The Dark Knight Returns

Frank Miller, Klaus Janson & Lynn Varley The Dark Knight Returns (1986)
As for Pow! the comic book growing up, I guess this was approximately where it all started, at least in terms of public perception. Watchmen is better remembered but this came first by about six months. Excepting Viz, I'd stopped reading comics, having given up on 2000AD back in 1980 and not really thought about it since. I found it odd when I overheard my friends Charlie and Garreth talking about comic books, specifically Batman of all things. What the fuck? I opined, and so Garreth lent me a prestige format issue of Frank Miller's version of Batman so as to impress upon me that it was significantly different to the version of Batman who routinely found himself caught in giant mousetraps; so that was probably the start of my comic book habit, or a significant contributing factor.

I haven't read this in probably twenty years, and have been reluctant to do so of late for fear of what I might find, given Frank Miller's apparent recent transformation into Ron Swanson; but Kafka was boring me shitless, and I'd already resorted to Grant Morrison's All-Star Superman by way of light relief, so Batman seemed like the next logical step. As everyone in the universe knows, The Dark Knight Returns is essentially grittily realistic Batman or, to fine tune the definition, if Batman were a real person, then he would almost certainly have to be something in this direction and the most pertinent questions would be whether there's any real difference between a homicidal maniac and a homicidal maniac claiming to be the good guy. All the moral baggage - or absence thereof - one might anticipate given that it's Frank Miller at the typewriter is already there and very much packed, which I probably didn't notice last time around, being a bit slow on the uptake for most of the eighties; and yet The Dark Knight Returns remains as powerful as ever because Miller's view of the world is, at worst, simply massively pessimistic, and is communicated without even hinting at any sort of agenda. Batman fights crime, as we would expect, but is himself a criminal as he freely admits, and a particularly violent one. Everything else is on us, depending on whether or not we're cheering every time he kicks someone's head in or breaks their fingers. Miller isn't suggesting that any of this is good so much as that there's a certain inevitability which comes with certain situations, and particularly so when we start asking questions about morality, justice and all that good stuff. The Dark Knight Returns is therefore a post-Vietnam Batman, one left permanently changed by a conflict which blurs established notions of what the right thing may be. It's dark and unpleasant because anything else would be dishonest, and maybe you're not actually supposed to be cheering along like some fucking simpleton.

So never mind Batman, this really was a whole new deal, not least in terms of how the story was told, further distancing the familiar names from their primary colour origins. If not conventionally beautiful, it's difficult to look away from the scratchy expressionist lines, with the story structured just loosely enough as to feel organic, quite unlike the rigidly mathematical progression of Watchmen, and hence somehow more truthful regardless of the presence of the guy from outer space. I've never been a massive fan of Batman or his specific type - the freelance cop who beats up the ne'er do well and returns the stolen wallet to the millionaire - but just for once someone actually got it right, and this was that book, and I suspect Frank Miller is probably a more complicated individual than we realised, at least in so far as that he's since apologised for Holy Terror.

The Trial

Franz Kafka The Trial (1914)
I'm sure we all know about this one, it being the book which seems to have given us the term Kafkaesque, describing actions where the mechanism or structure of what occurs is so ludicrously convoluted and confusing as to negate whatever the original point may have been; so here, as you may already know, we have Josef K who faces trial without ever quite discovering what he's supposed to have done. I assumed it would be a courtroom drama, albeit more by way of a written equivalent to expressionist cinema than Perry Mason, but we don't even get that far. Josef is arrested, and there's something approximating a conclusion at the end, but the intermediate chapters mostly comprise impenetrable conversations with his friends, relatives, acquaintances, and colleagues as he prepares himself for whatever may lay ahead, and these chapters are such that it doesn't really seem to matter which order they appear in. I liked Metamorphosis a lot, but Metamorphosis was relatively snappy compared to this which, despite some nicely made observations, never really adds up to anything and is thus something of a slog, possibly because I suspect the whole point was specifically its failure to add up to anything.

The introduction explains how The Trial was one of a number of unpublished works found amongst Kafka's belongings following his death in 1924, and he requested that it should be burned. Obviously it wasn't, and so we have this, a work with which the author himself was presumably unhappy, and I can see why. Without bearing the burden of any specific flaw, The Trial is simply a better idea than it is a novel unless you really, really love the fuck out of Kafka. For my money, it's readable, but then that album which Simon Napier-Bell once patched together out of Marc Bolan outtakes and offcuts is probably listenable by some definition.

