The Naked Lunch

 

William S. Burroughs The Naked Lunch (1959)
This was probably the third or fourth Burroughs I read, back in the first flourish of youth when I was reading everything I could find by the man. I therefore suspect I may not have read it since the early eighties, which would at least explain the deficit between what I've read just now and what I vaguely remember.

I'm sure you all know what Naked Lunch does and I don't see much point going over it yet again; but for what it may be worth, it's essentially a written equivalent to one of those Heironymous Bosch paintings commenting on the questionable state of his society by showing a thousand tiny figures with foreign objects projecting painfully from their bumholes. I'd somehow forgotten that it slightly predates Burroughs' use of cut-ups, so although we have random narrative swerves and streams of consciousness implied by Céline's three little dots, it's muted compared to the impersonal onslaught of undifferentiated meaning we find in subsequent books. Mostly we have routines and dialogue, essentially similar to what we read in Junky and Queer but without the linearity.

Much to my surprise, and regardless of whatever I thought first time round, Naked Lunch is a transitional novel wherein the author is still very much finding his feet; and it feels as though those feet were mostly trudging. Of course, it throws up plenty of interesting ideas, but nothing which wasn't better expressed to greater dramatic effect in the novels which followed, most of which additionally benefit from a greater variety of narrative techniques. While Naked Lunch is arguably important, its reputation refers mostly to it having been unlike anything published at the time. This particular edition commemorates this by reproducing three or four months worth of sniffy editorials and related correspondence from the Times Literary Supplement on the subject of how Naked Lunch was either disgraceful or the bestest best thing ever. Both Michael Moorcock and Anthony Burgess chip in for the defense but no conclusion is reached, and the strangest realisation is how closely this lengthy exchange - beginning in November, 1963 - resembles the incoherent slanging matches seen on Twitter whenever someone points out that women don't usually have cocks. The language may be elevated and the sentences constructed as though by Renaissance architects according to the golden section, but the arguments still amount to burrows is shit LOL #cantfuckinwrite followed by a string of those horrible crying with laughter emoticons, which I feel sort of proves Billy's point about one or two things.

Analog September 2008

Stanley Schmidt (editor) Analog September 2008 (2008)
This was the first issue of Analog I ever bought, and it probably wasn't a great place to start. I've long held The Last Temptation of Katerina Savitskaya by Henry G. Stratmann to be the worst short story I've ever read. Coming back to it fifteen years later, I realise it's not quite so painfully didactic as I recall, and online research reveals the author to be an almost certainly above average decent guy whom I find difficult to square with this particular example of his writing. Last Temptation reads like fundamentalist Christian science-fiction written by someone who prefers movies to books and who might be more at home churning out romance novels. The story is that mysterious and powerful aliens have moved Mars into a lower orbit around the sun, somehow rendering it habitable, but only two people are allowed to visit - a man and a woman, and maybe you can see where this is heading. She's deeply religious. He comes from a more scientific background and is portrayed as cynical - although it seems he's simply a realist to me. The two of them discover a giant pyramid within which they are subjected to a number of spiritual and moral trials seemingly to determine whether or not humanity will be allowed to colonise. On this, my second reading, the story isn't quite so simplistic as I've made it sound, but as with much fiction driven by religious ideology, it feels as though we're playing with a stacked deck, are perhaps even subject to a certain level of condescension, and the symbolism seems at least as heavy-handed as painfully allegorical episodes of sixties Star Trek - although I sort of enjoyed Stratmann replacing the apple in the Garden of Eden with a radish, for what it may be worth.

That being said, it's better than I remember and, I would guess, is more likely a philosophical tale which suffers from the necessary fine balance having eluded its author, rather than the Bible-thumping sermon for which I took it in 2008. It doesn't help that a couple of deferential references to romantic fiction do nothing to prevent it reading like the same, or the number of times Stratmann invokes a specific TV show or movie.

He looked up at the towering structure and growled, 'A pyramid on Mars. With our luck, we'll find Sutekh waiting for us inside.'

'Who?'

Martin smiled mischievously. 'That's right.'

I'm sure that works for most of those who would get the reference, and who would then go on to declare the author a genius in the tradition of literary giants such as Terrance Dicks, but it didn't do a lot for me. I still find The Last Temptation of Katerina Savitskaya vaguely annoying, but after this second reading I've warmed to the idea that Stratmann has probably written better.

Elsewhere in the magazine we find an article about nanotechnology which I didn't really understand and three further short stories which, if not terrible, mostly had me hoping the next one would be better, which it wasn't. We close with one of those review columns which simply relates a detailed plot outline of each title under discussion, then part two of the presumably novel length Tracking by David R. Palmer. Tracking is written in an experimental first person narrative shorthand which tends to eschew pronouns and articles so as to presumably mimic the sensation of experience, so it reads like Chris Claremont's thought bubbles from eighties issues of X-Men. It sort of works once you're used to it, but forty pages seems like a lot and I gave up after about twenty.

