Don't Forget Us Here

Mansoor Adayfi Don't Forget Us Here (2021)
Mansoor Adayfi was sent to Guantánamo Bay detention camp in 2002 on suspicion of being something significant within al Qaeda. He wasn't. He was an eighteen year-old farmer from Yemen who had the misfortune to visit Afghanistan where he was kidnapped and sold to the American military - then paying big bucks for anyone who might have information on Osama and his angry pals, yet surprisingly ill-equipped to tell the difference between a fervent jihadist and some bloke who worked on his dad's farm. It would seem that a great many of those interned at Guantánamo Bay were sent there by the same criteria, namely looking a bit brown and being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Mansoor didn't get out until 2016 and, regrettably, not even because the US military ever truly realised that it had been in error.

I'm sure we've all heard about what happened to detainees at  Guantánamo Bay, the force feeding, the beating, the sleep deprivation, the endless cycle of humiliation. Mansoor experienced the worst of it and this, at long last, is his story; and it's one hell of a story, the kind of thing which could only be communicated by one who lived through it. Much of it makes for harrowing testimony, although Adayfi holds back from describing the worst of the horrifying details, doubtless fearing they might unbalance the tone of the book which, against expectation, somehow keeps its account on an even, objective keel. Most of the indignities imposed on inmates of the camp seem to have been based on brutality and denial - sleep, food, basic rights - more than directed sadism because those running the camp were at least trying to keep their prisoners alive long enough to answer their misdirected questions; so the situation wasn't entirely comparable to what happened at Auschwitz and other places, although was nevertheless an atrocity which should be remembered in the hope of preventing its repetition.

Mansoor describes three main phases of his fourteen years at Guantánamo Bay - first a period of brutality and hunger strikes, a moderate thaw during the early years of the Obama administration, then a resumption of the brutality once the US government began to realise it had perhaps incarcerated the wrong men and might have to say sorry. Some small degree of sunlight is intermittently shed upon the horror, because persons deprived of hope and with so little to lose will tend to take their pleasures where they can find them; and because the one thing the US government got right about Mansoor and his brothers was the strength of their faith, and it was their faith which got them through the worst times, and which kept them from ever becoming the fanatical monsters their captors so obviously needed them to be.

So our unflinching documentation of the very worst forms of governmental and cultural hysteria and oppression is tempered with accounts of the tiny moments of beauty and even humour which characterised life at Guantánamo.

We had so little in our cages, a brief glimpse of beauty and the magnificence of Allah's creation could carry our spirits for days or weeks.

The most surreal of the lighter moments comes at the point when, during the first years of the Obama administration and consequent relaxation of certain rules, inmates conspire with staff to play practical jokes on newly arrived guards. It all goes a bit 'Allo 'Allo! in places, particularly with the bedtime stories.

'Okay,' the block sergeant said. 'Let's divide up. Who wants to read stories?'

'You can't be serious,' another new guard said.

'They can't sleep until someone reads them a story,' the block sergeant said, 'or tells them one. It's up to you.'

'What kind of story do we tell them?'

'Just read to them from the books they have.'

'Story time, please!' Abdul called out. 'I'm tired.

These lighter moments, incongruous though they may at first seem, really fortify the account, providing stark contrast to the terrible crime which has been visited upon these men for no good reason by reminding us that deep down, we are all very similar, with the same sense of right and wrong - although I'm not sure this is true of at least a couple of the guards and I won't be gratuitously thanking any khaki strangers for their service any time soon. Anyway, ludicrous though it will most certainly sound, aspects of daily life at Guantánamo Bay remind me a lot of working at Royal Mail for twenty years - the more light-hearted bits, obviously.

I've never read anything quite like Don't Forget Us Here, and nothing with quite the same power or sense of humanity, nothing which connects the reader to the broader human experience in quite the same way. Everybody should read this book, and I really mean everybody.

Aaron's Rod

D.H. Lawrence Aaron's Rod (1922)
Aaron's Rod has been broadly characterised as one of Lawrence's lesser novels but—you know—screw you. He never wrote a minor novel. It is, however, one of his more freewheeling efforts - improvised in terms which can't be said of acknowledged greats such as The Rainbow or Women in Love. It therefore tends to get lumped in with The Lost Girl which was similarly improvised and draws pseudo-autobiographical inspiration from the same period and events of the author's life, namely meeting his wife, then her family and their move to Italy. As with The Lost Girl, he began writing, gave up, then finished the thing off a few years later on the continent. However, where The Lost Girl feels very much like two novels bolted together - one of them apparently written for Will Hay - this holds together very well. The first eleven chapters - amounting to the early material - could just about have worked as a novella in their own right, and if there follows a degree of subsidence, maybe a little coasting, it all pulls together with surprising elegance towards the end.

