Both Flesh and Not – David Foster Wallace

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Both Flesh & Not CoverBoth Flesh and Not is the first of what I assume will be several posthumous bringing-togethers of David Foster Wallace’s shorter non-fiction.  This collection offers a somewhat disparate array of brilliant and not-so-brilliant essays plonked in concert with seemingly little concern for chronology, consistency of subject matter or overall theme.  As such, I’ve decided to structure my review accordingly:

Both Flesh and Not – The compilers hit the ground running with what is arguably DFW’s most well-known essay; a long and performative piece about Roger Federer’s tennis genius which acts as a way-in for DFW to examine the state of modern tennis in general.  Possibly the best example of his tripartite prose style, Both Flesh and Not melds hyperbolic and lyrical writing with high-level technical language and a penchant for multi-page, off-tangent footnotes.  The overly long and microscopic focus on, for example, a particular ground-stroke of Federer’s or the ballet of his backhand, is equal parts tedious and hypnotic, but plough through the jargon long enough, and you’ll eventually be rewarded with such gems as:

The truth is that TV tennis is to live tennis pretty much as video porn is to the felt reality of human love.

Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young – In which DFW successfully equates the 1980’s rise of utilitarian, adjective-hating, snarky prose with “the aesthetic norms of mass entertainment”.  The idea that “Television’s greatest appeal is that it is engaging without being at all demanding” would later become a significant and oft-repeated part of his critical ideology.  It’s unfortunate that a beautifully written and thought-provoking essay is occasionally undermined by such essentialist bullshit as “Today’s trash writers are entertainers working artists’ turf”, but all is forgiven by a thinly-veiled yet wonderful end-game jibe at his bitter rival (or so the press would have you believe) Bret Easton Ellis: “many of our best-known [young writers] seem content merely to have reduced interpretation to whining”.

The Empty Plenum: David Markson’s ‘Wittgenstein’s Mistress’ – A difficult and meandering book review that’s not for the philosophically uninitiated.  Some of it I got, a lot of it I didn’t get. But mostly, I imagine, there was stuff that I don’t even know I wasn’t getting.

Back In New Fire – The infamous AIDS essay, and, it seems, the absolute low-point of DFW’s writing. Here he lambasts the sexual revolution of the 1960’s for taking away any sense of danger or thrill or human connection from sex.  He imagines your typical chivalrous knight assailing a castle to win a fair maiden (yes, this really is his metaphor of choice for talking about sex…) but instead of a dragon to defeat (religion, parental control, societal perceptions, unwanted pregnancy etc.), thanks to modern contraception and an openness about sex, there IS NO DRAGON.  The knight can saunter in and his maiden will be waiting, legs akimbo. No risk, no taboo. Sex is now easy, so where’s the thrill etc?

Ignoring for a second his problematic rendering of sexual relations as exclusively a man assailing a maiden in a castle, he states:

 The casual knights of my own bland generation might well come to regard AIDS as a blessing, a gift perhaps bestowed by nature to restore some critical balance, or maybe summoned unconsciously out of the collective erotic despair of the post-60′s glut. Because the dragon is back, and clothed in a fire that can’t be ignored.

He goes on to add “I mean no offense”, and follows this with (somewhat dishearteningly) “but” [isn’t that word just the death knell of tolerance?] “our own history shows that – for whatever reason – an erotically charged human existence requires impediments to passion”.

 It’s… it’s not his greatest moment, to be honest.

The (As It Were) Seminal Importance of Terminator 2 – In which DFW reveals himself to be quite the film critic by rightly pointing out the myriad ways in which the first Terminator film is far superior to the utter bathetic dross that is Terminator 2.  I, however, love this essay for the following observation, so beautifully put:

It was flat-out criminal that Sigourney Weaver didn’t win the ’86 Oscar for her lead in Cameron’s Aliens.  No male lead in the history of U.S. action film even approaches Weaver’s second Ripley for emotional depth and sheer balls – she makes Stallone, Willis et al look muddled and ill.

Overlooked: Five Direly Underappreciated U.S. novels > [sic] 1960 – In which DFW reveals himself to be a better film critic than literary critic.  These five short pieces on his favourite novels are uninspiring, un-insightful, flat and somewhat of a faux pas.  His one-sentence review of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (“Don’t even ask”) is glib and immature, it seems.

The Best of the Prose Poem – Very funny book review taking the form of a bullet-point list, said form employed because, DFW argues, none of the words preceding each bullet point’s title “constitute subjective compliment, appositive not any recognised grammatical unit” hence allowing to him to vastly exceed his “rigid 1,000 word limit”.

Twenty-Four Word Notes – 24 micro-essays, each concerned with an individual word or some esoterica thereof.  Here Foster Wallace insists that the word whom, as a relative pronoun, should never be replaced with that (as many people do replace it), and that any progressive linguist who suggests that the increased popular use of that in place of whom is representative of the word whom being phased out of the language is wrong WRONG WRONG.

This sort of argument is interesting in theory: ignore it in practice. As of 2003, misusing that for who or whom, whether in writing or speech, functions as a kind of class-marker – it’s the grammatical equivalent of wearing NASCAR paraphernalia or liking pro wrestling.

Well, that’s a nice helping of intellectual and cultural elitism if ever I’ve heard it.  I wish I could say he was being ironic or tongue in cheek. Alas.

Just Asking – Brilliant short, provocative essay that asks what price are we willing to pay for freedom of movement/agency/speech within a state, free of government intervention, over-zealous policing etc. and etc. “What if we chose to accept the fact that every few years, despite everyone’s best efforts, some hundreds or thousands of us may die in the sort of terrible suicidal attack that a democratic republic cannot 100 percent protect itself from without subverting the very principles that make it worth protecting?”.

Bonus: The ‘Best Footnote of the Book’ award goes to the medial-question-mark-in-sentence trick, which allows DFW to form a coherent sentence using the word that six times in a row: “He said that? that that that that that writer used should have been a which?”

Tomcat.