The best thing about this were Stanley Schmidt's editorial and his memorial to Arthur C. Clarke. In fact, even his response to some letters page dingus accusing him of expressing eugenicist sympathies in a previous issue is more interesting than the rest of it. I guess this explains why I never became a regular reader.

The Cursed Earth

Pat Mills, John Wagner, Mick McMahon etc. The Cursed Earth (1978)
Being twelve or thirteen at the time, it didn't really occur to me that there might be a problem in Judge Dredd waging war on either Ronald McDonald or the Jolly Green Giant. All my progs went to the local comic shop for something pitiful like a tenner back in the early nineties, and by the time I came to consider revisiting Dredd's trip across the Cursed Earth, the thing had been reprinted following the relaxation of some copyright law or other, so here I am. I have good memories of the Cursed Earth, Dredd's first true saga given that the robot revolution can't have been more than ten issues; and happily it still rocks, so this hasn't been anything like revisiting a once beloved Rupert annual, as sometimes turns out to be the case. Being Dredd, and being aimed at young lads of the age at which I found myself in 1978, there's a lot of narrative shorthand, an explosion on nearly every page, and an astonishing degree of violence, but it works and additionally stands the test of time because McMahon's war torn art is gorgeous, and neither Mills nor Wagner assumed their readership to be fucking idiots. There's not much breathing space as Dredd and Spikes rampage across their post-nuclear wasteland, but just enough to allow for a degree of pathos, even in these primary colours, and to the point that I almost couldn't read the fourth page of Tweak's Story.

I never found Dredd that interesting a character, but this was where the strip really took off for me in revealing a little more of the terrible reality he inhabited. This was the golden age, with Joe as more or less an agent of karma in a brutal but realist world rather than the monotone vessel of fascist slapstick he seems to have become. It always struck me as odd that 2000AD, an English weekly, should run a strip set in a future America in keeping with the prevalent obsession with the romance of the formerly wild west; but with hindsight I see that Judge Dredd offered commentary on America and its seeping cultural infection, complete with jokes, and with a wit that would have been mostly beyond mainstream America itself, this being a far more pragmatic take on truth, justice, and the rest than you would have had from Clark or Bruce back in '78; and it beat Michael Crichton to the genetically engineered dinosaur thing, should anyone be interested, and probably did it better. It really is a masterpiece.

Spook Country

William Gibson Spook Country (2007)
I burned out on Gibson a while back when ploughing through all of those cyberpunk novels and noticing how they're all the same book, give or take some small change. This observation isn't intended to be quite so dismissive as it will seem, but for all the man's astonishing prose, he seems to have wrung a lot of mileage out of punky types hunting down some crucial piece of either technology or information in a dystopian setting spattered with brand names. On a bad day, it reads as though he's just getting off on describing designer labels and gadgets, which is a shame because although it could be argued that his narratives tend to be all surface, it isn't like he doesn't have anything to say - and usually something which is best expressed through his seemingly obsessive attention to superficial detail.

Conversely, when he gets the balance right, the books are amazing even with those punky types hunting down some crucial piece of either technology or information in a dystopian setting spattered with brand names. Idoru was pretty great, and Pattern Recognition probably qualifies as a masterpiece. Spook Country has been praised to the hilt. It's not quite Pattern Recognition, from which it follows on in a loose sense, but it gets there in the end.

As usual, the narrative is slightly bewildering, requiring that the reader keep track of a wide range of characters driven by ambiguous motives; but the point emerges like a signal from the proverbial noise, meaning it may not actually have mattered whether you can still remember who was who by the end because the message is fairly clear, despite pertaining to the absence of clarity from the world it describes - which is more or less our world, by the way. Spook Country is about a world which has ceased to make sense in conventional terms, somewhat foreshadowing the rise of the game show host as president and the mess we find ourselves in. It answers the question of how to do satire when that which is satirised is more ridiculous than any fictionalised version could ordinarily manage to be. Spook Country seems to promise the usual narrative of the last minute save as everyone meets up in the town square, the nuclear spectacle averted, the dark forces defeated but - as it is in our world - we don't get that, nor anything which really makes sense.

'I've just seen someone, some people,' she told him, 'tonight, do the single strangest thing I imagine I'll ever see.'

'Really?' He was suddenly grave. 'I envy you.'

'I thought it was going to be terrorism, or crime in some more traditional sense, but it wasn't. I think that it was actually…'

'What?'

'A prank. A prank you'd have to be crazy to be able to afford.'

