The Castle of Otranto

Horace Walpole The Castle of Otranto (1764)
This is a very important novel, so I've been told, having originated the gothic tradition which led to Frankenstein and arguably to the entire science-fiction genre, amongst many other things. Brian Aldiss reckons it owes a lot to Piranesi, but I don't know who that is and don't feel sufficiently enthused to find out. The element which made The Castle of Otranto such a massive chart-busting smash back in the late 1700s was its fusion of realism with spooky or otherwise supernatural elements. Walpole was the first to do this, apart from a few other writers who sort of got there first, albeit with perhaps less emphasis on atmosphere.

It begins well, and even grips, as a wedding is postponed due to the groom having been crushed by an inexplicable giant helmet of the kind generally belonging to a suit of armour rather than to a male generative member. The father of the deceased has certain concerns regarding his familial claims to the castle of the title which will come to seem tenuous in the absence of a male heir and the grandchildren he was accordingly expecting. With this in mind, he decides to tell his wife to fuck off and become a nun so that he can marry the conspicuously younger woman who would have been his daughter-in-law had her fiancé not been crushed by a huge helmet. A series of supernatural occurrences follow - ghosts, a painting coming to life, and most notably an appearance of the former owner of the helmet - all representing fearful omens regarding our man's claim on his castle. Then a load of other people show up and talk about romance, inheritance, marriage and so on, which I found fairly difficult to follow and reminded me of eighteenth century novels which spend hundreds of pages debating what a certain young lady meant by leaving her handkerchief in the drawing room knowing it would almost certainly be discovered by some viscount she intends to shag.

The strangest thing for me was that The Castle of Otranto reads like a novel that wants to be a play performed on a stage with a full cast, much like certain examples of Who fiction reading like novels pretending to be telly. Walpole apparently admitted to the influence of Shakespeare in a later edition, presumably because it would have been pointless to deny it; and while we're here, I'm almost certain I recall old Billy including ghosts, fairies, and other supernatural beings in a few of the plays what he wrote.

I'm not widely read once we go back past the turn of the last century, but I've read enough to know the form, and enough to recognise the difference between that which is written in an archaic style with which I am unfamiliar, and that which simply could have been better. Gulliver's Travels was published forty years before The Castle of Otranto, for one example, and quite frankly pisses all over it - although to be fair Gulliver's Travels pretty much pisses over more or less everything which has been written since in most respects. The Castle of Otranto clearly has it's place and isn't entirely lacking in charm, mood, or merit, but as a landmark of literary history, it's kind of underwhelming.

Revenge of the Lawn

Richard Brautigan Revenge of the Lawn (1971)
This is an odd one, a collection of Brautigan's short stories, except as with the two or three page chapters which constitute most of his novels, they're so short as to amount to what may as well be considered poetry in prose form - pithy thumbnail snapshots of Brautigan's daily existence in San Franciso but, in this case, without any particular overarching narrative theme beyond having come from the same guy. Some of them are wonderful and none of them are of a length conducive to outstaying their welcome, but the whole never quite adds up to the sort of thing you find with the novels. Occasionally there's something great and yet so brief it can be quoted in full right here, The Scarlatti Tilt, for example.

'It's very hard to live in a studio apartment in San Jose with a man who's learning to play the violin.' That's what she told the police when she handed them the empty revolver.

Mostly, it's a satisfying collection peppered with the usual astonishing morsels of deceptively simple profundity which cement the legend of Brautigan as never having quite slotted into any literary tradition excepting perhaps his own.

The Return of Jongor

Robert Moore Williams The Return of Jongor (1946)
Admittedly I've read only one of Edgar Rice Burroughs' four million Tarzan books, and so assuming Tarzan of 1912 to be reasonably representative, I continue to be impressed at the Robert Moore Williams knock off doing more than simply replicate the formula; although the difference may be down to the additional influence of possibly Robert E. Howard and certainly Abraham Merritt. That said, the second book isn't quite so memorable as the first, Jongor of Lost Land, although is notable for adding yet another ancient race to the catalogue - in this case a species of centaur, survivors of Arklan which was once the greatest, most advanced city on earth - and so on and so forth. More interesting still are understated intrusions from Williams' personal cosmology, the screwy yet ponderous stuff which renders his later novels so weirdly absorbing.

'Because this was the dream the Arklans set for themselves when they and the world was young. The sadness comes because we turned aside to little things and in turning aside failed to reach our dreams—and also failed to reach the potential greatness that was in us.'

There was great sadness in Nesca's voice as she stood in front of the centaur statue.

'But you can still achieve this greatness—' Anne began.