Aaron was the brother of Moses in both the Torah and the Old Testament. His rod was a staff with reputedly magical properties, a symbol of authority and fertility. Here it's Aaron's flute and possibly also his hampton to some extent, the instrument which informs his progress, the course of his life and, significantly, a means by which Aaron communicates without reducing everything to the vulgar codification of words. This is a theme which really comes to the fore in The Plumed Serpent, and Aaron's Rod accordingly reads a little like a dry run.

'Ay, all right then,' said Aaron. 'But there isn't anything wonderful about it. You talk as if you were doing something special. You aren't. You're no more than a man who drops into a pub for a drink, to liven himself up a bit. Only you give it a lot of names, and make out as if you were looking for the philosopher's stone, or something like that. When you're only killing time like the rest of folks, before time kills you.'

Similarly, in Aaron's Rod we find Lawrence's pastoralism beginning to develop a more philosophical dimension.

Much that is life has passed away from me, leaving us all mere bits. In the dark, mindful silence and inflection of the cypress trees, lost races, lost language, lost human ways of feeling and of knowing.

Of course, it is this current of mysticism which has led to Lawrence being denounced as proto-fascist in recent times by those who tend to prefer their complex arguments reduced to the black and white narrative of a Star Wars movie; but it's frankly fucking bollocks and primary colour politics are dismissed over and over in this novel, written, lest we forget, immediately in the wake of the first world war. Lawrence deals with the individual, usually himself, and never has much to say about larger pictures.

'Who threw the bomb?' said Aaron.
'I suppose an anarchist.'
'It's all the same,' said Aaron.

Here he's dealing with himself, using the characters of Aaron and Lilly as a dissection of his own confused relationship with Middleton Murry - a love-hate deal wrapped up with D.H. feeling the need for a submissive male disciple, someone in which his own philosophical leanings might be echoed and hence justified. Nevertheless, this is as much a novel about marriage to the endlessly polygamous Frieda as anything, and the Lawrence-Murry metaphor only works up to a point. While the thoroughly yappy, opinionated Lilly doubtless resembles the author in many respects, the brooding, ever reticent Aaron seems to capture what the man wished to become; and it's difficult to avoid reading him as the principal author stand-in.

Minor novel, my arse.

Ploughshares Fall 2021

Ladette Randolph (editor) Ploughshares Fall 2021 (2021)
Ploughshares is a quarterly literary collection of short fiction. Most contributions are approximately novella length, so this is going to be a long one. If you need to dash to the kitchen to grab a few cans of Kestrel and a packet of custard creams, I can wait.

Okay, in vague order…

I'm kicking off with Afsheen Farhadi whose The Mexican Detective takes its time, creeping up on the reader without giving away too much of where it's going despite the obvious focus on bereavement; and once everything has fallen into place, it leaves a lasting evocation of the unreality which tends to surround the death of a loved one, mapping a borderland in mythic terms - in this case by the seemingly implausible agency of a Mexican detective who admits he's mostly just a guy who attends a writing class. The aforementioned borderland incorporates Mexican streets terrorised by knife wielding infants, and I've always enjoyed reality described by that which is found beyond its outer limit.

Christie Hodgen's Bush v. Gore hits a lot of buttons for me, being set in Texas - albeit Dallas rather than San Antonio - with a regular gal, probably the author, abruptly stranded within one of those dysfunctionally over-moneyed families with which I'm now somewhat familiar thanks to the stepson. My bunch are of generally lesser toxicity than Phyllis and the gang, but not one of those people got where they are by playing nice; and the point at which our narrator finally pops, dumping an entire paragraph of home truths on her hosts - page 113, if anyone's wondering - is so satisfying that I had my wife read it too. The entire psychodrama is set against the backdrop of George W. Bush defeating Gore in Florida, or kinda sorta maybe defeating Gore in Florida. Why the election played out as it did seems adequately explained by the family dynamic of Jack, Phyllis and the rest, which in turn goes some way towards accounting for what happened more recently in November 2016.

Yxta Maya Murray's When the Prophet Gazed upon the Face of the Lord is incredible, and one of the tightest, most powerful pieces of writing I've read all year. It orbits - I suppose you could say - the true story of a partial nuclear reactor meltdown in Simi Valley, California back in 1959, additionally taking in the tangential horror of Nazi rocket scientists and other elements found so far beyond the edge of daily existence as to impinge on the spiritual, in this case the religion of corn, stone knives, and the Centzontotochtin of old Mexico. The reality of the tale and its telling is such that it's difficult to imagine it consciously composed and directed as a fictionalised narrative, such is its power.

