the modern workaday) offers a good way-in for readers more familiar with so-called Literary or Realist Fiction, to which Lavalle’s stylistic choices (first person narrative, uncannily poetic reminiscences of early childhood, constantly informative biographical sub clauses that’re kinda out-of-place and un-realistic in said first-person narrative etc.) also attest. Anyway, that’s quite enough over-worked metaphors for an opening paragraph; my point being: hurrah, we’re all invited.

Not that you’d know it from the book’s design.  I liked the non-representational blood red swirly cover art that functions as aesthetic call-back to the novel’s trippy(/druggy) themes and graphically violent content; but the hyperbolic endorsements from Mos Def and Vanity Fair, the utterly nonsensical (and non-applicable) blurby references to the X-Men and the wannabe-candid-but-is-in-fact-obviously-posed off-centre b&w author snapshot suggest a hipster target audience perhaps more shallow and transient than Big Machine deserves, which is a shame, because it’s a good book; rampant with a wry and self-aware wit so often lacking in Realist fiction, but also open to the supernatural vagaries,  non-standard plotting and fearless engagement with unanswerable questions that’s such a hallmark of the Weird.  Just try your best to ignore the embarrassingly fawning and cringeworthy author interview with which somebody’s deigned to chunk-out the back of the novel.

In brief: Ricky Rice is an American, middle-aged, (almost)ex-junky janitor and recusant suicide cult survivor recruited by a band of interventionist clairvoyant detectives who’re able to tap into fate or determinism or something via an arduous process of reading newspaper clippings while searching their feelings.  Bear with me, it’s not as naff as it sounds.  The group’s M.O. is strikingly religious, with a visually cliché but nonetheless metaphorically loaded induction ceremony comprising a long walk through a darkened room towards the voice of the de facto leader.  A twee if over-wrought creation myth combines with a quasi-messianic figure to create what is essentially a post-slavery spiritualism for black Americans.  Ricky’s understandably weary caution in the face of this has origins in his past – played out through lengthy flash-back chapters (a highlight of the book) – ; he was born into a cult founded by his three aunts who re-appropriated Judeo-Christian mythologies and re-cast the major players as American forefathers.  In both cases, the significant religious preoccupation is in propagating an expressly American piety distinct from the Old World origins of all the major religions and grounded in American history.  If these groups offer moral sanctuary for those disenchanted with the alterity of the (for want of a better word) classic religions, it also exposes Lavalle’s philosophy of America as very much still a frontier nation – young and searching for itself – America as engaged in self-creation is a thematic interest reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy or even Philip Roth.

Far from being an out-right fantasy of religion or world-building experimentation, however, Big Machine’s primary focus is an Infinite Jest-esque exploration of addiction and its attendant losses and pain.  As such, it’s down to the caprice of the individual reader whether or not encounters with dark angels, parasitic male pregnancy (a nice Alien reference?) and the intervention of the Voice of God are genuine real-world experiences, allegorically coded comments on everybody’s capacity to carry monsters within, or the hallucinatory externalisation of inner fantasies brought about by the mental strain of addiction or withdrawal or chronic loneliness or drug use or whatever.

Unfortunately this has the disappointing effect of somewhat de-fanging both the novel’s supernatural elements and its more realist focus on American social issues.  Of course it’d be foolish to suggest that one can’t sit comfortably with the other – but Big Machine’s myriad themes of religion, addiction, supernatural horror, poverty and race all kind of get in each others’ way.  The supernatural aspects of the book lack any internal consistency or logic, to the extent that by page 300 there’s a definite feeling that anything goes – which is especially frustrating when random/unexplained magical elements arrive deus ex machina to resolve significant plot events (c.f. Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore).  And while my readerly mores don’t demand constant closure and the satisfaction of a well-rounded explanation, the few-and-far-between moments of unexplained and phantasmagoric magic are too shallow to act as buffer or mitigator to the book’s more realist drug-related concerns.  The suggested promise of supernatural cure-alls bathetically undermines any sense of threat or consequence latent in the seriousness of drug-taking or prostitution or terrorism.

Victor Lavalle clearly has a beautiful cathedral of an imagination, and an obvious deep love of horror/fantasy/Weird fiction, but he’s holding back, perhaps lest he alienate that percentage of his potential audience who’re exclusively interested in Big Machine as an “issues” novel.  It almost works, but too vague supernatural elements clash awkwardly with a heavy focus on contemporary Americana – which itself is often explored through long passages of expositional dialogue.  It’s a question of balance; and if anybody’s going to write the Great American Weird novel, then it probably will be Victor Lavalle.   Big Machine is almost there, but not quite; I’ll definitely queue up to buy his next novel, and look forward to the day when he really lets his imagination run riot.

Tomcat.

Lord of the Flies – William Golding

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Hello.  My blogging has fallen a little off schedule recently – it turns out that I can’t read as fast as I can write, and consuming enough novels to stay on-target with anything like a semi-regular posting plan is proving more of a challenge than I initially anticipated.  I don’t know how those one-book-review-every-day bloggers do it – really, I don’t.  So I apologise for my recent bloggy silence – but I shall endeavour to read faster in future, in order that I might shine the bounteous rays of my reviews into all your lives. Ahem… anyway…err… let’s get this severed pig’s head rolling…

I bought Lord of the Flies out of a misplaced sense of obligation to the literary canon (read: I’ve not read a ‘classic’ in a while) and a smattering of middle class guilt that, at 26, I still hadn’t read it, seen the films or bought the T-shirts(http://tinyurl.com/6elpcvz) etc.  Frankly, I expected to have a one-night stand with it; carve its figurative notch into my equally figurative literary bedpost and never engage with it again (form an orderly queue, ladies…).  But I was caught off-guard; not only by how much I enjoyed the novel, but by how long it took me to finish (I found myself taking frequent pauses to furiously scribble notes in all its margins).  So with my blog idling away unnourished, I thought I’d try a review.  Being a mountain of the (popular)academic landscape, Lord of the Flies is difficult to analyse without regurgitating the same points made a thousand times before me by a thousand other commentators a thousand fold more eloquent than I – so I beg your pre-emptive forgiveness should the following be either too familiar, hackneyed or even cliché.  Here goes…

My first surprise was that the book’s title doesn’t include the definite article – so not only had I not been reading it for 26 years, I’d also been mispronouncing it  ‘The’ Lord of the Flies – is my face red!  Ya’ll know how it goes: schoolboys; plane crash; island; tribes; tragedy; rescue.  Sentence-by-sentence Golding’s choice of language is simple and readable – events unravel slowly and with more than a little repetition, but this all contributes to the novel’s sinister sense of impending crisis.  The opening is crammed with adjectives and introduces its large ensemble cast in one single short scene; but conveniently each crash survivor possesses a set of physical characteristics that function as both memory-aids for later appearances and visual signifiers for their future tribal inclinations.  Straight-backed, ‘golden’, lean and well-spoken Ralph becomes the exemplar of rhetoric, democratic reason and leadership, whereas his sinister shadow and alter-ego Jack is a savage and violent tribesman – proclivities belied by his feral red hair and broad shoulders.  By contrast, the be-spectacled, asthmatic and obese ‘Piggy’ functions as character-metaphor for intelligence and wisdom: his swollen body all but useless and unnecessary, his brainpower and glasses give him access to the most evolved technology on the island – making fire. Sure it’s a twee exploitation of visual stereotypes, but this externalisation of inner truths imbues Lord of the Flies with an almost Disney-esque vibe of fairy tale – evil, corruption, honour, kindness (etc.) are indicated as much by outward appearances as action – and this places the novel firmly within a familiar tradition of allegorical signification in which everything acts as symbol: a shell stands for democracy, fire is adult responsibility and a pig’s head becomes (almost literally) Satan; hence the novel’s unusual stringency in directing the reader’s visual conception of its scenes to a specific aesthetic.

