The Very Hungry Caterpillar – Eric Carle

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The Very Hungry Caterpillar is a phantasmagoric bodyshock horror story that focuses on the tenets of extreme gluttony and one creature’s psycho-compulsive desire to consume the world around him.  Taking cues from Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft, The Very Hungry Caterpillar’s conception of horror isn’t a hyperbolic focus on blood and viscera, nor is it concerned with gothic notions of ghosts or death: rather, the anathema is an internalised grotesque; it is the body itself that is to be feared, treacherous from the inside and predisposed to intense bloating, mutation and the eventual emergence of the literal monster from within. 

Whether or not the titular (yet never-named) Caterpillar’s gluttony is caused by some form of substance withdrawal, early childhood trauma, psychosis or hormonal imbalance is never made clear, as Eric Carle’s sparse and deliberately minimalist prose refuses to satisfy us with any kind of biography or context.  I guess it’s down to the caprice of the individual reader whether or not the hubristic protagonist is eating to compensate for some tragic loss or unhappiness, or whether the book functions as a more simplistic parable and warning against greed as a moral vice.  You could even read the work as a capitalist allegory; a sarcastic metaphor that criticises consumerist living and the compulsion to relentlessly use up even that which we don’t need.  At about mid-way through the narrative, for example, the Caterpillar abandons the apples and foliage of his natural diet and turns instead to increasingly unsuitable and unnecessary processed foodstuffs: cakes, ice-cream, chocolates etc; he doesn’t need these things, but he is nonetheless beset with the urge to consume them, resulting in an inevitable sickness that can be only read as a kind of moral malady and existential ennui in the face of so much needless feeding of the self, something with which – in the current business environment of in-your-face marketing and the suggestion that an exponential increases in what we buy is the only path to happiness – I think we can all identify.

Eric Carle’s familiar illustrative style is here made noxious with a gross high-contrast palette of juxtaposed reds and greens that might function as trippy visual call-back to hallucinatory substance abuse, perhaps hinting at the protagonist’s hidden and difficult past.  The cut-and-paste nature of the art is reminiscent of Max Ernst, the early Twentieth-Century master of visionary Dada collage.  What is most striking about The Very Hungry Caterpillar’s aesthetic, however, is the white and formless void in which the narrative action transpires.  Whether this is a visual metaphor for the emptiness of the Caterpillar’s existence, or a literal representation of the world after it has been entirely devoured by our protagonist is never made clear – it could even be a psychologically sympathetic reflection of the Caterpillar’s own solipsism: all he sees, all that has meaning to him, is food and the self.  In a highly creative manipulation of the book as a physical ‘artefact’, several pages have been punched-through with holes, providing the reader with a teasing glimpse at what’s coming next, which not only lends great pace and momentum to the work, but also provides us with a taste of the Caterpillar’s own mental state (and, indeed, the mental state of any addict) – always looking forward for the next meal, the next hit and the next and the next; wondering where it’s going to come from.

The formless white void inhabited by "The Caterpillar".

Most shocking, however, is the book’s horrific dénouement, in which (spoilers ahead…) the Caterpillar descends into a life of abject reclusion, shutting himself away for an undisclosed period of time before an act of eclosion which sees an entirely different creature emerge from the now empty shell of our hero’s grossly disproportionate and outsized body.  There is some debate, as lepidopterists will tell you, over whether the emergent insect (the “butterfly”) is, in fact, an altogether separate species of animal from the crawling, wingless original.  If this is the case, then the Butterfly could be read as a monstrous and parasitic ‘other’, hijacking our helpless protagonist from within and enforcing upon him a set of behavioural patterns beneficial to the waiting monster, but not the hero, namely: the aforementioned propensity for extreme greed, reinforcing The Very Hungry Caterpillar’s identity as a work of terror, in line with such classic horror staples as demonic possession or parasitic alien gestation.

The Very Hungry Caterpillar is bildungsroman tragedy told via a pastiche of horror fiction mores and an unsettling convergence of disparate genre conventions: prose poem meets phantasmagoric dreamscape meets an examination of chronic loneliness, all fused with the suggestion of a loss so deep and painful that even when the hero devours the world until it is reduced to an empty white nothingness, the suffering remains.  Perhaps the inescapable punched-out fissures in the book’s pages expose The Very Hungry Caterpillar’s real subject and message, the core of hurt that persist through everything: the holes that can’t be filled.

Tomcat.

