Worldcon, Neil Gaiman, and Marvelman

Anticipation, the 67th World Science Fiction Convention, is coming up soon — August 6 to 10 — and I, alongside Claude Lalumière, will be blogging about it for the Montreal Gazette's Narratives blog. I've been reading sf all my life, but this'll be my first convention; Claude has a lot more experience with publishing, fandom, and the like, so the two of us will be able to present both an insider's and an outsider's view of the con.

I've written a preview piece for the print version of the Gazette, which I believe will be appearing this Saturday. As part of the story, I got to interview Anticipation's Guest of Honour, Neil Gaiman. Obviously, I spent most of the interview asking him about Worldcon; but, given Marvel Comics had announced only a few days before that they'd acquired the rights to Marvelman, I also felt I should take a moment to ask him about that. And that part of the conversation is now up at the Gazette's blog.

Readings 2K9: Dying Inside

Dying Inside

by Robert Silverberg

After reading this book, my girlfriend compared it to The Catcher in the Rye, which she’d had to read in high school; she hadn’t enjoyed that book, either. I found the comparison interesting, because after reading the book I compared it to Malamud and Philip Roth, writers I’d had to read in high school and whose work I hadn’t enjoyed. The point being: this isn’t really a bad book, but it has the earnestness and self-conscious literariness of English class. It aspires to be the sort of book that attains bourgeois respectability.

Another way to put it: this book is the story of a middle-aged telepath in contemporary New York City slowly losing his gift ... and that tells you everything you need to know about the novel. Tone, plot, character, there’s nothing surprising in the book at all. Each individual scene is well-written, but put together you start to notice that you see too easily where it’s all going. Each individual character sounds good when you first meet them, but never really add up to more than a collection of stereotypes: the Black nationalist, the bitchy sister, the One Woman He Truly Loved, and so on. It’s ironic, since the book wants to insist on the value of every individual experience — but presents only well-written stock characters. Even the way the theme of The Depth of Every Individual is brought out is unsurprising (the main character, in a flashback to his adolescence, goes deep into the thoughts of a taciturn farmer, a Man Of The Earth, and finds that Still Waters Run Deep).

The style is solid, the construction — weaving flashbacks into the slow progress of the present-day sequences — effective. But the book never becomes anything more than a stylistic exercise, a series of tropes hit in practised order, all the right notes in all the right order. It’s the sort of book, I think, that attracts a lot of praise when it’s first published, and which slowly loses its luster as the years pass — a pat conclusion, maybe, given the plot of the book, but it’s the only assessment I can give. If you’re looking for literary sf, you could do worse — but you could also do much better.

Readings 2K9: The Jewels of Aptor

The Jewels of Aptor

by Samuel R. Delaney

Delaney’s first book, written when he was a teenager, is a fast-paced, imaginative pulp fantasy. Some solid description lifts it above the run-of-the-mill, and there’s a respectable amount of ideas per square inch. Occasionally the writing has some odd gaps in clarity or specificity — a character loses a hand at one point, and I don’t think it’s ever established which hand it was — and some unrealistic psychology; but it’s unrealistic in the style of fast-paced adventure stories, as it were, complex emotions skipped over to keep the narrative moving. It’s not, in other words, great writing. But it’s a good quick read, with strong rhythms and vocabulary, and some oddly psychedelic touches which help make the style stand out. On the one hand, it’s of interest mainly as Delaney’s first work; on the other, it’s far from the worst fantasy-adventure book I’ve read, and stands nicely alongside the pulpier writing of somebody like Michael Moorcock.

Readings 2K9: Artifact

Artifact

by Gregory Benford

I don’t enjoy writing a wise-ass review. If nothing else, it means I’ve just spent time reading a bad book. But in general, I understand how much work writing is, and how much of the self is invested in a written work, especially a novel length work. So usually I think even a bad book is worth a serious response. Still, there are books which test that attitude; books which read as particularly half-assed, or which feature particularly ugly characterisation — negative portrayals of a particular ethnicity or gender, say — or simply especially simplistic, ugly prose. Which brings me to Gregory Benford’s Artifact, a book that comes close to hitting all of the above.

Let me begin by saying this is a boring, slow book. It opens with an archaeological dig in Greece in the late 1990s, something like fifteen years after the book’s publication in 1984. American archaeologists find a peculiar cubical artifact in a tomb from about 1500 BC, but are chased away by the agent of a new nationalist and socialist Greek government. This man, Kontos, is aggressively unpleasant: a trained archaeologist with a military rank and a tendency to violence, he sexually assaults, or tries to, the female leader of the Americans. The Americans leave at his order, then sneak back to the dig site (with the novel’s main character, a mathematician who came over from the States to work some scientific equipment, in tow) to recover their work, and end up stealing the whole artifact. That takes about 200 pages. Back in the US, they discover the thing’s radioactive, and set about trying to figure out why; that’s good for about another 150 pages. The final 150 pages of the book is about the scientists and the US military trying to prevent an explosion on the level of a 100-megaton blast, despite the interference of those pesky Greeks.

First off, the book’s got a basic problem: how do you justify the theft of a priceless historical artifact from its country of origin? One way is by portraying pretty much every single Greek person in the book as aggressive, stupid, and/or incompetent. The book does that. Another is to handwave the question away by saying it’s not important. The book does that, too. The point is: for the book to have a plot (however slow in developing), the Americans have to get the artifact back to the States to study it. So they do. I don’t understand why the book couldn’t have been about Greek scientists and archaeologists studying the artifact in Greece; at least that way, a sub-plot about war between Greece and Turkey wouldn’t feel like a tacked-on kludge to force characters to be in certain spots at certain times in order to build up to something resembling a proper conclusion. Which is basically what the subplot feels like now.

At any rate, the book’s one-sided portrayal of Greeks is in keeping with its one-sided portrayal of pretty much everybody. If Benford dislikes a certain group, you really get to know about it. Notably, you can tell whether he prefers humanities like archaeology or hard science like physics: at a description of a physics conference, one character sees the physicists “answering questions, handing out preprints, defending their ideas. It seemed very far from the meetings of archaeologists, who tended to hold forth in lengthy verbal talks illustrated by slides in darkened rooms, answering questions only briefly at the very end. That bull-moose pattern, trumpeting one’s position from a lordly lectern, had always irritated her. The physicists, with their unassuming posters, flatly displayed to lure an audience by snagging their curiosity, seemed more honest and democratic than the humanists.” Yeah, one thinks, dirty filthy humanists, probably the kind of people who’d point out that bit about the ‘honesty’ of the posters, which ‘lure’ despite being ‘unassuming’, and mutter things like “incoherent” or “contradictory” or “Orwellian”. Or maybe just “goofy”. (And then likely go on about the redundancy of "verbal talks".)

Anyway, the preceding quote is pretty much of a piece with the book’s view of things. One of the minor characters of the book is an archaeologist high up in academe; he’s a pencil-necked dweeb who ignores the female archaeologist character and believes whatever the evil male Greek archaeologist says, because of professional courtesy. Physicists, by contrast, are uniformly clever, funny, and respectful of people of the opposite gender (which is always female). We’re told that one of the physicists has a reputation as a ladies’ man, but this turns out to be a smear by those evil humanists.

The book tries to talk about gender roles and old-boys-networks — in the context of those archaeologists, of course — by having one of the main characters be female. You can tell because she’s tough and independent, with a fierce outer shell that she’s had to put up to protect herself from the male gazes around her. Yes, she does end up being rescued by the main male character at the climax of the book, why do you ask? And, yes, she does end up happily married to the same character, who after all is the only man she feels secure enough with to let her inner fears and tensions surface through her take-no-shit exterior. We could see this coming early in the book, you see, when said male character looks at her in her skirt, and wonders to himself whether she might wear garters instead of pantyhose. Guess what? We find out in an aside a few dozen pages later that she does! Of course, it’s because of a tendency to yeast infections, and not for any objectifying sexual reasons. Naturally. So that’s okay. Anyway, the point is, clearly these two were made for each. He’s a bland, generic southerner, she’s a walking stereotype and occasional fetish object. What could be better?

Mind you, the absence of characterisation in the two leads is matched by the absence of character in the rest of the book as well. Everybody’s bland (scientists, agents of the American government) or else straight out of central casting (the comic-opera military strongman who gives the book what passes for a villain). There are no surprises here, only stereotypes. One of the physicists in the book, for example, is a brilliant Italian. So, of course, he’s quiet, thoughtful, reserved. Right? Oh no he bloody isn’t. He’s extravagant and waves his hands about a lot. Sadly, he is also the closest thing to a memorable character in the book.

So the book is not good; it’s slow, somehow turning a story about a global drift toward war into a chore to read, and the characters are flat. Is it aggressively stupid enough to deserve mocking? I think so, yes. It’s not that Claire, the female archaeologist, finds that US Navy men are uniformly “quick, intelligent, and disciplined without being rigid” (she walks in on a group of them aboard ship sitting around watching a PBS documentary); I mean, you know, okay, why not? It’s that it’s part of a pattern of the way the US is presented in the book — “worshipful” is perhaps the adjective I want here, though “adoring” could fit as well. Basically, this is a book in which Americans are always superior to foreign-types, and indeed are unjustly persecuted (we’re told) round the world. So sad.