Most attention-grabbing of the cast, however, is Simon – frequently interpreted as a martyr or Christ figure due to his brutal murder at the hands of both rival tribes – I prefer to read him as sympathetic point of view character upon which readers are invited to project themselves.  His political disinterest and complete lack of physical description are traits unique to his presentation and establish Simon as somewhat of a blank canvass upon which the reader can paint his own image.  Simon’s refusal to pick sides and his frequent assertion that he is ‘on the outside’ give him an outlier identity that correlates him with the reader as onlooker – present, but separate.  Likewise his ability to see the island’s ‘Monster’ for what it really is, the depth of his empathy towards the younger children and his clairvoyant understanding of their every need suggests he has access to information that should otherwise only be available to the reader.

The moment of Simon’s murder marks the point at which the slow-burning entropy of the narrative explodes into outright anarchy – both literally as a sequence of brutal events, and figuratively in a dramatic change in the book’s language and style.  Killing Simon is, then, akin to killing the reader as mitigator of order and another way; it’s not a perfect analogy, but Simon’s death marks a definite volta through which Lord of the Flies suddenly shifts into a dramatically unstable work of imagism, narrative breakdown and primal chaos.  The aforementioned clarity of physical description is replaced by ambiguity and metaphor: the boys lose their individuality and meld with both their surroundings and each other – initially through the liberal application of improvised war paints, and later through a behavioural descent into animalistic savagery – they don’t so much start to resemble the jungle around them as they actually become it; Ralph’s once golden hair now is ‘tendrils’ and ‘creepers’, and ‘cries of fear and panic’ are indistinct from the natural animal sounds of the forest; it’s impressive stuff.

Imagine my disappointment, then, when I came to the book’s ending – the deus ex machina that is the boys’ notably undramatic rescue by the British navy (…deus ex aqua?). I had a better ending in mind: the film reel in my head had the camera slowly pulling away as the island burned and the boys preyed upon each other– without rescue or resolution.  Not only does the actual ending (with its return to a drab linguistic normalcy) undermine the brilliant post-structuralist breakdown of morality, language and reason that serves as allegorical end-game portent(/warning) for any society similarly unravelling, but it somewhat weakens the more general coming-of-age themes implicit in the novel’s events with an illation that suggests ‘it’ll all be set right in the end’, which definitely dulls the blade of the book’s message about the adolescent dawn of responsibility and consequence.  Furthermore, the British navy’s pompous alighting to save the ‘savages’ from themselves has a colonial leaning to it that I neither expected nor welcomed – I’m aware it’s a product of the book’s time and should be viewed in context of contemporary western attitudes, but it’s nonetheless a difficult thing to encounter in a novel I was otherwise enjoying.  Similarly, many of the book’s obsolescent phrasings make for uncomfortable reading; “Are we civilized or are we negroes?” becomes a common refrain in later chapters, and is hard to dismiss as a mere idiosyncrasy of the speaker, so prevalent is the sentiment.  While I would never accede to the censorship of such things (remember the embarrassingly hysterical public reaction to the recent re-publication of Tintin in the Congo?), their value today is more historically educative than morally insightful.  Some of Golding’s… um… choicer passages are akin to hearing a casually racist grandfather spurting epithets that are, frankly, at home in a more patronising past, and best left there.  Obviously such things shouldn’t be swept under the carpet and ignored entirely, but neither do they warrant decrying the whole novel for – it’s better to engage with them critically (‘deal with it’) than to discount them or boycott the book as a result.  As I’m discovering with H.P.Lovecraft, it is possible to enjoy/engage with art despite an ostensible dissimilarity with your own moral sensitivities.

Irrespective of these niggles, Lord of the Flies is a strikingly impressive and vertiginously dark horror novel that functions successfully as both a bleak reimagining of the much-worked coming of age yarn and allegorical warning against the societal implications of greed, selfishness and the will to power. I had trepidations going in, which I mostly put down to my reactionary and juvenile hatred of all books on the GCSE English syllabus – but I’m grateful to have read it sans the fun-sucking pressure of an impending exam, which I feel colours many people’s negative reaction to the book.  If you’ve not read it: do so.  If you read but hated it when you were sixteen: read it again.  And if you’ve read it and loved it, well – I hope you found something here interesting.  Sorry for the length of this review. And its abrupt ending.

Tomcat.

Kraken – China Miéville

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Ah China Miéville, the Guardian reader’s acceptable face of Sci-fi; albeit shaven-headed and assortedly be-pierced.  Lots of readers, who would otherwise never touch Weird Fiction with the proverbial barge pole, devoured his 2009 existential detective thriller The City and The City on the back of a veritable slew of awards and unprecedented attention (for a book of its kind) from the mainstream literary media. Of course this is no bad thing, in fact it’s great – more people should read experimental fiction.  But unfortunately this lead to his 2010 follow-up Kraken receiving a somewhat lukewarm reception from the popular press, as Miéville abandoned the sci-fi-lite of The City and The City that had proven so popular, and returned instead to his characteristic out-and-out fantasy weirdness.  Perhaps this shows that all those new-found converts to Weird Fiction weren’t quite as ready to embrace the oeuvre as they’d attested, which is a shame, because Kraken is mesmerisingly brilliant; complex and surprisingly funny, it’s a frenetic gatling gun of ideas.

I guess it’s become kinda de rigueur of me to begin my reviews with a short discussion/description of the genre space in which any given book functions, but darn it Kraken has me stumped.  The most obvious moniker would be the utterly drab ‘Urban Fantasy’, but lest this conjure up images of earnestly non-applicable Twilight-equse teen fiction bullshit, I’m not going to use it.  On the other end of the spectrum, of course, we have the pigeon-holing obsessed theorists who like to throw-up the sort of compound genre label vomit that’s ironically all the more baffling for its specificity, you know, stuff like: “Postmodern-Cthulhu cult –New Wave-London Noir” Quite.  So where does this leave me?  I’m not sure what to call it: Kraken is just really weird, and the best focus I can give this review is to describe (with attempts at explanation) quite how unique it is – but don’t worry, I’ll try to think of some half-decent genre tag by the end of this review.  Promise.