'Thank you, my dear, again,' Nesca said. 'No, I think not. There is an appointed time for greatness. If you miss the tide of greatness when it flows for you, you miss it until the great river of life brings it back again. When will this happen? I do not know. No one knows. How old is time, how old will it become?'

I realise it's probably not of significantly greater philosophical depth than the concluding speech from an average episode of Thundercats, but the crucial point is that Robert Moore Williams absolutely believed this stuff as part of his evolving vision of a distinctly psychedelic cosmos wherein love is the missing matter of the universe, or something like that; and this belief, whatever it was, informs his writing with qualities beyond what you might anticipate in places so far removed from the world of proper books. It's also nice that he keeps it short and snappy.

Rommel? Gunner Who?

Spike Milligan Rommel? Gunner Who? (1974)
I first read this as a teenager in the seventies, when most of those named therein as Milligan's pals were still alive, as was the working class culture from which they were drawn forth to fight the rise of Nazism. It seems safe to assume that nearly everyone named in this book is now dead, and I probably belong to the last generation to recognise the environment. Rommel? Gunner Who? was written thirty years after the events it describes, and nearly fifty years have passed since it was written. I'm still not sure how to process this information.

As you possibly know, it's the second of Spike Milligan's war journals, detailing his daily life, having been sent to man the guns in north Africa. As part of an artillery regiment, his experience of the second world war was, at least for the first half of 1943, as something occurring over the next hill - a distant point at which shells were fired, and from which shells were returned in retaliation. It probably wasn't the worst part of the fighting to have been caught up in, but there were nevertheless casualties and the humour is very obviously the thing which kept them from losing their marbles.

Its composition is somewhat haphazard compared to that of the first volume, reading as an assemblage of memoirs - some in much greater detail than others - jokes, comic scripts taking the piss out of the enemy, and jottings which might almost be the preliminary shorthand notes for the book - suggesting that he never quite got around to writing the thing in full and simply handed what he had in to the publisher on the grounds that it worked fine as it did and didn't  require transformation into anything more respectable.

A line of black clad Arab ladies carrying pitchers moved liquidly by. 'You'd think their old man would buy 'em a suitcase,' said Chalky White.

'How you gonna carry bloody water in a suitcase?'

'Look, I just think of the ideas, it's up to the wogs to make 'em work.'

There are quite a lot of wogs in this book, and the term would - lest it need stating - leave me somewhat uneasy in almost any other context, but the context here is that of young working class men spending at least some of the time trying hard not to think about whether they'll still be alive in six weeks; and there's nothing particularly mean spirited in their casual dispensation of this racial slur, or any others for that matter, just anger with the circumstances and at having to get on with it regardless. I mention this because Spike's bunch were patently good people for the most part, and they remind me of people I worked with - often from the same part of London, as it happens - and I grow tired of the demonisation of the working class by humourless fuckers who have taken it upon themselves to police our language on our behalf because they went to better schools than we did; and I fear that the people who still get this will one day all be dead, with entire tracts of valuable human experience whitewashed out of existence because of a generation so insecure that it can't stand anything not made in its own fragile image.

Anyway, once you get into the rhythm of this thing, the humour is both relentless and infectious, despite the disjointed rhythm of prose turning to script, punctuated with absurdly captioned but otherwise unrelated photographs or engravings. I have a feeling that this telling of the events of a few months in north Africa by means of what amounts to collage may actually serve as a better record of the mood which Spike was hoping to record than the more traditional narrative of this happened, then this happened, and here's how we felt about it. Strangely, the technique allows for a sense of creeping unease without requiring detail beyond a few incongruously pensive passages describing the writing of the book, Spike's communication with old friends regarding the same, and even a few nightmares from the time. It's a riot, but you can tell that he knew what was coming, and that he knew it would be terrible.

As to why anyone would make jokes about anything so terrible as the second world war which, lest any of us should have forgotten, led to the routine industrialised slaughter of six-million Jews, the answer is because we have to; otherwise the enemy have won.

Genesis 0

Isabelle Nicou Genesis 0 (2007)
Back in March, I opined that Nicou's Paresis wasn't likely to be Amphetamine Sulphate's chart smashing hit single for all that it constitutes an astonishing debut. Genesis 0, on the other hand - Nicou's second novel to be translated from the French - may be another thing entirely. It demonstrates the same forensic level of attention to existential and biological detail - so beautifully realised that it almost hurts - and yet its purpose is driven and absolutely clear, and to the point of reminding me - because apparently I'd forgotten - that this was what proper novels used to look like before everything expanded to five-hundred page bloaters with the author's name in raised silver type. This is the sort of thing Penguin should be publishing now rather than whatever the fuck it is they actually do publish these days.