The thing of it is ... and the reason why I feel the tone of this review is appropriate ... between 1967 and 1974, Greece was ruled by a military junta backed by the United States. The junta was notable for mass arrests, use of torture, and the deprivation of civil rights for the population of Greece. Bill Clinton formally apologised for America’s support for the junta (which some people have described as a fascist government) in 1999. For Benford to write a book in 1984 in which he portrays Greeks as being, essentially, stooges who turn toward Marxism for no reason, and as anti-American for no valid cause, is ... ‘troubling’ is probably the mildest word usable. There’s no mention whatsoever of the American-backed junta, no basis given for the attitudes of the Greeks in the book. Why did he write the Greeks so negatively in the first place? One wonders whether he saw some article about anti-Americanism in Greece in the early 80s, or perhaps reacted to the election of socialist Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou (who had talked about withdrawing from NATO in his election campaign — he didn’t follow through, but Greece’s withdrawal from NATO in the book is presented as a sign of their essential wrongheadedness). In any event, it underscores the essential cluelessness of the novel.

In the end, politics are perhaps less significant from a reader’s angle (weirdly, a disclaimer on the book's copyright page claims that "The political views stated or implied in this novel do not reflect those of the author", which I don't even know what to do with) than the book’s uninteresting central premise — it’s just dull as ditchwater, a scientific what-if unconnected to any human question or theme — and the unremitting blandness of the prose. The sentences have minimal variation in their structure, no real complexity, and an impoverished vocabulary. The characters don’t sound as intelligent as their positions would suggest they have to be; on one level, that strains credibility, but on another level, it’s a reflection of the book’s overall dullness.

Not recommended.

Readings 2K9: Native Tongue

Native Tongue

by Suzette Haden Elgin

I wanted to like this book a lot more than I actually did. It had an interesting premise — in a future where women are subjugated, families of linguists are the only means for humans to communicate with dozens of extraterrestrial species; the United States government tries to usurp their power even as female linguists plan an unconventional rebellion. And there are good things about the novel; structurally, it’s nicely put together, with character and plot dovetailing well. The climax, with its presentation of reality shaped by language, makes for an interesting conclusion. Multiple perspectives are for the most part well-handled (though individual characters are often flat), and bring out different aspects of the theme and setting. But ...

The setting doesn’t really make sense to me. There’s a constant confusion between ‘humanity’ and ‘the United States’ which is really troubling; the US is the only nation that seems to be challenging the linguists’ monopoly on alien communication, and indeed other countries and cultures are only vaguely waved at in passing. Linguists are given the ability to manipulate people by language, which is okay, but the depiction of this process is clunky and unsubtle; it’s impossible to believe in the presentation we get. And the presence of aliens — nearly fifty of whom have dealings with humanity — has apparently not led to any significant change in human society.

This last is particularly odd given the subjugation of women in the novel’s society. Many of the aliens apparently have gender (both biologically and linguistically) — are all of them patriarchal, as human society has become? If not, how does that affect human relations with the aliens?

Crucially, the issue of the subjugation of women is confused. In the novel, women all over the Earth are legally disenfranchised, reduced to the status of children in the eyes of the law. There are references made to the failure of the Equal Rights Amendment in the US, and to discoveries in the 1990s — the novel was published in 1984 — which proved that women were mentally inferior to men. I get the impression that the reader is meant to assume that the chauvinism which led to the defeat of the ERA led to bogus scientific discoveries buttressing claims of male supremacy, in the same sort of way apartheid-era South Africa churned out studies claiming that White people were superior to Blacks. The problem is, that’s not really what the book actually presents. In the future the book gives us, countries all around the world apparently take these experiments as proven fact, and change their laws to match. Note some countries actually have, or had, the constitutional guarantee that the US voted down. Canada, for example, would have had to radically alter its constitution to fall in line with the kind of society Elgin suggests is normal in the future. It’s inconceivable that the failure of a single piece of American legislation (however regrettable) could have had that kind of global impact. So ... the only way to make sense of the world of the novel is to conclude that in this world, women really were proved to be mentally inferior to men. Which then becomes problematic, if only because there’s no hint in the way the characters think and act that the women are in any way less intelligent than the males, and certainly nothing in the book that examines the implications of the premise.

So, basically, the setting of the novel really doesn’t make a lot sense, and suffers from an annoying America-centric perspective. I get the impression that the novel was written as a reaction to the failure of the ERA; if so, it reads like it needed either one more or one fewer draft. One more, which would have fixed some of the problems with the setting; or one less, which might have allowed the emotion that inspired the book to come through. As it is, it’s an occasionally interesting but fundamentally flawed read.

Readings 2K9: June summation

Well, I read 20 books in the month, as I wanted. That's not counting three books I read on the computer. Two of those were library books, though, and I added four books over the past month (well, two months, as I forgot to mention picking one up in May). Annoyingly, I noted I was inconsistent in the way I was counting totals so far (getting confused about whether to count books added to the apartment against my total, which is what I really should do). So, as I make it now: 71 read for the year, 32 fewer unread books around the place in total. I've got a ton more books to read in preparation for Anticipation, the World Science Fiction Convention being held this year in Montreal. These would be sf books I've owned for a while, and Worldcon gives me a good excuse to finally sit down with them -- so hopefully I'll have another decent month in July.

Now I just have to write about them.

Readings 2K9: Vulcan!

Vulcan!

by Kathleen Sky

Well, this is certainly a Star Trek novel from the 70s. It’s not as weird as some; you don’t have the Klingon Empire locked in a slow-time field by irate cosmic entities, for example. In fact, by those standards, the book’s positively sedate. The borders of the Romulan Neutral Zone are shifting, and the Federation’s about to lose a claimed but only partially-explored planet; it’s not clear whether the inhabitants are sentient, and the crew of the Enterprise has to figure it out before the Romulans take over. The xenobiologist who comes on board to do so is ...

... Okay, well. Katalya Tremain is “not beautiful, but well proportioned.” Her uniform “fit perfectly over her small waist and hips and the curves of her full bosom. Her eyes were dark, warm as forest pools struck by sunlight,” and so forth. Although age thirty-five, “she looked as though she might be twenty, at most.” So all this, plus her genius-level intellect, explains why both McCoy and Spock fall instantly in love with her (Kirk? He’s actually the model of professionalism and decorum). Ah, but, she is violently prejudiced against Vulcans. So, inevitably, when the time comes to beam down to the mysterious planet, it’ll be her and Spock in the landing party ... and the rest of the party gets killed ... and the two of them must work together to learn the nature of the planet’s inhabitants before they’re all lost to the Romulans.

There are some cute ideas here — notably, a past-his-prime Romulan commander who freaks out when he learns that the Federation starship he’s dealing with is commanded by the fearsome Captain James Kirk — but then there’s also the occasional terrible bit of writing: “Professionalism was warring with his gonads, and it was going to be a neck-and-neck race as to which side won,” we’re told at one point, which, as mixed metaphors go, is really pretty ugly and only gets uglier the more you think about it. The “he” in that sentence is McCoy, who acts as Tremain’s therapist when she comes on board the Enterprise, giving her drugs to increase her suggestiveness while openly hitting on her. They did things differently in the twenty-third century, once upon a time.

Reading the book, I was reminded of the fact that when I was younger, between the ages of, oh, let’s say ten and fifteen or thereabouts, I read a ton of these Star Trek books. As far as I can make out, looking at the Wikipedia lists of novels, probably a few dozen. Now, at that time, the early to mid 1980s, there were only 79 episodes of one TV series, plus the occasional movie and a few comics. I was young enough that the idea of ‘canon’ meant little or nothing to me. The point being, books like these meant Trek to me at least as much as the actual show did. This sort of writing, in a kind of penumbra between fanzines and “real” sf novels, not only kept the world and what we now call “franchise” alive, but also to some extent built up and shaped the characters and ideas of the original show.

Nowadays, of course, everything's different. I read (or perhaps reread; my memory for thirty-year-old Star Trek novels is not so great) this book at about the same time I saw the new film. It’s interesting to compare the two. Obviously, there are some surface similarities which may come out of long-standing desires to do certain things with the characters — you know how Spock is fundamentally rational and represses his emotions so strongly nobody ever sees them except under life-or-death stress? That notion is not operative in either the book or the movie, exactly — but the thing that strikes me is the difference between them. The new Star Trek film takes the surface structure of Trek and fits it into a Hollywood action-adventure film: lots of special effects, quick editing to create the illusion of intelligence, hand-waved science, a female character who does nothing particularly significant except be a lust-object for male characters, a fast-talking guy with a funny accent for comic relief (pardon me, two fast-talking guys with funny accents), a few vague nods in the direction of a theme which is abandoned once the action gets underway, and above all a bad guy who is thoroughly bad and cannot be negotiated with and is in the movie only to be blown up. Vulcan!, for all its sins, is actually smarter than that. As noted, the Romulans have actual personalities and motivations. There’s some kind of communication between them and the Enterprise. There’s even an attempt, however poorly-executed or heavy-handed, at character growth. A mind-meld scene late in the book actually tries to develop a sense of wonder.