Blurrrb: Billy Harrow is a curator for the Natural History Museum in London.  While giving the Museum’s much-feted tour, Billy discovers that a giant squid, complete with glass case and all such Damien Hirst-ish paraphernalia, has vanished from the Museum.  Billy is soon recruited by a cult of Kraken-worshipping religious nut-jobs who’re desperate to get the squid back, unharmed.  But, it turns out, large sections of a hidden London also want to know what happened to the squid: from bizarre magic users, to worshipers of the sea, to an army of rodent familiars, a living tattoo and a man who alters Star Trek memorabilia so that it actually works.  And trust me when I say that this is just the tip of a very weird iceberg.  Events escalate and get odder by the page, until an end of the world prophecy looks likely to come-true, unless the squid is found and a big vat of ink is bleached…

I know it sounds trite, but in Kraken London operates as much as protagonist as place.  The book espouses the same metropolitophilia that’s such a common idiosyncrasy of many(/all?) of China Miéville’s novels, but here the city-as-character cliché is taken to extremes in the ‘Londonmancers’, a sect of divining cultists who can, literally, talk to the city streets.  This ardent mythologising of London as magical hinterland may put off, if not alienate, readers disinclined to yet another London-centric Fantasy of the Neverwhere ilk (I admit, I was anxious at first), but all the same, I’d encourage you to give Kraken a go; it presents a very different fantasy London from others you might have encountered.

In fact, it’s a testament to Miéville’s skilled characterisation that in a novel so rampant with strange magics and utterly weird plot twists, it’s the characters themselves that most held my attention.  Understandably Billy is a blank-canvass of a protagonist, but he’s tolerably bland because he functions as sympathetic point-of-view character for readers who, likewise, find themselves in a baffling landscape that requires constant explanation.  But a neat side-effect of Billy’s dreariness is that the novel’s supporting cast (already pretty bonkers) stands out even more by comparison.  Kath Collingswood is a magically well-endowed yet profane police officer whose perfectly non-pc outbursts add a comic depth to what could otherwise have been an entirely plot-mechanising and lazy character piece; Marginalia is an under-used but charming artist who assumes the mantle of reluctant amateur detective with pleasingly emotive results; and Goss and Subby are an old-man-young-boy duo – supernatural henchmen-for-hire – who’ve haunted and terrified magical London for centuries and who, frankly, are the most terrifying baddies I’ve ever encountered: a fact augmented by their grammatically non-standard, dreamtype dialogue and propensity for acts of horrific violence that belies the youthful appearance of Subby and seemingly frail nature of Goss.

Further to the book’s multifarious dramatis personae is Miéville’s predilection for drafting dorkishly detailed systems of magic and religion, each of the latter replete with a whole host of eschatological theories and expectations.  Many of Kraken’s detractors have criticised this world building, drawing explicit focus to the amount of neologism that dominates the narrative.  My counter-argument would be that the vast majority of these so-called ‘neologisms’ are merely compounds of pre-existing words (mostly nouns) and require relatively little decoding in order to fully understand: “unhabitants”, “eschatonaut”, “pistonpunk”, “heresiarch” etc. – a refusal to engage with such fun and unusual language is the hallmark of a lazy reader, I feel.

Kraken is linguistically exuberant, and long, snaking compound-complex sentences are very much the grammatic standard, but such is China Miéville’s aptitude for beautiful phrasing that convergence of new/scientific/jargon words with classical forms of expression are always a joy and never a chore to read:

Water gulped at the ChaosNazis; seawater freezing and London muddy sucked and pulled them down with eddies and undertows it imported from its wide ocean self.

Supplementing such oceanic imagery is a nice visual preoccupation with ink, which not only functions as call-back to the squiddy premise of the book, but also fetishises the book as artefact in the reader’s hands in a religiously eulogistic way (remember the squid is a God to many characters).  It’s not a novel obsessed with narrative form, but Kraken draws attention to the intersection of ink as both physical fact and metaphor for consciousness – ink as transmitting device is an idea Miéville grabs and really runs with, investigating the problems of articulating the chaos of London, magic and even consciousness with the apparent rigidity of the printed word.

There’s the occasional gaffe, for example a constant name-dropping of contemporary Hip-Hop artists that I found embarrassing in a white-and-middle-class-but-I-actually-quite-like-that-kind-of-music-anyway way.  I think Miéville did this to ground Kraken in a “realist” setting markedly different from the otherworld fantasy that has dominated his previous output: the real-life pop culture references seem to say ‘this really could be London’, but also hint at ‘look how much music I’ve heard of’, which is considerable more naff.  But as criticisms go, this is barely worth mentioning…

I was going to end this review with a “Kraken is kraken” type joke (‘kraken’ – ‘crackin’…geddit?), but test audiences did not respond well to such a terribly over-worked pun.  So you’ll have to settle for: Kraken is awesome.  It mightn’t be the straight-up genre piece with nods to Weird that fans of The City and The City were hoping for, but China Miéville is nothing if not diverse.  If you’ve read his Bas-Lag novels you should feel relatively comfortable (even if he does manage to last an enormous 200 pages before introducing his first union strike action).  I’ve still not decided how to categorise Kraken, so let’s just call it a great big London magic end of the world squid novel with phasers and living ink.  That’ll do.

Tomcat

The Kraken Wakes – John Wyndham

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In perpetuation of my 2011 China Miéville binge-fest, I’ve recently acquired his Cthulhu cult novel Kraken (review pending).  Before reading it, however, I thought it prudent that I at least nominally educate myself in the genre to which Kraken pays homage.  So I read The Kraken Wakes [1953] by John Wyndham first. It’s a sci-fi novel with ‘Kraken’ in the title, so surely it’ll be ‘of type’ with Dr Miéville’s book, right? WRONG! The Kraken Wakes couldn’t be more different, unrelated or detached from the tradition in which China’s Kraken book is written.  Darn it. Serves me right for conducting zero research and judging a book by its name alone, I guess.  So much for the Kraken-on-Kraken compare and contrast exercise I’d hoped to write later this week.  But as I’ve read the Wyndham book anyway, here’s a review…

In po-faced defiance of its title, The Kraken Wakes contains no tentacular sea monsters of Scandinavian mythological origin whatsoever. Neither does it so much as allude to giant squid, octopodes or cephalopods of any kind.  Rather, the title is a bastardisation of a line from the Tennyson sonnet ‘The Kraken’ [1830], which is a sea shanty-esque verse about the propensity of the ocean to be simultaneously both calm and deadly.  The book itself is a fictional work of journalism by Mike Watson (with some monstrously unsubtle suggestions of a personality correlation with Sherlock Holmes’ similarly surnamed sidekick), who narrates in the first person and describes his experiences of (and involvement in stopping) an alien invasion.  The USP of these extra-terrestrial nasties is that, rather than saucering over cities and blasting us from the air, they land their crafts in Earth’s Oceans and conduct a slow invasion  from the world’s deepest underwater trenches – you’ve gotta credit their originality.

