Catching Up

I’ve been silent on this blog for a while, mostly because I’d been using it to write about books I’ve been reading, and somehow my attitude toward writing about books changed when I began reviewing regularly for Roverarts and Black Gate. It’s still fun, but I find I approach it with more seriousness, more weight — so writing becomes more time-consuming as a result. Add that to the fact that a lot of what I’m reading I’m also writing about for those sites, and I think it’s time that I rethought the purpoose of this blog. I haven’t come to any firm conclusions yet, but we’ll see what transpires.

Mewanwhile, I do still want to keep track of my reading, at least in terms of raw numbers. So let’s see: in October I read four books, one of them from the library, and due to the presence of two book fairs I added forty-three. So down forty on the month. In November I read two, and added thirteen; down eleven. In December I read four, and added nine; down five. In January I read seven, and added one; up six.

So in 2010 I read a hundred and two books, and added a total of thirty-three. That’s mostly due to three book fairs (Concordia, McGill, and the Friends of the Westmount Library) in October and November. Add my birthday in September and Christmas, and the trend here seems to be that I have to read a lot early in the year to have any hope of balancing out the amount of new books I get later on. Something to remember.

Readings — The Wood is Sweet

The Wood is Sweet

by John Clare

selected by David Powell

This is a selection of poems by Clare, chosen by Powell. Powell (presumably it was he) also edited them, adding punctuation and normalising spelling. The result is a curiously sedate Clare, a partially domesticated Clare. Much of Clare’s distinctive wildness is lost, and the poems acquire a chiming sameness.

These are still fine nature poems, perhaps especially for young readers. Edited or not, Clare’s obviously capable of striking images, as when he imagines ants as deformed fairies. The book’s divided into sections by subject, which works for poems about times of the year or about times of the day, but not as much for others; again, a monotony sets in. Still, a sequence of poems about animals helps point up the intensity of Clare’s empathy with the wild, and his observation of the life around him. This is, in the end, a book that couldn’t help but be good — it is still Clare, at the end of the day — but which is not to be preferred to more faithful reproductions of Clare’s work.

Readings — The Zombie Survival Guide

The Zombie Survival Guide

by Max Brooks

Turns out, not being a zombie fan, I’m not the ideal reader for this book. Go figure. I’d quite liked Brooks’ other zombie tome, World War Z, a politically-savvy multi-voiced take on a zombie apocalypse, and had hoped this book would be something comparable. It’s not, really. It’s a series of tips on, well, surviving a zombie incursion, played completely straight. If you’re fascinated by zombie stories, you’ll probably quite enjoy it. Personally, I liked the last section quite a bit, which imagines zombie outbreaks throughout history, in a range of different cultures. Which is to say, that was the bit most like World War Z. Overall, though, I’d have to say this is a well-done book for zombie fans, and not terribly interesting for those of us who aren't.

Readings — Of Mice and Men

Of Mice and Men

by John Steinbeck

Steinbeck wrote this book, apparently, in a deliberate attempt to cross the novel form with the play form, creating a prose story which could be acted on stage. In practice, it feels like a fix-up afterthought; like a poorly-adapted play. The language is improbable and stagey, and a number of ostensibly major characters come off as mere devices (including the only female character). You can imagine good actors making something of this material. But it’s too much to expect a reader to cobble the hints here together into credible characters. Sure, novels can work by indirection and implication, but the gaps in this book are in the wrong places, and the work is unsubtle in language, theme, and character. The melodrama, and the overly-signposted symbolism of the speeches, drown out everything else.

Now, I’m not a tremendous fan of American literature in general (more precisely: not a fan of what I’ve read of the American-written literature that Americans chose to canonise in the twentieth century), still less of early-twentieth-century American naturalism. And the fact that the book’s been so widely parodied and has such a broad influence doesn’t help; it’s impossible not to hear some of the lines of dialogue spoken by Mel Blanc, and difficult not to think of Old Yeller at the overwrought tearjerker finale, as well. Still, the book seems to me to be dated in ways that Dickens and George Eliot never are, particularly in its slang.

I’d go so far as to say that the book was so bad that it called into question the idea of the pared-down narrative voice. That is, most of the book consists of dialogue between the characters, with only an occasional brief interjection by an omniscient narrator. Instead of feeling like a successful attempt at economy of diction, though, it felt like a half-assed attempt to turn a play into a novel. Which makes you wonder about other novels that try for a similar spareness. Is that stylistic direction really fruitful? Or is it something inherently un-novelistic? Is it a coincidence that this stylistic ideal became prominent at about the same times that films did?

No art form exists in a vaccuum, and different media forms will influence each other. But not every influence is necessarily positive.