This is not to say that I enjoyed the book more than the movie. It’s just to note that, while it may be bad, it gets something right. I don’t just mean that it gets something right in its approach to Trek; sure, it’s closer in spirit to the original show, but then it’s also closer in time, meaning both that there were fewer derivative works to sweep away, and that (perhaps more important) it was the product of a society much closer to that which had originally produced Star Trek. For example, the tense relationship between the US and USSR made itself felt, however hamfistedly, in the way the show depicted Klingons and Romulans and all sorts of things. There’s an echo of that in the book; at the time, I think it was inescapable. The movie ... well, there’s nothing that interesting in the movie. And that gets to the main point I want to make, which is this: The book follows on from a TV show that had to do, at however diluted a level, with dramatic things. Power, politics, dealing with the other. The movie is a deliberate attempt to reject all of that, leaving not a whole hell of a lot.

The book, like the original show, has a certain interest in aliens. Are these antlike aliens intelligent? What’s going on in the Romulan ship? The movie, well, not even slightly. Vulcans are racist and repress emotions and Spock turns his back on them and then they all get blown up anyway. It’s an inward-looking movie. It’s not at all interested in exploring strange new worlds, or in seeking out new life and new civilizations. This makes it, in the long run, awfully dull.

I suppose what I’m saying is that the movie is inherently conservative, while Trek has usually been concerned with the new. Not always in a sophisticated way, as witness Vulcan!; but the theme I think can be fairly said to be present throughout much of Trek. I suspect it’s that fact that drew me, and probably many others, to the show (in whatever iteration) in the first place. Books like Vulcan!, however flawed, kept me imaginatively involved in the show; kept the characters alive for me, kept their mission of exploration going as an ideal for me as a reader. I don’t know whether the new Star Trek movie would have been as effective, in the long run. I wonder whether it’ll be effective for others.

Readings 2K9: Last Legends of Earth

Last Legends of Earth

by A.A. Attanasio

I won’t say this book is what every science fiction novel ought to be, but it’s pretty near the ideal sf book as far as I’m concerned. It’s extravagant, epic, and consistently inventive, not only in terms of setting, and not only in terms of how the setting affects the characters, but in the way in which the setting is described — the language, the sentence structure, the way of thinking. It’s a book that, to me, fulfills every promise the idea of science fiction suggests. 

The novel’s set in the far future, long after the death of Earth and the solar system. An alien from a subatomic world, Gai, creates a new star system in the galaxy as a means of luring and trapping her people’s enemies, the zotl, who will come to the new star system to feed on its population; it’s a desperation tactic in a genocidal war. To draw the zotl, Gai creates bait to people her star system — human beings. But not new humans; these are the spirits of humans from the past, reincarnated as pawns in cosmic war. The book follows the war’s progress, but also follows the exploits of a pilot named Ned O’Tennis and his lover Chan-Ti Beppu, who are torn apart by circumstance and struggle to find their way back to each other across time and space. 

The scope of the book is tremendous, covering thousands of years of history and fifteen planets (more, in fact). It’s both linear and non-linear, which sounds confusing, but works smoothly in practice; it’s an example of the understated cleverness with which Attanasio has assembled his text. “Assembled” is perhaps not the right word, but does hint at the shifting points-of-view in the novel; in a way, it’s put together out of the stories of the many characters who wander through its pages, with Ned and Chan-ti only the most notable of several recurring figures. Everyone has their own story, here. More: everyone is a legend. One of the last legends of Earth.

The book moves easily from flying cities to primitive hunter-gatherer communities to the point where high technology and myth fuse. Attanasio makes all these things, all his wildly disparate materials, cohere into something with character all its own; the book is a true original.

Is it the best sf book I’ve ever read? Probably not; it doesn’t quite reach the heights of Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun, which as far as I’m concerned is one of the greatest books I’ve ever come across in any form. But we’re talking here about degrees of greatness. I think it’s the finest book I’ve read this year so far, and I look forward to working my way through the rest of Attanasio’s work. For me, this is one of the best things about the book; not only is it great in itself, but it’s the first book by Attanasio I’ve ever read — meaning I have a new author to follow, a new bibliography to work my way through. It’s a treat to discover a writer like this, and a pleasure to find that there are more books out there that can give these kinds of pleasures.

Readings 2K9: May summation

This month, I read a total of nine books. All of them are from around the apartment, so that's forty-nine books in total so far, only twenty-eight of which are books I own. I've got to step that up to reach my goal for October, so my goal this month of reading at least twenty books.  I'm also going to try to be quicker about posting my thoughts on the books I read up here; that probably means that the posts are going to be shorter.

We'll see how that goes.

Readings 2K9: Anathem

Anathem

by Neal Stephenson

This is not a bad book, but I’m reluctant to go so far as to actually call it good. It’s an odd sort of science-fiction novel; it’s really a set of extended philosophical dialogues, given a few nods toward a novel form. It takes place on another world, in which human history has followed a path roughly analogous to Western civilization on Earth (with analogues for Greece, Rome, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and so forth), though it's set a few thousand years after the point analogous to the present. Scientist-philosophers are contained within monastery-like maths, while outside their walls cultures and civilisations rise and fall. Anathem follows Erasmas, one of the inhabitants of a math; the first third or so of the book sees Erasmas getting involved with politics and mysteries within the math, the next third is a kind of father-quest in which he seeks an absent mentor-figure, and the last chunk of the book brings together and sums up all the mysteries of the setting with an adventure into space. It’s a nicely structured sf adventure story, then, with a constantly escalating series of payoffs.

Except it isn’t, really. The action, the forward movement of the plot, is sporadic at best. It seems to exist as a vehicle to move from one pseudo-Socratic dialogue to another. It’s like sf’s traditional weakness for infodumps and digressions has been apotheosized; taken to the utmost degree, it has become the main structural principle of the book, so that the novel (like a literal-minded Tristram Shandy) is composed primarily of digressions — which, it must be said, turn out in many cases to be not as digressive as they appear. Still, there’s no doubt this could have been a much shorter and more streamlined story, had Stephenson wished it.

Personally, I don’t think the book quite makes its case for its circuitous presentation of its ideas. One of the aspects of the nature of fiction lies in its difference from philosophy; fiction is philosophy in action, if you like, ideas given dramatic form. Anathem recoils from drama; even when important things happen, they tend not to be dramatic in the usual sense — hinging on human choice. Indeed, the novel’s extrapolation of its central premises suggests that choice is in a way moot; all possible outcomes of a given situation may be seen as equally valid. Which is an interesting thought-experiment, but Stephenson doesn't translate it into an interesting story structure.

Stephenson crafts the novel well on the sentence level. He coins new words, which are sometimes clumsy (and sometimes jarring) plays on standard English terms, but which occasionally bear more weight. One of the made-up words, “Suvin”, is almost certainly a reference to sf critic Darko Suvin, for example. His sentences are clever and occasionally intricate; his humour mostly works, and the book is readable enough.

The underlying science-fictional ideas are familiar. The ‘theorics’ studied at the maths are basically physics with some math and philosophy; so there's another sense here in which this is a classical science fiction story — physicists and physics students trying to save the world, in opposition to politicians and unenlightened non-scientists. It feels like a traditional sf juvenile, with students working out secrets of the world through sheer cleverness.

Unfortunately, it falls into the stereotypical pitfall of old-school science-fiction: the characters are rudimentary, to be polite. Erasmas has a crush on one character for the first two or three hundred pages, but if you don’t read closely you could easily miss it — it’s not like he actually does anything about it, or has his way of thinking affected by his emotion. Incredibly, Erasmas later discovers he’s actually in love with somebody he’s known for years; even more incredibly, we’re expected to believe that her removal from the math later that same day is a serious driving force for him. 

There’s a terminal blandness afflicting many of the characters, and it’s why at the end of the day I can’t bring myself to call this book a success. There’s nothing memorable on a human level in this novel. Even the father-figure Erasmas seeks in the novel’s middle part is flat; he works, to the extent that he works at all, only because he reminds us of mentor-figures in other stories, similar characters in similar roles in better books. This is kind of appropriate, given the notions of ideal forms Stephenson pays around with — archetypes as ideals. But in the end, all the book does is demonstrate the gap between the ideal and the real; and suggest that, in certain ways, it is the latter which is more interesting.

Readings 2K9: First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women

First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women

by Eric McCormack

It’s a pity that this book isn’t as interesting as its title. It’s not terrible; it’s the story of a boy born in Scotland, orphaned at a young age, who ends up travelling a fair part of the world and seeing some strange things before his story is wrapped up in Canada in his middle age. It’s an odd structure. The first two thirds or so are extravagant, set in exotic locales, featuring almost Gilliamesque oddities; the last portion is stripped of wonder and charm, livened only by an odd dream and a perhaps-supernatural vision of blackness. It’s clever, but makes the whole feel false. The two parts don’t coexist comfortably within one tale.

The problem may simply be the blandness of the narrative voice. McCormack chose to make his main character tell his tale in a very prosaic voice; there’s a reason for that, as we discover when we find out who he’s telling the story to, and why. But it doesn’t do the actual story any favours. There’s an absence of atmosphere that the story perhaps needed; lacking that atmosphere, the extravagances of the early parts never come to life, never catch fire, and end up even less substantial than they were presumably meant to. It’s a book that balances wonder against the quotidian, and tips the scales in favour of the quotidian.

