Crap Holiday

 

Jenny Morrill Crap Holiday (2018)
At the risk of eclipsing a certain orange president in terms of sheer lack of self-awareness, books which began life as blog posts can be a bit of a lottery. That which might seem like the wittiest thing on Earth in the space of five minutes spent scrolling down a screen can turn into a six hour coach trip sat next to the funniest man in the marketing department once transposed to print. I couldn't get past the first ten pages of Jenny Lawson's Let's Pretend This Never Happened and it was the same with David Thorne's I'll Go Home Then; It's Warm and Has Chairs. Cold hard ink on paper plus time somehow exposes failings which might otherwise go unnoticed.

Jenny Morrill tries to avoid the pitfalls by writing something in the spirit of her genuinely wonderful World of Crap blog rather than just selotaping old jokes into a notebook, and mostly it works as a legitimate novel. I say mostly, because the arrows haven't quite lined up with the target here in so much as that the tone of the novel occasionally sits at odds with the subject, and it may be significant that the chapters are mostly short, each being about the length of a blog post - just sufficient length to get in, deliver the gag with a customary roll of the eyes, then get out again.

Melissa is a vaguely directionless young woman with a low tolerance for bullshit who passes long-suffering and caustic commentary on her work, her friends, acquaintances, flatmates, and her entire existence, and she's very, very funny, just as World of Crap is very, very funny, taking grim delight in the absurdity of the shabby and the eternally disappointing. Here she spends four days at a new age festival surrounded by fucking idiots with only a Daniel O'Donnell souvenir mug for intelligent conversation, and it's painful, and great because it's painful, but I could never quite rid myself of the feeling that Melissa simply would never have attended a new age festival, and probably would have faked her own death in order to get out of going, as she pretty much admits in the first person narrative; which leaves us with the possibility of the author having deliberately placed her character in awful situations entirely for the sake of generating sarcasm, which by extension seems a bit easy and obvious - and actually a little like sending Garry Bushell to a gay pride event because you basically know exactly what you're going to get. So while the jokes work and the new age targets are absolutely deserving, the feeling of watching them delivered by conveyor belt only to be picked off one by one somewhat undermines the integrity of Crap Holiday as a novel - as distinct from a series of amusingly withering remarks. Thus when Melissa gets her arse into gear at the end, it ends up reading like something done because that's how this sort of novel is supposed to go.

On the other hand, it is fucking funny in places, and I suspect some of the problem may be that it was written specifically as a comedy where some of it is actually quite grim and probably didn't need to worry about remaining quite so witty on every single page. At best, it reminds me oddly of Brautigan's Dreaming of Babylon - possibly because I read Dreaming of Babylon only the other week - in telling the tale of someone drifting haplessly through their own absurd existence seemingly without much say in where it's going, except that Melissa has a somewhat more dour outlook than Brautigan's private detective.

Regardless of reservations expressed above - none of which really diminish the pleasure of reading this thing - Crap Holiday is almost a great novel, and is impressive for a debut, not least as something written at a tangent to Morrill's usual semiotic deconstruction of old episodes of Rainbow or things found inside packets of seventies breakfast cereal.

Yesterday's Tomorrows

 

Rian Hughes, Grant Morrison, Chris Reynolds and others
Yesterday's Tomorrows (2010)
I remember thinking Grant Morrison's Dare was amazing at the time, but apparently not so amazing as to keep me from flogging all my issues of Revolver on eBay; then, more recently, I found this which reprints the same along with other things by Rian Hughes. This is going to be a bit painful because I've met Rian Hughes and he's a friend of at least one friend - or was - and he seems a decent guy, and I genuinely love his design work; but this ain't great.

Dare retains the initial thrill I recall experiencing thirty years ago, or whenever it was, but then suddenly stops as though they ran out of shocking things to do with the poor cunt and decided just to cut to the explosion. It probably wasn't so obvious in monthly instalments, but read in one sitting it comes across as comically weak. This was the era of the comic growing up, Rupert Bear dealing crack in Nutwood and so on, so naturally the latest version of Dan Dare turned him into a metaphor for the failure of England's dreaming and a colonial embarrassment who buddies up to Morrison's version of Thatcher. Here she's even more like Mosley than the real one and her big scheme is to win votes by solving a national food shortage, all endorsed by Dare, so it would seem; and the cheap food source is produced by a biological monstrosity made out of recycled members of the unemployed and resembling four giant penises penetrating four vast vaginal orifices to yield a cheap nutritious Pot Noodle style substance somewhat resembling spunk. It's all a bit exhausting, and our Thatcher substitute is quite naturally business partners with the Mekon. Morrison did this much better in St. Swithin's Day, The New Adventures of Hitler, and probably almost everything else he's ever written; and while Dan Dare might be a relic of a certain era with all sorts of discredited cultural baggage in tow, I'd say it's a bit of a stretch to call him a bully. Even Belardinelli's Dan Dare as Sid Vicious seems ultimately more faithful and certainly less insulting.