The Wind-up Bird Chronicle – Haruki Murakami

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TWUBCOn the face of it, Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-up Bird Chronicle seems a fairly innocent and quirky coming-of-age story; an earnest yarn about a passive, unemployed waster who only realises the true value of life and love (etc.) when his wife leaves him, an old friend dies, and his, er, cat disappears (what is it with Murakami and disappearing cats?).  But even the most superficial reading will soon reveal a cliché-riddled and structurally confusing mess of a book populated by inconsistent and ungraspable characters whose various motivations, behaviours and decisions are just completely baffling.  Worst of all, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle is underpinned by the most appalling misogyny, reinforced by a fetishistic presentation of violence and a dismissive treatment of rape.  It’s a male power fantasy that lamely attempts to justify itself by gradually exposing all of its female characters as adulteresses, pathological liars and manipulators, as if in some way this validates the male-gazey, objectifying and frankly gross way the book presents women.

It begins well enough; protagonist Toru Okada – a polite, shy, loving but unambitious sort – is introduced living in suburban Tokyo with his wife Kumiko and cat Noburo Wataya.  Soon both wife and cat mysteriously vanish from Toru’s life, and what follows is an increasingly confusing sequence of events interspersed with cod-philosophical musings on, for example, the transitory nature of love, Japanese consumerism, and the modernist quest to find meaning in an increasingly homogenised world.  Punctuating the mundane, kitchen sink-ness of the runaway wife plot are some slightly more “weird” (a favourite adjective of Murakami’s) events: mysterious phone calls, visits from people with access to information they shouldn’t reasonably be expected to have access to, occasional prophesies from old, wisened herbalists etc..  It’s the sort of trendy, surreal-lite kind of stuff that literary hipsters dine out on.

The prose, meanwhile, is characteristically understated and blunt; there’s little in the way of lyricism, but the matter-of-factness of tone is perfectly charming, and the frequent off-tangent ramblings and numerous adjacent references to classical music and food preparation give the writing an identity truly its own.  The clipped, simple sentences and the author’s reluctance to indulge in polysyllabic words lend great pace to the narrative, and I found myself turning pages at a pretty good whack.

It’s not long, however, before this quirky and amiable tone is subsumed by a more sinister penchant for titillation, exploitative quasi-pornographic writing and a truly unbelievable description of one woman’s sexual “awakening” (more on this later).  Toru’s investigations into the whereabouts of his missing cat lead him to recruit the services of Malta and Creta Kano: sisters who offer a sort of life-coaching-cum-spiritualism advice service.  During Toru’s first meeting with Malta, she describes the rape of her younger sister at the hands of Toru’s brother-in-law.  This long passage of direct speech is constantly interrupted by copious descriptions of Malta’s breasts, the shape of her buttocks as discernible through her dress, the movements of her tongue as she speaks etc. and etc.  Malta is recounting an act of monstrous sexual assault, meanwhile the author’s gaze (and by proxy the reader’s) is focusing on her body.  It seems that while Murakami is attempting to elicit an emotionally sympathetic response in his readers, he is at the same time trying to… turn them on.  The juxtaposition of a distressing rape confessional with constant descriptive asides about the speaker’s body is unsettling in the extreme, denigratory towards women and patronising to the reader; as if the only way Murakami can hold our attention during what should be one of the book’s more difficult, more emotionally demanding scenes is to make cheap appeals to our sex drives.  I say ‘our’; of course the writing is actually targeting a very specific readerly demographic: probably young, definitely straight, men.  Murakami lets it be known in no uncertain terms who he wants reading his book. The overall impression of the scene is this: “yeah, her sister was raped: but phwoar!”

There’s no saving grace; this contrasting placement of rape confession and perving is not trying to make some larger, over-arching thematic or structural point: there’s zero nuance at play here, and suggestions that this scene is meant, in some way, to tell us something about Toru as a character are, I feel, generous in the extreme, as Toru’s behaviour is completely at-odds with his pre-established personal concern for sympathy, kindness and respect.

And unfortunately this is not an isolated example; there isn’t a single female character who isn’t first introduced (and then meticulously described) in terms of her physical characteristics.  Of course this isn’t by any means unusual – writers have to paint their pictures – but the descriptive focus of The Wind-up Bird Chronicle is distinctly sexual and, I might add, this is a narrative idiosyncrasy that does not apply to any of the book’s male characters.

To return to the aforementioned “sexual awakening”, then.  At about mid-way through the book, the rape of Creta Kano is described for a second time, only now it has been re-evaluated not as rape “per se” (Todd Akin, anyone?), but as a kind of re-birth for the victim.  I shit you not.  Creta takes great pains to describe herself as a previously numb and empty shell, devoid of all passion and emotion; literally incapable of feeling.  All of this changes when she is raped [[and as a note, the word ‘rape’ mysteriously vanishes from the text at this point – whatever it is that happened, both narrator and characters stop calling it ‘rape’; it’s now just sex, or whatever]].  Creta Kano, upon being raped, undergoes a miraculous transfiguration and is now capable of love, compassion, anger, happiness – why, the whole gamut of regular human emotions! Now that she’s been “made to feel such intense sexual pleasure” she undergoes a “gigantic physical change” and an “escape from [her] profound numbness”.  What was initially described as a rape becomes, without any pretext, explanation or logic, some kind of sexual rite of passage requisite for any woman to truly become able to experience proper emotion.  This is reiterated later, too, when Toru’s wife Kumiko writes a cold and uncaring letter to him in which she confesses to months of promiscuous adultery (over which she has “no sense of guilt”, of course) with men she doesn’t even like, but which sex enables her to finally enter the world of stable, adult emotional life.  The Wind-up Bird Chronicle offers a “literary” (word used in the loosest possible way) equivalent of the macho cliché “what she really needs is a good seeing to”.

The conception of women as numb homunculi or empty shells incapable of feeling until true emotion is fucked into them at the behest of men’s generous cocks is just… well… the word offensive doesn’t quite seem to cut it.  The Wind-up Bird Chronicle is founded upon a deep structured misogyny, and any reading that doesn’t interpret the book in this way would be very forgiving indeed.

Of course, no journey into the finer points of what it means to be human would be complete without our hero having lots of no-strings sex with beautiful women – but there’s a problem here, too: our hero Toru is married, and Murakami has already established that adultery is wrong. The solution? Dream sex! You’ve never heard of it? Throughout the novel Toru has multiple sexual encounters with women in his dreams – but these are no mere wet dream fantasies: the women in question experience everything, but in some mutual otherland or dreamscape rather than the real world.  Imagine that shared dreaming stuff from Inception, only with lots more sex, and you’ll get the idea.