Unsurprisingly, it’s a Canadian novel. It’s a decent example of the sort of tropes one thinks of when one thinks of CanLit — an erudite wander through a colonial culture’s history and literature; a tendency to flee the fantastic in favour of a bleaker realism (superficially bleaker, at least; one suspects that CanLit is more comfortable with the narrower bounds of realism). It’s a short and not terrible book; but, like much CanLit, not in the end terribly interesting.

Readings 2K9: Soon I Will Be Invincible

Soon I Will Be Invincible

by Austin Grossman

One of the charming and exasperating features of the comics field, and especially of the super-hero comics field, is the weird intertwining of both wildly inflated claims of value and self-loathing put-downs. So comics are both an outlaw medium that is the bane of the censor, and also just trash not worth keeping or re-reading. Comics are a neglected art-form with its own geniuses, and also the lowest rung of the pop-cultural ladder, schlock cynically ladled out to kids who don’t know any better. You can make a case for either set of arguments; what’s always impressed me about people in comics is how they can go from one set to another within a single paragraph. 

One could argue that this is a fundamentally adolescent mixture of arrogance and angst, reflecting both the young age of the medium and the target audience of its most commercial forms. I wouldn’t necessarily be convinced of this argument, but I can see it being made. I mention it because it seems relevant to Austin Grossman’s super-hero novel, set in his own world with his own characters, a daring imaginative enterprise that refuses to take itself seriously. Or, more precisely, refuses to wholly believe in itself; refuses to engage with its own imagination, falling back on unconvincing irony and affectless characters.

I should note, despite the above comment, that this isn’t a bad book. It’s the story of a super-villain, Doctor Impossible, and his attempt to get revenge on his arch-enemy, CoreFire, and, yes, to become invincible (though one suspects, based on the book, Grossman's mixed up the definitions of "invincible" and "invulnerable"). Alternating with Impossible’s point of view is that of new super-hero Fatale, recently recruited to the world’s premier super-team, which has dedicated itself to hunting down Impossible and bringing him to justice for the murder of CoreFire — for, to Impossible’s chagrin, it appears somebody else has killed off his nemesis. The story unfolds neatly, though Fatale’s point-of-view proves somewhat unnecessary, and the plot strands, loose throughout the book, don’t quite dovetail strongly enough. The ending generally is something of a problem, with a dea ex machina and expository anti-climax slipping into easy parody. Still, Grossman clearly knows his genre tropes.

It’s with the exploration of those tropes that the book disappoints. For Grossman, the experience of adolescence is the key to the genre; specifically, the super-hero story becomes a parody of high school, with heroes as jocks beating up nerdy villains. Questions of good and evil are secondary; this is not a book particularly interested in morality. Or in the cosmic sublime. Its sensibility is mundane, for all that it plays with superficially imaginative elements.

The problem, though, isn’t its quotidian and reductive approach to super-heroes; it’s the flatness of its metaphorical high school. That is, the problem isn’t the prevalence of adolescence, it’s the lack of credit Grossman implicitly gives adolescents. There’s no depth to these characters; no sense of real issues, real problems, of the process of growth and maturation. One of the female heroes is bulimic, which is a nice touch, but nothing's done with it. You don't have to spend a lot of time around actual teenagers, or in an actual school setting, to realise how much is lacking in this book.

That issue aside, certain problems of believability arise in Grossman's book. Is Doctor Impossible genuinely brilliant? He doesn’t sound like it, or behave like it. If he is hyper-intelligent, why does he act so foolishly? He’s physically humiliated by another villain after going to a villain hang-out; it’s impossible to imagine a major villain in an actual super-hero comic (Lex Luthor, Doctor Doom) suffering so, in part because they’d be intelligent enough — have enough common sense — to prepare. If you’re going to a location filled with physically dangerous villains, ensure you can deal with it. Basic logic, right? But if Doctor Impossible thought things through, Grossman wouldn’t get the scene he wanted. 

Now, Impossible ends up beaten up by the other villain, not killed. And in general, there’s a notable absence of death or substantive destruction in the book. This not only makes it difficult to take seriously, it goes against the grain of almost every super-hero comic for the past forty years. For at least that long — and arguably since the advent of Marvel Comics in 1961 — super-hero books have been about the illusion of realism, convincing the reader that the events in the book are grittier, more emotionally true, more adult and less kid stuff, than anything before. Of course most of the time this isn’t true, and wouldn’t necessarily be any good if it were; the point is that the genre is at its most adolescent in its striving to be taken seriously, and in the way that striving manifests. Had Grossman realised it, his book might have had a greater sense of depth; in any event, he doesn’t seem to have noticed this, and the book rattles along, slipping into parody and out of it again.

Generally, there’s a problem here with the fundamental ordinariness of sensibility on display in the book. We’re told several times how one of the heroes, Elphin, is a hero out of legend; we don’t get that sense from anything she says or does. Her dialogue is, if anything, notably uninteresting. It’s true that super-heroes are a pop phenomenon, but still at their best they transcend the mundane, and capture something imaginative. That never happens here. The book never touches the freewheeling imagination you need to mimic the best Marvel and DC books. Lacking any operatic emotions, any real sense of heroism or villainy, that lack of imagination is a killer.

Again, this isn’t to say that the book is unskillful. The prose is very slick, and within its limited tonal range it modulates itself quite nicely. And Grossman clearly has thought about his heroes and their nature, the key importance of their physical bodies in their powers and origins. He works thankfully unobtrusive Freudian touches into their stories — with parents absent, surrogate figures from an earlier generation of heroes are given mythic airs. It’s a clever, and convincing, bit of analysis.

The book is interesting, no doubt. But I can’t say that it becomes anything more than that. It’s not one of the best prose super-hero books I’ve read — not as good as Elliot S! Maggin’s Superman books, not as good as the best of the George R.R. Martin-edited Wild Cards anthologies, not as good as the surprising short fiction anthology Who Will Save Us Now? But it’s not a bad book. It does what it wants to do, and does it well. I just can’t help but feel that its sights were set too low; that there was a failure of sensibility, a failure of conception, somewhere along the line. Had it been more parodic, its failure to grasp what is most powerful in super-hero books would have been more acceptable. As it is, I can only say: it’s all right, if you like that sort of thing.

Readings 2K9: Crimson Shadows

Crimson Shadows

The Best of Robert E. Howard, Volume 1

When I was younger, I had a vague idea of Howard as a would-be tough guy, cranking out stories about barbarian hard men, militaristic and formulaic wish-fulfilment. There’s some truth to that image, but much that is wrong. And much that is left out; Howard seems to have suffered from clinical depression, for example, which shaped his life and his approach to the same. He knew and wrote about actual tough guys and guys who simply wanted to be tough; but although he believed the barbarian in humanity would ultimately triumph, he didn’t necessarily see it as a good thing. Howard, in short, was a much more fascinating figure, and fascinating writer, than I had supposed.

It helps, in reading this collection, that the key wrongness in the way I thought about Howard was the word “formulaic”. Howard occasionally wrote to formula, but he wasn’t formulaic that I can see; he made the formulas his own. And, frankly, much of the formula that we do see in his writings came about because he wrote material from which formulas were later derived; thus Kull, and Conan, and the barbarian swordsmen who followed. Howard wrote other kinds of fiction as well, much of it represented here — or, more precisely, he wrote in many different settings, though the adventure-fiction structure and tone was almost always the same, occasionally leavened by a greater sense of humour. But always there is a strong structure, always (even in the most comedic of stories) the almost homicidal sense of violence ready to burst out at any moment, always the swift relentless motion of the story ever onwards to bloody climax.

Technically, Howard could write taut, dramatic tales; often he didn’t reach this standard, but this book does a good job of selecting some of his most compelling work. You can feel the compulsions bubbling under the surface of the stories here, especially in his dark ages tales about Bran Mak Morn and the Picts. Howard researched his stories, and was strongly inspired by his sense of history — by the pseudo-Darwinian narratives of races rising and falling, of history as a tale of peoples climbing some evolutionary scale and then collapsing into nothingness. As I said, Howard believed the barbarian would triumph in the end; it’s a sort of historical nihilism, matching his Weird Tales companion H.P. Lovecraft’s cosmic nihilism.

Like Lovecraft, Howard was a racist, but for the most part that’s not directly reflected in these stories. Howard’s framework for thinking about races and peoples is clearly here, and, as in the case of Lovecraft, clearly influencing the kinds of fantasies and stories he imagines. It’s sublimated racism, in other words, which in this volume does not, by and large, break the surface. Gender politics, of course, is something else, and that — no surprise — is where Howard is weakest. 

The value of a book like this is in the way it makes a case for Howard, for all his flaws, as a writer worth taking seriously. That is, it presents Howard as somebody with a native sense for words; it makes a strong case for his ability to construct a sentence, to make it do what he wanted. The poems it presents are decent examples of what I mean — not vastly sophisticated, ballad-like, perhaps vaguely similar to Kipling or Chesterton (the latter of whom was a particular favourite of Howard’s), tremendously successful at stirring emotion or images in the mind of the reader. The point is not that Howard was a craftsman; he was, but my point is that he had something more than that.