Cold Hand in Mine – Robert Aickman

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I think it’s unfortunate that when met with the notion of ‘The Weird’ as genre, most people will kinda stare blankly or shrug their shoulders.  A few might be able to roll off the names of the more familiar and better-known progenitors: F. Marion Crawford, Algernon Blackwood, Lord Dunsany, H.P. Lovecraft or T.F. Powys; a few more will know and have read the heavy-hitters of the modern revivalism (the so-called ‘New Weird’): Miéville, VanderMeer, Michael Cisco, Thomas Ligotti etc. But the real empty shelf in the stacks of readers’ minds is the inter space between The Weird’s abounding inception and its recent popular revival.  Even the word ‘revival’ is somewhat of a misdirect, suggesting if not a death then at least a falling to unconsciousness or lethargy, when in fact the genre was very much alive and pumping its beautifully disgusting blood all over the 20th Century.  One such writer from this nearly lost mid-period of The Weird is Robert Aickman, the British master of the weird short horror story.  Infuriatingly he’s pretty much out of print these days, but his seminal collection Cold Hand in Mine is available via the print on demand Faber Finds series.

Aickman’s stylistic proclivities are in line with the aforementioned Blackwood and Lovecraft – (and more recently Ligotti owes Aickman a debt) – in that his stories are characterised by a wanton sense of ambiguity and a frequent refusal to provide the reader with any kind of closure or resolution.  It’s telling that Cold Hand in Mine quotes in epigraph Sacheverell Sitwell, “In the end it is the mystery that lasts and not the explanation”, and I took this as a useful heuristic when faced with the frustration of an abruptly ended story or the never-arrival of a long-teased denouement.  ‘The Swords’, for example, opens with the sexually suggestive question “My first experience?” and a short biography from the narrator that baits the reader into expecting an entirely conventional loss of virginity bildungsroman. What follows, however, is a journey to that staple locale of so many classic horror stories: the out-of-the-way mist-shrouded town, and an encounter with a strange kind of theatre in which a woman is repeatedly stabbed by members of the audience – (coming to no apparent harm) – before being sold as prostitute to our narrator and literally falling to pieces during the sex act.  It’s tempting to paste some hackneyed psychoanalytical significance onto the repeated stabbing of the woman, and the sexual metaphor of swords as phallic substitute is perhaps a little too in-your-face; but fundamentally this is a narrative that demands reader-input and analysis if it’s to make any kind of sense.  The language of performance coupled with the theatre sequence definitely casts the reader in the role of scopophiliac audience member, consigning all sex scenes to acts of inherent voyeurism with the reader as the third party onlooker.  The sense of horror is thus created when the act of reading is equated with passive observation, suggesting that you, as just another audience member, are, by continuing to read, somehow complicit in the mass on-stage rape of this woman.  Furthermore, the woman’s gross disintegration under the inexperienced thrusting of our protagonist can be read as either i) non-literal nightmare manifestation of his sexual anxieties and naivety; ii) a heartbreaking metaphor for the psychological disconnection the prostitute has to make during sex between her inner self and her physical body: a kind of mind//body separation that functions as self-preservation; or iii) a telling moment of tragic revelation in which the prostitute’s apparent immunity to the on-stage stabbing is finally broken down and her true pain revealed: her on-stage and back-stage personas being not so different, after all.  The ‘death of innocence’ so often explored in works of sexual initiation is here coupled with a much more bleak and literal examination of death.

But not all of Cold Hand in Mine’s stories are so analytically yielding.  It’s anybody’s guess what strange combination of folk tale, ghostlore and German mythology have gone into creating ‘Niemandswasser’, in which a reclusive and suicidal German lord wrestles with doppelgangers, sibling rivalry and a strange correlation of literal topographic borders with the finer internal boundaries between mental balance and madness: a kind of horror that ties humanity to nature not in a way that’s organic and beautiful, but in a manner which exposes man to all of nature’s violent vagaries, inconsistencies and dangers.  Elsewhere, ‘The Real Road to the Church’ sees a demonic and otherworldly funeral procession pass through the garden of protagonist Rosa’s new island home, coupled with an almost Socratic exchange between Rosa and a retired priest that’s peppered with unnervingly personal and quasi-romantic non-sequiturs, “I can hear the beating of your heart”.  Precisely what’s going in is difficult to pin down, but that’s entirely the point: the stories of The Weird function at their highest when they transcend the everyday and the predictable, even rendering the language of exegesis imprecise and unhelpful.  The more I tried to dig out these stories’ foundations, the more I felt like I was just piling stuff on top of them.