Yet, such were my tastes back in 1990 that Rian Hughes art was enough to carry the thing; except with hindsight I realise that it's mainly the deco buildings and the tailfins which do the heavy lifting, with the figures seeming almost intrusive. Unless reduced to design elements seen in the distance, Hughes' people are awkward, angular, and seem forced, as though they're deco buildings trying to look like people; and the lines which serve the landscape so well remain consistent for the sake of the design, despite being ill-fitted to anything organic, particularly the human face. One can see what he was getting at - possibly something with the elegance of Fougasse - but Hughes' figures are sabotaged by the style to which he was apparently committed.

Regrettably, I felt the same about the rest - strips reprinted from Mauritania and elsewhere. The figure work is awkward, despite its best efforts, and painfully so, reducing the potential for anything truly expressive, turning it all into an exercise in retro-cool with little discernible substance. The Lighted Cities is sort of atmospheric, probably because it's short; The Science Service is barely comprehensible, and I've already read Really & Truly once this decade, which was more than enough. There's also some sort of Raymond Chandler adaptation but I couldn't face it.

Design-wise, I'd say Rian Hughes is right up there with Neville Brody and Malcolm Garrett, but the cartoon strips unfortunately weren't all they could have been.

Dreaming of Babylon

Richard Brautigan Dreaming of Babylon (1977)
In between bouts of kicking myself for having failed to read more Brautigan earlier, I continue to find delight in each new novel, and so much so that it's hard to avoid the fear of eventually coming to the one that reads like Jeffrey Archer channelling Ted Nugent, at which point the bubble will accordingly burst.

Anyway, it hasn't happened with this one, and Dreaming of Babylon constitutes further evidence of Brautigan's genius despite being some way outside what one might reasonably assume was his comfort zone. Specifically it's a detective novel, or at least a detective novel filtered through the Brautigan lens and seems potentially the least autobiographical of any of his that I've read. The great strength of his writing, I would say, is that it feels so much like personal experience. This one is no exception, so hopefully serves as a testament to the author's imagination.

Dreaming of Babylon presumably differs from much detective fiction in focussing less on the detection and more on the unusually shabby existence of its central character stumbling from one ludicrous scenario to the next, usually failing and failing hard, and keeping himself going by daydreaming of Babylon with what little imagination he has at his disposal - which just about runs to something resembling a Flash Gordon cinema serial. He owes money to everyone, can't find work, has no car, no office, no secretary, can't pay the rent, and is just about getting by on telling lies and the sort of feckless optimism which only the terminally stupid can achieve.

My client whoever they were hadn't arrived yet.

I was very curious about who would show up.

I didn't know whether it would be a man or a woman. If it was a woman, I hoped that she would be very rich and beautiful and she would fall madly in love with me and want me to retire from the private-eye business and live a life of luxury, and I'd spend half my time fucking her, the other half dreaming of Babylon.

We have murder and confrontation, even firearms and knives, but the core of the form - what was done, by whom and why - remains vague, not much more than background detail, just as Dreaming of Babylon is the story of a guy who amounts to background detail in his own daily existence. It's profound, sad, and funny without digging you in the ribs and pulling faces. Actually, it's so profound as to make what's it about seem like a stupid question.

The Moon Pool

 

Abraham Merritt The Moon Pool (1919)
To recap the salient points from the previous review, Merritt was huge in his day - in terms of reputation and sales rather than actual physical volume - but seems to have pretty much sunk from view in recent years. This was his first novel and is the second I've read, and is probably better than The Face in the Abyss in some respects while being more or less the same sort of deal, belonging very much to the genre inhabited by Conan Doyle's Lost World, much of what was written by Edgar Rice Burroughs, and particularly H. Rider Haggard's She, which I gather substantially influenced Merritt; thus we have scientific blokes who venture forth and discover a lost civilisation of some description, consequently resulting in thrills, scrapes, and at least one of their number copping off with a lady in a metallic bra. I'm drawn to Merritt specifically because he was a major influence on not only Robert Moore Williams, but also Richard Shaver; and for what it may be worth, the influence on H.P. Lovecraft - with whom he additionally collaborated at one point - is difficult to miss, particularly on the likes of The Dream Quest of Unreadable Kadath. In fact, it's probably fair to say that The Moon Pool amounts to Lovecraft with better planning and less Nigel Farage. I've seen it claimed that Merritt's writing was unfortunately of its time, usually meaning openly racist, but if so - leaving aside certain creaking stereotypes - actual xenophobia doesn't seem to feature in this one so far as I noticed.