This is not a perfect book, as Howard was not a perfect writer; but then he never had a chance to reach what for most writers would be considered maturity. It’s tempting to wonder whether it’s not time for a full-scale re-evaluation of Howard’s work. Lovecraft is, I think, becoming increasingly acceptable as a canonical writer; I think generally there’s a greater interest in American pulp writers. Could Howard be rescued as a writer worth studying? Maybe; maybe not; either way, he’ll be a writer worth reading, and a writer who will be read for a very long time. Books like this make the case that that’s a good thing.

ByattBlogging Postscript: On Histories and Stories

This is a collection of lectures on the topic of storytelling. As with much of Byatt’s writing, it’s interesting both in its own right as criticism, and in what it says about her particular creative projects.

The first chapter, for example, is a consideration of the historical novel — how it has been viewed, examples of what has been done with the form, and what makes it important, especially in Britain. Byatt is strong on the value of historical fiction: “the aesthetic need to write coloured and metaphorical language, to keep past literatures alive and singing, connecting the pleasure of writing to the pleasure of reading.” The next chapter extends this discussion of the variety of pasts being created, and the voices being created; the ventriloquism which brings a past to life. (It is no surprise that Peter Ackroyd is discussed at length here.)

The next chapter considers the meta-narratives which frame a writer’s understanding of the world; Christianity, Newtonian physics, Darwinian evolutionary theory, the definitions of the world of which the writer is a part. Taking evolutionary theory as perhaps the most important for the present day, Byatt identifies a trend to the investigation of natural history, the discussion of the animal world, in several key (to her) novelists. This ends up as a consideration of Victorian thought and art, in the course of which Byatt discusses her own work in Angels & Insects. The book is discussed even further in the next chapter, which is about research and precision and, inevitably, language. Rather tenuously, Byatt links fiction’s alleged turn towards scientific accuracy with history and criticism’s turn towards ‘artfulness’. That’s arguably fair enough in the case of non-scholarly history, but much of academic history of the past generation or two has been marked, I think, by a move away from narrative. And to prove her point in terms of criticism, Byatt cites the puns found in a book by the critic Mary Jacobus; but the passages Byatt quotes seem merely trite, forced attempts to move from one subject to another or meaningless — perhaps anachronistic — attempts to avoid coming to grips with the writers Jacobus is trying to discuss.

In fairness, Byatt’s take on Jacobus is far from unmixed. But then she contrasts Toni Morrison’s Beloved to Melville and Poe, and I’m not sure she does the latter writers justice. Byatt specifically discusses colour symbolism — black and white — in these writers, and I’m not entirely convinced by her summation of their work. The symbolism is too uneasy, too multifarious, to be convincingly described or dismissed in a few sentences. (It probably doesn’t help that I thought Beloved was good, but not great.)

At any rate, Byatt then turns back to her own work, and it’s fascinating observing her discussion of her working procedure. She convincingly describes some of the moments of revelation common to writing — the points when suddenly things come together, and you realise you’ve become aware of something you’ve known all along. The points when something finds its voice, finds its form.

Which then leads into a chapter on storytelling and form, and European traditions with regard to story. Byatt here makes a firm distinction between tales, the romance tradition, and the novel, which is fair enough. But her discussion of storytelling involves, always, either classic stories — The Arabian Nights, The Manuscript Found in Saragossa — or self-consciously literary fiction: Salman Rushdie, Italo Calvino, Angela Carter. I found myself wishing that she’d move beyond this frame of reference to consider the output of Carter’s colleague Michael Moorcock, whose work covers a wide variety of storytelling forms — such as the pulp novel. What I mean is that I found myself wondering why, if Byatt wanted to talk about storytelling, she didn’t turn to the most prolific source of stories in the contemporary world — popular fiction, which, especially in the form of fantasy, is not only close to fairy-tale and myth in its plot structures, but also comes in a range of sophistication. Moorcock alone has written both potboilers and formally ambitious fantasy fiction; why not look at these things?

Byatt makes an interesting point in this chapter that tales have to do with death — or the avoidance of same. The story, she points out, is immortal; it outlives both reader and writer. It’s a good insight, but when Byatt goes on to try to contrast the tale with the literary story she runs into problems, and I think in part it’s because she’s missing a term in her argument; without the popular story, she can’t make things cohere. It’s no help that some her readings here are suspect; she refers to Tolkien, implicitly, as lacking “social density”, which suggests that she has not read The Lord of the Rings very closely at all (or else that she needs a more intuitively obvious phrase than “social density”). Byatt does, at the end of the chapter, bring in Terry Pratchett, and even calls him “one of the great modern storytellers”; one wishes she was able to present something of the context in which he writes, in the way in which she’s able to get across something of the intellectual background common to writers like Calvino and Calasso.

A chapter on “Ice, Snow, Glass” then follows, apparently because the book has reached a point at which an excursion into sheer symbolism is appropriate. Byatt considers this imagery in various writers and works, many of which have haunted her fiction even as the images of ice and glass have. Again, this piece is fascinating as a window onto Byatt’s own writing.

The conclusion, “The Greatest Story Ever Told,” is about The Arabian Nights, and its manifestations in writers like Proust and Rushdie. It’s a brief meditation on storytelling, the endless immortal death-challenging urge. It’s a nice coda, a subversion of the idea of endings; a justification of storytelling and life against destruction and death. It’s the proper way to conclude the book, an ending about endings and stories that do not end. If the book has begun with sophisticated modern and postmodern takes on the novel, it must end here, with pure romance, with tales interlinked with tales — in a structure more complex, told often with language more elaborate, than the literary novels with which this volume began. Byatt has worked her way back to the ocean of story (to borrow a term from another vast collection of narratives), and so we are released, as her critical writing ends, to find our way ourselves back into the fictions which she has just discussed; perhaps with better understanding, perhaps more aware, at any rate made joyful at, the freedom of all fictions.

• Other posts in the ByattBlogging series may be found here.
  

Readings 2K9: Crooked Little Vein

Crooked Little Vein

by Warren Ellis

This is not, in an absolute sense, a good book. The characters are stock and underdeveloped. The plot is episodic. The lead character wraps up his problems with help from minor characters who are introduced out of nowhere, by chance and not by any natural evolution of the plot. That wrapping-up still doesn’t make sense in the context of the plot up to that point (we have to assume that a character consistently depicted as being above the law is going to be taken down by the LAPD). Basically, the structure of the novel is rudimentary, an excuse for a series of sardonic riffs on the theme of the perversity of the modern world.

They’re good riffs, though. Whether that’s enough depends on what you want out of the book. This is essentially an exercise in style, and certainly as style it’s flashy and funny. It’s the kind of short, fast read you can take between longer and heavier novels, and feel refreshed. If that’s what you want, here it is. Hey, I enjoyed it.

The story is simple: a down-at-heels private eye gets hired by the shadow government of the United States to find the secret Constitution, which has the magic power of resetting society’s clock back to the eighteenth century. According to the secret government, the perverts on the internet are getting out of hand, and the reset button must therefore be pushed. The private eye sets off on an odyssey across the United States, and soon meets up with a sexually voracious sidekick who promises to be his guide through modern degeneracy. Not that she really does much guiding; it’s a linear story, through a series of, basically, odd sexual activities and fetishes. The book is short enough that it doesn’t quite get repetitive, but there’s nothing particularly insightful about the presentation of the sex, nothing clever done with the fetishes; they’re just there, a novelistic equivalent of a freak show.

There’s not much of a theme in the book. The main characters quickly decide that the present day, in all its freakishness, is better than the way things were, and decide to double-cross their employers. This would be more convincing if the characters — or the novel — displayed a greater understanding of the way things were, or more thoughtfully contrasted then and now. Come to that, the understanding of the present day seems oddly rudimentary; the conclusion of the book suggests that The Internet Will Save Us All, which comes off as about as facile as it sounds.

All in all, there’s a sense that the book is a cleverly-disguised lecture, or, more precisely, a disguised editorial. It’s entertaining, but light on drama and depth. It’s quick and funny, and if that’s what you want, that’s what you’ll get.

Readings 2K9: April summation

The Friends of the Westmount Library had their biannual book sale on the weekend of April 25th. Here’s what I found there:

Charles N. Brown and Jonathan Strahan, editors — The Locus Awards

Hal Duncan — Vellum

Austin Grossman — Soon I Will Be Invincible

Eric McCormack — First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women

Blake Morrison — The Justification of Johann Gutenberg

Robert Payne — The Fathers of the Western Church

Arthur Quiller-Couch — Selected Short Stories

Diane Setterfield — The Thirteenth Tale

Tom Shippey — J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century

Robert Silverberg — The Gate of Worlds

Milton Singer, editor — Krishna: Myths, Rites, and Attitudes

All of which means that I’ve added more books to the apartment this month than I read. I also bought Crooked Little Vein earlier this month, so I added twelve books in total. I read ten over the course of the month, but only five of those were books I had here rather than taken out from one library or another. So seven books up in total.

And Now For Something Completely Different: Wahoolazuma!

One of the few pleasures of being young in the 1980s was the thrill that came from wandering into a comics shop when the new comics came out. In those pre-internet days, you had no idea what the hell you were going to find. Similarly, if you went to another city and found a comics store you’d never seen before, you had the chance not only to pick up back issues not available in your home town, but also to be exposed to a new selection of titles. This mattered, because in the heady days around the alt-comics explosion of the mid-80s, all kinds of oddities flourished. Most of these books were awful, some were good, one or two were excellent, and many were just plain weird. One thinks of George Alec Effinger’s Neil & Buzz in Time and Space, or Arn Saba’s Neil the Horse — I don’t know how to begin describing these things.

