J.D. Salinger - The Catcher in the Rye (1951)

 

I read this mainly because it had begun to feel a bit weird that I hadn't, given the shadow it casts across various stretches of popular culture. Having been found in the pocket of the bloke who murdered John Lennon, and then again in the fictional narrative of Margaret Thatcher's aspiring assassin in Grant Morrison's St. Swithin's Day, I'd always assumed Catcher to be about a neurotic outsider who flips and consequently pops an innocent with a firearm - the blueprint for all those school shootings. Thankfully it isn't anything quite so obvious and the general concept of both teenagers and their inherent disgruntlement was still very much in development back in 1951.

So Holden Caulfield isn't the tidily modular rebel who rejects whatever you've got on principle, but rather is someone who has failed to connect with aspects of his own existence - like a more freewheeling version of Roquentin from Sartre's Nausea, the first English translation of which had appeared just two years earlier, it might be noted. My own stepson had a couple of years at one of those supposedly prestigious military academies to which Americans with too much money send their offspring, and so I recognise Caulfield's environment, finding it both reassuring and depressing that someone else identified the exact same problems with such places over seventy years ago. Caulfield isn't a bad student, or a kid with any  psychological issues which would today be medicated to drooling oblivion. It's simply that he's just smart enough to recognise bullshit when he sees it and struggles to reconcile himself to what is expected of him, most of which is predicated on the existence of a noble world full of grand achievements, aspirations, and fine men delivering speeches in front of marble columns, as distinct from a world made entirely of bullshit. He's been taught to hold truth as among the highest of virtues and so cannot help but revolt against that which it reveals. In practical terms, this amounts to his dropping out of school and vanishing off into the wild, blue yonder over the course of a weekend, as told in rambling first person with endless digressions and passing distractions in Caulfield's own distinctive if occasionally limited turn of phrase. You might argue the case for it being a more populist Nausea with Caulfield, lacking Roquentin's philosophical rhetoric, obliged to define his disconnection in more familiar terms, or terms with which I was more familiar at least.

It isn't a literary precursor to Ill Bill's Anatomy of a School Shooting, despite the reputation, being concerned with cause more than dramatic effect, and I doubt it would have endured so well were that the case.

D.H. Lawrence - The Woman Who Rode Away (1928)

 

...and other stories, mostly written after The Plumed Serpent but prior to Lady Chatterley, and he'd apparently got most of the thrusting and scowling out of his system, which is nice. I tend to regard Lawrence's greatest strength as his ability to capture the soul of the moment, achieving in text an equivalent psychological effect to the work of the more tumultuous symbolist painters of the time, give or take a decade. However, there's an unfortunately fine balance to be struck and he was never the best judge of his own work, meaning he occasionally borders on unreadable, invariably because a cloying syrup of mood, interpretation, and even premonition brings everything grinding to a standstill so that it can feel as though you're trying to read a ten minute widdly-widdly guitar solo from the early seventies.

There are a couple of blanks in this collection for sure - tales which may or may not actually do something which proved difficult to identify or even to apply one's concentration - but the good stuff is arguably among the best he ever wrote. By this point Dave was well aware of his time having become limited, so maybe reconciliation to his own mortality had blown away a few of the cobwebs. Glad Ghosts and The Woman Who Rode Away in particular benefit from a clarity and a paring down of sentiment to just the implication which seems more or less unprecedented in Lawrence's fiction. He was, I assume, expanding his palette, and so four of these are generally credited with supernatural themes, most of which seemed symbolically layered rather than actually supernatural to me; although None of That might almost qualify as weird fiction by virtue of its arbitrary narrative swerves and surreal mood.

The Woman Who Rode Away is an odd one. It features a woman somewhat resembling Mabel Luhan who, fixating on the exotically indigenous, rides into the mountains of wild Mexico in search of an idealised native culture. Unfortunately she encounters the same and is ultimately sacrificed by its representatives. It's difficult to avoid the probability of the tale being Lawrence's revenge on Luhan, his former landlady at Taos, here brutalised by the reality of her own affectations in a distinctly unsavoury and arguably misogynist narrative, as I'm sure Lawrence was aware; and yet there's much more to the story than just this, which is what saves it from itself.