Essentially, dreamsex is a mechanism employed by Murakami to exonerate his hero from any accusations that he is committing adultery (which would reduce him to the same moral level as the other adulterers in the novel –all, by the way, female) while at the same time enabling him to screw all of the women he desires.  The point of all this dreamsex is narratively incomprehensible, seeming to serve no purpose in the wider plotting of the novel, nor in its emotional intricacies, as Toru, remember, is supposedly a man broken by the abandonment of his wife.  We must conclude, then, that the dreamsex serves no other function than to titillate the reader by breaking up the monotony of what would otherwise be a primarily thoughtful and philosophical rumination on the agony of love.  A kind of bribe to maintain our interest, treating the reader with the same disdain for our attention spans that T.V. and film producers have for their audiences’: keep the action and the sex frequent, lest we give the impression that this is a work of cohesion and depth.

The preposterous height of these non-sequitur titillations, if you will, occurs at around the three-hundred-and-fifty page mark, when Toru picks up a garden hose and is propositioned by a bikini clad sixteen-year-old school girl:

“Would you spray me with that? It’s sooo [sic] hot! My brain’s going to fry if I don’t wet myself down.”

It was warm and limp. I reached behind the bushes and turned on the tap. At first only hot water that had been warmed inside the hose came out, but it cooled down until it was spraying cold water. [...] I aimed a good, strong spray at her. I looked at [her] body, hardly covered by her bikini.  She was sixteen years old, but she had the build of a girl of thirteen or fourteen.

I hope by now that I’ve established that I’m not just being prudish: quite why this gratuitous scene (it goes on for several pages) is even in the novel is completely beyond me.

Anyway, you get the idea: it would do my review a disservice were I to list, verbatim, all such sequences in the novel. But over and over again in The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, women are routinely objectified, vilified and pacified by the actions of character, narrator, writer and, in a kind of gross by-proxy complicity, reader.

Elsewhere the story unfolds in myriad confusing and messy ways until the final 200 pages: an entirely baffling and bizarre sequence of events that defies any logical explication and structure.  Can Toru melt through the walls of a well? Sure! Does the black mark that appeared on his face for no reason 400 pages ago similarly vanish without ceremony? You bet!  Does Toru follow a Tokyo stranger all the way home and beat the living shit out of him with a baseball bat in a superfluously violent scene that undermines everything Murakami has heretofore done to establish his character? YES!  I’ve read various internet reviews/commentaries/forums in which critics have attempted to paste some philosophical or moral reasoning over the book’s nonsensical events, but very little actually seems to stick.  I’ve enjoyed novels by Murakami before (Kafka on the Shore and After Dark I thought were pretty good), and taken pleasure in the obvious fact that he doesn’t plan before writing (he’s admitted it, too), but The Wind-up Bird Chronicle is just surreal for surreal’s sake; a trendy misappropriation of post-structuralist genre proclivities that captures much of the style of the continental philosophical novels that Murakami is clearly aping, but none of the depth.

So, no redeeming qualities then? Well, Toru’s neighbour May Kasahara is a wonderful character: playful, puzzling-but-not-in-a-maddening-way, idiosyncratic in speech and morally aware of her own past mistakes and limitations. It’s unfortunate that about mid-way through the novel, then, Toru and May are separated and reduced to corresponding via letter; at which point May looses much of her personality and quirkiness, as if once May is out of Toru’s arm’s reach, Murakami couldn’t be bothered with her anymore – it was the proximity of their relationship and the obvious contrasts therein that made the characters work together. Adding distance subtracts tension.

But that’s about it.  The Wind-up Bird Chronicle is a sinister, misogynistic book characterised by an overabundance of pointless sex and violence, coupled with an alarming treatment of female sexuality, emotion and morality.  The placing of long, rambling descriptions of the Japanese military efforts in Manchuko adjacent meaningless sequences of dreamsex is puerile, belittling and offensive.  Ostensibly the book is about the journey from numbness to feeling – but I just don’t see it; for me and my own journey reading this book, it was the other way around.

Tomcat.

The American Future: A History – Simon Schama

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Nobody writes history quite like Simon Schama:

But when you stepped through the bails of scratchy tumbleweed that had come to rest against the broken fence you could see the place was held together by nothing more than the debris of its own ruin; the splintered wreck of a life that was hanging on in the middle of nowhere, so its reproach would endure against the Colorado sky like someone who wouldn’t or couldn’t stop crying.

Like most people, I assume, I first became aware of Simon Schama way back in 1999 when I watched his seminal BBC series A History of Britain. But it wasn’t until university that I started paying attention to him as a literary stylist, when a lecturer told me (with all the histrionic hand gestures and unintentional spitting of the enthused academic) that the moment Simon Schama decided to write history instead of fiction marked a terrible loss to the modern novel.  I took this gauche statement for all the unqualified hyperbole it so obviously is but, apparently, there was indeed such a “moment” as my supervisor described.  In Schama’s quasi-autobiographical book of essays Scribble, Scribble, Scribble he writes:

I made my choice albeit with some torment. I was a History Boy. Hector [Schama’s English master] took it badly, as if betrayed, and barely spoke to me for months.  Many years later I told him that much of the rest of my life had been spent trying to make the choice between history and literature moot.

Of course you could interpret this statement as a bashful attempt to justify the defiant, un-historian-like floweriness of Schama’s prose, but – for what it’s worth – the more books I read by Simon Schama, the more I’m impressed by not just his fluency and eloquence as a popular historian, but by the beauty, imagination and emotional insight of his writing.  His newest book The American Future, which examines the myriad ways in which America has imagined its own future “from the founding fathers to Barack Obama”, isn’t any kind of departure from his previous output of so-called “narrative history”, and as such is unlikely to convert any of his critics, but it definitely feels more socially relevant than many of his recent publications, which have leant more towards art history than politics (The Power of Art, Rembrandt’s Eyes, Landscape and Memory (which is excellent btw) etc).

