Ham on Rye

Charles Bukowski Ham on Rye (1982)
Bukowski only wrote a handful of novels, the bulk of his published work being poetry. This was the first one I read, recommended by my late friend Andrew, an unfortunately dedicated alcoholic who shared some of Bukowski's habits and much of his general outlook. It was a good place to start. The general composition of Bukowski's narrative has calmed down since Post Office, less of the screaming capital letters, and with thirteen additional years of boozing and falling over seemingly providing further distance from the emotional battering laid down during his childhood years, here described in roughly autobiographical terms through the fictionalised persona of Henry Chinaski. I didn't have a bad childhood, but neither was it one so idyllic as to leave me with any soft focus desire for a return revisit; and I think anyone who engages in at least some degree of honest reflection will recognise the description of reality kicking you in the teeth over and over, even if child battery played no actual part.

Ham on Rye is, unsurprisingly, a far from pretty picture, and it would be shocking to read of Chinaski's dabbling with the politically far right in any other context. Tellingly, this seems to have been a gut reaction, as I suppose it often is, inspired by a distrust of the vocally and demonstratively liberal, which I can at least understand. What's more significant here is the author failing to give a shit about presenting himself as a sympathetic figure, not even really a victim of circumstance - which seems a fairly rare thing; and the visceral element is perfectly balanced with glimpses of beauty snatched here and there for the sake of contrast, or if not beauty then at least reasons to be alive: discovering the novels of D.H. Lawrence at the local public library, solitude, drink, fighting just for the sheer fucking fun of it.

America, regardless of James Dean, Marlon Brando, and whatever else it has told itself, never really did rebellion. It's a nation of boy scouts, good little soldiers, and loyal snitches who regard diversity and imagination as dangerous gateway drugs to Communism and homosexuality, and whose minds are easily blown by Michael J. Fox dancing on the hood of a gridlocked car so as to teach the grown-ups a thing or two about what it means to be young. This is why America's fuck-ups and square pegs tend to be pretty hardcore, at least Manson levels of craziness; although of course they don't quite count as America, not officially, not until we get the commodified Tarantino version, probably with Brad Pitt saying motherfucker in an amusing way which will inevitably give rise to a thousand cool memes, as they will be regarded by those fuckwits who place stock in the term cool holding any value whatsoever.

So that's a massive generalisation right there, but I'd guess it explains Ham on Rye and is therefore a recommendation.

Fantasy & Science Fiction 613

 

Gordon Van Gelder (editor) Fantasy & Science Fiction 613 (2003)
I have new books, or at least books newly purchased which I'm yet to read, but somehow nothing is sticking. I read a few pages of London Fields, a few of a Kornbluth, part of a short story by A.E. van Vogt, but I'm not in the mood for any of them; so I'm really beginning to appreciate having accumulated unread back issues of the digests just in case, particularly those such as this one which has been mostly light without feeling either insubstantial or crappy.

This is my third back issue this year, bringing us up to 2003, and it's been the best one yet, seemingly representing a further refinement of what Fantasy & Science Fiction does. Back in April, I wrote:

Unfortunately I am no more able to read fantasy than I am able to attend renaissance fairs dressed as a fucking minstrel. As soon as I read a sentence suffixed with my Lord, my brain shuts itself down.

I guess it wasn't just me, because by 2003 the magazine is happily free of anyone with pointed ears wearing a green hat, and what we have sits loosely between speculative fiction and the modern ghost story - I'd say something in the Gothic tradition, but I'd be guessing. M. Shayne Bell's Anomalous Structures of My Dreams and Jeremy Minton's Halfway House are probably the stand-outs, but there's nothing bad here, and everything reads very much like the work of authors who care about their craft. I stumbled a little upon Mary Rickert's The Machine and Albert E. Cowdrey's Grey Star, but second run ups taken next morning paid off, particularly with The Machine, which is, on reflection, probably one of the more satisfyingly intense things I've read this year.

Perry Rhodan: Enterprise Stardust

K.H. Scheer & Walter Ernstling Perry Rhodan: Enterprise Stardust (1961)
I remember seeing a shitload of these in WHSmith when I was a kid, and yet only recently have I come to realise that Perry Rhodan is the main character of the series rather than its author. I hadn't bothered with any of them because I generally prefer to start a series at the beginning for obvious reasons, but it turns out that this was the first one, so here we go.