Readings — The Romance of the Forest

The Romance of the Forest

by Ann Radcliffe

I don’t know why I never read any Ann Radcliffe before. I’ve enjoyed a number of early Gothic novels, but had yet to get to hers. I think hearing about Radcliffe’s notorious tendency to cop out on the supernatural aspect of her stories, presenting Scooby-Doo endings where all the apparent magical or ghostly happenings were actually improbable machinations by the earthly characters, caused me to shy away. In fact, I was somewhat surprised to see that the supernatural played almost no part in this book; it’s essentially a historical melodrama set in seventeenth-century France.

I was more surprised by the fact that it read less like an adventure story and more as an attempt to speak up on contemporary debates on the philosophy of the sublime. Radcliffe has a tendency, as many people have observed, to feature extended passages of landscape description; certainly, if you think Tolkien tended to excess in that respect, you don’t want to come anywhere near Radcliffe, but then as with Tolkien those passages aren’t just providing colour but actually providing shape to the theme of the book. So Radcliffe’s gothic is actually a part of an extended dialogue on the sublime and human reactions to nature. You can see the link to contemporary Romantic poetry clearly.

On the other hand, the descriptions of nature don’t do a lot to speed up the story. Coincidences abound; the structure is halting, episodic. Jane Austen, notoriously, rubbished Radcliffe’s character-writing, but she’d have been better advised to focus on Radcliffe’s plotting skills.

Since I’m on the subject, though, let’s look at that Austen quote. I’m referring to this passage in Northanger Abbey (here from Project Gutenberg):

Charming as were all Mrs. Radcliffe's works, and charming even as were the works of all her imitators, it was not in them perhaps that human nature, at least in the Midland counties of England, was to be looked for. Of the Alps and Pyrenees, with their pine forests and their vices, they might give a faithful delineation; and Italy, Switzerland, and the south of France might be as fruitful in horrors as they were there represented. Catherine dared not doubt beyond her own country, and even of that, if hard pressed, would have yielded the northern and western extremities. But in the central part of England there was surely some security for the existence even of a wife not beloved, in the laws of the land, and the manners of the age. Murder was not tolerated, servants were not slaves, and neither poison nor sleeping potions to be procured, like rhubarb, from every druggist. Among the Alps and Pyrenees, perhaps, there were no mixed characters. There, such as were not as spotless as an angel might have the dispositions of a fiend. But in England it was not so; among the English, she believed, in their hearts and habits, there was a general though unequal mixture of good and bad.

Okay, so, taking the last point first: I was surprised to find that, contrary to Austen, The Romance of the Forest actually did have a number of “mixed characters” in it. Pierre La Motte, who carries the story for the first part of the book, is decidedly mixed; well-intentioned, but weak. The same for his wife. Nor am I entirely convinced that Adeline’s meant to be entirely without flaw. Certainly, you can argue that these characters are not convincingly drawn. But Austen’s main point is that “human nature” is not faithfully represented in Radcliffe because her characters are “spotless as angels” or else “have the dispositions of a fiend”. This is simply not true. (It also ignores the fact that faithful representation of human nature is not necessarily the aim of a novelist; but that’s a whole other argument.)

Still, what always struck me as ridiculous about this passage — I can think of no other word for the incredulity with which I first read it — is the central part: “But in the central part of England there was surely some security for the existence even of a wife not beloved, in the laws of the land, and the manners of the age. Murder was not tolerated, servants were not slaves, and neither poison nor sleeping potions to be procured, like rhubarb, from every druggist.”

All right, then. Anybody who ever read Hardy’s Mayor of Casterbridge will recall that the book opens with a poor man selling off his wife, thinking that would count as a divorce. According to one reference book I have to hand (Daniel Pool’s What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew), “Between 1750 and 1850, in fact, there were some 380 of these do-it-yourself divorces effected in rural England. The general procedure was even crasser than Hardy suggests, for you typically put a halter around your wife’s head and shoulders and led her to the auction place like a cow, the only checks on the practice being occasional ostracism and not very stringent legal penalties.”

That’s assuming we’re talking about divorce, which in its legal forms was prohibitively expensive and difficult to obtain. Pool again: “Once married, a wife could not sue or make a contract on her own nor make a will without her husband’s consent. If he wished to confine her against his will, as Mr. Rochester does his wife at Thornfield Hall, until 1891 he was well within his rights in doing so. He could ‘correct’ her if he wished, too, a right which was supposed to mean only verbal chastisement but in practice often meant physical punishment.” So, yeah. I suppose you could make an argument that the Brontës’ brand of Gothic, unlike Radcliffe’s tales set in England, went some distance toward both disproving Austen’s take on a wife’s situation (Austen, of course, was never married herself) and perhaps validated the experiences of their readers.