The American Future, then, sweeps through two hundred-plus years of American history in just under 500 pages.  This compression of so much history inevitably results in an unrelenting barrage of names, dates and political terms that make great demands on both the reader’s concentration and memory.  Attempting to remember every place or event or person mentioned in just a single chapter is akin to standing in front of one of those tennis ball machines set to rapid fire and trying to catch (and hold onto) every ball it serves: some – if not most – are going to pass you by.  Thankfully this quick-fire and comprehensive approach is tempered by Schama’s narrative (I’m wary of saying “novelistic”) treatment of history.  Schama’s concern for his subjects’ emotional lives, coupled with frequent deferrals to diary entries, letters and photographs make The American Future a pre-eminently affecting and story-like telling of history.  There’s little concern for chronology as the book flits, sometimes in the span of a single sentence, between different decades (and even centuries) of history in a bid to make whatever over-arching thematic or structural point a particular chapter is concerned with.  Like all narrative history, then, The American Future is open to such accusations that the book is more concerned with imbuing an emotional impression upon its readers than, say, delivering as much objective information as possible – and that’s fine; it is, of course, down to the caprice of the individual reader to decide what they read history for.  The prose takes undeniable poetic license with history, but always in an attempt to (cliché imminent…) bring its subjects to life:

As if in supplication, one of the cassocked choir would every so often slowly lift both arms, palms upwards, trembling, like a marionette worked by a celestial puppeteer.

In the opening chapter ‘America at War’, Schama establishes the dichotomy that he will use throughout the book to analyse various aspects of American history: Jeffersonian vs. Hamiltonian approaches to militarism.  Thomas Jefferson favoured a limited army of well-educated specialists trained in engineering and capable of re-building a country’s infrastructure following a war – an army to defend liberty. Alexander Hamilton, by contrast, argued for a larger, more militaristic force – an army to spread liberty. The parallels with modern American approaches to foreign policy aren’t lost on Schama, who at one point describes Mitt Romney as a “neo-liberal Hamiltonian”.

The book uses these two radically contrasting approaches to Americana as a spring board to launch investigations into such wide-ranging topics as slavery, irrigation, the compulsory purchase of Cherokee land and national identity – all contained within their own distinct chapters.  Naturally some investigations are more successful than others; I found ‘What is an American’ to be a rambling and ungraspable chapter that comes to few conclusions while spreading itself regrettably thin with its examples and sources.  ‘American Fervour’, by comparison, is a passionate and moving examination of the role of religion in the lives of slaves, with frequent quotations taken from the ‘Sorrow Songs’ recorded by black army officer Robert Sutton in the 1860s; it stands as a testament to Schama’s emotional conviction that it’s not enough to simply “know” history,but that “we’ve got to understand” it too.

Determined to plant its flag firmly in the Jeffersonian camp, The American Future takes a somewhat hagiographic approach to describing the third President of the United States, and is especially praising of Jefferson’s little-studied and undoubtedly enlightened (would we say “modern”?) attitudes towards religion:

Though Jefferson held Jesus in high esteem, as perhaps the greatest of history’s moral teachers, he thought it absurd, if not offensive, to compromise that standing by fairy tales declaring him the Son of God, born of a virgin and such foolishness. [...] Jefferson believed that adhesion to unexamined and irrational beliefs had been the greatest cause of contention and slaughter in the world, for there could be no arguing with those who asserted from revelation alone.

But later derisions of Jefferson’s personal life and his contradictory attitudes toward slavery build up a complex and multi-dimensional picture of the book’s primary subject: part moralistic, part reviled.  This is one of Schama’s more interesting stylistic ticks, and in this respect The American Future really is novelistic: red herrings abound as figures are introduced, praised and set-up as likeable, only to be deconstructed and exposed as bigoted or selfish in subsequent chapters.  I found myself, for example, quite taken by manufacturing giant Henry Ford when Schama describes the free schools he established for his migrant workforce and his unwavering dedication to a liveable wage, only to be crushed with disappointment when it’s revealed that Ford also penned the book The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem.  It’s this up-and-down, wavering and constant re-assessment of his subjects that fuels a lot of anti-Schama criticism from readers who would prefer a more consistent and “objective” approach to history, but I nonetheless enjoyed the complex positioning of the novel, as Schama attempts to present America as very much a frontier nation: not either/or, but filled with contradictions and difficulties.

As you’d expect from Simon Schama, The American Future leans distinctly to the left, and as such the book is most interesting when constructing history via the personal struggles of down-trodden masses rather than the political lives of the elite.  Chapters are separated by short present-day vignettes describing Schama’s 2008 road trip across America following the Obama campaign, in which he interviews numerous regular Joes in an attempt to gauge not the media or politicians’ reactions to Obama, but the people’s.

The American Future is a dense, challenging history book made joyously readable by Schama’s narrative approach.  It presupposes an understanding of American history that I was unable to bring to the book (I frequently found myself Googling the dates of Presidents’ terms or the specifics of various legislation, for example) and in this regard it suffers from a lack of a comprehensive glossary.  Sure it’s a bit of a crash course (after all, who can cover all of American history in 500 pages?!) but if, like me, your reading background is more fiction than non-fiction oriented, then I highly recommend The American Future as both a helpful way-in to American history and an extraordinarily beautiful piece of writing.

Tomcat

Light – M. John Harrison

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I’ve read in numerous places, which I’m far too lazy to reference here, that M. John Harrison’s 2002 novel Light does for Space Opera what his Viriconium sequence did for Fantasy back in the 1980s.  This is quite the claim, as Viriconium towers over the landscape of postmodern fantasy literature as a definite and unchallenged Olympus; the book that finally did-away with the literary naivety of the field by drawing direct attention to the problematic artificiality of secondary-world High Fantasy, all the while remaining deeply enamoured of the tropes, traditions and history of the genre; a genre with which Harrison is clearly well-versed and much in love.