Actually, it's a translation of the first two, Perry Rhodan having been a weekly digest first published in Germany - each week a new novella amounting to sixty or seventy pages of text. A minimum of research has revealed that Perry endured for decades - still keeping to that weekly schedule - was massively popular, and seems to have given birth to the story arc, from what I can tell. By story arc I mean self-contained tales which form part of a larger narrative within an even broader evolving continuity, as distinct from three or four novels with the same setting or the sort of stuff Edgar Rice Burroughs used to churn out. Maybe there have been earlier story arcs, but I can't think of any right now.

As with both Doctor Who and 2000AD comic, the pressure of a weekly schedule compelled the creators to a certain degree of homage, borrowing, or whatever you would prefer to call it, and the legend accordingly has it that Perry Rhodan has been caught up in more or less every conceivable science-fiction scenario at one point or another, and so we begin the saga with first contact.

These books have a reputation for being somewhat pulpy. This one is more uneven than anything, albeit uneven with a certain pulpy sensibility in evidence here and there. The story is quite slow, even laborious as it tells of Rhodan's historic moon landing in detail which clearly foreshadows the Apollo missions and reads very much like the work of Arthur C. Clarke. Our guys encounter the scout ship of an advanced alien race stranded on the moon, at which point traces of pulp become discernable. One of the aliens is a female called Thora, summoning unfortunately intrusive images of Songs of Praise - at least for me; and we learn that the marooned Arkonides have become a degenerate race, meaning they've reached the peak of evolutionary perfection but now spend all day sat on their fat asses watching telly. This is literally why they're stranded on the moon - because they can't be bothered. Rhodan returns to Earth with a couple of the livelier Arkonides, obliging all of those nuclear superpowers of the sixties to unite and cooperate, having at last realised that Earth is just one planet at the edge of a much larger galactic civilisation. This last element of the story actually seems to have drawn inspiration from accounts of the space brothers as related by Adamski and all of those other flying saucer abductees of the fifties.

So it isn't great literature, but neither is it the worst thing I've ever read, and it's easy to see why Perry Rhodan was popular. The writing is a little uneven, and the narrative occasionally treads water - presumably stretching things out just enough to make up a page count - and the characters creak a little, but it was written - or at least translated - by people with some ability, and doesn't suffer from any of the ineptitude I've seen perpetrated by certain more recent authors. There's a sort of screwy enthusiasm here, that of a fairly stupid story told well, and perhaps Perry deserves to be remembered with a little more dignity than has generally been the case.

William the Ancient Briton

Richmal Crompton William the Ancient Briton (1965)
I never developed any particular attachment to William as a kid. I had William and the Space Animal - a book my father passed on from his youth - but I only recall looking at the pictures. I came across this one in an antique shop when visiting England and bought it for my stepson on the grounds of his being named William, and because he has fixated on certain aspects of my homeland. He reads more than I ever did at his age, but mostly because he's obliged to do so by his school. I didn't read much, but what I did read was usually read because I wanted to read it. Hypocritical though it may be, I really wish my stepson would read for pleasure rather than wasting time and brain cells on shitty games and YouTube wankers.

'Here,' I said, having just sat down and pulled a few things from my bag following more than twenty hours in transit. 'I got you this.'

I placed the book on the corner of the table in the front room. He looked at it, then looked at me, then started to tell his mother about some new fact he'd just learned from the internet.

Because we're a somewhat slack family, William the Ancient Briton was still there on the corner of the table in the front room one month later. 'Is he even going to look at the thing?' I asked my wife.

She relayed the question next day whilst giving the kid a lift to school. Of course, was apparently his reply, adding that he certainly wasn't one of those people who fails to appreciate a gift. The book remained where it was for another three weeks, at which point I reclaimed it; and now, three years later, I'm getting around to reading it so that someone has. There doesn't even seem much point in being disappointed in the boy. I was never a big reader at his age, and Crompton's William Brown is an outdoorsy sort of kid who has adventures, and I think our gamer would be out of his depth.

I have a theory regarding the cultural differences which divide England and America, and one which is thrown into sharp relief by Crompton's William. We grew up with Dennis the Menace, the Bash Street Kids, and of course this guy, chuckling as our heroes got away with it, or were else punished for misdeeds whilst remaining gleefully unrepentant. America grew up with the Hardy Boys and Superman, wholesome boy scouts who righted wrongs and taught us how the coolest kids are those who brush their teeth and obey the rules. This is a massive generalisation, as Enid Blyton is my witness, but I firmly believe there's something in it, and that these formative and quite different attitudes to authority reflect how the rest of us got here - how someone as relentlessly cuboid as Trump could ever be regarded as rebellious; or even that Boris Johnson has ascended through somehow passing himself off as one of Lord Snooty's pals for that matter. Anyway, this is a debate for some other time.

