The Crimes of Love

Donatien Alphonse François de Sade The Crimes of Love (1800)
I wouldn't say I've ever been particularly drawn to the writing of de Sade, at least not since having my stomach definitively churned by an excerpt from The 120 Days of Sodom reproduced in some power electronics literature back in the eighties; but I've begun to notice him as a presence at the periphery of other things I've been reading, and I gather his writing has some philosophical dimension, so I picked this up because it's short and seemed like it might not be quite so terrifying as the novel about sticking red hot pokers up people's bumholes, and was therefore a hypothetically good place to start.

It seems that Crimes of Love comprises twelve novellas distributed amongst four volumes, so this is actually more of a sampler, five relatively short stories of which Lorenza and Antonio seems to be represented by excerpts from what I presume to be a somewhat longer work.
 

This was de Sade's attempt to demonstrate that he could write respectable fiction without anything getting shoved up anyone's arsehole. I gather he was tired of having been labelled a pornographer, possibly because the label apparently missed the point of whatever it was he wrote in those earlier books. Nevertheless, even without the descriptions of it going in and out, Crimes of Love probably shouldn't be mistaken for Johnny Rotten settling down and doing adverts for butter, and it's difficult to miss the author taking some pleasure in the ruination of the virtuous as an inevitable consequences of their own trusting but somewhat hypocritical nature. Mademoiselle de Faxelange, for one example, spurns the virtuous man she should have married for Monsieur le Baron de Franlo, who seems initially more promising and whom her parents prefer, which of course ends terribly. Franlo is revealed as a pirate and mass murderer who admires Genghis Kahn and makes his new wife an unwilling partner in his reign of terror; and yet there's a sort of honesty in his tyranny and he is unrepentant to the last, whilst Faxelange herself comes to a miserable end. If de Sade was presenting, as claimed, cautionary tales, it's interesting that the views seemingly closest to his own should be expressed by those against whom he is delivering his warning:

'Death happens everywhere. If I risk the scaffold here I risk a sword-thrust in society. No situation is without its dangers, the wise man must consider them in relation to the advantages and make his decision in consequence. The threat of death is the thing that occupies us least. What about honour? If I had been imprisoned, I should have been regarded as a criminal. Is it not better to live effectively as a criminal while enjoying all human rights, being free in fact, rather than being suspected of some crime while in chains? Do not be surprised if a man becomes a criminal when he is degraded, although he is innocent. Do not be surprised if he prefers crime to fetters, since in both situations he can expect hatred.'

Dorgeville and Rodrigo similarly punish their victims in order to make points, and Rodrigo is additionally interesting for its fanciful and heavily allegorical thrust, introducing its antihero briefly to the notion of civilisation having developed on other worlds, notably Jupiter and Saturn.

Lorenza and Antonio is here rendered as excerpts punctuated by notes explaining what happens in the passages we're skipping. It seems to have been included as an example of de Sade's theatrical leanings and love of dialogue, and to me, reads like a more ponderous variation on Romeo and Juliet; so it's probably fascinating if you're more invested in de Sade's life and work than I am, because I found it more or less unreadable; following which, I was likewise unable to work up much enthusiasm for The Comtesse de Sancerre, the final selection. All the same, I got one hell of a lot more from the first three than I ever expected, so I may come back to these last two at some point, and the earlier, scarier works now seem a marginally less terrifying prospect.

The Martian Way

Isaac Asimov The Martian Way (1955)
Whilst I have a general feeling of having read as much Asimov as I'll ever need to read, I nevertheless find it difficult to resist those covers from the sixties or earlier; and coming across this copy of The Martian Way reminded me that I have no specific objection to copping another Asimov, and this one was new to me so fuck it...

It's a collection of four short stories, of which the title track is happily one of the best I've read by this guy, a novella length tale which really showcases all of his strengths. Asimov can be a little dry, kind of repetitive, and with a tendency to have socially awkward yet scholarly types stood around discussing protons for longer than seems entirely necessary, but when his interests align with the right kind of story, he really shines, granting insight into just why he has such a reputation. His writing here is clear, heavy on mind-expanding scientific detail but with just enough snap to keep everything swimming along in the same direction. The Martian Way tells of astronauts travelling to Saturn in order to ferry massive asteroids of water ice back to the inner planets, and yet somehow it's genuinely gripping.

The other three stories are mostly decent if less obviously remarkable, with only Sucker Bait coming close to letting the side down. It kicks off as something which might be seen to foreshadow the second Alien movie, only to reveal that the colonists were killed off by trace elements of berryllium in the air - this being the discovery of one of those characteristic Asimov smarties whose job is to figure it out, and to be right where all the knuckle-dragging cavemen with their sports cars and sex lives got it wrong, the big dummies! The archetypal four-eyed genius of Sucker Bait is Mark Annuncio, who is clearly supposed to be something on the autism spectrum - having immediate recall of every single fact to which he has ever been exposed, and who is as such a representative of something called the Mnemonic Service. Aside from being way too long and nothing like so fascinating to read as it may have been to write, Sucker Bait unfortunately reminds me of Asimov's occasional shots fired against sexual inequality wherein, with the most noble sentiments in the world, he somehow ends up skating a bit too close to Alan Partridge for comfort and ends up insulting the demographic he's trying to defend.

