Women in Love

D.H. Lawrence Women in Love (1921)
Women in Love has been hailed as Lawrence's greatest novel in certain quarters, and while it's undoubtedly up there, I'm not convinced. As you may already know, Women in Love began life as the second half of The Rainbow before evolving into its own thing, and so continues the lives of Ursula and Gudrun whom we met in the first book while inevitably reiterating certain themes of the same, notably expressing the then revolutionary notion of women as capable of leading an independent existence, or at least one not entirely reliant upon the goodwill of men; but I'm not convinced that this is all it's trying to do.

Rather, if we take The Rainbow as a summation of human progress, society, and ethics dating from Biblical times to the modern era - as represented by the stratified generations in the novel - then Women in Love is principally looking forward to speculate on where we go from here.

It was written as a modern novel in a world wherein electric lighting was still very much a novelty, and accordingly borrows from adjacent modernist territories, particularly the visual arts which reoccur as sign posts - or possibly scratching posts - throughout the book, which itself orders its chapters in a sequence suggesting pictures at an exhibition with the reader moving ponderously from one scene to the next as most of the actual narrative motion occurs somewhere off the side of the page. As with individual paintings in an exhibition, each new chapter brings a different emphasis in terms of mood, colour and subject. Chapter six opens with what could easily be a description of a painting by Manet or Toulouse-Lautrec, introducing Minette who is unmarried, pregnant and fearless - much like Boccioni's similarly employed Modern Idol of 1911. If she seems a harshly lit character, it would probably be more accurate to suggest that she is simply described without sentiment, a description underscored by the then fashionable African totems and Futurist art at the house she shares in Bohemia, as such providing contrast to the tradition and conservative values espoused in chapter eight. Further to this contrast, the stately Breadalby House is acknowledged by Gudrun as resembling an old aquatint, while in chapter eleven the larger estate inspires Ursula to comment that one could have lovely Watteau picnics here.

The divide - here referring to culture and tradition as much as to class - is further emphasised by the mechanisation of the mine workers described in chapter nine, as a new sort of machinery in terms which echo the Futurists whilst unfortunately foreshadowing both Ayn Rand and Margaret Thatcher. Lawrence was clearly aware that where we go from here would be violently mechanistic, having written at least some of the novel during the first great war. Women in Love spends much of its page count engaged in destruction as a creative act, specifically destruction of the old order right down even to basic Victorian sentiment and the comfort of tradition. Gudrun and Ursula are school teachers, modern women teaching the science which has given birth to the twentieth century and even the possibility of the future being more than a simple continuation of the past. Even the title, Women in Love, seems possibly ironic, either a focus shifted to those who were traditionally the object of love and so denied autonomy in the socially sanctioned expression of the equation; or perhaps a bitter comment on love as a more violent and visceral institution than Victorian society would have had it.

Even if, as has been pointed out by Kate Millet, Lawrence's women can never be more than Lawrence's idea of women - an accusation which I rather feel misses the point - the sheer balls of this novel being titled Women in Love in 1921 shouldn't be taken for granted, nor that Ursula and Gudrun are the principal characters, the ones who react against everything herein, not least being the views of the author as voiced through Rupert Birkin. Lawrence was here attempting to cut through the bullshit, including his own bullshit.

Women in Love destroys nineteenth century sentiment without mercy or favouritism, even revealing newly embraced notions of progress as red in tooth and claw, with Gerald Crich exposed as a ruthless objectivist machine in The Industrial Magnate; with the supposed innocence of even children shown as essentially cruel in Rabbit.

What, one might wonder, does Lawrence presume to build in the wake of all this revelation and destruction? I don't know, and I'm not sure he knew, instead finding himself obliged to settle with approximations of what he didn't want and a vague notion of the direction in which we should probably be heading. Inevitably some of the proposed way forward allows for Lawrence's poorly quantified desire for a relationship which allows for a big strapping male friend on the side, but this is a personal preference rather than a manifesto, and I don't think the retroactive application of fashionable gender related neologisms is likely to help anyone in this instance. Otherwise, he's mainly asking questions which no-one had thought to ask in the presumed hope of getting an answer which wasn't too stupid.

There had been some discussion, on the whole quite intellectual and artificial, about a new state, a new world of man. Supposing this old social state were broken and destroyed, then, out of chaos, what then?

The novel is the response, I guess, approximately summarised thus:

'You can only have knowledge, strictly,' he replied, 'of things concluded, in the past. It's like bottling the liberty of last summer in the bottled gooseberries.'