Even the popular books were almost self-consciously odd; I mean, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles? Really? And the more self-consciously artistically ambitious books were also made out of unexpected materials: Cerebus, combining parody of old Marvel Conan comics with the Marx Brothers and Canadian politics; or Love & Rockets, mixing magic realism and women’s wrestling and punk and Archie comics. But the point is, whatever the level of artistic or commercial success, you just had no idea what you’d find on a store’s shelves — you’d see some fifth-generation Elfquest knock-off beside a sensitive and realistic story of a young boy in the Depression wandering the country with a tramp calling himself the King of Spain, or a cheap comics bio of a heavy metal group beside a wise-ass story about Christ returning to earth to fight the world’s only super-hero, the Anti-Christ. I’m not saying the comics field was producing better material then than now, only a wilder mix of things; and, somehow, the fact that it was all contained within a single store — that comics specialty stores were the only place you’d find them, mixed in with Marvel and DC on the one hand and The Comics Journal on the other — gave this disparate collection of stuff a sense of unity, of cohesion.

It’s this latter point, I think, that distinguishes comics-as-they-were from the webcomics field of the moment, which is the closest area I can think of to something like the weirdness of the comics field of the 80s. There are a lot of different webcomics out there, covering a ridiculously wide range of genres; but without the store as a place where these things are all physically gathered together, the feel, to me, is much looser. Then again, it may be only that so far webcomics haven’t yet come up with an Alan Moore or a Love & Rockets; a creator or a work that hits the heights of artistic and formal ambition. At any rate, if such a person or creation exists, I’ve not heard of them yet. One assumes it’s only a matter of time.

But if the current era doesn’t have quite the same creative feel of the years past, it does have this going for it: masses of material, from that time and others, are coming back into print (which was certainly a characteristic of times gone by; classics weren’t easily available. Curiously, although this was obviously a hardship in many ways, in some ways it might actually have been useful — not everything hailed as a classic can survive a close look with older and wiser eyes). So this extended trip down memory lane is all by way of trying to begin talking about Larry Marder’s Tales of the Beanworld, which is now being reprinted by Dark Horse, along with all-new material. 

Very roughly, it’s the story of a society of anthropomorphic beans living in a wonderland-like secondary world — simpler than Alice’s wonderland, the sense of the Beanworld as a place which operates by its own rules of logic and character is still vaguely similar. Much of the story of the comics had to do with various members of the Beanworld — its hero Mister Spook, or its artist Beanish, or its scientist Professor Garbanzo, for example — trying to solve some riddle of the Beanworld’s nature or exploring the world in some new direction. With, always, further riddles appearing once one was solved.

The Beanworld has its own logic, but it also has its own feel. It’s a little like what one thinks of as an underground comic, especially in its early issues; but it’s also gentler, Seussian, and more mythic. The first couple of issues, among the nine collected in the first reprint volume Wahoolazuma! (a cry of joy in the Beanworld), have a satirical tone which is immediately abandoned — for the better, as the book actually gets deeper and more involving without it.

Reading Tales of the Beanworld — now just Beanworld, in its new edition — is like nothing else I know. Not only like no other comics experience, but no other experience overall. It’s gentle, but also ominous, in the way a fairy tale is ominous. It’s vaguely like a computer game, as actions have consequences and the world is built on interlocking riddles; but it’s more organic than that, and the characters are stronger. But then again, those characters are archetypal, as in a folktale. But then on the other hand, the vocabulary and sometimes imagery is more modern than that.

So Beanworld is a mix of a lot of things, and the result is something wholly individual. Something compelling, too; it had been years since I’d read an issue of Beanworld — years since a new issue had been published — but everything came back as I read the collection, in a way that’s unusual with old comics. The thing sticks in the mind.

Some of that may just be due to Marder’s way with craft. Beanworld is in a lot of ways a simple book, literally suitable for readers of any ages, but the comics storytelling is very clever, notably in terms of the Marder plays with page layouts and panel transitions. It’s incredibly clear work, which is impressive given that Marder’s laying out the workings of a world pretty far removed from common experience.

In the end, perhaps the most impressive thing about Beanworld is the sense that it’s managed to find a way to do without conflict as a drive for narrative. It’s vaguely like a really good Hayao Miyazaki film, where the more you learn about what’s happening and why, the more you come to realise that apparent conflicts are simply reflections of a lack of understanding; that, in fact, things are unfolding as they should, and our own slow increase of awareness is itself a part of that unfolding process. At its best, this sort of story is involving, teaching us perhaps something about ourselves that can’t be got at in any other way. Beanworld is in that class of stories; it operates at an almost preconscious level. It bills itself as “A Most Peculiar Comic Book Experience”, and it is that. It’s also a valuable one, and one I’m glad to see back on shelves.

ByattBlogging: A Provisional Conclusion

Any assessment of a living writer’s accomplishment must be at least in part provisional. Still, when dealing with a body of work like A.S. Byatt’s — eight novels, five short-story collections, and one book of paired novellas — it should be possible to make at least a few observations.

Certainly one can spot recurring motifs. Texts, interleaved into a main text; stories-inside-stories. A concern with women’s roles and the place of women in society over the past fifty years (a concern I have perhaps not highlighted enough in these posts).  Zoology, particularly in the later novels but also present in The Game, her second book (and it is interesting that the zoologist Simon Moffit, from that book, is mentioned towards the end of Byatt’s most recent novel as well). Fantasy, or fairy story, either as a form in itself or as a contrast to a realist work which contains the fantasy as a fiction. A concern with story and storytelling; with the nature of reality. A distrust of theory, and of facile attempts to explain the world. Scandinavia and Scandinavians; as characters, typically male, usually helpful or admirable. Quakers and Quakerism. A concern with the life of the spirit, a search for something resembling God, a modernist deity. A concern with character, and the form of the novel. A recurring interest in certain writers, including Proust, Tolkien, Tennyson, Milton, George Elliot, the Brontës. A concern with painting and visual art, especially Matisse, luxe, calme et volupté. The south of France as a place of light and of enlightenment. The university as a haven for the intellect, a model of reason and a vital element in society. Colours: red and white, green and gold, or else blue and white, gold and silver — linking characters and situations. Mythic images, especially females: the Medusa, Venus Anadyomene, Proserpina.

There’s a lot in there, but over the thousands of pages of Byatt’s books they become recognisable touchstones — enough to create a world, enough to populate it, enough to give it an identity without seeming enclosed. For all the list of motifs above, Byatt is still capable of being surprising; every new book seems to bring in some new concern, or else amplify an existing concern in a surprising way. Crucially, she develops her ideas, her themes, her images, in not only innovative but consistently intriguing ways. They’re like gears, in a sense; they interlock, turning as the pages go by to fit together in new configurations. 

This is quite necessary, I think, for Byatt’s is not primarily a narrative art. Her novels in particular are not hesitant about interrupting their narrative drive to give the gist of a character’s speech on a technical issue of biology or philosophy. They earn the title “novel of ideas”, but at the expense of the forward motion of story. This is much less the case with Byatt’s short fiction, which tends to be focussed on the tale and its telling. In a way, her novels are like her short fiction expanded with more character detail and digression — there is more in them, but more does not necessarily happen.

What makes them compelling, even vital, is not the ideas as such, though; it’s their expression. Byatt is attentive to words, their roots and their development. From this interest she has crafted a powerful style. It’s not based on intricate sentence structure; she rarely tries to dazzle the reader with page-long sentences. Instead, she has developed a language based around hard nouns and precise adjectives. Her narrative voice, her vocabulary, had a clarity to it that compels the reader’s attention. For me, an unfortunate side-effect is that she has not yet found a voice in the first-person (unless one counts the apparently-autobiographical short story “Sugar”) which reads as strongly as her third-person fiction.

Her character-work generally is above reproach. That she thinks about her characters in depth, and their relation to the world around them, is obvious. It’s something that’s been a constant since Shadow of the Sun, her first book. In that book, the story seemed to move fitfully between pages-long character analyses; since then, Byatt has become much better at working her character description into the unfolding tapestries of her stories. At the same time, her characters seem more prone to come alive, to do things that surprise themselves and the reader, and perhaps even the author. Most important, Byatt’s routinely capable of creating interesting, lively personalities who can carry a novel, or indeed several novels.

I’ve read that Byatt doesn’t like her four-book series — The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life, Babel Tower, and A Whistling Woman — to be described as the Frederica Potter quartet. But it is Frederica who is the most vivid character in these books, the most alive and the most constant. She is what most clearly defines them for the reader; intelligent, strong-willed, highly sexual, unafraid, working through a society not always congenial to a woman who is any of these things much less all of them. In any event, these books stand out the most in Byatt’s bibliography to date; obviously her longest work when viewed as a unit, they also contain some of her best writing, and some of her most experimental. The last of them, at this moment, is her last major long work. They are, all in all, a good display of her characteristics; they are what she is, as a writer. With the quartet now finished, it will be fascinating to see where she goes from here; how will she change?