Never mind. It was still worth it for the main feature.

Welcome to the Monkey House

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Welcome to the Monkey House (1970)
I never really intended to read my way through his entire back catalogue, but I guess he wrote so much, and so much which sold so well as to warrant an extended print run, that I suppose it's inevitable that I should still be finding titles I'm yet to read on the second hand shelves; and I usually buy them because there's always the chance of the latest find being one of the good ones. Usually it is, although sometimes it will turn out to have been Kurt going through the motions, meaning the jokes are still good but the whole gets to be a bit of a slog. Monkey House was purchased out of habit without particularly high expectations. I knew it was a collection of previously published material, and this would therefore be my fourth Vonnegut of such composition. I knew not to anticipate any massive surprises.

Happily, excepting a single book review, it turns out to be a collection of his short fiction, and therefore quite unlike other assemblages I've read which have been mostly of essays and the like. Even better is that it seems Vonnegut was well suited to the short form given how it obliged him to get straight to the point, sparing us any of the rambling post-modern gagfests which are either wonderful, or else serve only to remind me of Marx Brothers routines amounting to someone talking bollocks very, very fast. Most of these short stories were written prior to the success of Slaughterhouse Five,  back when he was still trying and are thus informed with a sense of the author hoping to appeal to an audience at least a little bit. Hence we get the apeshit satire, Jonathan Swift jammed on eleven and daring you to whine about suspension of disbelief, but relayed with a tight, vaguely populist sense of craft - like Player Piano distilled to something which doesn't go on far too long. There are a few which don't really do anything much, but everything here is kept short and punchy so its worth sitting through a few duds for the sake of Harrison Bergeron, More Stately Mansions or The Kid Nobody Could Handle. Vonnegut's strength has always been his humour combined with a razor sharp critique of Emperors failing to dress themselves accordingly, in which capacity Monkey House represents an impressive display of muscle.

The Return of the Native

Thomas Hardy The Return of the Native (1878)
I've had several run ups to Pohl and Kornbluth's allegedly classic Gladiator-at-Law, and whilst I can see that it's well written in terms of elegant sentences, I just can't seem to give a fuck about anything happening within the narrative. Now on my second or third attempt, I make it to chapter eleven and notice that I have no idea what's happening to who or why; then somehow I find myself reading this instead, a big fat Victorian novel of such volume that copies could be used to weight sacks containing stool pigeons destined for large rivers or other bodies of water. No sentence is less than two-hundred words long, typically describing the moral import of some minor feature of someone's face, and nothing happens for the first quarter of the book, or what felt like it - just a bunch of people stood around a bonfire gossiping about some woman being no better than she ought to be, amongst other things; and yet unlike Gladiator-at-Yawn, it's positively gripping.

The story is spun around the doomed marriages of two couples. Clym has been living in Paris but, having decided it was all a bit too fancy, now returns to his beloved and rustic Egdon Heath to marry Eustacia, who only marries him because she hates Egdon Heath and assumes he'll change his mind and will take her to live in Paris. Naturally it all ends in tears, ultimately concluding with lessons learned.

Derwent May's introduction seems to spend a lot of time refuting D.H. Lawrence's assertion that the main character of The Return of the Native is the landscape itself, as described in his Study of Thomas Hardy. Without actually having read Lawrence's Study of Thomas Hardy, I'd say he seems to have a point.

The first part of the book serves to define its cast as ephemerals within a much larger and essentially mysterious landscape across which bonfires are lit from one hilltop to the next in this pre-technological era, itself only a moment in the depths of geological time, with references to arrowheads, bronze age tribes, and Biblical times provided for the sake of scale.

The instincts of merry England lingered on here with exceptional vitality, and the symbolic customs which tradition has attached to each season of the year were yet a reality on Egdon. Indeed, the impulses of all such outlandish hamlets are pagan still: in these spots homage to nature, self-adoration, frantic gaieties, fragments of Teutonic rites to divinities whose names are forgotten, seem in some way or other to have survived mediaeval doctrine.