Regardless of a few duds, of the collections I've read, this may well be his greatest on the strength of where it succeeds.

Nigel Kitching & others - The Light Brigade (1990)

 

This may seem a bit of a stretch as reviews go - not even a stack of comic books, but a strip featured in an anthology title which was dead in the water by the eighth issue; so The Light Brigade was never finished, which is a shame.

The Light Brigade first appeared in the late and much missed Martin Skidmore's Trident - a bi-monthly which lasted a little over a year - and was arguably the lead strip given its featuring on three of the eight covers, notably those drawn by both John Ridgeway and Alan Davis. Eddie Campbell's superb Bacchus has obviously done much better in the long run, but The Light Brigade, co-created with Neil Gaiman - although his involvement was limited to the first instalment - felt like the potential hit single.

It's a cyberpunk comic strip hitting all of the points you would expect to find in a cyberpunk comic strip, but dating from 1989 - way before the rise of the internet. It wasn't the first, didn't do anything which hadn't already been done in a William Gibson novel, and in the wake of the movie Tron, I've no doubt everyone from the X-Men to Biffo the Bear had toppled some virtual corporate edifice in cyberspace by this point; but The Light Brigade nevertheless feels early, like the first expression of something new, as was, without quite having dated in the usual way. The story, such as it is, tells of four individuals, underwhelming urban nobodies in real life, waging a VR war as magically punky pirates; and it would probably be bollocks were it not for Nigel Kitching.

I gather Kitching went on to international renown as artist on the Sonic the Hedgehog comic book - which seems, by the way, a peculiarly logical development; but back in 1989 he was drawing this, Mark Millar's Saviour, and not much else that I'm aware of. His art tended to the starkly angular and expressionist while conveying a lightness of touch equal, I would argue, to that of Eddie Campbell elsewhere in the mag. We get a few fill-in episodes from adjacent artists, Nigel Dobbyn, D'Israeli and so on, each of which squares so beautifully with the whole as to come and go without the usual sense of disruption or looming deadlines. So I guess it's all down to Kitching's writing, which is well paced, erudite without waffling, and prone to sparking off new and delightfully wacky ideas above and beyond anything you would expect of punky pirates fighting Richard Branson in cyberspace. It was at least as good as anything in 2000AD that year.

Unfortunately, excepting Bacchus, it was significantly better than the rest of Trident for the most part -  a black and white newsprint anthology which never quite found its identity and was neither 2000AD, Deadline, nor the small press. It had its moments - notably a couple of strips by Denny Derbyshire - but was firing off in too many directions with too many weak links - not least being the terrible art of Lowlife. Thus did Trident fall from the edge after just one year, going the way of most attempts to sell not-quite-mainstream comic books to the English. I don't suppose The Light Brigade will ever be finished, but it should be remembered at least.

Nick Sweeney - Daedalus: All Dublin Talking (2023)

 

Never having read Ulysses, I may be at something of a disadvantage here given that Daedalus extends the existence of its principal character; and yet it didn't feel as though I was at a disadvantage. Similarly, this is a work in progress - a breather taken for the sake of comparing notes and due consideration given to what other materials will be needed before the building can be completed - and yet to me, in my potential ignorance, it feels finished. Daedalus presents thirteen snapshots in the life of himself beyond the final page of Joyce's novel and dating from 1904 to 1925. Sweeney hasn't yet settled on what will occur to link these interludes, hence the temporary pause to take stock.

I didn't have much of an idea of what occurred to Stephen before the final page of Joyce's novel, but Sweeney isn't afraid of making what I suspect may be dramatic changes - dramatic changes being more consistent with real life than with fannish extensions. So our man turns his back on the poetry and we find him later crossing the Atlantic to churn out popular songs for Tin Pan Alley - or at least one of its cousins - then hanging out on Hollywood lots with Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel. It probably could have turned a little pear-shaped given some of the supporting cast, but doesn't, retaining its focus on what it was doing anyway and otherwise ignoring the legends of celebrities who happen to be passing through; although this paragraph gave me a warm chuckle:

He gave in to sleep, dreamed of a bananaeating lion roaming the Emperor Diocletian's Palace in Split, and he and Stan and a fat man comically trying to shoo it out the door before the illtempered boss noticed and put his one fearsome beady eye on them all.