While I’m at it, I might mention that when Austen declares “servants were not slaves” she neglects to mention that slavery was actually legal (she completed Northanger Abbey in 1799, the slave trade was outlawed in the British Empire in 1807, the book was published in 1817, Britain abolished slavery in 1833). And it has to be said that to someone in the contemporary First World, a servant’s life still seems pretty harsh. Pool tells us that a servant’s day might begin at 6 AM and end at 11 PM, with only half a day off on Sunday and two full weeks of vacation in a year, plus one evening a week and one day per month. Pay could be as little as 11 pounds a year. “The servants slept in tiny, overheated or freezing-cold attic rooms and worked in dark, dank basement areas that were too hot or too cold ... They were ordered around, sometimes insulted, and frequently treated with minimal respect for the long, hard back-breaking hours of work they put in.” And, of course, a female servant who got pregnant could expect to be fired.

(And just to finish everything off, Austen claims “neither poison nor sleeping potions [were] to be procured, like rhubarb, from every druggist”, which is a statement so manifestly false I have no idea why she made it. Laudanum, opium dissolved in alcohol, was widely available in patent medicines as a pain reliever and to bring on sleep. The best possible interpretation, I suppose, is that Austen was seeing around her only what she wanted to see and ignoring what didn’t fit.)

The point I’m getting to is that not only do I think Austen was wrong in her specific criticism of Ann Radcliffe, I have to wonder whether Radcliffe wasn’t a more accurate observer of the world around her. Was the Gothic form that Radcliffe partly created (the Brontës certainly seem to me to owe more to Radcliffe’s ‘realistic’ Gothic than to the overt supernaturalism of Walpole, Beckford, Maturin, or Lewis) a way to say things that could not be said more directly? There has been much written in recent years about Gothic as a female form of writing, about Gothic as a means of social criticism — does the form allow one to think more freely about the world around oneself?

(Edited to add: the thoughts on Radcliffe and the sublime follow from reading the 1986 World's Classics edition with notes and introduction by Chloe Chard. Some strong scholarship there, I felt.)

Readings — Records of Shelley, Byron, and the Author

Records of Shelley, Byron, and the Author

by Edward John Trelawney

A somewhat notorious book, this claims to be a faithful recollection of Trelawney’s experience with the two poets, and as well a discussion of his own military adventures. It is frankly beyond me to disentangle fact and fiction, and indeed has been a primary preoccupation of Shelley and Byron biographers for the past hundred and fifty years. What I can say is that it’s swiftly written and engaging in its own right.

Trelawney’s recounting of his escapades after the death of the poets (justifying the “and the Author” portion of the title) is particularly engaging; you get the sense that the subject which most interested Trelawney, at a basic level, was Trelawney. Shelley and Byron are useful insofar as it allows Trelawney to recount his experience of the two men. It’s impossible not to be sceptical, therefore, of that recounting. Certainly I had the sense of biography like a sun setting behind clouds: glints of something bright and real, shining behind a screen which was made fascinating by the light it obscured. Which is to say that the book’s intensely readable, but you take it for truth at your own risk.

Readings — Headlong Hall and Nightmare Abbey

Headlong Hall and Nightmare Abbey

by Thomas Love Peacock

Peacock, a friend of Shelley, is mostly known for books like these: light comedies structured around dialogues between characters standing in for people like Shelley, or Coleridge, or Byron. Or so I’d always heard. I was happy to find these books had more to them than just a roman à clef. Peacock’s got an understated sense of structure that makes his work feel taut, and a feel for humour writing — by which I mean that you don’t just get laughs out of the books, but you’re pulled on by sheer amusement to find out what happens next.

That said, these books do feel a bit thin. Partly that’s because the characters are (deliberately) very broad — so much so that a complex figure like Shelley can be playfully satirised by two differerent characters in Headlong Hall, each representing different aspects of his personality and thought. But the thinness also comes from the style in which Peacock writes, where action is described very simply and pictorial description hardly appears at all. In other words, stylistically similar to old metrical romances.

That said, though broadly similar, these two novels (the edition I have put them in a single volume) are very dissimilar. If you step back and look at the overall plot structure of Headlong Hall, it’s actually a pleasing romantic comedy in an almost classic sense. A group of unlikely characters gather in an isolated spot; a young man pursues a young woman’s favour; she takes against him, and may end up married to a pedantic older man (a satirical take on Coleridge); various zanies and guests add to the chaos; at the end the slightly-buffoonish-yet-patriarchal lord sets things to right, almost by accident. Plot-wise, you could easily imagine this adapted to stage or film. As a novel, though, it proceeds almost entirely through those dialogues, which don’t always move the story along. In fact, the story can come to seem an appendix to the dialogue, which is a shame, as the matter of the story is nicely-turned in its own right.