In its favour, The Moon Pool gets off to an astonishing start, albeit one which quite clearly betrays the influence of Robert W. Chambers' The King in Yellow, promising weird fiction filtered through a semi-scientific lens of such focus as to foreshadow Asimov during certain passages.

 

'I know how hard it is, Larry,' I answered. 'And don't think I have any idea that the phenomenon is supernatural in the sense spiritualists and table turners have given that word. I do think it is supernormal; energised by a force unknown to modern science—but that doesn't mean I think it outside the radius of science.'

Thus do we venture forth into the depths of a lost underground and formerly advanced civilisation - identified as Muria but probably referring to Lemuria - ruled by the Silent Ones, who clearly aren't human, and at the mercy of the terrible Dweller, the inhabitant of the moon pool of the title and who may or may not be made of moonlight; which Merritt admirably attempts to describe in approximately sciencey terms of sufficient conviction as to facilitate suspension of disbelief. So, as I already implied, it reads not unlike Lovecraft but without the drippy overwritten mysticism.

Unfortunately though, aside from our eminently likeable narrator, we also have his cosmopolitan band of adventuresome guys to contend with, comprising Olaf, Marakinoff, and Larry. The main point of Olaf seems to be the occasional comment about how something or other seems a bit like something from Norse myth. The Russian scientist Marakinoff doesn't really get to do much more than Olaf and never quite delivers on the promise of being the scheming bad guy. Larry O'Keefe, on the other hand, never shuts up, and barely a fucking page passes without our being reminded of just how Irish he is, which gets seriously tiresome.

'Sainted St. Patrick!' O'Keefe gazed ruminatively at his automatic. 'An' he expected me to kill that with this. Well, as Fergus O'Connor said when they sent him out to slaughter a wild bull with a potato knife, Ye'll niver rayilize how I appreciate the confidence ye show in me!'

Everything that happens reminds O'Keefe of something Irish and we get to hear all about it, and eventually I forgot what I was reading beyond having a vague impression of it occurring underground. I don't recall any specific mention of O'Keefe wearing a green bowler hat or carrying a pig under his arm, but my concentration wasn't all it could have been during a few of his more extended observations.

Additionally, as we come to the inevitable conclusion in an underground war, I couldn't help but notice misty-eyed eulogies to those making the ultimate sacrifice - which struck me as a little peculiar for something written in 1919; and Merritt mumbles darkly when referring to the Russian revolution, as possibly embodied by Marakinoff. Neither detail necessarily leaves a taste anything like so unsavoury as any of Lovecraft's odes to Tommy Robinson, but it doesn't help after all the greenface we've had to wade through in order to get to the actual fucking story. In terms of novels wherein adventuresome types discover underground civilisations, The Moon Pool could have been one of the best had Larry spent a lot less time banging on about Leprechauns and Brian Boru.

Robo-Hunter: Verdus

John Wagner, Ian Gibson & José Luis Ferrer Robo-Hunter: Verdus (1979)
I just couldn't leave this one in the book store. The pull was too powerful. I grew up reading 2000AD from issue twenty onwards and this was, in my opinion, one of the very best things from those early years before the comic grew up and Judge Dredd took to dropping the occasional reference to Baudelaire. Robo-Hunter was Sam Slade, a man who hunted robots as is probably obvious from the title. Here, in his debut strip, he travels to an entire planet of robots.

Seriously, what more could you fucking ask for?

More or less every single page of this thing was like stepping on a memory sherbert landmine, and best of all is that somehow this comic strip about a man who shoots robots which is very clearly targetted at twelve-year old boys and which makes not one single reference to a Portishead album remains an absolute delight when read in Trump year IV by a fifty-five year old man. Even the jokes are still funny.

I think it works because Robo-Hunter takes itself approximately seriously whilst also being completely fucking stupid, and joyously so. I'd forgotten, for example, how Sam is held prisoner by BO, the unfortunately designated sewer robot, and is required to play Robopoly in order to win his freedom. Robopoly is robot-themed Monopoly complete with tiny robots as playing pieces. BO's pieces cheat, and so Sam bribes the tiny robot coppers inhabiting the board game's jail to knobble his opponent. You simply never had that sort of attention to detail in Blade Runner.