William was not originally written as a children's book in the strictest sense, which explains the tone of the stories collected here - wry, sardonic, and expecting readers to keep up rather than simplifying anything. Mostly they are short, sharp bursts of absurdist slapstick of the kind to which Arthur Askey and others almost certainly aspired, but the kindly yet long-suffering narrative voice conveys a wit which might be seen to foreshadow much of Peter Cook's career. William himself is a pain in the arse for sure, but not actually a bad lad, and is allowed to get into all sorts of trouble without anyone having to learn a lesson at the end because Crompton clearly trusted her readership to have developed a moral code without requiring that it be spelled out in primary colours. These are therefore lessons in idiocy featuring a wise fool who tends to come out on top through finding himself pitched against persons more idiotic than himself, often adults but not always.

Some of the tales work better than others. The story which lends its name to the collection as a whole is a little underwhelming, but elsewhere we have William Enters Politics, William is Hypnotised, and other gems approaching near Dadaist levels of peculiar brilliance. The former features himself spying on a local council meeting by pretending to be a portrait painting hung on the wall, which he effects by leering through a hole in the aforementioned wall whilst holding a gilt picture frame around his face; and in William and the Campers, our boy is scheduled for a scrap with a neighbouring gang even as his own group is perilously reduced to just himself and Ginger. He swells the numbers with otherwise pious, well-behaved children from a visiting Sunday school by fooling them into treating the scrap as an exercise in cultural anthropology. This he achieves by delivering a lecture about tribal traditions, pretending to be a visiting speaker by agency of a false beard, having somehow managed to derail the lecture the Sunday schoolers were supposed to have received.

I gather this collection is something of a greatest hits featuring material written as far back as 1924 - William's Extra Day which first appeared in William the Fourth - which itself speaks well of Crompton's ability and the versatility of her creation, which, if something of a one joke character, is at least a joke which survives endless retelling.

Post Office

Charles Bukowski Post Office (1971)
To begin at something of a tangent, I recall being told that no-one actually reads Bukowski - or William Burroughs for that matter - but we tell people we do so in order to appear sophisticated, or because we think we're lush when we really aren't or something of that sort. I was told this by a person on a forum dedicated to Doctor Who, the children's television programme, and it is, I suppose, typical of the sort of bollocks rattling around in the heads of those who can't cope with anything but adventures, one after the other, an endless fucking line of thrills, scrapes, and companions captured for the sake of shifting the story along towards yet another ballsachingly familiar conclusion. I mention this only in the hope of annoying anyone reading who might subscribe to this view, and in the hope of annoying them so much that it causes them to grow the fuck up and invest at least some of their time in something besides adventures, because we really, really, really, really need as many thinking adults in the world as we can get right now.

I first read Post Office many years ago back when I was working for Royal Mail. I wouldn't say I loved it, because it isn't the sort of book you love, but it is nevertheless a great book which left me with mixed feelings over how something written in the American sixties so precisely described my own working conditions in the English nineties - mixed feelings incorporating equal measures of depression and satisfaction, specifically satisfaction at having my suspicions confirmed regarding the universal experience of bullshit. Reading it again in 2019 is interesting from the point of view that although I'm no longer in the job, I now live in America and some of the other details have accordingly come into sharper focus.

Bukowski keeps it plain and simple, just the things you need to know but assembled in such a way as to resonate with a more or less common experience which ends up saying something arguably more profound than that which is given in the text. This is probably why dunces of the kind described in the first paragraph don't get Bukowski, because they lack either the common experience or the imagination to work with anything which isn't directly spoon fed to them as adventure.

To be fair, most people have Bukowski all wrong, also meaning those who need this to be considered transgressive literature because our man likes a pint and has sex with ladies. This probably accounts for his receiving notice in the same open mouthed breath as William Burroughs. The two of them never met, although they once stayed in the same hotel. Burroughs sent a message inviting Bukowski over for a drink, and Bukowski declined because he preferred to drink alone and didn't see what the two of them could possibly have to talk about, the only common ground being their shared disregard of authority. Burroughs dissects power structures, even proposes solutions up to a point, where Bukowski simply reports, tells it how it is, and we can take what we like from that because it's mostly bullshit - even the good bits, those details which might seem worth remembering.