Paradoxically, despite a notable lack of jokes or obvious humour in her books, I think it’s possible to view Byatt as a comic novelist. There is a warmth to her writing, for all its ruthless clarity. There is bemusement and invention. There is a constancy of tone, in other words, which is engaging and generous. There’s an optimism about the human condition, married with a real concern about the effect of humans on the planet around them. Byatt is a writer with real concerns, then; but, primarily, she is an artist with a passion for language. It is this which makes her worth reading. Worth thinking about and writing about. She is a writer from whom it is capable to learn much, about language and imagery and structure; she is also a writer who it is interesting to follow across the course of her career. I don’t see any reason to expect that to change in the future.

• Other posts in the ByattBlogging series may be found here.
  

ByattBlogging 14: The Little Black Book of Stories

Byatt’s most recent collection of short fiction covers a wide range in its five tales. Not all of them are explicit fantasies, but all of them play with genre and with what is beyond the real. There’s also an element of darkness to them; hence, perhaps, the blackness of the book. 

“The Thing in the Forest” is the story of two girls, evacuated during the Second World War to a house in the country, from which they will be sent on to foster homes; so it begins like The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. The girls go exploring, and see a hideous monster in the forest. Life goes on. The girls join their foster families, get sent back to their homes, their fathers die and decades later their mothers follow. By this time one of the girls, Penny, has gone on to university and become a psychologist who works with autistic kids; the other, Primrose, has become a nanny to the kids in her community, a caregiver and tale-teller. The two women meet each other back in the country, back in the house to which they were evacuated (where they see a book identifying the monster they saw as a folkloric local dragon); later, first Primrose and then Penny investigate the forest for some sign that can explain the experience of their youth.

The key to this story seems to be the different paths the two women take in life, and then their different reactions to the woods. The point is to compare and contrast; Primrose is inspired as a writer, learning about languages and finding names, while Penny goes further, challenging the boundary of what is the real world and what belongs to the sphere of dreams. But it is Primrose who gets the last word, turning their experience into art, making dreams into language.

“Body Art” is superficially more realistic. A doctor, Becket, at a hospital, St. Pantaleone’s, meets a young art student at Christmas; she’s helping to decorate the wards. The story follows his interactions with her, and with Martha Sharpin, an art historian involved in the administration of the hospital on behalf of one of the institutions which fund it; the hospital has the materials of an artistic and anatomical collection in its basement. So this is another of Byatt’s stories which focus on visual art.

It also, as in her story “Christ in the House of Martha and Mary”, embroils art with the contrast between the active and contemplative life. Martha, unsurprisingly, is Martha; the student, Daisy, is the unexpected Mary — a botched abortion having left her supposedly unable to bear children, it is described as a “miracle” when she conceives Becket’s child (Becket, incidentally, is a lapsed Catholic, who at one point sees his ex-wife on television playing in — what else? — a Beckett play. It may be significant that he works at a place named for a Commedia character, two different kinds of absurdity; more likely, it’s a symptom of a clash between a godless cosmos and one with some sort of meaning to it). The title of the story nods to the use of art; art and body are united in a number of ways, from the hospital’s collection, to Daisy’s work, to Daisy’s body piercings, to a suggestion by another artist to make art from blown-up x-rays. The ending is surprisingly inconclusive, except in that Martha takes charge; she will be a part of the lives of Daisy and Beckett as they go forward. 

“Stone Woman” is remarkably straightforward; after the death of her mother and an unspecified abdominal surgery, a woman, Ines, slowly metamorphoses into stone. She meets an Icelandic sculptor, who takes her back to his home; the story, it turns out, has been about her finding the strength to go off with the trolls who haunt Iceland — to abandon all that she formerly knew, all that she had been. In some ways, it’s reminiscent of “The Next Room” in Sugar and Other Stories; a mother’s death frees an elderly woman to find her true path. But here she’s not alone; here it’s clear that she’s becoming something new, something grand, something monumental. This is a beautifully-written fantasy, with the inevitability and grandeur of continental drift.

In some ways, “Raw Material” is the most intriguing of these stories: a failing novelist, Jack Smollett, is teaching a Creative Writing class to adults at an arts centre, when he is impressed by — creatively revitalised by — the work of one of his students, a very elderly women who writes detailed, introspective recollections of the domestic chores of decades past. His other students aren’t as impressed, and criticise her harshly; he sends her work off to a contest, which it wins (ironic, as Jack imagines himself being in some way judged by her), but before he can tell her this he finds that she has become the victim of violence, deriving from some unknown past wrong. The other students are secretly happy; they have written stories about murder and violence, and are happy to see that their world has caught up to the writer of elegant slice-of-life recollections.

What’s interesting here is Byatt’s use of a strong prose style as a symbol of both physical and mental cleanliness. Smollett thinks to himself of clichés as a stain, contrasting with the theme of cleanliness in his student writer, Cicely Fox. In the end, her concern with cleanliness may be a function of repressed guilt — there seems to be some connection between her and the woman who ends her life — but it remains as an ideal; and ideal style, in contrast to the trite horrors and slack adjective-filled style of the other students.

If “Raw Material” is the most fascinating of these tales from the point of view of Byatt’s perspectives on prose and style, “The Pink Ribbon” is perhaps the most emotionally immediate. An elderly man is caring for his wife, who lost her mind long ago; he meets a younger woman, who turns out to be his wife’s ghost, or fetch. She instructs him on what he must do. It’s the only story I can think of that balances references to The Aeneid with references to the Teletubbies.

For all the strong emotional material in these stories, Byatt resolutely avoids wringing extra tension out of them. Her style is spare, in a sense pure. She also avoids many of her usual tropes; some appear — a reserved Scandinavian male here, the intense description of a piece of artwork there — but on the whole this collection is filled with new images, new symbols. It’s a strong book, and very promising for Byatt’s future writing as she moves on from the conclusion of her Potter quartet.

• Other posts in the ByattBlogging series may be found here.
  

ByattBlogging Bonus: Potter vs. Potter

Well, not really. More like ‘Potter-maker versus Potter-maker’. In 2003, A.S. Byatt, creator of Frederica Potter (and family) wrote an article criticising the Harry Potter series of books, at that time five books in. I though it’d be worth looking at here, insofar as the piece got Byatt a certain amount of notoriety. Some commentators were eager to make her out to be a snobbish member of the literary élite, decrying popular fiction just because it was popular. This, of course, was a profoundly idiotic reaction. 

To begin with, in the same article in which she criticises J.K. Rowling, Byatt praises Terry Pratchett, not exactly the act of a dyed-in-the-wool snob. More crucially, the snob argument is an ad hominem attack, which is usually made by somebody losing a debate. Whether Byatt is a snob or not, it shouldn’t invalidate the critical points she makes either way. If you believe in the distinction between good writing and bad, then the article should stand or fall on the strength of the argument it presents. If you don’t believe in that distinction, then you have several thousand years worth of human aesthetic reaction to language to explain away; you’re also in fundamental opposition, I think, to several major elements of Byatt’s philosophy.

So what exactly did Byatt say in her Potter article? This, I think, is where the article becomes interesting. It’s uncharacteristically slipshod in its construction, and in its thought.

Byatt begins by asking why children like the Potter books so much, and then why adults like them. Her argument to the first question: “they are written from inside a child’s-eye view, with a sure instinct for childish psychology.” As will soon become all too clear, I don’t agree with this statement. But never mind that; Byatt believes that this answer precludes, for some reason, adult appreciation of the books — she doesn’t explain why — and that there must be another reason why adults read Rowling.

(I might as well note here that I can enjoy the Potter books, though I wouldn’t say that they’re particularly good except in certain specific limited ways. I think the plot mechanisms and riddles are ingenious and clever. I think the prose is weirdly readable in a way I can’t explain — it’s literally more difficult to lift one’s eyes from the page than to slide them sideways over the text. And I think that the structure of most of the books, following the school year through, is attractive; the seasons and holidays give Rowling a basic skeleton to follow for each book. For me, the last book, in which she abandoned the school and the school-year structure, was far and away the worst of the seven. If I had to say why I think kids enjoy the books so much, I’d say it’s probably a mixture of the easiness of the texts, the outsized characters — not unlike Silver Age Marvel Comics — and the way the common childhood experience of going to school becomes the whole basis for a fantasy and a magic world.)

Byatt tries to justify her statement about child psychology by the use of Freud, a difficult trick these days. Byatt complains that while the earlier books present a preadolescent “latency-period” fantasy, Order of the Phoenix fails to translate that fantasy into a convincing portrait of adolescence. Which is true enough, but is surely a problem in the earlier books as well; by fifteen, as Harry and his friends are in the fifth book of the series, most kids are well into adolescence.

Let me skip back a bit. Byatt argues that the Dursleys, Harry’s adoptive family, represent, in a Freduian decoding of the stories, Harry’s real family — the world of reality, as distinct from the fantasy-world of Hogwarts. “The Dursleys are his true enemy,” Byatt says. “When he arrives at wizarding school, he moves into a world where everyone, good and evil, recognizes his importance, and tries either to protect or destroy him.” 