Somehow, although written in a style which pays homage to Ulysses, or so I gather, Daedalus is recognisably the work of Nick Sweeney in that it's the voice established in Laikonik Express and The Émigré Engineer, which seems like no mean feat, elaborating on migratory themes - where we end up and how we're changed by the journey, which appeals to me for obvious reasons. So Daedalus isn't either - ugh - fan fiction, or even Wide Sargasso Sea which, fine book though it is, sings from an entirely different hymn sheet to Brontë's Jane Eyre. Most surprising of all, at least to me, is that it doesn't read like a work in progress and does everything it apparently needs to do in just 150 pages. It feels complete and satisfying as it stands, and doesn't suffer from its episodic composition; and it's of a quality suggesting that any expansion, extension, or filling in of gaps the author chooses to make can only add. I'll be interested to see where it goes from here.

I really need to read Ulysses, don't I?

A.E. van Vogt - Cosmic Encounter (1980)

I still find it amazing that my first encounter with the writing of A.E. van Vogt led me to conclude that he couldn't write, and that I might therefore scratch his name from my list; and yet here I sit, approximately fifteen years later, having now read thirty-four of his thirty-six novels - many of which bordered on incomprehensible - and countless short stories. I have only Siege of the Unseen and To Conquer Kiber left to read, and the latter exists only in its French translation so that one probably ain't happening. The French regard van Vogt as an important surrealist writer, which is fair.

My initially unfavourable reaction stemmed from his fiction suggesting an author drunk at the typewriter, and even now that's often how his books read. The difference is that I've learned to appreciate that the disorientation is orchestrated, and that there's a lot going on with this guy's work if you know what to look for.

Cosmic Encounter was one of his last novels and seems better realised than many others written around the same decade - although by better realised I mean that you can see he's doing something even if it's not obvious what it could be. We open on a pirate ship in the year 1704 as it encounters the robots of a Lantellan spacecraft and all spacetime collapses to that one year, with the entire past and future of the universe simply ceasing to exist, after which the novel gets weirder by the chapter. The explanation, when it finally comes, is difficult to understand, being wrapped up as it is in a mesh of van Vogt's ideas regarding the gulf between that which we observe and how we describe it; but if you hold on tight, concentrate hard, and re-read the more obtuse passages until some sort of understanding is reached, you just about get an impression of what he's been trying to do; and I'm beginning to suspect that he may have been using language and narrative to rewire the reader's brain so as to facilitate cognition in terms described by Korzybski's general semantics, of which A.E. was very much a fan. Of all his works, Cosmic Encounter is very odd, even more dreamlike than usual, and certainly seems to do something peculiar to your head.

Without being particularly familiar with Korzybski, I gather van Vogt's interest lay in establishing a form of logic which eschews the binary of either-or with nothing in between, a logic wherein two plus two can equal five, and we shouldn't get too hung up on his using pirates and space robots to communicate this. Cause and effect being something traditionally subject to an either-or duality, van Vogt plays it down, often uncoupling one from the other, writing everything exclusively in the moment - which is why you really have to hold on tight with this stuff, to pay attention, and not get too upset where common or garden linear sense goes flying out of the window.

So I enjoyed Cosmic Encounter a lot, even if I struggle to describe what it's about, that being something you have to experience for yourself. It's worth the effort.

Pam Ayres - With These Hands (2021)

 

You couldn't escape from Pam Ayres when I was a kid. She was always faster and what with those extendable arms on the box, or at least it felt that way, and so we took her for granted. At some point I was given Thoughts of a Late Night Knitter for Christmas, or possibly a birthday. It made me laugh, and joined the other books which made me laugh on the window sill - or wherever I had them at the time - and so became part of my personal mythology.