Nightmare Abbey’s a different creature in a lot of ways. Written by Peacock for Shelley as a comment on Shelley's romantic affairs, the lead’s a charmingly emo-goth take on Shelley (“He built many castles in the air, and peopled them with secret tribunals, and bands of illuminati, who were always the imaginary instruments of his projected regeneration of the human species ... He slept with Horrid Mysteries under his pillow, and dreamed of venerable eleutherarchs and ghastly confederates holding midnight conventions in subterranean caves. He passed whole mornings in his study, immersed in gloomy reverie, stalking about the room in his nightcap, which he pulled over his eyes like a cowl, and folding his striped calico dressing-gown about him like the mantle of a conspirator”). He ends up having to choose between versions of Shelley’s first wife, Harriet Westbrook, and an amusingly humourless Mary Godwin (Peacock thought Shelley should stick with Westbrook). It’s far more cynical than Headlong Hall, and arguably less predictable. I think it’s less perfectly structured, but the characters are more engaging, and since the dialogues are really the main features of these books, that means it feels more lively than Headlong Hall. Both books, incidentally, feature a romantic triangle between a young woman, a Shelley-analogue, and a Coleridge-analogue; the different ways the triangles resolve say something about the different spirits animating the two tales.

On the whole, both books are enjoyable. The style’s brisk, and humour still sharp and direct, and there’s an amiability to them that’s still pleasing after two centuries.

Readings — Biographia Literaria

Biographia Literaria

by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

I’d read parts of the Biographia in a class on English Romanticism, so I was used to thinking about it as a text of literary criticism. Which it is, but in a roundabout way. The heart of the book seems to lie with philosophy, specifically Coleridge’s take on contemporary German philosophy. The question of plagiarism has swirled about this part of his writing for almost two centuries; I don’t have an opinion on that one way or the other, not knowing enough about the originals, but it does seem to me that the style and approach of the work shift substantially when Coleridge enters into a relatively technical exposition of these ideas.

That said, in general the book is a strange mishmash of things — philosophy, criticism, biography, anecdote, republished letters from years before — so a shift in style here or there is not uncharacteristic. In fact, there’s at least one part of the book which Coleridge claimed he chose not to publish, but which may in fact never have been written. It’s all very peculiar, but not, I found, peculiar enough to be consistently interesting.

I’d say further that when reading the Biographia, there’s a curiously orthodox sense to much of it, especially the philosophy, which seems to rest uneasily with the Christian belief Coleridge felt was important. I don’t mean that Coleridge was Blake’s Milton, in chains when writing of heaven; but to me there’s an almost domestic, traditional tone in his writing when he discuss his religious views, something that’s notably absent not only in the most vivid parts of this book, but in all of his greatest poetry. Coleridge at his best was one of the pre-eminent poets of the strange, and at its best this book touches that strangeness. Just not very often.

As I understand it, the book was patched together for the sake of having something to publish, and reads like it. That doesn’t mean it’s terrible, nor does it make it not worth reading; Coleridge is certainly enough of a writer, and enough of a thinker, that it at least repays the reader’s time and then some. But it does have, to me, the feel of a missed opportunity, of something less than it could have been. Which, I suppose, is something that many people feel about Coleridge in general — that his genius never quite found its fullest expression.

Readings — English Romanticism: The Human Context

English Romanticism: The Human Context

by Marilyn Gaull

This is a very impressive introduction to English Romanticism and its era. Gaull gives a real sense not only of the intellectual currents of the time, but of the way people thought and felt. It’s a wide-ranging survey not only of literature, but of politics, painting, philosophy, science, and other forces that shaped those turbulent, fruitful years. Gaull’s style is brisk and authoritative, and she moves quickly and easily from one subject to another. Mostly, she works through descriptions of the lives of prominent historical figures, creating a series of characters who collectively define the time.

It’s not a perfect book. The edition I had suffered from probably the worst proofreading of any book I’ve ever read (including a bewildering insistence on referring to Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer as Melmouth). And inevitably there are a few judgements that I’d disagree with. But on the whole, it’s an incredibly valuable resource, and makes you feel the excitement of a time when great spirits on Earth were sojourning.