To think that the same writer could reinvigorate not just one, but two distinct genres both of which, let’s be honest, suffer from more than their fair share of cliché, repetition and imaginative exhaustion is difficult to believe, but having read the frankly staggering (and not to mention extraordinarily beautiful) Light, I’m definitely coming round to the idea.  It’s 30-odd years since Harrison seemingly abandoned New Wave sci-fi with his early (and criminally underrated) novel The Centauri Device, but his forays into the lands of Fantasy and (later) Literary Fiction were obviously time well spent, as Light meshes a keen commitment to psychological realism with a penchant for inventive, stripped-back imagist prose.  The book toys with and deconstructs many of the familiar tenets of science fiction, but in a joyous and celebratory way, never sneering.  Harrison’s frame of reference is galaxy-spanning, and Light is replete with subtle (and not-so-subtle) tributes to the canon of famous (and not-so-famous) science fiction literature, T.V. and film.  Please don’t think the book is just some big party of self-indulgent genre references, it most certainly isn’t: the narrative is dominated by an unflinching and unsympathetic portrayal of horrific violence, manipulative sex and mental illness, but underpinning this grit is a definite comic treatment of the vagaries of space opera.  The satire is tender, and the commitment to sensawunda is genuine.

Light focuses on three larger-than-life characters; the theoretical physicist and serial killer Michael Kearney; Seria Mau Genlicher, a woman who’s been (voluntarily) cybernetically mutilated and encased in a vat of protein fluids from which she pilots a strange alien craft – an artefact from some long-extinct race of star-moving galactic engineers; and Ed Chianese (/Chinese Ed), a Virtual Reality addict enlisted in what can only be described as a… er… space circus. Michael’s story takes place in 1999, the latter two narratives (Seria’s and Ed’s) transpire around 2400 AD, with chapters alternately flitting between each character.

All three protagonists are haunted by different manifestations of ‘The Shrander’, an ungraspable and incarnately weird creature that variously functions as terrifying apparition of death, anti-hero, malcontent, surgeon, seer and sage.  The Shrander’s most memorable form is that which haunts Michael Kearney in the guise of a be-robed and spritely stalker with a horse’s skull in place of a head. Not only is this a clear aesthetic reference to the Celtic Welsh tradition of the Mari Lwyd (and a knowing wink to fans of Viriconium with a suggestion of a shared universe), but the horse skull-headed version of the Shrander also acts as microcosm for one of the book’s major themes: the estrangement of the familiar.  By tradition the Mari Lwyd is a luck-bringing and festive Celtic ritual, and while The Shrander definitely contains elements of this festivity, it is by turns a much more terrifying and grotesque presence: it’s the Mari Lwyd uprooted from its traditional contexts and placed, instead, within a weird and defamiliarising alien landscape.  Removed from its place as a curio of Celtic festive and musical history, the writer imbues the image of the horse skull-headed puppet-creature with more sinister connotations – death, madness, murder.  This is largely achieved by a fixation with the anatomical otherness of the Mari Lwyd.  In general the image of a skull is inseparable from the concept of death, and Harrison manipulates this to truly horror fiction-esque scales.  A big part of Lights’ aesthetic is a making-strange of otherwise common place or traditional objects.

A Mari Lwyd. My what big teeth you have, etc.

Outside of The Shrander’s haunting, much of the plotting is concerned with explaining how the three protagonists found themselves in their current situations.  Seria Mau’s life before her cybernetic implantation into an alien ship is told through a series of disjointed and cryptic dream sequences that, though initially baffling, come together in a way that rewards patience and is immensely satisfying.  The disorganized memories of her troubled childhood gradually expose the awful circumstances that led her to make the irreversible choice to be implanted into her ship, and I expect the visceral scenes of techno-surgery to stick with me for some time.  It’s a testament to Harrison’s skill as a writer that something so physical and disturbed can also be so moving.  Seria Mau is mutilated, trapped and profoundly alone, but these are truths the reader has to parse out from prose dense with scientific jargon as she concerns herself not with pitying introspection, but with the everyday mechanisations of her FTL alien ship and the technical demands of operating in nano-second time frames stretched out by mind-altering drugs to last, for her, for subjective minutes.  The tragedy of Seria Mau isn’t her present circumstance, but that the universe organised itself in such a way that she made the choice to live like this.

Decisions, then, form the thematic heart of the novel.  This is re-iterated by Michael Kearney’s work as a quantum physicist exploring the various theories surrounding probabilities, quantum states and branching, possible universes. Driven half-mad by the stalking Shrander and his failure to devise a useful system of quantum computing, Kearney defers all of his choices to a strange set of dice that he stole from the Shrander in some un-written prologue to the novel.  The dice are loaded (… I apologise in advance for this…) with symbolism… with connotations that range from choice theory and quantum mechanics to the world that could have been if only different choices were made.  Of course “dice stuff” is a big cliché of post-modern fiction, but here the beauty and pitch-perfect tone of Harrison’s prose and the playful morality of his ideas stop Light from ever seeming trite or disingenuous. Also there are cats (two cats – one black, one white) that manifest in all three timelines and that play a significant part in the choices and directions of the characters’ lives, both literally and figuratively.

This is all well and good, but where Light really (again, I’m sorry…) shines…  is in its examination of the ways these characters’ choices affect the lives of the people close to them. The supporting cast is a lowly and agency-less collection of tragically damaged individuals tossed around like ragdolls by the selfish and often misguided decisions of the three protagonists. Michael Kearney’s ex-wife/occasional fuckbuddy Anna, for example, is a mentally unstable woman in thrall to Michael’s every movement. The beautifully constructed, psychologically piercing and eloquent exchanges between the two are a stylistic highlight of the novel, albeit harrowing and difficult to “enjoy” in the usual sense of the word:

“I try to help you – only you won’t let me”

“Anna” he said quickly, “I help you.  You’re a drunk. You’re anorexic. You’re ill most days, and on a good day you can barely walk down the pavement. You’re always in a panic. You barely live in the world we know.”

But in terms of its style, Light is a book of many shades (… just take my apologies as a given from now on…).  Several long passages of esoteric technobabble (much of which I suspect is more bullshit than science) are almost David Foster Wallace-esque in their challenge to the reader to actually look up the words you don’t understand (only to find that a percentage of them actually are bullshit).   While some may argue that this renders the “science” part of “science fiction” arbitrary and spurious, I think the real point is a playful fixation on the glorious sounds and tones of jargon, absent their content, to become a kind of poetry. It doesn’t have to make sense, as the narrator puts it: this is “a place where all the broken rules of the universe spill out”.