Forty years later I spot this in Waitrose, Kenilworth while visiting my parents in England, and I'm pleased to see that it exists, and that it's on such prominent display in a supermarket, because it means that Pam Ayers and all she ever meant to any of us hasn't quite yet been concreted over alongside the others we no longer discuss because they failed to foreshadow the exact same opinions we now regard as gospel. I bought it, not because I felt a particularly deep connection, but somehow I felt I should, that I needed to show my support in some way.

Pam writes poems that rhyme so hard it makes your eyes water, covering homely topics which once made sense to almost all of us. I don't know if it's art, but would argue that it probably is because she does what she does so exceptionally well, and popularity alone should not be considered a disqualifier. Pam wrote for an audience which found common ground in her strange little tales of domestic confusion, not for an audience busily dividing itself up into increasingly esoteric sects. With These Hands presents a selection of poems and song lyrics interspersed with autobiographical material serving to introduce the same. The poems are great, just as I remember them albeit nothing like so cosy, peppered as they are with minor shocks, twists, and yelps of involuntary laughter. The linking prose has the cadence of something transcribed from a spoken performance, but was powerful for me given that I grew up in the same world of spotted dick, grinding poverty, no telephone in the house, and wasn't really aware of it having vanished. She even mentions the village where my grandparents lived.

It's not that everything was better then, and there was much which was a lot harder to endure; it's just that certain aspects of daily life weren't so fucking stupid as they have become. With These Hands goes some way to explaining why without delivering any specific statement of the same. Sorry.

Charlotte Brontë - Jane Eyre (1847)

I tend to think of my secondary education as having been fairly crap, but on the other hand we had an English teacher who made us read this so it clearly had something going for it. On average I read Jane Eyre roughly every ten years, not as part of some long term schedule but simply because it works out that way. If it's a fairly straightforward, linear story, the level of detail and description is of such complexity as to yield fresh revelations with each reading, and this latest engagement has been no exception.

Jane Eyre, as you should probably know, is the story of Jane, participant in a partially autobiographical existence, who endures childhood misery, harsh schooling, crushing expectations, and the one man she would consider marrying harbouring a deranged wife in the attic of his stately home. It's about female agency, to some extent, as the tale of a woman who resists the expectations of nineteenth century society, forging her own path despite forces which might promise a quiet life at the expense of autonomy. I suppose, by extension, one might almost say it's a novel about the nineteenth century, the age in which truths held previously unassailable began to look a bit crumbly around the edges - notably with the death of God and the notion of progress and change as desirable or even necessary. Jane lives in a world dependent on certain truisms being taken for granted, notably those of sex and class, but her society is illusory - a spectacle in the sense of that which Debord describes in The Society of the Spectacle - demanding that she makes her way by critical means, basing decisions on that which is demonstrably true or at least ethically correct.

This isn't what makes Jane Eyre a great book so much as the poetry of how it undertakes to dissect nineteenth century society and to highlight wrongs in realistic and compassionate terms without the occasionally cloying sentiment of, for one roughly contemporary example, Dickens. With few of the book's demonstrable real world details adding up to a consistent chronology or year, Jane Eyre has been described as a fairy story, and certainly it can't be deemed a realistic novel in the conventional sense despite concerning itself with the real world. Aside from the ubiquitous atmospheric effects continuing the legacy of the Romantic era, it's a book full of implied spirits, spectres, and otherworldly influences - even though the only plausibly supernatural occurrence is a brief moment of long-distance telepathy between Jane and Rochester near the end. The brilliance of the book is, I would say, rooted in the apparent contradiction of what it does, namely that it uses the language and imagery of the haunted, the spooky, and the ethereal in presenting an argument in support of realism, critical thought and not just doing something because that's what everyone else is doing and that's how it's always been innit. Even the fearful mad woman in the attic is never quite reduced to just a symbol of the kind used by authors to hammer some black and white point all the way home.

However, it does much more than just the above, and describing some of the mechanism as I have done, does little to convey the true complexity, elegance, or beauty of this novel. I don't know if it's truly the greatest novel in the English language, but it surely has to be a contender.