Wyndham crafts his alien invaders with a set of narrative proclivities that are more in keeping with horror fiction than traditional sci-fi.  The aliens themselves, for example, are never actually seen, either by character or reader; – they always function off-stage, as it were.  They begin their take-over of Earth by pulling ships into the oceans, making any travel by boat untenable; later there are some suggestions of living tank-like weapons crawling up beaches, and finally, over several years, the sea-levels rise to apocalyptic heights and it looks like lights out for the human race.  That all this violence occurs without a single physical description of or appearance by the aliens is what makes them seem so damn, well… alien.  The ardent lack of description and the glacial pace of the aliens’ progress allow the reader’s imagination to run riot with speculation over what these things look like.  This lack of any specificity whatsoever creates the uncanny impression that these non-visual invaders are simply too alien and too horrific to be adequately described with language.  Wyndham’s rejection of the standard anthropomorphised extra-terrestrial is markedly refreshing, and it’s the latent inability of the cast to truly know their enemy that’s responsible for the horror fiction vibe that dominates this book’s tone.

But unfortunately, little else about The Kraken Wakes is as successful as its alien invaders.  There are significant pacing problems, to the extent that I began to wonder whether Wyndham was deliberately dragging his feet with story progression in some kind of postmodern narrative reflection of the grass-growingly slow invasion of his alien antagonists.  Frequently 50 pages will pass without a single synoptic ‘event’; the characters merely spend their time rushing around England asking if anybody knows what the hell is going on (in this regard, I suppose they echo my own sentiments).  Similarly, much of the book’s language is dull and clunky – often leaden with unhelpful adjectives and long, long passages of extraneous, journalistic musings about the international response to the invasion.  Such chapters are frustrating because much of the book’s scientific terminology is now obsolete; I often found myself reaching for the dictionary to look-up some esoteric phrase or other, only to discover that it is no longer in use: ‘coelenterate’ being the most commonly used of such out-dated nomenclature (in case you’re wondering: it describes a kind of jellyfish-like tentacle).

As far as I can tell, the most frequent modern criticism levelled at The Kraken Wakes is that it’s very much a product of its time, and hasn’t aged well.  Large chunks of the book reflect contemporary societal fears that’re just no longer applicable.  The Americans initially refuse to believe in the alien invaders, choosing instead to apportion blame to some new and secret Soviet weaponry.  Likewise the Russians accuse the Brits of sinking their ships, and vice versa.  I don’t entirely agree that this Cold War slant alienates a modern readership, because all a reader needs to do is replace every reference to ‘Soviets’ with the word ‘terrorists’, and this should do a more than adequate job of contextualising the Cold War climate of fear and suspicion for 21st Century readers.  Besides, I don’t think that a book being a ‘product of its time’ is any kind of valid criticism at all.

Elsewhere characterisation is problematic, and somewhat of a double-edged sword.  Protagonists Mike and Phyllis have the least believable marriage I’ve encountered in a long while, and speak to each other in a kind of faux Fleet Street insipidity that bathetically undermines any attempts Wyndham makes at presenting the couple’s supposed love and affection.  They’re entirely without depth, and function purely as vehicles for telling the story – they may have worked better as colleagues, rather than lovers.  A major contributing factor to their roboticism of character can be ascertained fairly early in the novel:  they lose their newborn baby – an undeniably tragic event that is, bafflingly, never mentioned again; as if such an appallingly terrible event could ever be shrugged off in favour of yet more tedious investigative journalism. Their banality as ‘main characters’ has the inopportune side-effect of making the seldom seen supporting cast that much more interesting.  The eccentric appeal of mad scientist Dr Bocker (spookily always one step ahead of the aliens) and comic relief of nosy, opinionated neighbour Petunia only highlights the prosaicism of the leads, and left me longing for the rare appearances of the book’s secondary characters.

My final gripe is with The Kraken Wakes’ ending.  Consider yourself duly spoiler-warned: though I’m sure such augury is obsolete in a review of a 60-year-old novel.  Mike and Phyllis have fled to the countryside; most of the world’s land is now hundreds of feet underwater; most of the world’s population has drowned.  It’s summer, early evening, they’re looking out over the indescribably vast ocean that covers the planet, only a few islands of land (former mountain ranges) remain, and the narrative tone is one of unknowability and question: who are these aliens? How/why have they flooded the Earth?   It’s beautifully vague, ambiguous and heart-rending.  Then we get to the final page.  I’m not going to quote it all, so here’s a recreation (highly accurate, I promise):

“Hi”

 “Hello?”

“Hi Mike, you don’t know me, but I have good news. We’ve found a way to kill the aliens.” 

“What?”

“Yeah, we’ve just invented a new weapon that’ll kill them all.”

“What? A weapon? What is it?”

“It’s a” *cough* “some kind of” *cough* “machine.  It vibrates with ultra… something”.

“Okay cool.  Bye. 

Darling, that was a strange man outside.  He says we have a weapon to beat the aliens”

“Great.”

THE END.

[The phrase ‘ultra-something’ is a direct quote].  The picture of an endless ocean drawn immediately before this conversation is so beautiful, well described and evocative that I was preparing myself to forgive the book’s myriad failings in light of a brilliant ending; but the dues ex machina undermines the poignancy of the moment in an almost comically bizarre come-down that’s entirely out of sorts with both the established pace of the story and the emotional tone of the scene.  The Kraken Wakes is an ambitious but unsuccessful attempt at giving the alien invasion trope an unusual twist.  The focus on the media reaction to such an event is great; likewise the exploration of international suspicions and fear mongering is convincing.  I also enjoyed the horrific presentation of a truly other, unknowable alien life form.  But poor characterisation, pacing and a frankly stupid ending ruined the whole experience for me.  The Kraken Wakes is slow and boring, and although I’ve been told that this is a minor blip in an otherwise illustrious sci-fi career (Wyndham wrote the universally praised Day of the Triffids and The Midwich Cuckoos), I think it’ll be a while before I pick up another of his books.

Tomcat

Bend Sinister – Vladimir Nabokov

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Ah Nabokov.  Verbally ebullient Nabokov. Na-Bo-Kov.  Did you know that he hand-wrote his novels on numbered blank postcards?  As friends of mine who’ve kindly put up with my eulogistic diatribes in praise of Nabokov’s brilliance will be aware, he’s one of my favourite writers, and perhaps my very favourite stylist.  But what’s that you ask?  If I’m such an ardent fan, why have I only just read his black comic dystopian masterpiece Bend Sinister when surely any genuine and discerning Nabokov devotee would have devoured said novel the instant they learnt of its existence?  Well, such is my love for Nabokov, that rather than be the fat kid who spoils his pleasure by stuffing all the ice cream down his throat in one exorbitant gorge of deliciousness, I’ve decided to stretch my consumption of Vlad’s output over a long period, all the better to savour the piquancy of his genius.  So, it’s one or two Nab novels a year for me, which means I have many years of Nabokovian banquets ahead. Geez, does writing about books make anybody else feel hungry?