It’s probably somewhat ironic, then, that the most disappointing stories of Cold Hand in Mine are those that offer the comfort and succour of logical explanation.  When, for instance, the vampire in ‘Pages from a Young Girl’s Journal’ is revealed to be just that: a vampire, I couldn’t help but feel deflated.  Before Aickman’s ‘big reveal’, the vampire could have been anything; the ultimate revelation is a massive letdown in the face of the story’s brilliant lexical pastiche of Jane Austen-esque romance, which would have benefited from a much more avant-garde supernaturalism.  What we get instead is a fairly run-of-the-mill, period vampire romance.  If The Weird has an agenda to horrify with the suggestion of an unknowable other, it fails itself when resorting to specificity and explanation; that which is sensible cannot be Weird.

And that’s really the crux of it.  Robert Aickman’s best stories are not yours, not mine; they’re not even his, because when it hits its stride, Cold Hand in Mine is so unknowably strange and tenebrously cryptic that the reader is almost too scared to look deeper: the suggestion is that the truth of these tales is even more horrific than their mysteries.  So it’s never the narrator who is uninformed, nor the by-standing secondary characters, nor the landscapes themselves: it’s the reader who is exterior. The paranormal hysteria generated by the almost-living steampunk-esque time pieces in ‘The Clock Watcher’ makes perfect sense to Ursula, likewise the titular protagonist of ‘Meeting Mr Millar’ knows exactly what strange things go on in his offices.  Cold Hand in Mine is successful because it doesn’t show something ‘other’ to the reader, instead it makes something ‘other’ out of the reader; the reader is on the outside: and what could be more strange, horrific or, indeed, Weird than realising that it’s not the world or it’s people that’re mad: it’s you.

Tomcat.

In Soviet Russia, Books Review You

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Tintin in the Land of the Soviets

Spurred on by constant encouragement/recommendations(/nagging) from my friend Thom (all well meant, of course), I’ve recently ‘gotten into’ comics and graphic novels.  It’s taken me a while, sure, but this is mostly due to [misguided comment about comics no.1::] my latent fear of any book that so stringently directs your visual conception of its narrative as to actually have some guy(or guyess) draw you a picture of what’s happening in every single scene, the very notion of which I used to find irritatingly prescriptive in a kind of, like, here’s-what-to-read-and-what-to-see-and-you-will-have-no-say-in-the-matter way.  But after a concerted effort to get over myself and recourse to frequent memorandums telling me that comics are actually different from novels (no really, they are), I’ve found myself genuinely enjoying the medium.  My most notable [misguided comment about comics no.2::] comicular (that’s the adjective, right?) favourites thus far being: Warren Ellis’ Planetary, Grant Morrisons’ Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth, some Scott Pilgrim, some Phonogram and various and sundry DC/Marvel back-issues I’ve dipped in and out of. Of which in and out I have dipped.

I’ve held back from reviewing a comic until now, however, chiefly out of an anxiety that I lack the requisite artistic experience/knowledge to adequately critique what is foremost a visual medium, and worried that I don’t possess or understand the language of the visual signifier enough to make any headway into writing a review that’s at all engaging or insightful, or interesting. Or readable.  That anxiety’s still here, in buckets, but it seems apropos that just as I got over my fear of reading comics lest I find myself unable to engage with the form, I should likewise get over my fear of reviewing the same.  So I’ve chosen for my first (adjective used optimistically) comic review Tintin in the Land of the Soviets – this for various reasons: I’ve often heard the likes of Tom McCarthy and China Miéville extolling the narrative depth and exegetic fruitfulness of Tintin’s adventures, and so perhaps Hergé’s books offer a relatively gentle “way-in” for a first time reviewer such as me. But principally I chose Tintin so I can avoid the potential (?) reviewerly faux pas of giving more credence to the writer than the artist, or the artist than the colourer, or the colourer than (more leftfield) the letterer etc. as polymath Hergé has all four bases covered himself.