Verdus heaps absurdity on absurdity as it goes on, somehow without ever seeming cynical, culminating in robot religious leaders arguing in the robot parliament, and one of them is a mechanical Rabbi doubtless drawn from the films Woody Allen made when he was funny and arguably less creepy; and it works because Gibson's art has just enough elasticity to stretch to such ludicrous excesses without losing its dramatic footing. He was never quite one of my favourite artists, and I don't even like to think about those later strips which seemed to be mostly just wavy lines approximating women resembling Daisy Duck, but he had the balance just right with this one, keeping those loose lines in check with large areas of black or letratone.

I sort of object to the whole thing about spoilers, because if the matter of whether or not the butler did it is pivotal to your enjoyment of whatever it is you'd rather not have spoiled, then you're probably watching some shit allegedly bingeworthy TV show rather than engaging with genuine culture; but, even though Robo-Hunter is pushing forty, I'll refrain from telling you how it ends in case you don't already know because I'd forgotten the ending - which is actually quite weird and shocking and is probably indicative of why Robo-Hunter could only ever have been born from the pages of 2000AD. I guess I'd forgotten how great this comic used to be when they got it right. Sometimes it really was the galaxy's greatest, and this was one of those times.

The Stars My Destination

Alfred Bester The Stars My Destination (1956)
This is why I've tended to steer clear of the classics. I'm sure everything said of this novel is approximately true, but as with Asimov's Foundation, Zelazny's Lord of Light, Larry Niven's entire body of work, and many, many others, I probably should have read it when I was a teenager; because I'm nearly fifty-five and I think the moment has gone for myself and this novel. I don't recall being particularly knocked out by The Demolished Man either, for what that may be worth.

The Stars My Destination tells of Gully Foyle, a raging thickie stranded in space who swears bloody vengeance on the crew of a passing spaceship which fails to respond to his distress call. He's eventually rescued by other means, has his face tattooed, receives an education, acquires superhuman powers, disguises himself as the bon vivant owner of a weird futuristic fairground and, in pursuing his vendetta, saves the world from a super-weapon which presumably serves as part of some cold war metaphor. It's weird, fast-paced, imaginative, and ticks all of the boxes which might require ticking, and yet I just wasn't feeling it. For all it has in its favour, it tends to jabber in much the same way as C.M. Kornbluth, lending the text the slightly disagreeable jazzy quality of those Marx Brothers movies amounting to somebody saying something stupid very fast, and that's before we even get to the parole in libertà of the finale.

Some men on the internet said that The Stars My Destination is a precursor to cyberpunk with its pacing and corporate espionage, but I couldn't really give a shit about cyberpunk, so one might just as well call it a precursor to Joe Dolce's Shaddap You Face for all the difference it makes. Certainly it's hard not to think of said Ultravox defusing novelty record each time Gully Foyle asks what's a matter, you?, which he does with frequency sufficient for me to have noticed.

The story is actually, on close inspection, a little too weird to be sustainable under ordinary circumstances and is as such exactly the sort of thing A.E. van Vogt churned out on a fairly regular basis, except van Vogt usually made it work in spite of itself, screwy shit that doesn't quite add up being his natural literary habitat. So The Stars My Destination is good, or at least it's not bad, but it could have been better and probably was when I was fifteen. Never mind.

The Abortion

Richard Brautigan The Abortion (1971)
Having thus far failed to come up with a convincing comparison, I've at last realised who Brautigan reminds me of with this one, and it's Borges. The language and the mood are both very different to anything I've read of the Argentinian, but there's common ground in their both having fixated on the written word and language as reality, or as something distinct from reality. Half of Sombrero Fallout, for example, occurs on scraps of paper discarded and tossed into a waste paper basket by a frustrated writer, while The Abortion sets out its stall in a library and features librarians as its main characters; and because it's Brautigan, it's a library of unpublished books, an institution which, rather than being built or founded, seems to have come into existence in organic response to some obscure need within the culture at large. The librarians here are people who ended up in the job without quite meaning to, having mostly just wandered in off the street; and unpublished authors turn up with their manuscripts - typed or handwritten - and add them to the library, sometimes at three in the morning.