The Romans

Donald Cotton The Romans (1987)
Once was that I routinely bought these Doctor Who novelisations published by Target, and although they weren't all that I read, I sure was reading a lot more of these than I was reading anything else. This is why I've always found the magic of Doctor Who books is that they get you reading defence to be mostly pish given the number of people I know in their forties and fifties who still won't read much of anything except this sort of thing. Anyway, I thankfully lost interest somewhere past the halfway mark of the eighties, leaving twenty or so novelisations specifically based on the television show which I never bought. More recently, something akin to a mid-life crisis inspired me to hunt down the remaining volumes so as to fill gaps in the collection, which is what I've done and why I have this one. I know full well that a few of them will be utter shite, but it seemed like something I needed to do and most of them were still pretty cheap, and I somehow felt I owed it to my younger, less-worldly self; and, I suppose I should admit, there was just a little curiosity in there somewhere.

I vaguely recall having read Donald Cotton's Myth Makers novelisation back in the depths of time and found it surprisingly witty, and I vaguely recall having enjoyed The Romans a lot more than I expected to when it came out on VHS, so here I am. Happily, my instincts seem to have been right in this instance. The Romans, as seen on the telly when I was two, is an historical farce, so plenty of comic misunderstandings based on mistaken identity. Cotton avoids the pitfalls of describing something funny which once happened on telly by rendering Dennis Spooner's original story as a series of increasingly implausible letters, notes, and diary entries written by the main characters, in other words an epistolary novel - which, I should probably add, I had to look up. I say implausible because, for one example, Ian Chesterton's portion of narrative is told in letters he writes addressed to the headmaster of the school at which he once worked, written presumably in the event of his getting back to sixties England at some point; and he fills these letters with detail, writing at length during moments snatched here and there while serving as a slave on a Roman galley, or imprisoned at the circus pending a fight to the death with Andre the Giant; but the implausibility of said letters is part of the sheer joy of them, and if it's a problem, you've probably read too many of these things.

The various narratives perfectly adapt Cotton's considerable wit to the voices of the characters with the understated humour of a Peter Cook monologue. For example, here we have William Hartnell learning how to play the lyre, intent on giving a performance of Thermodynamic Functions, an atonal composition of his own which I'm sure would have pleased Tony Hancock no end.

I soon mastered the rudimentary principles on which the lyre can be persuaded to operate, and was endeavouring to implement some permutations which had occurred to me involving its more advanced harmonic frequencies, when I was distracted from this pleasant pastime by a series of thumps and bangs, which appeared to emanate from the next room.

My immediate impression was that my neighbour might possibly be a percussion player, anxious to accompany my impromptu recital; and glad as always to accept professional assistance whenever offered, I strode rapidly to the communicating door, which I flung open with a few well-chosen words of welcome, which now escape me. But no matter; for it was soon obvious that for once I was under a misapprehension.

The Romans novelisation is great, and genuinely great, not least as a reminder of what I liked about this thing in the first place, namely how it was once prone to flying off in all sorts of unexpected directions, back when narrative variation was more than just a matter of what it reminds viewers of this week. Above all, at least for me, it's gratifying to know there was at least some occasional justification to my reading these things to the exclusion of almost everything else.

Drowning in Beauty: the Neo-Decadent Anthology

Justin Isis & Daniel Corrick (editors)

Drowning in Beauty: the Neo-Decadent Anthology (2018)
I'm not particularly well informed when it comes to the history of literature and the movements which have come and gone, excepting in relation to science-fiction or where writing has occasionally intersected with painting. I tentatively associate the Decadents with Symbolist art of the late nineteenth century, implying ornate, even florid prose following the logic of the mythic more than the crudely realistic, which at least squares with Huysmans' Against Nature, and possibly David Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus, plus a load of others which I've never read. Happily, these potential gaps in my knowledge don't seem to matter too much because the Neo-Decadents aren't in the revival business, at least not in the sense of certain sniggering twats with cogs and watch-springs glued to their top hats; and these Neo-Decadents are additionally defined by what they're against, much of which has me punching the air because up until now, I thought it was mostly just me. Crucially, for the sake of this review, amongst that which they reject we have writing which aspires to be something in another medium, writer's workshops, writing advice with all of its attendant careerist bullshit about character development, story arcs - basically all of the rote tedium which gets in the way of the actual writing, and which is usually only necessary if you can't actually fucking write and therefore have no business attempting to do so. Not everyone has a book in them, and maybe we should leave it to those who have.