Women in Love was a massively ambitious undertaking, a novel which, in stylistic terms, seems to map rather than describe the emotional and symbolic meaning of that which befalls Gudrun, Ursula, Rupert, and Gerald; so it isn't a realistic novel and arguably has more in common with symbolist art or even Boccioni's states of mind paintings than with the nineteenth century page turner. Unfortunately it's also much longer than it really needs to be to express that which it expresses, which is possibly a hazard of the exploratory nature of its composition - itself a doubtless deliberate echo of Lawrence's own life at the time, particularly as he leaves England in search of whatever may be out there. So if it's not Lawrence's greatest novel, then it was at least his most daring as of 1921 - assuming The Lost Girl, which I've still to read, doesn't turn out to be five-hundred pages of potato prints with rude words written around the circumference. It's also a bit on the chewy side.

Words Are My Matter

Ursula K. LeGuin Words Are My Matter (2016)
Ever since I first read LeGuin's review of Jeanette Winterson's Stone Gods in the Gaurdani, I knew she was one of the good ones, someone who understood in a world of complete fucking idiots. She found a lot to like about The Stone Gods but spent a couple of massively enjoyable paragraphs rolling her eyes and sighing over Winterson's refusal to acknowledge that a novel in which someone colonises an alien planet can be termed science-fiction - on the grounds that science-fiction is such a boy thing or some such bollocks amounting to the usual snobbery one tends to experience with proper authors. The review is reprinted in this collection, along with a few similarly righteous and massively satisfying truths fired off in the general direction of Margaret Atwood; so I couldn't not buy the thing.

I'm not usually too stoked at the prospect of a writer writing about writing, but LeGuin's essays are packed with insights of the kind which I'd assumed were just me and probably no-one else in the universe. She dissects the relationship between proper writing and that which has come to be termed genre, bursting a multitude of self-important bubbles along the way, and even tackles the myth about whether people really are reading less these days and which people we're talking about when we make such generalisations. For what it may be worth, she doesn't believe that we are reading less, which is encouraging.

LeGuin proves similarly fascinating when discussing the work of other writers - both as reviews and dedicated essays harvested from various literary mags. Here she sheds fresh light on H.G. Wells, J.G. Ballard and others with such clarity and enthusiasm as to have inspired my purchase of a novel by at least one of the names I hadn't heard of - and naturally there are a few. She brings a refreshing feminist perspective to her subject while remaining even-handed and generous throughout, preferring to focus on positives even when dealing with books she clearly didn't enjoy and so eschewing the didactic tendencies of Atwood and Winterson.

Finally, we end with a diary written while at a writers' retreat on some island, with pleasing emphasis on the wild bunnies she encounters. It's not often I find myself wanting to hang out with an author as a result of having read their work, but Ursula really does come across as having been a genuinely wonderful person. We could do with a few more like her, generally speaking.

The Golden Age of Marvel Comics

Bill Everett, Jack Kirby, Joe Simon & others
The Golden Age of Marvel Comics (1997)
I'm still half-engaged in researching the history of Marvel for something I'm soon to be working on, which I probably shouldn't mention in case I get bored of the idea and it never happens; but thankfully it's a loose form of research allowing for general impressions picked up from a greatest hits collection such as this. I'm not sure I have the patience to hunt down expensive reprints incorporating everything right down to the adverts for sea monkeys. I'm not sure I would have the patience to read them, for that matter.

Marvel, as you probably know, began life as Timely Comics publishing its first title just a year after Superman first hit the news stands, so the myth of Marvel having been the lively young marmoset stealing the dinosaurs eggs derives mainly from their having changed the name so many times prior to Stan Lee - or possibly Jack Kirby - introducing acne and difficult homework assignments to the traditional superhero strip in 1961. This is what some of that stuff looked like before the characters took to agonising over teenage concerns.

It's probably fair to say that Lee's big idea - or possibly Kirby's big idea - at the beginning of the sixties was to shift emphasis from story to character, prior to which we had illustrated equivalents to the radio serials of the time wherein mostly hard boiled heroes identify bad guys before punching them squarely on the jaw, thus saving the day. The bad guys here were mostly boggle-eyed Nazis, shifting to boggle-eyed reds after the war, so it's fairly repetitive, trades mostly in clichés, and you can usually see the punchline forming before you've made it to the second page. About three quarters of the stories collected herein revolve around the theft of secret plans. Nevertheless, even within this fairly limited formula, there was a lot of invention, some truly screwy twists of imagination, and even at its most peculiar, the art is rarely less than arresting with panel after panel slapping the reader in the face with its relentless dynamic action. Later Marvel favourites such as Captain America, the Human Torch, the Vision, and the Sub-Mariner began here, and the latter is particularly interesting as he evolves from a triangular headed morally ambiguous enemy of mankind - more or less Tarzan underwater - to whatever he became in the sixties, which at least remained a far cry from the square-jawed guy who foils diamond heists to a daily schedule.