I have no idea whether Gibson refers to anything which actually happened when referencing funding for the rebuilding of Iraq after the deposition of Saddam Hussein, but given what he describes in this novel, I'm not sure this even counts as fiction.

Mosquito Blood Diaries

I wasnae gunna share this one, but fuck it...

Adam Gill Mosquito Blood Diaries (2011)
Well, it isn't the worst book I've ever read but is probably somewhere in the top two; although to be fair, as with Randy Henderson's Bigfootloose and Finn Fancy Free, I'm basing this assessment on the first fifty pages. I couldn't manage any more than that.

It was one of those out of the blue things, turning up in the mail without warning or explanation. Then a week later I heard from Peter Jones, with whom I briefly shared a house back in 1985, who said it had been written by his class mate at Dundee - presumably from some video post-production course or something of the kind. It was a nice gesture, possibly undertaken because I'd written a book which was likewise set in Mexico; but I have to say, the thing didn't exactly fill me with enthusiasm.

The back cover promises something about the end of the world as predicted by the Mayan calendar for 2012, which is unfortunate because everything written about the end of the world as predicted by the Mayan calendar for 2012 has been complete bollocks*. Similarly depressing is that I find I have a signed copy, and that it has been embellished thus:

 

Aside from my experiencing a possibly irrational and classist disgust at the thought of anyone being named Jonty, this cheery message somewhat suggests the author would have preferred to have made a movie, and that's coincidentally what the fucker reads like - or at least the first fifty pages do - begging the question, if you didn't want to write a book, why do I have to read it?

Never mind.

Anyway, I tried. It didn't seem too horrible at first, although it felt a little as though boxes were being ticked as part of something learned during a writing class - here's the character, here's what they look like, where they are, followed by some routinely sardonic observation just so we know we're not reading Enid Blyton. After a little while I noticed how each female character is introduced in terms of how cute she is, but she's also fiesty so it's not sexist; and we meet Herbert Tidy, one of the main protagonists.

So, let's see. His Christian name is Herbert and his surname is Tidy, which seems ingeniously Dickensian, wouldn't you say? What sort of person might that be, do you think?

But generally such charitable thoughts occupied only a fraction of his consciousness, the rest of his introspective ponderings were taken up entirely by work and his growing collection of graphic novels, not comics mind you, graphic novels. They were perhaps the only thing that he was passionate about and organising and reorganising them took up most of his spare time.

Nerds! Ha ha!

Later we learn that Herbert has been spending most of his time cataloguing and cross referencing the characters in his graphic novels, which no-one in human history has ever done, no matter how sad, possibly excepting characters from the Big Bang Theory which is - as is hopefully fucking obvious - the sports meathead's idea of what people who read comics are like. Many years ago I tried to read a Ben Elton novel, and this thing reminds me why I failed.

Amazingly, it doesn't get better. I didn't make it so far as the chapters which I presume wheel out various Mayan supernaturals as yet another pantheon of blood hungry monsters jumping up and down whilst chanting oogah-boogah, and this was because the writing began to get in the way. More and more I felt as though I might be watching some wearyingly edgy BBC thriller with a fast car every five minutes and no question denied its due sardonic response, one eyebrow raised so we can see that gosh she really is a fiesty filly!

Naturally Gill succumbs to that thing they all do with the clipped inactive sentences impersonating a brooding voice-over, which people who can't write tend to do in hope of building so powerful a mood as to distract from their being otherwise unable to string a sentence together. Full-stops everywhere. Willy nilly. Like this. You're not. Fooling anybody. Sunshine.

Finally we come to this, whatever the fuck it's supposed to be.

'But that was beyond butchery. That was sacrificial slaughter.' Exclaimed the scientist.

Exclaimed the scientist, doesn't work as a sentence by itself, and yet there it is; and speech is attributed by this same peculiar grammatical tic throughout the book, hence a shitload of sentences beginning with a capitalised Said. Whilst I dispute that there's such a thing as a definitively correct way to write English, it helps to understand at least some of the rules before you start flushing them down the crapper; and persons such as myself who read more than three books a fucking year can nevertheless tell when you don't know what the hell you're doing, no matter. Where you put the fucking. Full-stop.

I looked at the guy's facebook page and felt sorry for him because he's almost certainly a lovely guy. I assume this was his only novel, presumably composed in the belief that writing a novel is simply a matter of method - just like constructing a cabinet - so anyone can do it. It gives me no pleasure to describe Mosquito Blood Diaries as garbage, just as it gave me no pleasure to struggle though the first fifty pages; but garbage is indeed what it would appear to be.