Readings — Eric and Enid [Four Arthurian Romances]

Eric and Enid

by Chrétien de Troyes

translated by William Wister Comfort

A prose adaptation of Chrétien’s four completed Arthurian romances, this book is highly readable, capturing the romance — in all senses of that word — of Chrétien’s work. Now, Comfort seems, to judge from his introduction, to have been most interested in, or saw Chrétien as most interested in, just that; the pleasing narrative, the excitement and adventure. In the past century, though (for these translations are now a century old), I have the sense that scholarship has re-examined these works, with more of an eye for social aspects and thematic coherency. Indeed, according to Wikipedia, some scholars are now calling Chrétien the inventor of the modern novel.

That last seems a bit of a stretch to me, but I do find that this book hints at psychological acuity in the stories that doesn’t always entirely come across in Comfort’s words. I don't know if that’s a function of the translation or not. I do know that the stories all broke down very nicely into a tripartite structure. And that the theme of love seems to bind the stories internally, as well as each to each (some of them, notably Yvain and Lancelot, link up on a plot level as well).

The stories themselves are excellent, as you might expect. They twist and turn, and develop in intriguing ways. There’s a wealth of imagination here, as well, and coming near the beginning of the Arthurian tradition, some things happen that you don’t expect. More to the point, there’s a feel to these stories, in Comfort’s translation, that’s quite evocative. The details of dress and heraldry are described precisely; it seems logical to presume that they contain a wealth of meaning or references that are missed by modern audiences. Or, at least, by me.

When you read works from centuries past, especially eight centuries past, you have to be aware that writers and storytellers had different conventions, and different ideas of what they were doing and how they were doing it. Certainly some aspects of narrative are consistent across human experience. But perhaps fewer than you’d think. So Comfort translated Chrétien with his own expectations in place; reading these works now, trying to be more open to different conventions, it’s tempting to try to guess at what the translator missed. But that’s ultimately pointless. The texts are the texts. Take them for what they are, and draw from them what you will. Chrétien’s tales have lasted this long; they’ll last some while further, and be reinterpreted in each age to come.

March 2010 Reading Summary

So, as noted, I didn't read as many books in March as I wanted. I read a total of nine books, two of them from a library. I added one book to the apartment. So six books down, and I'll be trying for better in April.

Readings — Deep Future

Deep Future

by Stephen Baxter

This is a slim book of what might be called ‘popular cosmology’. Baxter takes a look at where the universe-at-large is going, according to the best that was known at the time of writing, and what science tells us about what’s coming up in the future. He spends some time considering possible futures of human technology, but so much is unknowable about how that’s likely to develop that he soon widely leaves this field to talk about the slow aging of the universe, and strategies for us to cope with same.

I gather Carl Sagan wrote books something like this, popular science outlining the grand scale of the universe we live in. Baxter’s used to that scale from his sf writing, and he plays with big ideas and vast reaches of time and space just as in a big-screen sf story. The writing’s not terribly sophisticated, but it is clear and non-technical while still being detailed. Overall, well-written and mind-expanding.

Readings — Nifft the Lean

Nifft the Lean

by Michael Shea

A collection of fantasy short stories in the Vancian mode, characterised by elaborate diction and a decadent mood. Like Vance, the diction isn’t quite supported by a style as smooth as that of, say, Clark Ashton Smith (whose work this sort of thing otherwise recalls). On the other hand, Shea’s work is probably more intensively plotted than Smith’s, and the volume’s tied together by ‘introductions’ that help situate the stories in their subject’s overall career. There’s an abundance of imagination on display, and the sort of cheerful refusal to take itself wholly seriously that can result in characters with names like Vulvula, the Vampire Queen.

But as you might imagine, it is a bit rich. I found the whimsy of the book, along with its richness of diction, made it best absorbed in small-to-mid-size doses. Which was a bit of a problem, in that one of the stories is a long novella in which Nifft and an associate wander through Hell. It’s not a particularly clever Hell, in the sense of presenting new spiritual tortures; but it’s quite spectacular, in the sense of presenting new physical tortures and gothic imagery. Still, it does start to become repetitive, and I at least needed some time away from the story by the mid-point in order to return later with refreshed eyes.

This is actually a bit odd, in that much of what makes Shea’s style (and Vance’s style, and Smith’s style) work is its novelty. That is, what really makes them stand out is not the ostentatiousness of the words they use, but the whimsy. The unexpected word that’s not only right, but arch, and throws a new light or an ironic tint across the whole scene or story. Shea does that, but while with Smith I’ll joyfully immerse myself in his wordplay for hours at a time, Shea’s prose tends to push me out. I think this speaks to a slight difference in the type of irony he uses; a little bit less profound, or else a little bit more prone to contrast itself with reality, I think (though, oddly, his world’s more fully-developed in terms of history and geography than anything I know of by Smith). Well worth reading, then, but the ultimate effect will likely be determined by your personal reaction to Shea’s tonal choices.