I'm not massively familiar with this era of comic book publishing, and for all their early promise, I guess Marvel were never quite so wild as - for one example with which I'm familiar - Planet Comics, and if there's some weird stuff here, there isn't anything which comes close to the like of Fletcher Hanks; yet there's a lot of charm, even if a little goes a long way, and I'd still rather look at this than Roy Lichenstein's version - or even Neil Gaiman cleverly subverting these tropes towards the usual ends.

Also, having read this lot, Bob Burden's Flaming Carrot now makes one fuck of a lot more sense.

The Ubu Plays

Alfred Jarry The Ubu Plays (1900)
1968 translation by Cyril Connolly & Simon Watson Taylor
It's hard to know where to start with Ubu. I started while taking drama 'O' level when I was seventeen or possibly eighteen, and it made a huge impression on me. It seems fair to say that Ubu made a huge impression on twentieth century culture in general, and if anything can be credited as the singularity from which modernism was born, it's probably Ubu. It's difficult to imagine there having been Dada or Surrealism without that formative kick up the arse provided when Firmin Gémier greeted his theatrical first night audience with a hearty cry of Merdre! back in 1896. Ubu Roi was hardly the first instance of artists thumbing noses at punters, but not even Rabelais did it with quite such riotous enthusiasm, using outrage almost as an end in itself.

Ubu Roi began life as a puppet theatre by which Jarry and his juvenile pals took the Victorian piss out of a hated school teacher, so any parallels one may happen to notice with Viz comic and the like are entirely pertinent. Jarry himself matured whilst ensuring that the scatological purity of his characters remained inviolate even as they moved from puppet theatre to the actual stage, by which point Ubu's focus had expanded to take the piss out of the entire Belle Époque and everything it held dear, not least its ruthless optimism. Pere Ubu achieves this by conquering Poland in the first play, then debasing himself in a peculiarly enthusiastic quest to become the lowliest of slaves in Ubu Enchaîné, the final tale. None of it really makes any fucking sense whatsoever, and that's sort of the point. I may have got more out of these plays had I been armed with a more thorough understanding of European history of the time - and I assume the treatment dished out to the Polish is supposed to be insulting for a reason - but the jokes still work so maybe it doesn't matter.

That being said, this book assembles the three Ubu plays, and although they're mostly entertaining, they work better on stage, as the author intended.

The Eleventh Tiger

David A. McIntee The Eleventh Tiger (2004)
While I may regularly gnash teeth over written fiction which wants to be telly, I realise there's probably a line to be drawn, and as usual I'm specifically talking about Who tie-in material because I've read a ton of it and still dig one out from time to time if I'm in the right mood. To generalise, the good stuff - such as written by Simon Bucher-Jones, Lawrence Miles or Lance Parkin - tends to work as science or at least speculative fiction regardless of certain characters or concepts having been on the box when we were little. The bad stuff gives the impression of having been written by persons who really, really, really love Doctor Who but who haven't actually read anything which isn't Doctor Who. Their work is usually characterised by pages dominated by dialogue, a reliance on clichés and sentiment, and a tendency to describe events as they would appear if dramatised for telly, right down to the invocation of specific camera angles.

David A. McIntee is possibly a bit of an anomaly in so much as that his books quite clearly strive to invoke the atmosphere of what we would have seen on the box, right down to the pacing and descriptions of what may as well have been low budget visual effects; and he's clearly happy to be an author of fiction which aspires to be telly; and yet he gets it right with thoughtful if admittedly breezy prose which does what it does without giving me cause to yell oh fuck off prior to hurling the book across the room - which is actually quite unusual. He even manages knowing postmodern chuckles without coming across like he's trying too hard.

'It's been a busy day, Doctor, as I'm sure you understand. One minute those kids are just running around chaotically, but the next minute they're focused and everybody's kung-fu fighting.'

'Those kids are fast as lightning,' Barbara added.

The Doctor raised his eyebrows. 'Are they indeed? And was it, perchance, dear boy, a little bit frightening? Hmm?'

The Eleventh Tiger takes place in nineteenth century China and is so determinedly true to its mileau that it recreates the somewhat plodding pace of certain Hartnell era stories, particularly the mostly historical ones. I found it a little difficult to follow presumably through not being quite so invested in Who as I was in my thirties, but on the other hand I wasn't quite bored, and it's intermittently gripping.

I bought The Eleventh Tiger when it came out, and it was one of the last to be published before it all went tits up, so far as I recall, meaning it's taken me seventeen fucking years to get around to reading the thing - which strikes me as weird - but I guess I'm glad I did, at least for the sake of closure.