The collection kicks off with an informative introduction and a couple of manifestos setting out the stall, much of which brought me great joy for reasons already stated, and which promises great things to come in the pages which follow; and for what may be the first time in publishing history - if you'll excuse the apparent hyperbole - great things do indeed come in the pages which follow. Drowning in Beauty seems to be loosely themed around varying notions of beauty, but without feeling as though anyone has been at work with a shoe horn, and even where the beauty is weird and upsetting from certain angles, its pleasure aesthetic is nevertheless communicated without recourse to any of the usual clichés - ironic contrast, or the sort of button pushing I'm sure you'll learn all about at the writers' workshop. These twelve authors work with different levels of realism, telling quite different kinds of story but with the same love of rich, expressive language where a single sentence may undertake more than one crudely descriptive task. It's ornate but never purely for the sake of design and even where that which is described may remain mysterious, the voices are clear, with nothing one could call impenetrable.

That said, I personally didn't quite connect with Avalon Brantley's Great Seizers' Ghost - more down to setting than the way it was told - but that was the only one. Initial skimming gave me cause to raise an eyebrow and roll an eye at all the transgressive weirdy music references in James Champagne's XYschaton, but upon reading the story I found it did the exact opposite of what I'd anticipated, justified what would have seemed clichéd under other circumstances, and was ultimately unlike anything I've read before - somehow deeply appalling and yet unmistakably descriptive of a form of beauty. Other highlights include Justin Isis' The Quest for Nail Art, Colby Smith's Somni Draconis, Brendan Connell's Molten Rage and Ursula Pflug's Fires Halfway, and I'll stop there rather than simply typing out the contents page because it's all good - great even, frequently startling and strange without having to pull silly faces, all of which makes Drowning in Beauty an absolute joy to have read, and a breath of fresh air the size of continental Europe after Conan fucking Doyle's droning train timetables. If you like to read, meaning actual writing, meaning anything you might read for reasons other than that it reminds you of something else and will probably do what you expect it to do, then you need the Neo-Decadents in your life.

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

Arthur Conan Doyle The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892)
I seem to recall that I hated The Lost World and regarded Doyle's Professor Challenger as a massive twat, while Doyle himself regarded The Lost World as one of his proper novels, unlike all that populist detective stuff; and Sherlock Holmes seems to have enjoyed a significant resurgence in popularity of late, most of which I've tried to avoid, the exception being a novel by Philip Purser-Hallard because I'd happily pay full price to read an Andy Capp novel if Philip Purser-Hallard had written it. We've had Cucumber as Holmes on the telly, an ingenious update in which Watson is advised to deal with his PTSD by writing a blog, which is well peng and edgy and shit; and we've had Elementary because apparently we'll now watch any old shit described by Netflix as bingeworthy if there's some homeopathic trace of Sherlock in the mix.

So why did I read this thing again?

Firstly, it was free, something which caught my eye at a lockdown bookswap event when not much else did; secondly, because I loved the Basil Rathbone movies when I was a teenager, and even to the point of reading one of the novels, possibly The Sign of Four, which I seem to remember enjoying; and thirdly, I suppose, to see what the fuss was about.

Not much, as it happens. Adventures collects a load of the short stories from The Strand or whatever it was in which they were published, and they're very short - mostly twenty pages or so, which doesn't really allow much room in which anything can happen. That said, Doyle's Holmes is more engaging than his Challenger, and it's quite nice to read something of modest narrative consequence; and they're nicely written with an elegant turn of phrase.

The problem is that at this length, these stories don't have the space in which to be anything more elaborate than crossword puzzles, and so become repetitive very quickly as one proceeds through the collection - possibly depending upon how much one enjoys crossword puzzles. Typically, most of the story is anecdotal, reported to Holmes, or to Watson, or else by one to the other. Usually someone or something will be missing and the details will seem almost ostentatiously resistant to analysis, which of course guarantees that they'll yield in about another fifteen pages; then we find out that Holmes was right, and why, and onto the next tale, repeat to fade…

I'm sure these tales had their charm when in isolation in whatever periodical, but the cramming only serves to expose their flaws, how thin they actually are, how absolutely lacking in ambition they were, wishing only to divert the reader for thirty minutes or so. Here and there we have glimpses of Doyle's thoughts on detection, even how we perceive the world around us, what we notice and what we miss, but in each case, just as it gets interesting, space demands we suddenly think about an intriguingly shaped stain on some cunt's trousers for the next few paragraphs. Being as I don't actually sploodge in my pants every time someone mentions Victorian England, top hats, or most exceedingly delightful difference engines, the appeal of these things began to wear thin for me after the first hundred or so pages, and by the half-way point I was no longer able to keep my concentration affixed to whatever inconsequential observation of nothing particularly interesting was being made upon the page; so I gave up and read something better.

Lesson learned.