Light is a challenging, oftentimes abstract novel that, in spite of (or maybe in complement to) it’s title, contains a lot of dark.  The novel’s dénouement ties the three narratives together in unexpected yet fulfilling ways, and the book’s examination of senseless cruelty and selfishness only lend the ending greater poignancy.  It’s a book of clichés turned in on themselves, of constant references to a saturated history of science fiction that Harrison neither attempts to ignore nor to revolutionise, but to celebrate.  I’m not sure if Light is the Viriconium of Space Opera, simply because I don’t think Space Opera suffers from the same institutionalised problems as modern Fantasy literature. It is, however, an incredible novel; perfectly balanced, relentlessly beautiful; puzzling but always fascinating.

Tomcat.

The Crossing – Cormac McCarthy

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Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing isn’t so much concerned with the violent and sudden breach of clearly demarcated borders as much as it is with the slow bleed-out and eventual death of innocence, tradition and stability.  There’s a parallel to be found between Billy’s journey from affectionate and naive purity to hardhearted maturity (via, of course, the violent upheaval of cruel experience), and the changes that the American South underwent during the sudden industrialisation of the early Twentieth Century.

It’s almost a truism for reviewers to draw a distinction between the literal crossing of borders undertaken by the book’s protagonist (America to Mexico), and the subtextual crossing of child- into adulthood; but there’s also a third implied narrative, one that concerns itself with national identity, with the U.S as a frontier nation, in a state of perpetual flux. It’s telling that McCarthy begins the novel with an assertion that the country “was itself little older than [a] child”, and ends with an allowance that “The past is always this argument between counterclaimants. It is history that each man makes alone from what is left. Bits of wreckage. Some bones.”.  It’s these more allegorical boundaries which, much like its predecessor All the Pretty Horses, firmly establish this novel as a uniquely American bildungsroman.

The Crossing tells the story of three journeys made by teenager Billy Parnham from his home in New Mexico down into Mexico proper, all in the late 1930s.  The first expedition sees him attempting to lead an injured, pregnant wolf back to her home territory; in the second journey he travels even further south, looking for the horses stolen from his family; and the third crossing sees a hardened yet defeated Billy searching for his missing younger brother, Boyd.  The book doesn’t quite hark back to the levels of cruelty and darkness that McCarthy displayed in his earlier output (Blood Meridian, Child of God, Outer Dark being the most nihilistically exposed of his opus), but it is nonetheless unremittingly bleak and violent; a definite system shock when compared with the relatively more optimistic tone of its sort-of prequel, the aforementioned All the Pretty Horses.  The heartbreaking and insistent sequence of tragic events that punctuate Billy’s journeys and which all encapsulate some form of loss (both literal and figurative: his family, his home, his innocence) do run the risk of overwhelming the reader, or even verging on the self-indulgent; but separating the book’s more shattering set-pieces are long passages of wilderness writing, which often act as sympathetic fallacy for Billy’s situation – dark and tempestuous when he’s at his lowest ebb.  This not only imbues the book (and Billy’s journeys) with an impressive sense of scale and majesty, but further establishes the notion that The Crossing is as much concerned with America as nation and landscape as it is with the struggles of its individual characters.

Stylistically, The Crossing is characteristic McCarthy: long sentences constructed in polysyndetic syntax are very much the grammatical standard, with a striking and only occasionally tedious penchant for meticulous physical descriptions.  As with all McCarthy novels, there’s also an attendant lack of punctuation: no marks to indicate direct speech, very few apostrophes (even when they’re grammatically appropriate) and even fewer commas.

The winter that Boyd turned fourteen the trees inhabiting the dry river bed were bare from early on and the sky was gray day after day and the trees were pale against it a cold wind had come down from the north with the earth running under bare poles towards a reckoning whose ledgers would be drawn up and dated only long after all due claims had passed, such is this history.

I’m tempted to make some twee comparison between the barren emptiness of the book’s landscapes and the typographical ways this is reflected in the absence of punctuation, but there’s really only a very limited extent to which even I could draw-out such a trite association.  Ahem.

I will, however, remark on the unusual sense of power that McCarthy’s prose seems to carry.  There’s something about his narration that’s so heavy and authoritative, as if Cormac McCarthy isn’t describing his personal vision of America, or giving us some lyrical interpretation of a subjective point of view; he seems, rather, to be telling things exactly as they are, as if he’s carved into stone an absolutely inviolable and sacred record of the world in its making.  I’m not sure how he achieves this: maybe it’s the sheer length and microscopic focus of his descriptions coupled with his lexicon of earthy, physical words, or maybe the simplicity and directness of his writing contains some biblical and hypnagogic quality that transcends the usual vagaries of fiction writing to imbue upon The Crossing a sense of absolute authority.  Either way, the book almost defies its notional identity as a novel to feel, instead, like some kind of definite, objective and truthful record of America. This is exacerbated by the book’s unsympathetic treatment of its readership; with almost all of the dialogue rendered in unstranslated Spanish, there’s a faithfulness to realism that’s given precedence over the needs and concerns of the individual reader.

The Crossing is an extraordinary novel. It’s difficult to discuss the finer points of its plot without resorting to massive spoilers, but Billy’s compassionate treatment of a trapped wolf that is the book’s beginning, and his violent attack against an old dog that is the book’s end should give you some indication of the bleak and pain-filled journey contained within the intervening 400 pages, and of the histrionic and deeply moving changes that effect and re-mould the perennially lost protagonist.  It would be somewhat amateurish of me to list, verbatim, all of the different ‘crossings’ (metaphoric or otherwise) that dominate the book, but I couldn’t help but feel that the most significant journey is the one that none of the characters ever truly accomplish: to cross the vast landscapes between one another, and to stop themselves from ever feeling acutely and profoundly alone.

Tomcat.

Overthrow: Peter Stothard and Why Blogging is Valuable

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Urch. So, the Chair of this year’s Booker Prize has made a contentious statement to the media about book bloggers – just as the Booker winner is due to be announced.  Right on cue, really. It’s almost as if he made the decision to declare his controversial opinions just as he’s about to enjoy his big Booker-judging moment in the sun, to ensure a couple of extra column inches are dedicated to a prize that many argue is becoming less and less relevant year on year. Almost.