Readings — The Woodcuts of Albrecht Dürer

The Woodcuts of Albrecht Dürer

text by T.D. Barlow

This is a small book (about 12 by 18 cm) from 1948 reproducing many of Dürer’s designs, along with a helpful introduction by Barlow situating the images in the context of the times and Dürer’s development as an artist. Curiously, the selection omits Melencolia I, Knight, Death, and the Devil, and St. Jerome In His Study (though another cut of Saint Jerome is included), nor are they mentioned in the introductory text. Still, what is here is well-reproduced and clearly-printed, to my eye. It’s just a pity the book couldn’t have been a bit more thorough.

Readings — Behold the Man

Behold the Man

by Michael Moorcock

One of the stranger books I’ve read of late, the high concept of this book is simple: a London student in the 1970s takes part in a time travel experiment, and goes back to the days of Jesus — where he finds himself taking over the role of Christ. To Moorcock’s credit, he doesn’t rely on the concept alone to carry the book. It’s structured nicely, and spends much of its time taking apart the character of Karl Glogauer, its lead.

The result is one of Moorcock’s better books, I think. It’s short, focussed, and gets at a lot of material in a short space. It’s both experimental and highly disciplined. And it has to be said that Moorcock’s quite adept at using the Christ scenario to tap a kind of iconic energy. He does it with a light touch, setting up a properly inevitable climax. It’s a subversive take on the Christ story, of course, but Moorcock handles it well enough that, to me (and I’m not a Christian), it doesn’t feel exploitative. In fact, because it’s not exploitative, it is that much more powerful — compare, by contrast, something as witless as Garth Ennis’ Preacher graphic novels, and you’ll see what I mean. Overall, then, quite a success.

Readings — An Evil Guest

An Evil Guest

by Gene Wolfe

Gene Wolfe’s latest novel strikes me as a mixed bag, both in terms of contents and in overall effect. By ‘contents’, I mean that it includes time travel, stage musicals, musings on celebrity charisma, dread Cthulhu, and a host of other things up to and including time-travel and aliens. By ‘effect’, I mean that I’m not sure Wolfe builds an involving novel out of the whole.

The tone, for example, is engaging, but noncommittal. What seems like it should be in one spot a screwball romp out of The Sound of Music, and then in another a suspenseful edge-of-your-set noir thriller, becomes flattened into an oddly grey, rambling story which contains these things but seems to lack their flavour. The setting is ostensibly the future, practically seems more like the big city of a 1930s Hollywood film, and feels really like nothing in particular. Sure, Wolfe’s linguistic dexterity is on display, his tricks with showing only what characters see (including what they see wrongly) are there as well, and it’s a book which will reward the engaged reader more than the casual page-turner — but I don’t know whether the reward’s really that great.

The WolfeWiki suggests an alternative reading of the work which is logical, internally consistent, and yet weirdly unaffecting. Which I think is my ultimate problem with the book. It’s too detached. Much of the effect of Wolfe’s writing, one way or another, comes from keeping the reader at a certain distance. I think for this book to work, the lighter sequences would need to be more affecting, and that’d probably mean allowing the reader a bit closer in. Lacking that, I found myself uninvolved with the characters and the world.

Now, it doesn’t help that the central character is not, to my mind, terribly well-written. Cassie Casey really hearkens back to the women in those ’30s films I mentioned above, and not in a good way. It’s not that she’s flat or unintelligent, though she’s both, it’s that she’s not credible. She sounds like a movie character, which means what a bunch of men in a smoke-filled room think a spunky woman sounds like — or what they think she ought to sound like. Adam Roberts, in his thoughtful review of the book, seems to me to have it exactly right: “Casey is not a strong woman. She is a conservative’s notion of a strong woman: an "Of Queen's Gardens" woman, permitted to explore to the very edge of her pedestal but not to step down from it.”

A concern with old movies is hardly new in Wolfe’s fiction; consider There Are Doors. But while that novel was, to me, genuinely eerie and unpredictable, An Evil Guest seems to struggle more with the pulp formulas it plays with. Certain Wolfeisms seem oddly out of place. For example, his fondness for what I think of as “Thursday” figures, after G.K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday. Without giving anything away about that remarkable book, its central figure is a mysterious man, fat, cunning, and wise, who has a disturbing amount of both power and charisma, and who is perceived at the beginning of the book in a sinister light but who ends it being revealed to be something different and greater than was previously suspected. Wolfe frequently uses similar figures in his writing, some of them sinister and some of them not, some of them variations on the archetype; consider Benjamin Free in Free Live Free, or Rex von Madadh in Castleview. The point I’m getting around to is that you'd expect a figure like that — and there are two of them in this book, though they might actually be one and the same, depending on how you read it — to fit naturally with noir themes. But they don’t, really. They seem, to me, out of place; as though Wolfe hadn’t quite worked out how to make some of his recurrent imagery harmonise with the other images he was working with.