Bend Sinister is set in some non-disclosed East European country recently renamed Padukgrad in honour of its new dictator Paduk, leader of the totalitarian ‘Average Man’ party.  The party is a philistine, para-military organisation whose conform or die approach to government and mandate to suppress all expressions of individuality has clear real world parallels with the far-leaning regimes of Nabokov’s contemporary Europe (he wrote this in 1945).  As such Bend Sinister can loosely be grouped with a whole host of other first-half-of-the-century reactionary dystopias such as Brave New World, We, and of course Nineteen Eighty-Four.

The significant point of difference is that Bend Sinister is strikingly more comic than other novels of its oeuvre.  The protagonist isn’t a noble dissenter whose valiant struggle against oppression and subsequent defeat at the hands of unstoppable evil is the ultimate expression of righteous individualism; instead, Adam Krug is an aloof and detached professor of philosophy, fundamentally dismissive of the party and its aims.  The former class mate of the dictator Paduk (a parallel to Wittgenstein, a one-time class mate of Hitler’s, perhaps?), Krug used to bully the crazed leader in a daily routine of “sitting on his head”.  The crux of the novel is that the ‘Average Man’ party desperately wants the endorsement of Krug to bolster the world standing of their philosophy, Ekwillism (sounds like ‘equalism’, geddit?), but as a world famous philosopher, Krug’s too well-known to be threatened with death.  What ensues is a disturbing and dark sequence of intimidation; a kind of fear campaign led by the party against Krug, which sees his friends arrested, his possessions taken and his child abducted.  Somewhat predictably, Krug only comes to his senses about the true power of the party when it’s just a little too late.

So far so de rigueur, and before I started reading BS (actually, probably shouldn’t call it that…) and before I started reading Bend Sinister, I anticipated that this would be an easy review to write.  A couple of sentences about freedom here, a warning about the dangers of totalitarianism there, a short comparison with Orwell’s book… and we’re done.  But ohhoho (that’s Nabokov laughing), oh so naive me: – Bend Sinister just isn’t as (dare I say)… obvious as any of those novels mentioned above.  It’s beset with a kind of dark and sinistral irony that contorts all clarity and distorts interpretation; nowhere more so than in the novel’s bewildering introduction, in which Nabokov lists and systematically rejects all labels a reader could use to classify the novel: satire? Nope. Didacticism? Guess again. Parody or analogue? I spit at you! In fact, Nabokov refutes almost every possible interpretive tag, but without actually providing a suitable alternative.  Obviously this isn’t up to him, right? And I read the introduction with the same cautious lookout for irony that I employed while reading the rest of the novel, “he must be joking”, I thought, “some of this critical mud must stick” – but dammit if it didn’t play on my mind, and it was this half piss-taking, half deadly serious tone that coloured, for me, my experience of Bend Sinister.

So where does that leave this review? My one-size-fits-all dystopian fiction critique isn’t going to cut-it, and besides, it’s somewhat dull to regurgitate the same thoughts about freedom, extreme politics, oppression and art as resistance that have been used and used and used in countless school essays on Nineteen Eighty-Four.  Similarly, I don’t want to fall into the trap of attributing any of the critical labels to Bend Sinister that Nabokov so forcefully rejects in his introduction, even if that was all one big joke.  Instead I’m going to talk briefly about the book’s myriad images and metaphorscapes – surely there’s interpretive substance in that, Nabokov being such an imagist master and all?

The book begins with a description of an oblong puddle outside a hospital in which Krug’s wife has just died, reflecting the building, sky and pavement in a grey mimicry of the real world (which, of course, isn’t actually real – but just the world of the novel).  As well as forming a striking metaphor for grief as a spreading “tentacled black dampness” through which the world is viewed at a muted remove, this image is an emblematic introduction to the novel’s foremost problem: that of being able to discern what’s real from what’s mere imitation.  I often fixate on Nabokov’s penchant for doubles (for e.g. the Humbert Humbert dualism in Lolita (both the protagonist’s name and his sinister shadow Mr Quilty), the doppelgangers in Despair or the unknowing love rivals in Laughter in the Dark) but in Bend Sinister it’s the entire world that is constantly re-created, copied, doubled and reflected; first in the grey puddle, later in mirrors, spilt milk, theatre and language (Krug’s nickname is ‘mad adam’ – a nice little palindrome/mirror image).

Early on, Krug attempts to cross a bridge only to be turned away by guards on the other side – but, once he re-arrives at the bridge’s beginning, a new set of guards turn him back; and so he is forced to wander between two sides of a bridge, repeatedly turned-away at either end.  The image of our protagonist walking back and forth, back and forth along a bridge is bizarrely comic, but also functions as a visual metaphor for his mental state: the bridge is a hinterland that he is struggling to cross: from his married life into widowerhood, from happiness into despair – and also, for the country, the bridge symbolises the new regime: a crossing from one political shore to another (if you want to be twee about it).  Such metaphorically loaded imagery is repeated over and over, and always in a way that questions rather than cements an impression of reality: reflections in mirrors, artificial lighting, mirages – all visual preoccupations that suggest copies or clones of the world, forcing the reader to question deeper parallels between the world of the novel, and our own.

So Bend Sinister is filled with other worlds: in reflections and paintings, over bridges and through echoes and even puns, everything is at a remove from reality; viewed in a mirror or through a double or as a shadow.  There’s even a nice passage in which an oak tree is replaced by an iron copy, which serves as a metaphor for the difficulties of translation, but also highlights a fundamental problem with allegorical fiction: the world of the novel is not our own, but an imperfect and artificial cipher.  There are moments (particularly towards the end) in which Krug seems to acknowledge his identity as a character in a fiction (frequent changes of narratorial register into the first person can be explained as Nabokov acting as voice of the ‘creator’, speaking on behalf of his protagonist).  Krug’s inaction in the face of the tyrannical new regime is even parodied by constant references to Hamlet, reinforcing the idea of theatre, performance and the artificial.