Being a Victorian novel, Native pays the same laborious attention to detail as any Pre-Raphaelite painting and is similarly loaded with meaning and allegory - possibly even to the point of the term native - here referring to Clym Yeobright - being a single letter removed from naive. Whilst the principal characters of the novel are not without depth, they are primarily described in terms of how they relate to their environment to the point that we may as well regard them as expressions of the same. Clym's defining characteristic is that he left the heath and has, as Hardy sees it, come to his senses, and it seems significant that we learn hardly anything about his time in Paris beyond that he'd had enough. Here we find this kinship expressed as the one time scholar is reborn back on his home turf as a common labourer who goes accordingly unrecognised by his own mother.

The silent being who thus occupied himself seemed to be of no more account in life than an insect. He appeared as a mere parasite of the heath, fretting its surface in his daily labour as a moth frets a garment, entirely engrossed with its products, having no knowledge of anything in the world but fern, furze, heath, lichens, and moss.

Clym's relationship to the land from which he was sprung is an instinctive rather than considered aspect of his psychology.

He already showed that thought is a disease of the flesh, and indirectly bore evidence that ideal physical beauty is incompatible with emotional development and a full recognition of the coil of things.

It's not difficult to see how this would have appealed to D.H. Lawrence, particularly as a forerunner of his own ideas about blood consciousness, as he termed it, as expressed by Don Ramón in The Plumed Serpent.

'Man is a column of blood, with a voice in it... And when the voice is still, and he is only a column of blood, he is better.'

Returning to the theme of how the characters serve as extensions of their environment, Eustacia is defined more or less entirely by her desire to escape from the heath; and then we have the Reddleman, Diggory Venn, an avatar of the land in the sense of Swamp Thing being an avatar of the bayou. Venn is coloured red from head to toe as a consequence of his work, extracting red ochre from the ground with which to mark sheep. Having no fixed abode, he comes and goes in the fashion of a wandering spirit, a parallel which is emphasised in the first part of the book by reference to a red ghost seen at large on the heath.

The lesson of The Return of the Native may, on the surface of it, seem typically Victorian and conservative - stick to what you know, stay home, honour thine parents, and so on and so forth. Clym shouldn't have gone to Paris in the first place, and his moderately unpleasant wife probably shouldn't make too many assumptions about the grass being greener over there; but I suspect this may be a misreading, or at least an unbalanced emphasis in so much as that it's not really the point of the book which seems too complex to be boiled down to any single, simple lesson. Some of it concerns fate, or what we understand to be fate, and the related dispensation of blame for the occasional shitty hand which we may be dealt.

'But you can't charge yourself with crimes in that way,' said Venn. 'You may as well say that the parents be the cause of a murder by the child, for without the parents the child would never have been begot.'

So, I guess it's about personal responsibility in the sense of suggesting that human agency plays a greater part in how our lives work out than any nebulous ideas of destiny, such as - for example - those which may seemingly root us to a specific patch of earth.

Human beings, in their generous endeavour to construct a hypothesis that shall not degrade a First Cause, have always hesitated to conceive a dominant power of lower moral quality than their own; and, even while they sit down and weep by the waters of Babylon, invent excuses for the oppression which prompts their tears.

The strength of The Return of the Native is not that any of this is necessarily spelled out, but that it allows us to piece these ideas together by whichever terms make most sense to the reader, avoiding the somewhat didactic qualities of, for example, Dickens, not to mention his cloying excess of sentiment.

We open with a sort of death, something coming out of the night, Thomasin returning stillborn to Egdon in the Reddleman's funereal conveyance as bonfires are lit in homage to the death of Guy Fawkes; then conclude with the Mayday rebirth of Spring, Diggory Venn who has scrubbed up fairly well and is no longer bright red, and Clym at last finding his calling as a preacher, but one who prefers not to simply spout doctrine or to go through motions determined by any external influence.

He left alone creeds and systems of philosophy, finding enough and more than enough to occupy his tongue in the opinions and actions common to all good men.

It's therefore about facing the future, I suppose, or something along those lines. It could have been shorter. I'm not sure I don't prefer the sound of the conclusion Hardy submitted for the earlier serialisation, wherein Venn remains a mysterious, borderline supernatural figure; but this 1912 iteration nevertheless holds together well, possibly excepting the laborious distended arse-ache of Diggory Venn and Thomasin Yeobright finally brought together by agency of a missing glove.

Nova Express

William S. Burroughs Nova Express (1964)
This was one of three novels in a collected paperback edition I stumbled across, the other two being Soft Machine and The Wild Boys. I didn't already have a copy of The Wild Boys, and I don't even think I'd read Nova Express, so I picked it up because it seemed to close a gap. First, I re-read The Soft Machine. It doesn't actually seem like it was that long ago that I read it, but according to what I wrote, I wasn't able to get much sense out of it, so it seemed like another attempt couldn't hurt, plus some minor obsessive compulsive impulse nagged at me, suggesting that it would be weird to leave the first third of the compendium unread, regardless of what seemed like a previous and fairly recent reading. Anyway, it didn't make a whole lot of sense this time either.