*: Even assuming the Maya indicated the termination of their calendar to be anything apocalyptic - which they didn't so far as I'm aware - the correlation of the big day with the Gregorian 21st of December, 2012 seems to depend upon which elements of the Mayan calendar one takes into account, particularly those details which allowed said calendar to compensate for its falling slightly short of the true solar year. Clearly the Maya employed a system equivalent to that of our own leap year, one which was not formally acknowledged as part of their calendar, yet which must have existed because otherwise their calendar would not have been so accurate as has demonstrably been the case. What this system could have been remains open to debate, and four different Gregorian dates can be seen to correspond with the termination point of the Mayan calendar depending upon what assumptions are made about this mysterious mechanism.

Mussolini: His Part in My Downfall

Spike Milligan Mussolini: His Part in My Downfall (1978)
The fourth of Spike's war journals opens with a slightly testy rebuttal to Clive James having described a previous volume as an unreliable history of the war. Whilst I'm sure it's true that, as Spike claims, he spent a lot of time getting his dates and facts right, Monty was erratic even by Spike's standards with those doubtless correct dates and facts speckled by jokes, comic asides, and absurdist sketches to the point of giving the impression of it having been edited by shoving everything loose into a carrier bag. Mussolini accordingly feels a bit more substantial, striking a fine balance between what happened and how stupid it seemed at the time.

Having read this one before, I recalled it as a harrowing volume concluding with a shell-shocked Spike gibbering away to himself in a secure facility; but my memory is off-kilter here. It's mostly light, or as light as one might reasonably expect under the circumstances, with shell-shock bleaching only the last twenty or so pages of humour.

As is probably obvious from the title, this volume records Spike's posting to Italy in 1943, and the eschewing of comic illustrations in favour of a higher, more thorough word count does well to capture the grinding misery and mundanity of warfare - in this instance, mostly waiting around in the pissing rain, terrible food, not enough sleep, and not much idea what the bigger picture looks like - contrasting wonderfully with the sublime experience of a few days leave in Amalfi, for one example.

Spike gives good account of how it looked from ground level, even expressing genuine sympathy for the occasional deceased German. As with anyone who ever had to get their hands dirty, he doesn't have much time for the bullshit of those higher up; and to hilarious effect when reporting a fire in the officers' mess, with the hated and officious Major Jenkins scrabbling to rescue his possessions from the conflagration, oblivious to a resentful Gunner throwing it all back on again.

There are a few later volumes of these war memoirs that I've never read, but this one seems to have been the best of those published at the time, reading as a proper autobiography beyond it being the work of someone more at home penning radio plays about hurlers of batter pudding. There was always a certain pathos to Spike's humour, even if it wasn't always obvious, and Mussolini is a powerful account in that respect.

The Eyes of the Overworld

Jack Vance The Eyes of the Overworld (1966)
Excepting Moorcock on the grounds of him being pretty much his own genre, Jack Vance is the first author of unambiguous fantasy to whom I've truly warmed, and by unambiguous fantasy I mean sagas of wizards in pointy hats inspiring quests across hill and dale, and so on and so forth. Actually, he's the second come to think of it, the first being Matthew Hughes whose tales of Raffalon are set against the backdrop of Jack Vance's Dying Earth, and this is one of Vance's Dying Earth novels - so I'm sure the sense of whatever I was trying to say can be found somewhere in that lot.

The Dying Earth is host to a post-technological society vaguely resembling our Renaissance but with magic, all occurring in the improbably distant future, at which point the sun routinely blinks out like aging strip lighting, hence the name. It was a significant influence on Moorcock's Dancers at the End of Time. I could probably leave the review there, but I won't.

Cugel the Clever is discovered attempting to steal certain valuable mystic items from Iucounu the Laughing Magician. Iucounu wraps an extraterrestrial squid around the thief's liver and obliges him to travel to the far north to procure the eyes of the overworld. The eyes of the overworld allow one to see the higher reality, transforming conventional perception of our world of rancid paupers screwing and pooing in stinking hovels into a reality of Disney princesses daintily wafting from one sparkling palace to another. The novel is a quest with a spell or enchantment resolving pretty much every scrape and episodic dilemma strung along its familiar path - and with no greater sense of consequence than in any other magically driven narrative - and yet Vance proves that it really is all in the telling. His fiction is heavily stylised, erudite almost to the point of shameless ostentation, and feels fresh and lively - more so than anything involving wizards surely has the right to be. I'd be surprised if he hadn't influenced Pratchett to some extent - although his wit is possibly sharper and less obviously satirical - and he assails the reader with a disorientating barrage of peculiar ideas and images to incredibly surreal effect - somewhat like Cordwainer Smith, but - frankly, better done. I don't know if The Eyes of the Overworld exactly says anything, but then it doesn't have to. Sometimes the mood, spectacle, and delightful confusion can be enough by itself.