In the end, An Evil Guest seems to me more an interesting book than a good one. It’s intriguing, and worth thinking about, and moves at a relentless clip. Its language is spare and pared-down, but the dialogue is often jarringly improbable. What I suppose you can say is that for good or ill — for good and ill — it seems weirdly characteristic of Wolfe. It’s far from his best book, but it is still recognisably his.

Readings — Tales From the Vulgar Unicorn

Tales From the Vulgar Unicorn

edited by Robert Asprin and Lynn Abbey

This is the second of the Thieves’ World anthologies, the books that essentially created the shared-world writing form, in which different writers set their stories in the same fictional universe. There had been predecessors of a sort, in the form of things like the King Arthur stories or H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos — and of course Marvel and DC Comics had been doing this sort of thing for ages — but these are the books that really created shared-world writing, as we have come to know it, in print. I read the first six or eight or so when I was very young; let’s say, oh, ten or twelve. A couple of years ago I happened to pick up a used copy of the first one; rereading it, I was surprised, and impressed, to see how much it was of a piece with traditional swords-and-sorcery pulp adventure. My recollection, shaped by the later books, was of something more inbred and elaborate, with more graphic sexuality and gender-based themes — and an annoying tendency to soap opera and excessively powerful characters.

You can see that sort of thing beginning to develop in this second book. The stories aren’t bad, as such, but the apparently-immortal character of Tempus seems strangely out of place in the low-magic setting. Which may be why series editor Robert Asprin tried (unsuccessfully, as I recall) to write him out in the book’s last story. At any rate, you can see a tendency to angst in the stories revolving around Tempus, while the earlier stories in the book seem to me much more in the vein of Frtiz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser stories. Which, given the choice, I prefer.

Overall, these are competent pulp adventure stories, probably better as individual pieces rather than as a sequence. The shared-world aspect is useful, but not dominant; you certainly get the sense that anything could happen at any point — wars starting, Gods descending, you name it. Which is really the problem. If you try to look at the book as a unit, it starts and stops in peculiar ways and shifts from character to character in an inelegant manner. What you gain in unpredictability is offset in shapelessness. And one of the virtues of good pulp is cleverness in form (not brilliance, necessarily, but a clever play with plot structure). I think, all in all, that this and the first anthology were interesting experiments, but more notable in conception than execution.

Readings — Zastrozzi

Zastrozzi

by Percy Bysshe Shelley

It’s perhaps unsurprising that Shelley’s gothic novel written at age eighteen suffers in comparison to his future wife’s gothic novel written when she was eighteen. The latter, after all, is one of the classics of the form, and arguably one of the great modern myths (depending on how one defines myth). So there’s a sense in which Zastrozzi is most useful as a way to throw the greatness of Frankenstein into stark relief. Comparatively, Zastrozzi is flat, and its prose more mannered. It never really touches on the primal fears that Frankenstein does, and seems much more of its era. Largely a violent soap opera, filled with lies and stabbings, its plot moves in fits and starts, and its conception of character is broad and simple.

But it’s not unentertaining, if you like the gothic. Specifically, if you like early gothic — Ann Radcliffe-style gothic, which was light on supernatural events but heavy on crumbling castles, sublime scenery, and villainous Byronic figures in the south of Europe conducting elaborate vendettas. It has been said that the gothic novel, in its original form, was in part defined by its anti-Catholic bias, its exoticising of Catholic societies, and you can see that in Zastrozzi’s wild Italian killers. That said, anti-Catholicism doesn’t seem to be a focus of the book, the way it seems a conscious interest of Maturin in Melmoth the Wanderer. In fact, other than the introduction of the evil Inquisition, there’s surprisingly little anti-Catholic sentiment here from such a noted atheist as Shelley.

You could probably read the book as an interesting contrast to Shelley’s own Cenci as well as a contrast to Frankenstein, or to Radcliffe’s Romance of the Forest. Like The Cenci, it’s about thwarted love and heightened emotion, with aristocratic Italian characters. On a technical level, you could probably argue that it’s better than Radcliffe's Romance in its dramatic technique, and particularly in its concision — the book presents itself as a fragment, a favourite technique of the Romantic era as it is now, and so begins in the middle of things with background filled in along the way. It’s almost terse, in structure if not in style, and gains a real power from the extreme compression with which the material is treated. At its best, it’s almost hallucinatory in its intensity. Which is a good and fitting thing in a true gothic novel.