 Krug is always on the bridge: between the old politics and the new, between happiness and grief, and, crucially, between our world and his own.  Fundamentally, I would argue that Bend Sinister is a novel preoccupied with the creation of itself.  The visual landscape, rampant with removes, doubles and shadows, is a symbol of the book’s own relationship with the real world: simultaneously familiar yet strange and removed (is ‘uncanny’ applicable here?).  Ironically, it’s through his madness that Krug sees most clear and realises that he’s not real: mirrors and plays and paintings and shadows bring the reader’s attention to the artificiality, the art, of it all – the layers of life and perception that colour the world with beauty and depth.  Yes there’s a run-of-the-mill dystopian critique of totalitarian politics to be found here, if that’s really your bag – but more than that, Bend Sinister is a novel about writing novels, which explores the hinterland in which our world ends and the novel’s begins: we are looking in at Krug, but he is also looking out at us.  Crucially this highlights the significance of art (the ‘freedom to art’, if you will) in the creation of our own world.  Freedom of thought, Nabokov insists, is Freedom of Art. When political tyranny obstructs this freedom, the final result isn’t a poorer world, but [spoilers]: the end of the world.  In case you’re wondering, a ‘Bend Sinister’ is a diagonal band drawn from the left side on an heraldic coat of arms: a divide or split in the world, a crack in the mirror.

Tomcat.

The Centauri Device – M. John Harrison

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At an austere 200 pages, The Centauri Device has destabilized my preconceptions of Space Opera.  I heretofore assumed that all Space Opera was self-defined as such by merit of its Homeric length as much as by any adherence to established themes or argument (admittedly I’ve been reading a lot of Alastair Reynolds).  But like a literary Tardis, The Centauri Device is abundantly more vast than its meagre pagecount would suggest, a feat entirely due to M. John Harrison’s mastery of the imagist mode.  In hand, this may be a lightweight flit of a novel, but the depth of its ideas belies the economy of its prose.  The Centauri Device rivals, if not supersedes, any 800 page genre brother you could care to name.  Harrison has a penchant for abstract, metaphor heavy, dream-state writing that is unfortunately absent in much current sci-fi, but the influence this book did have is undeniable; apparently it was the progenitor of those long poetic spaceship names that’re now so ubiquitous (notably in Iain M. Banks, Peter F. Hamilton and the aforementioned Alastair Reynolds).  The fact that Harrison developed, perfected and then abandoned this trope over the course of a single novel is testament to his talents (incidentally, among my favourite of his spaceship names are: Let Us Go Hence and the comically grandiloquent The Melencolia That Transcends All Wit). So, I’ll try my humble best to do The Centauri Device justice in the paltry compass of this article – but no promises…

Here’s the blurb: Several decades ago, humans bombed the living shit out of the planet Centauri, all but eradicating the native population.  Now an archaeological expedition has unearthed the so-called Centauri device, and the four major human factions go to war over its ownership.  There’re two problems however: 1) only the last remaining carrier of Centauri DNA (an anarchistic, drug-involved semi-criminal freight captain called John Truck (our protagonist)) can activate it, and 2) nobody knows what it does.  The Arabs (note: this is a loose, hand-down moniker with no geographical or religious relation to the present day) are a powerful movement of space socialists (stick with me…) who believe the Centauri device is the ultimate propaganda machine; the Israelis (again, no relation) think it’s a bomb; the Aesthete Anarchists don’t have a clue what it is, and the body-modifying religious nutjobs of the time, the Openers, believe the device is God Himself.  In effect, The Centauri Device is a strange incarnation of the alien artefact novel that was popularised by Arthur C. Clarke; here however, it’s tempered by a contemporary mid-period Cold War context reflected in the arms race agenda of the novel’s rival sects.

In this regard, The Centauri Device definitely shows its age; constant hyperbolic references to a Leninist takeover and hysterical fear of ‘Trotskyites’ are thinly veiled renditions of contemporary societal concerns. Plus there’s a space-hippy Stratocaster playing rock star who functions as a bizarre incarnation of Hendrix (Harrison was a big fan, apparently); likewise the drug du jour is a kind of future-Heroin imbibed at a never-ending psychedelic party; the Centauri device itself is clearly analogy for Nuclear weaponry – safe, but only in the right hands (whosever they may be).  But is it a failing of far-future sci-fi to be such an obvious product of its time? Well, no, because a fundamental aspect of the genre is an implicit, albeit removed, questioning of contemporary mores, without which the whole oeuvre would be meaningless escapism (not necessarily a bad thing), and arguably poorer as a result.

But where The Centauri Device suffers from a traditionality of plot and a contemporariness of reference which may alienate many readers (though which I found enjoyable), its most striking achievements are of style, theme and character.  Let’s forget the a-to-b-to-c mechanisations of scene, and focus on tone.  The Centauri Device is beautifully written; it has a kind of supernal, vertiginous otherness to it that augments the already bizarre goings-on with an impetus on metaphor, dreamscape and grammatically non-standard expression.  While this frequently results in baffling sentences and tangential musings that necessitate re-reading, the overall effect is to elevate the book’s more mundane aspects into the realm of aesthetics: the disconnect between the conventionality of the plot and the beauty of the writing is forgivable (hey, Harrison was a ridiculous 25 when he wrote it), purely because the style makes so much more of the story than would elseways be apparent.  A recurring motif, for example, is the description of the character Ben Barka as a desert, which is so stunning and well-realised that it adds both emotional depth and history to a character otherwise only cursorily featured – the empty but violent desertscapes suggested in his glance betrays an inner anger convergent with pain:

As he moved, he shed brittle echoes of past deserts and intimations of the Desert to Come.  And, far off in his liquid brown eyes – broken white columns, like reflections in a failing cistern.

It’s rare for a sci-fi writer to employ such imagist language but, surprisingly, it really, really works.  Where else in sci-fi could you find such an eloquent description of post-battle unconsciousness as this:

All of them, the asphyxiated and the dying, had worn coloured glass masks, or swum in senselessness, fish of the Impossible Medium; all solid forms had vanished in amazing twists and contortions, and he had felt his interface with space diminish, felt it crawl through him in slow, luminous ecstacies.

I’m showing impressive restraint (honest) by not just quoting the entire thing verbatim here.  Harrison’s prose is like some inter-dimensional tentacle that slips and slides between genre spaces, appropriating imagist language here, literary realism there, grasping at Shakespearean gravitas and Nabokovian satire and consolidating them into a unique style that transcends the conventional vagaries of sci-fi.  The Centauri Device functions in a surreal hinterland between the frivolous (guitar genius space rock-stars) and the literary (metaphor-heavy, imagist prose), and it’s the instability of this relationship that makes it so darn fun!

But don’t get me wrong, it’s not just a fundamental exercise in style; many of the book’s themes betray Harrison’s anarchist leanings: “Politics, Religion and dope: they keep us happy in Hell”, and the downward spiral from audacity to despair via mass murder and responsibility of the protagonist John Truck is brilliantly realised, displaying a moral depth more in keeping with so-called Literary Fiction than sci-fi.  If you were feeling particularly grandiose, you could claim that The Centauri Device evinces the literary legitimacy of Science Fiction: its ability to engage with real-world concerns while concurrently displaying a mastery of style, syntax and such higher-yield techniques as metaphor and allusion is no mean feat.  Some heavy handed plotting is problematic, particularly when John Truck is being passed around from faction to faction like some kind of Pass the Parcel Chosen One, but this book’s events are merely launch pads for its more ideological concerns of power, responsibility and the unknowability of technology.  The stark anti-war agenda may operate as an obstacle to readers disinclined to didacticism, but this is a minor thread and in no way detracts from the book as experience or idea.  The Centauri Device is beautiful sci-fi; flawed, but by no means broken – Space Opera in minor mode, a worthwhile way-in for newcomers and simultaneous stylistic pinnacle for genre purists.