It’s sadly ironic that Byatt, who mocked the metaphors of Freudian thought in her novels, sees no difficulty in applying its comfortable theories to another text. Probably more importantly, one is also uncomfortably aware that she’s misreading the text at issue in at least two crucial ways. One, the Dursleys have at least some clue as to Harry’s importance; they fear and hate him, for all that he’s effectively sworn to protect them — Marvel Comics, once again — and those emotions are explicitly tied into their actions and dialogue in the framing sequences of the books. Two, the Dursleys are as much a fantasy as Hogwarts; they’re caricatures. To treat them as in any way “real”, much less a “real” fantasy, is about as difficult as treating, well, Hogwarts as a real educational system. The idea of reality is embodied by one about as much as another.

Byatt goes on to say that “Ms. Rowling’s world is a secondary secondary world, made up of intelligently patchworked derivative motifs from all sorts of children’s literature — from the jolly hockey-sticks school story to Roald Dahl, from “Star Wars” to Diana Wynne Jones and Susan Cooper.” This is true, but so what? Every secondary world, including Tolkien’s, derives from pre-existing sources. Byatt seems to be trying to say that the patchwork in this case is unconvincing, or perhaps that it does not rise above its sources. It’s a viable point, but it needs to be supported. 

The closest she comes to this that I can see is to say that “Derivative narrative clichés work with children because they are comfortingly recognizable and immediately available to the child’s own power of fantasizing.” I can’t see why this statement would apply to children any more or less than it would to adults. In either case, it seems to me an issue of temperament — not everyone has the same “power of fantasizing”. “Derivative narrative clichés” (which sounds redundant) work with children because they don’t have the same experience with cliché that adults do; they encounter them for the first time.

“The important thing,” Byatt tells us, “about this particular secondary world is that it is symbiotic with the real modern world. Magic, in myth and fairy tales, is about contacts with the inhuman — trees and creatures, unseen forces. Most fairy story writers hate and fear machines.” To me, this is where the article really falls down; the statement is not only untrue, it’s a howler. Or, put another way, it’s only true if you’re very selective about who you call a “fairy story writer”. If you’re prepared to eliminate many modern fantasy writers — Michael Moorcock, say, or China Miéville — then maybe you can make the statement work. Though I frankly have no idea how you get around Frank Baum. 

Byatt goes on to say that “Ms. Rowling’s magic world has no place for the numinous. It is written for people whose imaginative lives are confined to TV cartoons, and the exaggerated (more exciting, not threatening) mirror-worlds of soaps, reality TV and celebrity gossip.” This is a hell of a statement to make, but set it aside for a moment. “Nobody is trying to save or destroy anything beyond Harry Potter and his friends and family,” Byatt continues, again displaying a breathtaking ability to ignore the text she’s supposed to be analysing — by Order of the Phoenix it’s very clear that the whole magical society’s in danger — and then goes on to say “So, yes, the attraction for children can be explained by the powerful working of the fantasy of escape and empowerment, combined with the fact that the stories are comfortable, funny, just frightening enough.” If this is so, the question still remains as to why Rowling happened to hit that combination just right when no other author in recent decades has managed the trick. What is it that makes the Harry Potter books so different?

Not only do I think this is a poor analysis of Harry Potter’s appeal, but it also seems to me logically confused; Byatt seems to be arguing that children who like Potter follow “soaps, reality TV and celebrity gossip”. Which seems unlikely. That’s without even getting into the question of what she means by “TV cartoons” — I can easily think of a number of Japanese cartoons, and even some American cartoons, which seem to me to be more valuable and imaginative than the Harry Potter books; whereas Byatt’s implication seems to be that the Potter books work because they’re more imaginative than the cartoons. (I would agree that there’s a lack of the numinous in the Potter books, but I think that’s a function of the limitation of Rowling’s writing talent, not necessarily of the nature of the story.) 

Weirdly, Byatt claims that “These are good books of their kind.” Her problem is a suspicion that people derive from them mainly comfort, with none of the “compensating seriousness” of writers like Susan Cooper, Alan Garner, or Ursula K. Le Guin. This seems to me to be an odd way to read books, and not much to do with what Byatt then goes on to find in these writers: “a real sense of mystery, powerful forces ... we feel we are being put back in touch with earlier parts of our culture, when supernatural and inhuman creatures — from whom we thought we learned our sense of good and evil — inhabited a world we did not feel we controlled.” This is I think a good sentence, and a good assessment of the experience of reading Cooper, Garner, and Le Guin. What she’s talking about is, basically, numinousness again. 

I’d agree that there isn’t much of this in the Harry Potter books, but, again, I think that’s a function of Rowling’s lack of talent, not of something inherent in the structure of the story or in the nature of Rowling’s invention. “Ms. Rowling’s magic wood has nothing in common with these lost worlds,” argues Byatt. “It is small, and on the school grounds, and dangerous only because she says it is.” But had Rowling more of a knack for atmosphere, that patch of forest would have the danger, the resonance, Byatt is missing; I think that’s what Rowling was trying for in her depiction of the forest. Put bluntly, I think Byatt is talking here about something caused by a lack of skill, and ascribing it to a defect of invention.

(Before I continue, I also have to express my disagreement with Byatt’s opinions about “regression”. She observes that “In a recent BBC survey of the top 100 ‘best reads,’ more than a quarter were children’s books,” and concludes from this that “We like to regress. I know that part of the reason I read Tolkien when I’m ill is that there is an almost total absence of sexuality in his world, which is restful.” Restful for some, perhaps; for others, it’s perhaps not particularly noticeable. The idea of returning to a preadolescent state as “regression” seems problematic; who’s to say that it’s not actually a healthy step up? In up and down worlds, up and down are equivocal; one person’s regression is another’s growth. Byatt seems to recognise this herself: “If we regress, we regress to a lost sense of significance we mourn for.” But then, part of my dissatisfaction with the article is this sort of equivocation. For example, the BBC survey she cites seems to me to be undermined later in the article when she observes that “A surprising number of people — including many students of literature — will tell you they haven’t really lived in a book since they were children.” There’s no need to go on about “comfort” when this characterises common reading experience. If people haven’t lived in a book as adults, of course they’ll pick their childhood favourite as their best read.)

Parallelling her comments on reality shows and the like, Byatt goes on to say that Rowling “speaks to an adult generation that hasn’t known, and doesn’t care about, mystery. They are inhabitants of urban jungles, not of the real wild. They don’t have the skills to tell ersatz magic from the real thing, for as children they daily invested the ersatz with what imagination they had.” I don’t agree with these statements. It seems to me to be fatuous to suggest that a basic human experience is not present in the current generation of adults. It seems even more fatuous to suggest that “inhabitants of urban jungles” are in some way emotionally stunted because they live in cities instead of ... well, what? Deep wilderness? Farmland? The “real wild” has been dwindling in Britain for centuries; I don’t know how much of what a Canadian would think of as wilderness was present in that island even a hundred years ago. Finally, the statement about the ersatz seems logically unfounded to me — if your imagination only has the ersatz to work with, won’t that strengthen the imagination? More crucially, the kind of sense Byatt’s talking about here — of numinousness, of mystery, of magic — seems to me not to be dependent on external training, but on inborn nature; this, though, is a position that seems to me incapable of proof or disproof.

Byatt’s next-to-last paragraph seems to me to simply be incoherent. Adults reading Rowling revert to a childlike state in so doing, she tells us, then switches topics to note that many people haven’t “lived in a book” since they were children, a sad side-effect of English classes. If adults are able to live in books, one might reasonably ask, doesn’t that say something in favour of the books that do draw them in? Rather than answer this question, Byatt says: “But in the days before dumbing down and cultural studies no one reviewed Enid Blyton or Georgette Heyer — as they do not now review the great Terry Pratchett, whose wit is metaphysical, who creates an energetic and lively secondary world, who has a multifarious genius for strong parody as opposed to derivative manipulation of past motifs, who deals with death with startling originality. Who writes amazing sentences.” I will say that Byatt mentioned Blyton and Heyer previously in the article. Beyond that, I cannot see how these statements logically follow any point Byatt’s made. I’m not sure they even follow each other — she seems to be saying ‘once, nobody reviewed Blyton or Heyer, who are bad writers, just as now they don’t review Terry Pratchett, who’s a good writer.’

Byatt begins her next, final, paragraph by saying “It is the substitution of celebrity for heroism that has fed this phenomenon.” I presume she doesn’t mean Pratchett writing amazing sentences. It seems that she doesn’t mean the lack of reviews for him either. It’s hard to see what she does mean; the paragraph is simply an attack on relativistic cultural studies, except that it’s not. Cultural studies are said to have a “leveling effect”, and to be “as interested in hype and popularity as they are in literary merit, which they don’t really believe exists.” But then: “There is nothing wrong with this,” she says. But then again: “it has little to do with the shiver of awe we feel looking through Keats's “magic casements, opening on the foam/Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.”” 

It’s as if the incoherence and equivocation that’s been at work all through the article bubbles to the surface here, and the conclusion of the essay is lost in a swamp of dithering. It’s a pity. Had the article been as denunciatory as Byatt’s critics suggested, it could have been genuinely interesting on a critical level. Had it been more interested in what the Harry Potter books really were, and how fantasy really worked, it might have been a useful examination of fantasy fiction. As it is, it seems only confused, unsure how to really grapple with its subject, slipping away whenever it gets close to a definitive statement.

• Other posts in the ByattBlogging series may be found here.