Where the transgressives have it wrong is that this isn't even nihilism. Like I said, Bukowski keeps it plain and simple, the unsteady testimony of a drunk, but a gentle drunk, laced with warmth and humour in the face of horrible reality but without the wasted effort of cracking jokes, or any other ploy used by lesser writers in pursuit of your sympathy. Post Office probably isn't a great novel in the sense of Mountainhead by New Juche being a great novel, but it doesn't try to sell us any bullshit, which is a rare thing, and is therefore good enough.

Lost: Fifty Suns

A.E. van Vogt Lost: Fifty Suns (1972)
I've now reached the point of owning so many van Vogt paperbacks that I have to spend at least five minutes inspecting each new, unfamiliar title found in Half-Price just to make sure it isn't one of the ones I already have under a different name. So far as I can work out, I think there are about five or six which I'm still to read - which is impressive for an author I initially dismissed as worthless after struggling with Away and Beyond back in the before times. That said, there are still a good number of his short story collections I'm yet to read, albeit short story collections most likely containing a couple of things I've already read through van Vogt subsequently welding them to other short stories and having the resulting Frankenbook published as a novel. The somewhat lengthy Lost: Fifty Suns, for example, was eventually stitched together with related material to form the novel Mission to the Stars, as I read it, or The Mixed Men, as seems to be its more popular title.

I found Mission to the Stars a little underwhelming - not without redeeming features but nothing special - which is sadly equally true of both Lost: Fifty Suns, the short story, and this collection as a whole. The main problem is that it all seems very uneven. The Timed Clock is okay, but leans a little too heavily on multiple twist endings the approach of which can be seen from many miles away, and - as with The Confession and The Rat and the Snake - doesn't quite read like the work of Alfred Elton, lacking the usual atmosphere, jarring angular sentences, or even any of his customarily familiar themes; and The Rat and the Snake stands suspicious comparison with his wife's writing, although I haven't found anything online to support the possibility of it being one of her efforts. The Barbarian is enjoyable, but worked just as well in Empire of the Atom, leaving Ersatz Eternal - which didn't leave much of an impression - and The Sound of Wild Laughter featuring characters from The Secret Galactics and which is another of van Vogt's slightly puzzling examinations of sexual inequality. The same views were expressed quite clearly in The Violent Man, but for some reason he never quite managed to get the subject working in any of his science-fiction novels, usually leaving us with a series of faintly troublesome mumblings about women turning frigid immediately following marriage. The frustrating thing is that while he probably doesn't quite qualify as a feminist pioneer, van Vogt's views on sexual inequality seem entirely reasonable in comparison with those of his contemporaries, but were often poorly expressed, as they are here, perhaps through a reluctance to terrify his mostly male audience. Although, given the number of female characters featured in this collection I can't help wonder if it might not have been assembled as one for the ladies, so to speak.

Oh well. His heart was in the right place, I guess.

The Prussian Officer and other stories

D.H. Lawrence The Prussian Officer and other stories (1914)
This was Lawrence's first short story collection, originally published in 1914 by Duckworth and collecting material which had mostly already seen print in the English Review. Lawrence actually revised most of the stories for this collection, and even gave them a specific order so as to draw attention to the development of certain themes from one story to the next. Unfortunately Duckworth threw this order out of the window, bringing the two stories referring directly to the first world war to the fore presumably in order to cash in on an anticipated upsurge of militaristic and patriotic fervour. I gather that this revision somewhat undermined the author's intended thematic development, which is in any case a subtle detail even with everything running in the proper sequence, leaving the whole seeming patchy and uneven. This version restores Lawrence's running order, although I wonder if the power of the original hasn't been a little overplayed. Antony Atkins' introduction describes the collection as a story cycle wherein certain themes are revisited, developed, or expanded upon in subsequent stories, and in which we notice an occasional warm-up exercise for one of the novels, but the pattern is something you may not even have noticed had it not been mentioned.