Tomcat.

Hamlet in Purgatory – Stephen Greenblatt

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If ever there were a poster boy of literary criticism, Stephen Greenblatt would surely be him.  Renaissance Self Fashioning, his 1980 thesis on constructed identity, is about as close as critical theory has ever come to an international bestselling mega-hit; and his 2005 biography of Shakespeare Will in the World has already established itself as the go-to Bard authority for under- and post-graduates alike.  Yup, all things being equal, hoards of screaming teenage girls would queue for days outside any venue in which Greenblatt was due to make an appearance, tears of convergent joy and despair running down their faces.  But we literati are a restrained bunch, our love and adoration is expressed in quiet coffee shop concord and polite Amazon book reviews.  Nevertheless, Greenblatt is a relatively big cheese, so it’s high-time I jabbered on about one of his books.

Perhaps Greenblatt’s popular eminence as literary celebrity was the provenance for the punchy and institutionally nonstandard title of his new(ish) book Hamlet in Purgatory.  It’s an undeniably glamorous heading that invites question, but it’s nonetheless fundamentally misleading, as any mention of Hamlet or critical analysis of the same is left entirely until the book’s closing chapter – also its shortest.  My initial disappointment with this lack of Hamletty analysis was soon mitigated, however, by Greenblatt’s early mission statement that the majority of this book functions as treatise on ghosts, demons, myth, monsters, the supernatural, pain, doubling, visual art and the unknowable nature of infinity. I don’t think any critical book has pushed so many of my literary buttons in one such swift movement.  Hamlet in Purgatory definitely piqued my interest, and having read it, part of me just wants to yell “Oh my God it’s so cool!” and let that stand for my review.  But I know you readers are a discerning bunch, and I wouldn’t want to let my “professional” (ahem) face slip, so here’s more detail…

As you’d expect from the pioneer of New Historicism, Hamlet in Purgatory reads more like literary history than exegesis.  As Greenblatt wrestles with the nature of purgatory, the text becomes dense with historical reference and description – nowhere more so than in the opening chapter, which describes a kind of contemporary battle of pamphlets between Simon Fish and Sir Thomas More: the former refuting the existence of purgatory, the latter attesting to it.  And this isn’t the minor theological nit-picking it may initially appear.  As I understand it, by the 16th Century the doctrinal legitimacy of purgatory was an explicitly Catholic aspect, and the rejection of it was therefore a strikingly avant-garde and Reformative (read: Protestant) stance; potentially treasonous.  Fish’s salient objection is against the Roman Catholic Church’s proclivity for demanding money in return for prayers for the benefactors’ souls – prayers that would speed the souls’ passage through purgatory and into heaven.  The two-fold challenge is that 1) the Church should be poor and 2) purgatory has no scriptural basis – which Greenblatt himself confirms by demonstrating that the first (extant) textual reference to purgatory dates from the late 12th Century.

Why this fixation with purgatory in a book ostensibly concerned with Hamlet?  Well, in the 16th Century purgatory was inextricably connected with ghost theory, and Old Hamlet’s ghost being the instigator of Hamlet’s entire plot, it’s pretty darn important (Greenblatt contests) to know how ghosts would have been understood by the play’s contemporary audience.  In order to achieve this, a working-knowledge of purgatory, as it were, is required.  Unlike today, where ghosts have a relatively wishy-washy place in the supernatural pantheon, back in the 1500s they had a very specific ontology: they were exclusively the spirits of the inhabitants of purgatory, come to ask something of the living.  All ghosts, it follows, are Catholic; and this Catholicism of the ghost, if you will, is conceived by Greenblatt as a source of major, albeit sub-textual, conflict in Hamlet: Greenblatt reads Hamlet as having a “distinctly Protestant temperament” which struggles hubristically with the Catholic nature of his father’s ghost to create the tension, delay, madness and disharmony rampant in the play.

Put simply, however, the book’s closing analysis of Hamlet is actually less interesting than the perambulatory exploration of the history (both literary and religious) of purgatory itself.  Although a theory of Hamlet offers the way-in or excuse for all this research in the first place, it feels somewhat tacked-on to the end, and the microscopic focus on this individual play is a definite disconnect coming as it does after a long, broad and all-encompassing study of ghosts and purgatory.  It felt to me as if Greenblatt’s examination of Hamlet was an unnecessary excuse to write-up a bunch of cool stuff about Purgatory.  And it really is cool.  One chapter, for instance, details the Discretio Spirituum- a list of questions that a Catholic priest can utilize to determine whether or not a ghost is actually a visiting spirit from purgatory, or a demon sent to torment a bereaved family.  As ghostbusters as it sounds, the Discretio Spirituum was officially sanctioned Catholic practice.

Elsewhere, the tradition of representing purgatory in art is explained, which seems to consist of a strikingly literal visual language.  Purgatory is dominantly depicted as a space literally below the earth, and in many ways synonymous with Hell.  (“Two spaces cannot share the same geographical location” argued one protestant theologian – he’s obviously never read The City and The City).  Here Greenblatt appeals to the modern sensibility of the glamour of the grotesque to lure in the reader: what was once intended to shock now morbidly fascinates. For e.g.: one reproduced illumination shows the Virgin Mary in heaven ‘soothing’ the souls of purgatory below her with comically ludicrous streams of breast milk.  Another exposes the bizarre specificity with which the Catholic Church had accounted for the various souls of Purgatory by depicting the precise punishment of “the wicked but not very”.

Occasionally Greenblatt veers into a critical lexicon and style that takes some decoding (and recourse to a good dictionary of theory), and this is frequently at odds with the otherwise popular and encompassing tone of his prose.  But fundamentally (and I know this is an entirely subjective judgement) Hamlet in Purgatory is relentlessly interesting.  In part I read it as an explanation of the primeval fear-of-monsters that’s such a characteristic of modern horror/supernatural fiction.  Something about the purgatorial ghost plays into deep, irrational fears of pain, unknowable evil, monstrous demons and the long-coming victory after noble suffering.  So many myths or hero sagas could be traced back to historical notions of purgatory as both concept and place, and for this reason Hamlet in Purgatory aligned with my own literary leanings and offered more-than-a-little food for thought.  If you’ve any interest (academic or popular) in the monstrous or supernatural, then you owe it to yourself to read this brilliant book, if only to discover the religious progenitor of the modern idea of the haunting.

Greenblatt’s fundamental conclusion that the ghost didn’t disappear in post-Catholic textuality, but was appropriated into the language of theatre as both narrative device and tragic idiom is beautifully explained and entirely convincing.  The Protestant ghost is an act of theatre, simultaneously ridding the concept of its religious significance, while maintaining its capacity to shock and alarm: “The space of Purgatory becomes the space of the stage where old Hamlet’s Ghost is doomed for a certain time to walk the night.”

