Frederik Pohl & C.M. Kornbluth Gladiator-at-Law (1955)
I've been trying to read this one since last April, having started it maybe five or six times, never once generating momentum sufficient to stave off the temptation to read something else. It's been praised as a classic in many places, and whoever last claimed it to be the greatest thing ever written did so in such a way as to bypass my laboriously constructed defences. I wasn't really intending to bother with any further Kornbluth. Beyond Wolfbane, Search the Sky, and maybe a couple of the short stories, I've found the rest mostly an uphill slog. He could write for sure, but too readily descended into a sort of self-congratulatory jabbering, or at least jabbering which felt self-congratulatory to me, like a man having a conversation with himself, or one of those fucking tedious Marx Brothers routines comprising somebody saying something stupid very fast over and over and over. Each time I came back to this one, I had no fucking idea of who was who, what was happening, or what any of it was supposed to mean, and this was usually by page twenty.
This time, vaguely recalling some of the characters from the previous five or six attempts, I felt I had a bit of a handle on it and was duly able to take some enjoyment from reading the thing, but I remain mystified as to the classic status. It's a legal drama in so much as that it's the story of a lawyer involved in a number of dimly related cases, and it's sort of witty here and there, but I still haven't got a fucking clue as to what happens or why. It's set in a future society with a pronounced class divide, the lower tier of which is kept in line with bread and circuses, and it's obviously a metaphor for rampant consumerism and the way America seemed to be heading in the fifties. Maybe the message seemed more profound at the time, because Gladiator-at-Law feels very much like a period piece given that the future has turned out arguably worse than predicted, with its street gangs seemingly resembling the juvenile delinquents one used to see depicted in older issues of Mad magazine, all Brylcreem and chewing gum. The book is not without merit, but it probably would have helped had I not been expected to accommodate some new character with a comedy name every five pages or so.
I've been trying to read this one since last April, having started it maybe five or six times, never once generating momentum sufficient to stave off the temptation to read something else. It's been praised as a classic in many places, and whoever last claimed it to be the greatest thing ever written did so in such a way as to bypass my laboriously constructed defences. I wasn't really intending to bother with any further Kornbluth. Beyond Wolfbane, Search the Sky, and maybe a couple of the short stories, I've found the rest mostly an uphill slog. He could write for sure, but too readily descended into a sort of self-congratulatory jabbering, or at least jabbering which felt self-congratulatory to me, like a man having a conversation with himself, or one of those fucking tedious Marx Brothers routines comprising somebody saying something stupid very fast over and over and over. Each time I came back to this one, I had no fucking idea of who was who, what was happening, or what any of it was supposed to mean, and this was usually by page twenty.
This time, vaguely recalling some of the characters from the previous five or six attempts, I felt I had a bit of a handle on it and was duly able to take some enjoyment from reading the thing, but I remain mystified as to the classic status. It's a legal drama in so much as that it's the story of a lawyer involved in a number of dimly related cases, and it's sort of witty here and there, but I still haven't got a fucking clue as to what happens or why. It's set in a future society with a pronounced class divide, the lower tier of which is kept in line with bread and circuses, and it's obviously a metaphor for rampant consumerism and the way America seemed to be heading in the fifties. Maybe the message seemed more profound at the time, because Gladiator-at-Law feels very much like a period piece given that the future has turned out arguably worse than predicted, with its street gangs seemingly resembling the juvenile delinquents one used to see depicted in older issues of Mad magazine, all Brylcreem and chewing gum. The book is not without merit, but it probably would have helped had I not been expected to accommodate some new character with a comedy name every five pages or so.
No comments:
Post a Comment