It’s tempting to begin a review of Tintin in the Land of the Soviets by lambasting its racist and clichéd portrayal of Soviet Russia; its patronising belittlement of Russian cultural achievements (“By Trotsky!” being the favourite native curse); its cast of offensively reductive, bearded, vodka-drinking Soviet stereotypes who converse in a ubiquitous cod-Marxist drivel talk (expect to read the word ‘Bourgeois’ over and over) and the sort of gross way it portrays Communists as not just politically dangerous and deceitful, but as intrinsically evil in every way (drowning dogs for the hell of it, etc.).  But to claim the moral high ground in this way you’d have to ignore the entire textual provenance of Tintin in the Land of the Soviets as well as its convoluted post-publication history.  Hergé, who working as a freelance pencil-for-hire was commissioned to compose the piece in 1929 as an anti-Communist educational guide for children, very quickly distanced himself from the work and frequently lamented its “political naivety”, even refusing to ink the book when, later in life, his publishers asked him to colour all of his early b&w strips.  In some ways Tintin in the Land of the Soviets does represent the worst that comics has to offer – a propaganda piece cynically targeted at children with an agenda to engender both jingoism and xenophobia via fear-mongering, stereotyping and hearsay – but it’s nonetheless a charming and frequently funny story that functions as early document of the comic as longform medium.

But as well as being an early example of comic working as sustained narrative, TITLOTS (whoa… this is one book I probably shouldn’t shorten to acronym…) Tintin in the Land of the Soviets is very much a proto-Tintin: the eponymous protagonist doesn’t even look like himself: he’s beefier, longer-nosed and his characteristic There’s Something About Mary-inspiring quiff is barely noticeable.  Similarly the 2D, side-on perspective and uniformity of both panel size and layout offers no suggestion of the formal experimentation and artistic creativity that Tintin’s later adventures embody; aside, that is, for the occasional deviation to a kind of quasi-isometric camera angle and the functional ‘blacked out’ panel that indicates darkness.  Also: Snowy talks in almost every panel – offering glib and sarcastic comments on events.  There’s a Stewie Griffin-esque ‘can the other characters understand him?’ quandary that the reader has to deal with, and I opted for ‘no’, which elevates Snowy’s musings to the level of extradiegetic commentary – outside of the narrative and addressed to the reader – Snowy voices concerns over the incoherency of the plot and Tintin’s propensity for encountering danger while also making the kind of pithy observations that can only be read as author self-insertion, as  Hergé wrestling with the less-than-wholesome vagaries of the politically loaded commission.

The predominant thematic focus, such as it is, is disguise: and whether it’s Tintin’s conveniently stumbling around the back of a Soviet factory to discover a Hollywood-esque set of wooden facades and sound-effects masquerading as successful industrialism (a foil to convince Western Europe of Russian technical might), or Tintin’s own constant employment of ever more ludicrous costumes (a soldier, a Bolshevik, a ghost etc. – the latter conceived to expose the stupidity of the Russians who’re all terrified), disguise is always the ironic means by which deeper truths are uncovered – on both a physical level (Tintin’s soldier bluff grants him access to a secret Soviet meeting) and metaphoric  (for e.g: the Soviet cover-up of the dearth of grain acts as metonymy for their lack of basic morality).  The Soviets’ use of deceit is implicitly tricksy and sinister – used to obscure the horrible truth of their regime – whereas Tintin’s disguise is set up in direct moral dichotomy to this: his tricks expose truth, theirs obscure it – a relationship clearly engineered to carry larger, real-world parallels with the political acts of the characters’ respective nations.

But even using the word ‘characters’ is somewhat of a miscall: Tintin has definite journalistic clout, and Snowy is charmingly aloof – but Tintin in the Land of the Soviets’ supporting cast of generic, un-memorable [misguided comment about comics no.3::] sprites is just another (visual) incarnation of the theme of guising: the soviets are all the same – not characters in any artistic or writerly way, but homunculi for the easy expression of Hergé’s political stereotypes.  It’s best to think of Tintin in the Land of the Soviets as a comic awash with the inauthentic: politically, visually and more literally in terms of plotting, costume and speech: the Soviets even like to spell out to one another their “evil” foreign policy plans and freely admit to their enormous political flaws in a manner utterly inconsistent with naturalistic dialogue.

It’s perfectly fitting that a comic Hergé would come to regard as false and not true to himself is so preoccupied with mistaken identity and cover-up.  For what it’s worth, I enjoyed reading it immensely, even if this enjoyment was coupled with a kind of moral trepidation at the comic’s overt agenda in a way that made me question my own readerly sensitivities.  But that’s my first ever comic review just about done and dusted. If people like it I may well review the second Tintin adventure next month; after all, there’s no way that it can possibly more controversial than Tintin in the Land of the Soviets… right?

Tomcat.

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.