Talking of which, Mona Susan Power is a member of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe and a Harvard graduate who was awarded the PEN/Hemingway prize for her novel, The Grass Dancer. Here she contributes Goodreads Warrior which tells how of a young Native American man from a town near the Standing Rock Sioux reservation gets into Harvard to be taught by a teacher whose last collection of short stories won the PEN/Faulkner prize, whatever that is. Whilst I very much like the theme of what it takes a Native to get ahead in such institutions, I had trouble getting past this one being writing about what it's like to be a writer - a genre I dislike because it feels self-involved and dishonest on some level. It probably doesn't help that our guy's own literary efforts, which appear nested within the narrative, aren't anything special and are conspicuously consistent with Power's own narrative voice, which is freewheeling and would, I suspect, better suit something a little less recursive.

A Procession of Beasts and Men is Will Schluter's first short story - according to the byline - and if it's a mostly decent effort and not lacking in poetry, most of it seems to comprise descriptions of the domestic texture through which his character moves without any obvious sense of direction. Accordingly, there are some long fucking sentences here.

Not unlike those waves of electric pole and line that rose and broke in a steady stream all the way from West Texas through New Mexico and into a rest stop just south of the headwaters of the Rio Grande where she ditched the Volvo for a Pinto left idling at a gas pump and urged that baby up up up and into the Rockies as that one cassette played over and over on fuzzy speakers because the car's broken antenna wouldn't pick up a radio signal that didn't give way to static after about three and a half seconds but the electric line never stopped no matter how high she went and that one song kept on playing Josie's on vacation far away as the woman not yet named Josie approached the crest of the Great Divide and the waves of post and line seemed to transfer into her own body starting in her abdomen and continuing on down through her pelvis over and over again until she felt the emptying that soaked her leggings and the whole carseat under them and she knew her water had finally broke up there among the snow-capped peaks.

I appreciate the reason for the absence of a pause anywhere in the above, but this sort of thing doesn't always work, and here it slows everything down which is, I suspect, the opposite of the desired effect. Additionally, Schluter strives to create mood by means of sentences broken into inactive segments. Such as this. Where a comma would work a whole lot better than a full stop. Never mind.

Having known Nick Sweeney since the nineties, I'm probably biased regarding his contribution, although you wouldn't actually be reading these words if I'd thought it was crap so make of that what you will. The Émigré Engineer is really a novella and the longest story in the collection, which is as it should be given the scale of the tale, trailing its main guy from his bloody coming of age during the Russian Revolution, to Paris, then small town America between the wars. It's about an engineer, one who forges with his hands, making his way by sheer bloody minded force of will in a difficult and occasionally fucking ridiculous world, as told with a satisfyingly nourishing cadence and a sense of the physical which reminds me of a folk tale or even Gogol, albeit without quite the same level of surrealism. I mainly know Nick as a friend of my friend Eddy and as - much to my excitement - a man who once auditioned for Adam & the Ants. I've no real idea from whence his interest in eastern Europe is derived, but he channels it like a native, I suppose you would say. My recent reading has brought me to the surprising conclusion that, despite the last few hundred years, the heart of our world has generally been that expanse of land between the Baltic, Adriatic and Caspian seas for the longest stretch of human history, with the rest of us fiddling about around the edges; and as an immigrant myself, and friends with at least one former Russian Jew, I recognise a lot of The Émigré Engineer, although thankfully not so much the more harrowing episodes. Nick Sweeney taps into something fairly fundamental here, yet without the need for anyone honking away on a trumpet.

Joan Wickersham's Mortal Enemy was an odd one for me, not least for being listed as non-fiction in the index - presumably through being directly autobiographical - which implies the potential for a technical discussion of scaffolding. It's an account, and a fairly harrowing one, of a one-time friend evolving into a violently bipolar stalker. The problem, which is possibly my problem rather than anything to do with the author, is the initial setting of writers, writing courses, and literary discussion amongst students at Yale, the sort of thing which hits me as vaguely adjacent to Wickersham's own assessment of a novel written by her mortal enemy.

The prose sounded like Bobby, Bobby eager to tell the world about itself, but what he knew about the world he'd learned from reading other books by men eager to tell the world about itself. He wrote in clichés. Every sentence congratulated itself for being that sentence.

This is why Charles Bukowski recommended time spent at the race track. To be fair, Wickersham writes without either cliché or sentences congratulating themselves, and the account begins to feel distinctly more vital once we move on from prestigious colleges and trips to Paris. It's honestly a respectable piece and one I'm glad to have read because I'm sure many of us have known Bobby at some point or other, although that whole deal of an insight into the lives of writers usually brings me out in hives which, as I say, is possibly just me.

Leslie Kirk Campbell's The Man with Eight Legs and Julian Zabalbeascoa's What We Tried to Bury Grows Here were both entirely decent without inspiring me to write about either, which is why I haven't.

I don't actively seek out new writers as any sort of official policy because I already have too many books stacked up on the to be read pile, some of which admittedly may be garbage, but these anthologies are always a pleasure when I make the time and I highly recommend this one, not least on the strength of the contributions from Afsheen Farhadi, Yxta Maya Murray, Nick Sweeney and Christie Hodgen.