Nova Express seemed a little more coherent in so much as that Burroughs just about gets away with claiming it's a science-fiction novel describing an invasive Venusian force taking over our planet, but you probably won't be too surprised to learn that at no point did I have to flip to the cover to check I hadn't picked up an Asimov by accident. It's mostly a cut-up novel, and I seem to remember reading that it's pretty much a remix of Naked Lunch, one of several if anyone's counting. So it is what it is, and certain passages work to create a sort of visionary narrative by impressionist means, but it gets very repetitive after a while and its impact is almost certainly less than what it may have been in 1964. The way it is written, or perhaps I mean assembled, is well suited to the conclusion which, according to Burroughs, represents the ascendency of the invasive forces as the breakdown of meaning, and by association, narrative; but frankly, it's not a whole bundle of chuckles. This sort of thing worked better when the pill is sweetened with a few interludes of regular material written in a straight line. Otherwise the experience of reading gets a little headachey and thankless.

Candide

Voltaire Candide (1759)
It seemed like time I dipped in a toe, never having actually read anything by the man whilst having lived with his influence for most of my existence. I'm actually listening to a Cabaret Voltaire album as I write this, funnily enough.

I was hoping for wacky proto-science-fiction, which Candide sort of isn't, but never mind. It turns out that I was thinking of Micromégas.

Candide describes the global journey of a young man identified as such, his progress notably incorporating the fictional land of Eldorado, vaguely situated in south America and probably commenting either on Thomas More's Utopia or else its legacy. The novel was a relatively new thing at the time of writing in so much as that it was still doing all sorts of weird things which no-one really seems to bother with these days. Candide is allegorical in the sense of Gulliver's Travels being allegorical - and I'm quite excited by the realisation that Voltaire met Swift whilst living in London - and so our hero's progress serves as a sequence of philosophical metaphors illustrating his ruminations on society, humanity, existence, and how these relate to the religious thought of the day. Specifically it's mostly concerned with whether or not we're living in the best of all possible worlds, as suggested in 1710 by Gottfried Leibniz as a means of accounting for the persistence of evil in a cosmos ruled over by a loving God. Voltaire found plenty of evil upon which to pass comment in 1759, and if he reaches an actual conclusion, I seem to have missed it, so I assume this is more about asking questions, ensuring that certain institutions feel duly uncomfortable, and taking the piss - although not quite to the extent of Swift.

As is probably obvious, I'm somewhat out of my depth here, so any or all of the above may actually be bollocks, but to continue regardless: Candide seems much softer focus than Gulliver, being closer to a ribbing than the weapons grade sarcasm of Swift, excepting infrequent incidents of rape, hanging and related horrors; although it could be that the translation has dulled the narrative's sharper edges. This one was handled by Lowell Bair who did a pretty decent job on Jules Verne as far as I recall, so who knows?

Candide seems fairly light, but was nevertheless a pleasure, and sufficiently so as to justify my keeping an eye open for the aforementioned Micromégas. Where my appreciation may be muted due to having precious little clue about the politics of 1759, the novel still represents a fascinating cameo of eighteenth century attitudes, not least those regarding science and evolution, with the relationship of ape to humanity being something which people were quite clearly thinking about.

The Blal

A.E. van Vogt The Blal (1965)
Having just done the calculations, I realise there are now only five novels by A.E. van Vogt which I am yet to read, which is pretty weird considering how many times I've struggled through one and consequently ended up telling myself it will be the last. On the other hand, it seems there are still a fair few of his short story collections I haven't tackled, which is probably only because I never see them in any of the usual second hand stores. I'd say that I'm maybe not so keen on his short fiction, but it's obviously bollocks because I keep reading it, and for all those incomprehensible brain scramblers I've had to wade through, the good stuff always makes it feel as though the tears and headaches and double vision have been worth it. Of course, one problem with the short story collections is that they tend to feature a lot of the same material, but then seeing as half of his novels were short stories welded together, I don't suppose I have much grounds for complaint.

Of this bunch, I'd already read five of the eight, some in short form, some human centipeded into larger novels, some both, but van Vogt can be absurdly dense and difficult to retain so second or third readings are often rewarding, not to mention surprising when a particular story turns out to be nothing like how you remember it. I'm sure War of Nerves did something completely different the last couple of times I read it.

Enchanted Village and Vault of the Beast render this collection approximately essential, in the event of you not already having either in seven other van Vogt collections. If The Blal falls short of qualifying as the absolutely definitive selection, it's decent and there's nothing bad here. Also, Final Command is interesting for its arguably bearing a closer resemblance to certain themes which inform Blade Runner to a more pronounced extent than anything from the Philip K. Dick novel of which Ridley Scott apparently managed thirty pages, which would be the second occasion of Mr. Hovis advert filming something which just happened to seem a teensy bit reminiscent of a particular van Vogt short story.