Genesis 0 - and that's zero rather than the fifteenth letter of the alphabet - inhabits pregnancy and in doing so explores territory I only seem able to recall having encountered in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and, to a much lesser extent, The Abortion by Richard Brautigan. Given where we all came from, without exception, this seems a ridiculous oversight on the part of world literature, so possibly it's just me. Obviously, I've never found myself with child, but I'm particularly close to someone who has, so a lot of Genesis 0 seems painfully familiar in its documentation of the fundamental changes to one's existence which occur when the periods shut down; and it's nice to find the subject approached without any of the customarily sappy shite about ribbons.

I don't know if we're still bothering to use the term transgressive fiction here, but if so, Genesis 0 proves it to be a redundant label risen above the waves only because the alleged mainstream of literature has devolved so far from doing what it should do. It's by no means an easy read and it demands that you pay attention, but masterpiece honestly doesn't seem too great an accolade.

Planets of Adventure

Murray Leinster Planets of Adventure (2003)
Much as I loves me some Leinster, a little can go a long way and once the page count passes five-hundred, it's probably best to proceed with caution; which is what I've done here, working through one novel at a time with substantial breaks in between, and now finishing off the remaining short stories. Planets of Adventure assembles a couple of novels - albeit novels made by sewing a few short stories together - with five autonomous but thematically related short stories, the theme being that they're all set on planets and feature characters having adventures. I already wrote about The Forgotten Planet and Planet Explorer back in May and June respectively, and of the remainder, Anthropological Note and Scrimshaw - both dating from the fifties - don't really seem to do a whole lot. On the other hand, Assignment on Pasik, Regulations, and The Skit-Tree Planet all date from the forties and benefit from the sort of characteristically peculiar elements which Leinster did so well, and which contrast so effectively with his otherwise amiably polite style - I'd say something with a touch of the Wodehouse, had I actually read any Wodehouse. In any case, you can tell he was nicely turned out right down to the bow tie as he sat tapping these out on his Remington.

Had literary history been kinder to Leinster, he might have been remembered as one of the hard science-fiction guys along with Isaac and the rest - as evinced by the peculiar ecosystem of Oryx in Regulations where magnesium is more common than sodium, as is apparently the case on Earth; but ultimately he probably had too much fun to ever make more than honorary membership of the chess club. As titles go Planets of Adventure may be somewhat overselling the collection, but it's mostly respectable and some of it is genuinely great.

two Stan Lee biographies

Stan Lee & George Mair
Excelsior! The Amazing Life of Stan Lee (2002)
While my own personal jury remains out regarding how much credit Lee deserves for strips co-created with Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko and others - because we'll probably never know for sure - the other extreme by which Stan was just some lucky schmo who happened to be in the right place at the right time seems equally unfair. Excelsior! is his side of the story, with linking paragraphs wedged in by George Mair so as to keep it all from degrading into a sort of Borscht Belt James Joyce; and while his side of the story is mostly well known, it's nevertheless worth preserving because it's enlightening and often genuinely funny and Lee comes across as a nice guy with the best of intentions. The extent to which this is the facade of some scheming snake oil retailing mastermind could be debated, but I suspect that if it were a facade, he would have done a better job of it.

 

Abraham Riesman True Believer (2021)
On the other hand, there's True Believer which has the advantage of not actually being written by Stan himself and accordingly paints a quite different picture. Thankfully, it doesn't seem to be anything you might term a hatchet job. Credit is given where due, as is the benefit of the doubt, but the bottom line is that this is a scrupulously thorough warts and all biography of a life which is revealed as having been, so it could be argued, mainly warts; which isn't to suggest that Stan was necessarily a bad guy or that he fucked kids or any of that sort of thing, but there's a point at which self affirmation crosses over into something more like mania. I would guess Stan understood this, hence the winning combination of boasting tempered with self-deprecating cornball humour of the stripe which makes Excelsior! so readable.

The creative ratio of Lee to Kirby or Ditko to be found in all of those characters for which he is famed remains debatable, although the success of the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man and the rest is surely at least in part down to Lee's tireless promotional bounce and general inability to shut the fuck up, even for just a second. So he's to be credited for something, and True Believer does as good a job as anything I've read of trying to pinpoint what that might have been. Oddly enough, I feel as though I've known at least a few Stans in my time, albeit none with quite the same level of charm or ability to generate money from thin air, but I recognise the type and this passage, referring to POW - one of our boy's later, admittedly shabbier enterprises - struck an uncomfortably familiar chord.

If Stan had doubts about his own abilities, he certainly didn't let them show. In fact, POW was presenting an image of the octogenarian Stan as a creative powerhouse, capable of churning out a wealth of ideas that could be converted into lucrative entertainment properties. However, POW's primary product was announcements.