Our story begins when Vida shows up with the book she's written about her own body, specifically how she doesn't understand it or particularly relate to it, which is a shame because it's apparently a great body - as Brautigan describes in some detail. Vida has sex with the narrator, becomes pregnant, and so we come to the reason for the title. I wouldn't say alarm bells were quite ringing by this point, but I had my fingers crossed, hoping to avoid a descent into mansplaining and what men may or may not think about abortion. I've seen online criticism of The Abortion suggesting that Brautigan spends a little longer than seems necessary describing Vida's tits and is therefore an oppressive phallocrat of some description, which is, I suppose, one reaction. Of course, the logical extreme of such arguments are that whatever a man may have to say on the topic of abortion will be essentially worthless. I agree in so much as that the casting vote should probably go to the person whose body is directly under discussion, but worthless is too great a reduction which as such seems based on the gender of the speaker more than on the actual potential worth - or otherwise - of anything said. Additionally, human biology is such that certain female physical features have a fucking powerful effect on certain males, and while I recognise that no-one should reduce another person to a mere object, whining about it is probably a waste of time. I guess Brautigan liked boobs, and I also like boobs, none of which necessarily gets in the way of anything else The Abortion may strive to achieve.

Returning to Borges, the library of The Abortion seems to inhabit its own reality, which is something slightly separate from regular reality. Vida is likewise divorced to a certain extent from her own body, which is what her book is about. Brautigan's book is therefore about regular reality imposing itself on those otherwise maintaining some distance from the same, something which tends to happen whether we like it or not - see also certain aspects of human biology. I don't have anything profound or worthwhile to say about abortion, and Brautigan reports without necessarily saying anything beyond that which we mostly know and understand to be approximately true, and so, writing without any of the usual hysteria, manages to avoid shooting himself in the foot as Philip K. Dick did with The Pre-Persons.

The Abortion is, perhaps paradoxically, quite life affirming for something which really could have gone horribly wrong; or at least I found it so.

Elric of Melniboné

Michael Moorcock Elric of Melniboné (1972)
Much as I loves me some Moorcock, I had no real intention of going anywhere near these. I've never been particularly big on sword and sorcery or sagas amounting to a million volumes, the existence of which seems to imply that you need to collect the whole fucking set because one on its own won't make any sense, and I'm sure I'd heard somewhere that Moorcock had churned out his Elric books to a formula mainly for the sake of getting paid. Also, I recall a ton of these things hogging a certain corner of the bookstore during my seventies childhood, and suspected Elric to be the first step on a slippery slope which would inevitably lead to Sven Hassel, Pan horror anthologies, and more Judas Priest albums than I really had use for; but there it was for just a couple of dollars, and being the first one it would surely be obliged to make some sort of sense without my having to take a degree in Elric Studies, and - fuck it - it's Moorcock, so how bad could it really be?

Actually, it's great, and great beyond my expectations. I suppose I should have known, what with it being Moorcock and all. Even if this was his crowd-pleasing money spinner, he still had to keep himself sufficiently interested in writing the thing and so we have sword and sorcery which inhabits the familiarly mythic language of the genre but otherwise shoots off in all sorts of weird, wonderful, and entirely unexpected directions, and accordingly very much distinguishes itself as massively superior to the usual bumbling Tolkien karaoke turns. Elric manages to be both faithful to the genre, and yet completely fucking weird, and therefore healthily and spikily at odds with the usual stumpy twats who do a-questing go.

Every time I read a new Moorcock, my estimation of the man's talents - and of the extent of his influence on all which has come since - goes up, just a little.

A Confederate General from Big Sur

Richard Brautigan A Confederate General from Big Sur (1964)
Brautigan's first novel is maybe a little more raggedy around the edges than those he went on to write, but you nevertheless could never mistake it for the work of anyone else. The dry humour is as deeply ingrained in the narrative as ever, with the story being told at the usual tangent to anything the rest of us might regard as reality. The deal here is that one Lee Mellon is the contemporary descendant of a Confederate general, except the general never existed so far as anyone can tell and neither did any of the other allegedly historical foundations upon which Brautigan builds his world of low-level west coast dropouts and amiable losers. Their reality is haphazard, often comical, but sort of heartfelt by terms which will be familiar to anyone who ever read a Freak Brothers comic book. In fact, it's almost Philip K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly but with much softer, more gentle drugs, and hence without the paranoia.

The Confederacy, as was, has become something of a hot topic of late, and not without good reason, suggesting the potential for dunderheads to miss the point of this book; but as ever, Brautigan arranges people and places within situations without editorial or moral commentary, at least assuming that his reader isn't a fucking idiot, which is nice.

I first read The Hawkline Monster when I was nineteen. How the fuck has it taken me this long to catch up?