I say “almost”, in fact I have very little doubt that his comments (or the timing of them, at least) don’t constitute a PR strategy to get his name and his prize into the papers and onto blogs.  This being the case, I really shouldn’t rise to the bait and write about what he’s said. But fuck it; I’ve been so irked by this guy this week that I just can’t help myself.

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In case you’ve not read or heard what it is that Peter Stothard has to say about bloggers, you can find the original Independent article here, and a shortened version from the Guardian here (complete with a response from mega-popular (and mega-good) book blogger Simon Savidge, who’s having his own discussion on this over at Savidge Reads (to which I’ve contributed, and which was the kernel of this post – so thank you Simon)).  To précis Stothard’s remarks: he argues that book bloggers “are harming literature”, that they offer “unreasoned opinions” instead of “literary criticism”, and that bloggers will damage “the future of writing”.

Quite. So where to start a rebuttal?  Peter Stothard seems to be suggesting that there’s a qualitative problem with book blogs.  Firstly, he hides his cowardice behind misguided propriety by not actually name-checking any of the blogs he so casually and caustically dismisses, so I can’t suss out for myself any of the internet reviewers with whom he has such a problem. While nobody would argue against the idea that the occasional poor-quality or misleading sites do pepper the blogosphere, I could point Mr Stothard to a whole host of blogs that are far more theoretically well-versed, critically astute, eloquent and funny than much of the hack in his TLS (did I mention he’s the editor there? No? Well, he is).  There’s some really high-level academic stuff going on in the blogosphere.

But, of course, that *isn’t* the point, is it? He’s not talking about those blogs, he’s talking about, you know, the blogs that have, like, opinions and stuff in them. Apparently. The problem with his argument is that drawing a distinction between subjective “opinions” and objective “literary criticism” is to establish a false binary.  In fact, Stothard’s comments seem almost to hark back to the Russian school of literary Formalisms from the 1920s, with their attempts to advocate a “scientific” approach to the study of poetics.  But let’s face it, literary criticism is a long way from being anything like an exact science – and, in my experience, lit crit is just as influenced by individual opinions and psychological, cultural and historical contexts as any other form of writing.    Literary analysis is not objective on any level: two Marxist critics may produce radically different readings of the same text – so where does that leave Stothard’s criticism vs. opinion binary?

A bit later on, Stothard adds the qualifier ‘reasoned opinion’ to his rant (“not everyone’s opinion is worth the same”), but again he fails to define his terms. What constitutes ‘reasoned’ opinion?  I wonder where he draws the line. Is there a certain number of critical terms from the dictionary of literary theory that a blogger has to use before he stops being a writer of ‘opinions’ and starts being a writer of ‘criticism’?  By his argument, then, the only person fit to review books is the hypothetical individual who knows the most about critical theory, or has read the most novels in the world (reductio ad absurdum etc.)  He states that literary criticism is all about “identifying the good”, as if literary “goodness” is some objective quality that “reasoned” critics are especially positioned and privileged to recognise. Which, of course, is absolute bullshit. Perhaps one needs a specific degree from a specific university before one’s opinions make the transcendental leap from internet hackery to valuable criticism? Maybe you need to have read Finnegan’s Wake ten times before Stothard will pay any heed to your book reviews? Who knows? I know some bookish autodidacts who’re more well read than many people with degrees, Masters, Phd’s – you name it. Stothard’s idea about what makes a person suitably positioned to review books is so nebulous and vague that it doesn’t really need me to deconstruct it…

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But let’s be honest. Stothard’s vile, poorly articulated and disgusting opinions have absolutely nothing to do with quality of writing or insight, and absolutely everything to do with snobbery, elitism and supercilious pretentions to intellectual privilege.  The subtext to everything he’s said is this: how dare the plebs review books; how dare they impinge on my domain, how dare they enter a sphere of debate heretofore reserved for an elite minority?  Before the rise of the blogosphere, Stothard and co. were part of a cosy clique of intellectuals whose elevated sense of self-worth came from a misguided notion that what they were doing (reviewing books) was somehow theirs; they’d earned it, and he doesn’t like the fact that we, the uninitiated, are now impinging on his privileged place in the culture.  And so there’s a snobbery of medium going on here too, with Stothard’s words implying a hierarchy of cultural value: the printed word being at the top, and the electronically represented word at the bottom.  There’s been a lot of debate recently about the blogosphere “killing” the printed word, and maybe it’s true, but my message to any technophobic luddites who challenge the value of blogging would be this: bring it on. It’s your responsibility to print material that people want to read; to use your medium to the best of its potential.  The fact that more and more people are turning to blogs to find reviews of books doesn’t just demonstrate the cultural significance of blogging, but speaks to the quality of printed literary journalism, too.

His implied assertions that printed book reviews by professional critics are de facto better than the opinions of the public are not just bizarre, but laced with a malicious snobbery – directed at both the messenger and the medium.  And his strange insistence that popular internet book reviews aren’t a valid and important part of critical discourse is nothing but a great big cultural fallacy.  Mainstream opinions influence art in myriad complex and unknowable ways.  I love the diversity of bloggers: internet book reviewers are a diaspora community,  with access to the kinds of social and cultural contexts that produce incredibly fruitful readings of texts: far more varied, passionate, unusual and creative interpretations of literature than anything you’re likely to see in printed newspaper journalism.  Of course authors read our reviews, of course they seep into the culture, and so of course they influence the literature of the time.  This community isn’t hurting the future of literature: it’s shaping it.  To say popular or mainstream (or whatever) book reviews damage literature is crude, short-sighted and, ultimately, wrong. Books and book criticism don’t exist in isolation of everything around them.  Stothard says he’s only ever seen six films in his life (an obvious lie, but let’s go with it), and so completely misses the point that art, literature, cinema, music etc. don’t exist in remote bubbles unaffected by one another.  How, for example, could a reader of Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash ever hope to fully understand the book’s aesthetic identity without at least a rudimentary understanding of Hollywood action films?  Frankly, I wouldn’t be interested in the book reviews of a man who’s only ever seen six films.