Roughly speaking, these twelve stories trace an evolutionary path from spooky nineteenth century mysticism through to twentieth century realism, ultimately leading to Lawrence's own somewhat mystical brand of twentieth century realism; so this notional path may refer to English society and the elevation of the lower classes, to the course of literature around the turn of the century, or to Lawrence's own development as a writer. It's really a case of taking your pick depending on which seems the most interesting sequence. Most of the stories are respectable, and a few, such as Odour of Chrysanthemums or A Sick Collier, are exceptional; but elsewhere, Lawrence gets so lost in his own prose, rendering even the tiniest quirk of psychology as something poetic and mythological, that the narrative collapses under its own lack of momentum, possibly because whilst the novel grants him space in which to achieve escape velocity, the short form is not always so well-suited to what he was trying to achieve. The thematic sequencing of the stories compensates for the shortfall in places, but still leaves the whole a chewier read than I would ordinarily like.

It's hard to imagine what Duckworth were thinking, particularly given that the two first world war tales are hardly Bulldog Drummond material, focussing instead on class issues with a distinct anti-militaristic tone expressed as deserters and conscientious objectors who rebel against their commanding officers; and Lawrence sidesteps any issues of such tales lacking due patriotic fervour - as I presume would have been a concern at the time - by setting them behind enemy lines, doubtless drawing on his experience of eloping to Metz on the German border with Frieda von Richthofen.

There's plenty here which conforms to the quality promised by Lawrence's reputation, but it's probably not a casual read.

The Turing Test

Paul Leonard The Turing Test (2000)
If this Who novel following on from something first read back before I had pubes suggests an emerging theme, I should probably make it clear that it's really just comfort food for my eyes. My reading time is otherwise presently taken up with proofing print copies of my own five volume Mexico Diaries. I've spent the last five years editing the thing, and whilst I consider it at least sufficiently entertaining to have been worth the effort, it's pretty tough ploughing through all five of the cunts for the millionth time and still finding typos. Anyway, the point is that I needed light relief, hence The Turing Test.

The Turing Test was, as you probably know, part of a series of novels which kept Who going during the decade or so of it being off the air prior to its 2005 revival as a massive steaming pile of shite. This one followed on from the slightly underwhelming Paul McGann movie, and has been remembered as one of the better books, although not necessarily by me - which I'll come to in a moment.

To give credit where it's due, the BBC Who novels pulled some interesting moves in their time, facilitated by their collectively working as a larger ongoing narrative. At this point of his notional existence, the Doctor had been left stranded on Earth following not only the destruction of his home planet but also the retroactive erasure of his past; so he doesn't know who he is and the TARDIS may as well be just a wardrobe. He doesn't seem to age, and he doesn't know why, and he's living his life one year at a time with the vague understanding of something due to happen around the year 2000. I gather the point of this was to really get the writers earning their tuppence ha'penny, and to see if Doctor Who still worked with more or less all of the established props and references rendered off limits.

The Turing Test occurs during the second world war and draws in Alan Turing, Graham Greene, and Joseph Heller as both characters and authors; furthermore, the novel is divided into three parts, each one a first person narrative written in an approximation of their respective styles. The story, just to get it out of the way, concerns an impenetrable code which, so it transpires, derives from alien visitors rather than Nazis, hence Turing. Graham Greene additionally worked for MI6, aside from being a novelist, so that's how he figures, and Joseph Heller knew how to fly a plane, and at one point they need to fly a plane…

In its favour, The Turing Test is a novel which is quite happy to be a novel, with none of the usual passages half-wishing they were on telly. It's been a while since I read either The Power and the Glory or Catch-22, but Paul Leonard seems to do a decent job of capturing the voices of their authors, so far as I'm able to tell. Additionally in its favour, The Turing Test tries to say something beyond simply plugging up a few hours of your time with adventures. Specifically, it presents comparisons by which we might consider the question of what is human - hence the title - with variant flavours represented by the Doctor, the aliens, Greene's somewhat dour pessimism, Heller's humanism, Turing's vulnerability, various Nazis just doing their jobs, and so on and so forth.

It's ambitious and generally exceptionally well written, and it almost works but sort of doesn't, or didn't for me. I felt the same way the first time I read it however many years ago. The problem is that, I would guess, Leonard put so much work into impersonating Turing, Greene, and Heller that he lost his grip on the dynamic of the story, which just seems to drift along for a few hundred pages without any clear objective in sight, pissing away the goodwill of the reader - me in this case - until we come to the final third and suddenly notice that here is a writer who has taken the author of Catch-22 and made him have an exciting adventure with Doctor Who from the telly, which is just silly. The Turing Test has its feet in two camps and is neither one thing nor the other - too ponderous to be gripping, too juvenile to provoke much thought. Its not a bad book by any means, but I really feel it should have been better.