You Look Like Death

Gerard Way, Shaun Simon & I.N.J. Culbard
You Look Like Death (2021)
While it would be a generalisation to suggest that I dislike modern comics - or all comic books published during the last thirty years, to really ramp it up a few notches - there are always exceptions, and it's rarely so much that I actively dislike newer titles as that I just can't get excited about them. I still generally think comics were better when they were cheap, stupid, populist, rarely aimed at anyone with a mortgage, and printed on crappy paper - back before anyone had decided what comics are and replaced weird surprises with collectability, limiting the things to sale in stores into which no-one sane could possibly wish to venture*.

On the other hand, the Umbrella Academy is one of the few things that genuinely ticks my boxes. This one collects six issues of a solo title centred upon Klaus, the guy who communicates with the dead, and is wonderful in pretty much every sense. Here Klaus, ejected from the family home with his allowance discontinued, attempts to get by in Hollywood. This version of Hollywood hasn't quite let go of the glamour of the thirties and forties; some of the characters are talking chimpanzees - thankfully no explanation given; and there's a fairground catering to vampires, specifically the kind who wear black cloaks with a red satin lining. So we have the logic of Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol - the supposed influence of which is looking ever thinner - applied to a version of Los Angeles which is almost the place we saw in Bill Griffith's very first Zippy the Pinhead strips - and all drawn with beautifully expressive yet clean lines suggesting Moebius having a go at Tintin.

I'm sure you saw the television series. It was watchable, but felt like a misreading of the Umbrella Academy as the usual sparkly Tim Burton-Neil Gaiman bollocks. It should have been more like You Look Like Death, except it couldn't because as a comic book, the Umbrella Academy is already where it needs to be, and asking a few pizza-scoffing square-eyed bingemonkeys to fit it in between the all day Babylon 5 marathon and season fifty of Superman's Pool Cleaner in one sitting is hardly an achievement.

It may still be a little too soon to start calling Gerard Way a genius, and I doubt I'll ever see the appeal of My Chemical Romance, but You Look Like Death is a genuinely wonderful thing.

*: I am aware of virtual comics which you download directly onto your GamePornPad and even - ugh - webcomics, but remain generally unconvinced.

Reflections of A.E. van Vogt

A.E. van Vogt Reflections of A.E. van Vogt (1975)
A.E. van Vogt was one of a number of persons interviewed as part of an oral history project undertaken by three universities - Colombia, UCLA, and UC Berkeley. This lengthy interview was eventually edited and published as Reflections of, which is as close as we'll ever get to a van Vogt autobiography. By this point, I think there are three van Vogt novels that I still haven't read - out of God knows how many - so it's probably fair to say that I'm very much a fan. Accordingly, I've found this to be a fascinating read.

Here Alfred Elton talks about growing up in Saskatchewan, his first writing sales to the magazines, Dianetics, the development of his technique and his theories about writing, particularly what he tries to do in his science fiction; and somehow I'm left with even more questions.

As you may know, van Vogt cultivated a particular style which, for want of a better description, seems to do to the page what German expressionism did to the cinema screen. You have to hold on tight because it can be disorientating, confusing, and dreamlike, often with the most confusing elements left deliberately bereft of explanation. My first reaction to van Vogt was this guy can't write, which changed to drunk in charge of a typewriter, until I realised the disorientation was on purpose and the result of a very specific methodology. As an aside, it's therefore probably a good thing that his just about an autobiography came from a series of lengthy interviews rather than more directly from the man himself.

As I expected, he was never shy when it came to blowing his own trumpet - much of which is admittedly justified - but it's particularly interesting that he should have also been so finely tuned as to his own failures, stories which didn't quite hold together - which is a relief because I've often thought it was just me. I suspect that these days we would describe him as having been somewhere on the spectrum, but I won't because I remain unconvinced of such a term being truly helpful. Aside from his occasionally startling directness, van Vogt comes across as an autodidact, although I suspect some of the grammatical eccentricities may stem from his having spoken Dutch until the age of four. Yet the image he presents of himself is itself contradicted by his views on L. Ron Hubbard, and on other authors he admires, and on what he tried to do with his own writing. I'm still not sure I fully understand what he tried to do with his own writing, although it refers to Marshall McLuhan as well as Korzybski and entails use of fictional sentences, whatever they are. Of course, it may all be word salad and inherently batshit, but the fact of van Vogt's greatest successes working just as well in the world inhabited by the rest of us support the idea that he may have been onto something.

Above all, Reflections leaves one with the impression that while A.E.'s Venn diagram - or Van diagram if you like - may not always have intersected tidily with the planet upon which the rest of us live, he seems like an incredibly nice guy, and one whom it would have been fun to hang around with.