Readings — First Folio

First Folio: A Little Book of Folio Forewards

No editor is listed for this volume, which is a collection of forewards written by various authors for books reprinted by the Folio Society. Catherine Taylor introduces the book, which seems an engagingly post-modern exercise, being an introduction to a series of introductions. The whole project recalls Alasdair Gray’s The Book of Prefaces, though it doesn’t have the high ambitions.

The value for me lies in the quality of the writers whose prefaces are being reprinted. Those include Iain Sinclair (examining the geography of The War of the Worlds), PeterAckroyd (reconstructing the life of Dickens to shed light on Oliver Twist), and A.S. Byatt (considering the nature of fairy tales in reflecting on Andrew Lang’s Pink Fairy Book). Many others of these brief essays are intriguing, such as Fergal Keane’s appreciation of David Thomson’s Woodbrook, or delightfully unexpected, such as Philip Pullman’s celebration of The Anatomy of Melancholy.

Really, only John Sutherland’s piece on Slaughterhouse-Five is actively poor — Sutherland’s an example of the sort of Vonnegut critic one hears of, who feels the need to absolve Vonnegut of the sin of having committed science fiction, himself knowing nothing about the genre. Particularly egregious, and frankly unjust, is Sutherland’s describing Vonnegut’s character of SF writer Kilgore Trout as “that archetypal SF writer who, like others of his craft, has great ideas but can’t write worth a damn”; leave aside the description of SF as a craft and not an art, leave aside the fact that (for better or worse) many SF writers were focussing on ideas and not prose style, and consider that Sutherland follows this statement with a note in which he says: “It is assumed that Kilgore Trout ... was based on the actual writer Theodore Sturgeon.” Now, I’m not the world’s biggest Sturgeon fan, but to say, even by implication, that Sturgeon “can’t write worth a damn” is simply wrong on the face of it. Granted that Vonnegut’s acknowledged the connection; but the point is that here Sutherland is calling Sturgeon, a conscious literary artist, a hack. It’s the sort of whopping error that doesn’t just leave the critic looking foolish, but calls into question his reliability as a whole.

(For the curious, Vonnegut himself sums up science fiction, and his relationship thereto, in this only mildly outdated essay.)

Thankfully, this sort of thing is not otherwise present in the book. And there is a lot that’s intriguing, such as Roy Foster’s dicussion of Yeats’ collected poems, or Richard Holmes brooding on his own life and Robert Louis Stevenson’s travel writing. So while there may be no outright revelatory re-imaginings of the experience of a classic text, there is a lot of illumination of lives and times, and much careful thought. Which is what makes a useful foreword.

Readings — Seven Ages of Paris; Paris: A Secret History

Seven Ages of Paris

by Alistair Horne

Paris: A Secret History

by Andrew Hussey

Superficially, these two books appear quite different. But read a little ways into both of them, and you soon see that the core of them is much the same. There’s a slight difference of perspective, yes, and they do in the end do slightly different things; but they’re recognisably telling the same story.

That, of course, is the story of Paris. Horne’s book appears to aim, if not at greater authoritativeness, at least at presenting a more traditional view of the city. Hussey’s more conscientious about digging out opposing voices and counter-currents in the flow of history. Surprisingly, though, the difference seems to me to be not much. I think that’s because the books have to cover history on such a grand scale — well over a thousand years — that differences tend to fade next to the shared substance.

That being said, the books do have differences. Horne chooses to make his Paris a key agent in the story of France, and so provides a pocket history of the country as a whole alongside the story of the city. Hussey, on the other hand, sees his Paris in somewhat the same way Peter Ackroyd sees his London: a metropolis suspicious of its rulers, less a microcosm of the country beyond its gates than a counterweight. Hussey’s also far more sedulous about linking past to present, discussing themes of the city’s past in light of its present, describing present-day Paris as a continuation or contrast to its past, and speaking to relevant contemporary Parisians.

Both books are well-written, Horne’s style more magisterial and Hussey’s more immediate. Both have a tendency to focus on recent history in more detail than more distant times, which in sweeping histories is understandable and usual and, to me, always disappointing. I’d say that Hussey’s book is much better on postwar Paris than Horne’s, which probably gives it a slight edge if I had to pick one or another. Rather than do that, though, I’d say both are fine books, both worth reading, and just different enough to make reading both volumes worth doing.