Of that which emerged from the mind of Stan Lee in the latter years, most seems to have been on the level of Alan Partridge's Monkey Tennis, with very little transcending the press releases about how great it was definitely going to be. One of the few exceptions was an animated series called Stripperella about a crime-fighting pole dancer with massive tits which, as evidence of Stan's wild imagination as something existing autonomous of Kirby, Ditko or whoever else was sat at the drawing board that afternoon, is pretty fucking thin; but you can't keep a good man down, as they say, and that was Lee's superpower, roughly speaking, coupled with an inability to monitor his own strengths and weaknesses. Comic book history has remembered the archetypal Stan Lee piece as Captain America leaping out of the page with a massive grin and an improbably distended sense of perspective, yet it should probably be one of the captioned photographs from You Don't Say. This one idea - if you can truly call it an idea - to which Stan returned time and again was that of stock photos to which he added side-splitting captions. He published a magazine along these lines in 1963, and there were a couple of others issued to a generally mixed reception a bit later, and yet it was something he tried to get happening over and over like Gretchen's use of the term fetch in Mean Girls, this sort of thing:

 

If you now need to go and change your pants, damage control the coffee fountain, maybe take a shower or whatever, I can wait.

Bizarrely, Stan doesn't seem to have been able to tell the difference between the Fantastic Four battling an underground civilisation led by an evil genius, and a photograph of Jimmy Carter amended with a comic observation about golf, which is ultimately tragic. As, I guess, was his life in certain respects, most of it being spent looking for something he probably never found, believing manic optimism alone would eventually bring it within reach, and failing to recognise anything with which he'd been involved as having been of value - contrary to whatever ludicrous bluster he may have committed at the time. He clearly wasn't a saint by any description, nor even anyone particularly remarkable, but he probably deserved better than he got; and it's hard to imagine there will ever be another account balancing sympathy with unflinching honesty as this one does.

The Butterfly Lions

 

Rumer Godden The Butterfly Lions (1977)
I'm aware that my writing about The Butterfly Lions may represent a new extreme in terms of the thematic gap separating it from, off the top of my head, Asimov's robot tales, but you'll just have to deal with it. I've read it, I've formed opinions, and so here they are.

My mother had - and indeed still has - this book, which I vividly recall from my childhood - vividly recall here meaning that I was aware of its existence rather than that I read it, or even necessarily looked at the pictures. It's approximately a history of the Pekingese, and we had Pekingeses. My wife bought this copy for me as a father's day present, because I'm father to a load of cats, and because the Pekingese remains my favourite dog by some margin even though we don't have one. She didn't realise I already knew of the book so that was a nice surprise.

Rumer Godden is probably best remembered as having written the novel Black Narcissus, amongst other things. I discovered this when checking online to see whether she'd actually written anything else ever - which seemed doubtful given the slightly uneven quality of composition and peculiarly clumsy sentences such as:

The Chinese did not encourage wild flowers and in cultivating them went to extremes.

To lay my cards on the table, I'm a big fan of the Pekingese, or at least I've never met a Pekingese I didn't like; but I try not to think about dog breeders or their pseudo-eugenic notions of pedigree perfection. On this score, Godden proposes that the Pekingese may be the world's oldest pedigree breed, at least implying a large, relatively healthy gene pool in relation to more recently emerged breeds; and also that sturdiness was a priority for Pekingese breeders, at least when this written, with the modern Peke being a distinctly more robust pooch than those which first arrived in Victorian England; so hopefully such claims are true rather than wishful, defensive thing.

Much of the book compares the parallel lives of Queen Victoria and, her contemporary, the Chinese Empress Tzŭ-Hsi as well as the worlds they inhabited by virtue of the first English Pekingese being one named Lootie, presented to the former by military types following skirmishes with and looting of the latter. Victoria was apparently very fond of Lootie and had the little dog's portrait painted, despite which Lootie ended up in an unmarked grave where many of Victoria's other dogs had headstones featuring sculpted portraits of themselves. Furthermore:

All through these years, Queen Victoria seems to have remained almost in ignorance of her opposite Empress; perhaps her imagination, not at any time a vivid one, could not have stretched so far.

All of which begs the question as to why Godden spent so much time comparing the lives of the two given that few of the parallels drawn are even concerned with their respective dogs. Being generally ambivalent, or at least consistently unmoved by much Chinese culture, I therefore didn't really see the point of much of Godden's argument - whatever the hell it may be - beyond a few interesting details scattered here and there. When writing about the Pekingese, she's interesting, even charming, but such passages are in an unfortunate minority. It's nevertheless nice to have a copy of this, but not so much for the sake of the text.