He goes on to argue that popular writers such as Ian Rankin aren’t worthy of critical analysis (he’s wrong): another of his false oppositions: popularity isn’t adversative to quality.  And as for his statement that critics need to be “alert to what’s new”: I’ll take him more seriously when TLS stops giving so much attention to Dickens and Byron or Jacobson or McEwan, Mantel, Faulks etc. and starts reviewing the truly avant-garde, boundary pushing “new” fiction that’s out there: Michael Cisco, Mark Danielewski, Lydia Davis etc. etc.

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How should I finish this? Of course I believe that book blogs are valuable; a wonderful, nay extraordinary addition to literary culture.  To suggest that the act of blogging is somehow damaging to literature is dunderheaded in the extreme (and I might add that the blogosphere is probably the most active platform of debate over the Booker Prize, and likely contributes to a large percentage of Booker nominee sales).  Peter Stothard’s contention that literary criticism is only valid when certain (nebulously defined) social and cultural conditions are met is nothing more than the most appalling snobbery.  Maybe he’s just afraid that, with the rise of blogging, he’s witnessing an unstoppable sea change, an opening up of what was once an elitism and is now a socialism. Blogging can’t be stopped: it’s in the Zeitgeist now. Of course printed and blogged book reviews can co-exist; but if Stothard is the voice of professional literary journalism, maybe a sea change is a good thing. I wouldn’t want to be associated with him and his ilk.  Maybe printed book reviews *have* had their time. Maybe this is an overthrow.

Tomcat

My Work Is Not Yet Done – Thomas Ligotti

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I’ve written before about the protean nature of Thomas Ligotti’s horror fiction; the ways in which he seems completely at home writing in genres as diverse as Lovecraftian grotesque or the ghost story, slasher fiction, philosophical horror, vampire mythos, demonic possession etc. and etc.  He’s equally comfortable subverting and corrupting the well-established tropes of these categories as he is paying sentimental homage to their more classical incarnations.  And while his mastery over so many different genre forms is undoubtedly impressive, it’s a little too easy to accuse Ligotti of over-reliance on the anaphora of his forbearers; the once-original motifs that have since become tired and predictable through over-use, Hollywood hack and the familiarity of age.  This isn’t to say those stories in which he channels Poe or Aickman or Lovecraft or Heym are disappointing or unsuccessful, quite the contrary, but horror fiction – perhaps more so than any other genre – relies on constant innovation in order to fulfil its ostensible mandate: to provoke, shock and disturb.  Even when Ligotti is distorting classic designs, he is still nonetheless working within structures that were mastered elsewhere, by other writers.  Predictability is the greatest crime a work of horror can commit.

Thankfully, My Work is Not Yet Done signifies the point at which Ligotti steps out of the shadows of the old masters and does something we all secretly hoped he was capable of: writes a novel in a genre truly his own.  The descriptor “Corporate Horror” is perhaps a crude epithet to plaster over the title page, but it’s a useful term, and one which I’m sure will soon become a valid and commonplace part of critical vocabulary.

The novel, as this appellation suggests, is about a man who works in an office – scary stuff, right?  It’s true that the office space and the workaday routine has become common fodder for the literary mainstream – the pointlessness of it all, the existential ennui of routine and the black comedy of bureaucracy – but the office of My Work is Not Yet Done, though as mundane and ordinary as any other, is cast as a place of abject panic, despair and horror for our narrator Frank Dominio, whose prose is most poignantly characterised by his opening and oft-repeated refrain “I have always been afraid”.

The book takes great pains to describe the head-splitting flicker of florescent office tube lights, the grotesque and unearned self-confidence of those in higher management, the never-ending barrage of non-specific and pointless paperwork and the unfair and unreasonably small ways Frank’s co-workers attempt to undermine him.  The acts of selfishness and cruelty best described as “office politics” Frank knows he should ignore and rise above but which, simultaneously, seem deeply, personally, disgustingly offensive and hurtful.  Ligotti’s pitch-perfect prose oscillates between a microscopic focus on unimportant, trivial details on the one hand, and a fetishisation of the mundane, vague, unspecific blandness of it all on the other: “He was of average height and build, average weight, average age”.  The cumulative effect of this cloying and constant description is a sensation of desperate, claustrophobic loneliness, anxiety and horror as Frank trudges through his daily “maze of pain”.

I was somewhat disappointed with the second half of the novel, in which some strange force Frank terms “the great black swine” grants him the power to fulfil all of the sadistic fantasies of violent murder he harbours against his co-workers “I wanted to do things to Richard that would make the sun grow cold with horror”.  The jarring tonal shift from paranoia and solipsism to supernatural hyper-violence really irked me: it converges clumsily with the insightful social criticisms of the novel’s first half in a way that almost undermines the book’s sense of hopelessness.  I mean, the novel’s second half is well-conceived, well-structured horror with some gloriously imaginative comeuppances directed at the book’s most perversely unpleasant characters (and I especially liked Frank’s hubristic fall when he presumptuously ignores the single caveat and condition of his new supernatural gifts – powers which are otherwise in danger of being so all-encompassing and poorly defined as to be narratively uninteresting), but the whole supernatural element is just so, so unnecessary.  The book’s aesthetic identity is fully realised in its first half. The fact that Ligotti crafts such disturbing and panic-ridden horror from what is essentially a description of a man going to work is the book’s most striking achievement.  The rest is good Ligotti, but perhaps the writer’s ideas would have been better served had these two parts been kept entirely separate.

It goes against my every readerly impulse to say this, then, but when Ligotti offers the suggestion that the book’s supernatural elements have entirely rational and psychosomatic foundations, I embraced it whole-heatedly.  Given the choice, I would usually pick the more fantastical of any two feasible textual interpretations (it’s just more fun that way), but the possibility that My Work is Not Yet Done doesn’t collapse into hocus-pocus-fuelled demonic mayhem, though by far the least substantiated interpretation, is by far the most interesting reading.  The nine-to-five office space of corporate drudgery, with all its potential for loneliness, repetition, anger, desperate anxiety and claustrophobic despair is horror enough: there’s nothing more to add.

Tomcat.