Tomcat

The Sense of an Ending – Julian Barnes

Posted by Tomcat on

Being a realist novel about memory and loss (or is it remembrance and grief?), The Sense of an Ending has just been longlisted for the Man Booker Prize.  It has that kind of middle-brow, middle-class, middle England vibe to it that elevates personal events (or, rather, tragedies) to a level beyond their actual significance, and constructs them with such lofty, psychological and solipsistic language that you’d be forgiven for thinking that our protagonist narrator is the first man in history to have been dumped, or divorced, or grown old, or feel uncomfortable around his grandchildren, or suffer from a weak bladder.  I guess it’s down to the caprice of the individual reader whether or not you find such a microscopic and personal focus on what are essentially mundane and universal experiences to be worthy of your time and money (in this case, more money than time – it’s a tiny squit of a novel), and whether a white, middle-class, unremarkable man’s reminiscences of school, history lessons, furious teenage masturbation, dancing and university exams actually make interesting material for a novel.  From reading other reviews of the book, it seems ‘identifiability’ is a large part of its appeal (albeit demographically limited).  For what it’s worth, I’m not at all averse to such mulchy realist fiction; it is, however, fast becoming the ubiquitous genre de rigueur, and Barnes has stiff competition in this field.  The Sense of an Ending is a solid addition to the oeuvre, but it’s not remarkable; unfortunately every success is counterpointed by an equally mitigating failure, and the result is something that can’t quite rub shoulders with the best of its ilk.

The narrator is Tony Webster, a sixty-something divorcee, retiree and grandfather.  Writing in the first-person past, the novel opens with a long flash-back to Tony’s school/university days, and carries an explicit focus on his friend Adrian, his first love Veronica and the awkward dynamic between the three.  This sequence acts as set-up for the rest of the novel, in which the teenage decisions made by our three protagonists re-surface some forty years later, with devastating consequences.  In brief: there’s a suicide, a love triangle and the resurgence of an emotionally charged letter.  It’s hardly blazingly original, but the ordinariness of its premise is tempered by an intriguing philosophical bent, in which the veracity of memory, documentation and history are constantly challenged.  When one character quotes Patrick Lagrange “History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation”, he is unwittingly delineating the crux of the entire novel.  Misunderstandings, false remembrance and the unintended ambiguity of the written word are the cause of all our protagonists’ problems – basically, Lagrange’s academic idea that the construction of history is problematic is here applied to personal experience.  The question seems to be: can we rely on our past, when all we have to prove it is biased, patchy memory and infinitely interpretable documentation?

It’s almost a truism to say that the word-perfect recall of childhood is an idiosyncrasy of the lit fic genre, and initially The Sense of an Ending seems to fall headfirst into this trap: there’s an uncomfortable disconnect between the novel’s assertion that memory is vague, and the photographically exact, highly poetic, vivid and deliberate way in which Tony describes his past.  But irony abounds in the second-half, in which the credibility of Tony’s recollections and his confidence in the same is rigorously tested: the once impregnable bastion of his memory crumbles until all that remains is doubt. – Essentially, several people’s memories of the same events disagree, and with no higher authority than memory to adjudicate, the unnerving conclusion is a depressing but nonetheless apposite deconstruction of the entire notion of objective personal history.  The narrative is unstable, founded on a memory sequence which is entirely unreliable.

Not that The Sense of an Ending is a radical and reactionary attack on realist fiction – far from it; we’ve already established how run-of-the-mill much of this book is – but the ironic treatment of recollections of childhood is a satisfying deviation from genre norms, and highlights one of my most frequent frustrations with this type of writing.

To return to themes: regret, memory, bias, grief: these aren’t covert threads which I’ve insightfully unpicked with superhuman critical thinking (ha!), they’re explicit aspects of the narration, spelled out (literally) for the reader in long passages of philosophical self-analyses.  The Sense of an Ending’s cast are all armchair psychiatrists, and while much of this is interesting, even moving and poetic, much more of it lapses into a kind of cod-psychology.  Tony definitely changes (dare I say ‘grows’?) as a character, and in this respect The Sense of an Ending functions as a strange take on the bildungsroman: in his sixties, Tony is still coming of age.  But his description and self-pitying analysis of this personal growth is just cringe-inducingly pseudo: “To die when something new is being born – even if that something new is our very own self”.   Similarly: “Life isn’t just addition and subtraction.  There’s also multiplication, of loss.”  It’s relentlessly naff, even his description of dancing is a text-booky excuse for “insightful” (read: hackneyed) introspection: “Basic male display behaviour of the period, determinedly individualistic while actually dependent on a strict imitation of prevailing norms”.

But there’s a disparity, because such wordy, robotic narration is coupled with frequent interjections of slang and profanity which, frankly, I don’t want to hear coming from a sixty year old narrator.  Constant references to ‘snogging’, ‘wanking’, ‘tits’ etc. are just so at odds with the otherwise high register of the book that I began to wonder if Barnes was taking the piss and making fun of his own protagonist – but I’m not sure, because neither seriousness nor satire are consistent enough that one dominates the other.  Tony is a well-read, intelligent narrator who makes frequent appeals to propriety – but undermines himself with this occasional lapse into slang (I’m 26, and I don’t know anybody who uses the word ‘snogging’…)  The Sense of an Ending is tonally indecisive, to the extent that I was unsure whether to laugh at Tony, or pity him.  As a narrator he’s often erratic and unknowable, which is fine, even interesting, but as a character he’s just discrepant and irritatingly inconsistent.

The Sense of an Ending is a half-decent stab at the old-man-whose-mistakes-are-catching-up-with-him yarn, but the scales of success//failure are equally balanced.  There’s a narrative visual concern with the act of opening letters and the physical description of envelopes which contrasts nicely with later depictions of e-mails and text messages, likewise the dialogue is incredibly strong; moving and believable; stylised but not arch.  But equally, many passages read like a sixth-form student’s pop-psychology essay – and long descriptions of mundane, commonplace activities may put-off readers who’re looking for something… I want to say ‘bigger’, but that implies that the personal and everyday is insignificant, so I’ll just say, it may put-off readers who’re looking for… escapism.  Much of the book is dependent upon the reader buying-into the notion of a teenager philosophically arguing himself into suicide; similarly the book’s dénouement is abrupt, leftfield, and isn’t especially satisfying.

My fundamental itch, however, is that I’ve seen this sort of thing done much better elsewhere.  If you’re especially intrigued by a man’s simultaneous ruminations on the romantic mistakes of his youth and the existential despair/regret of his old age, then I recommend you try either Everyman by Philip Roth, or the perfect On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan – both of which are vastly more successful versions of what Julian Barnes has, only somewhat prosperously, attempted.

Tomcat