The Eyes of the Overworld

Jack Vance The Eyes of the Overworld (1966)
Excepting Moorcock on the grounds of him being pretty much his own genre, Jack Vance is the first author of unambiguous fantasy to whom I've truly warmed, and by unambiguous fantasy I mean sagas of wizards in pointy hats inspiring quests across hill and dale, and so on and so forth. Actually, he's the second come to think of it, the first being Matthew Hughes whose tales of Raffalon are set against the backdrop of Jack Vance's Dying Earth, and this is one of Vance's Dying Earth novels - so I'm sure the sense of whatever I was trying to say can be found somewhere in that lot.

The Dying Earth is host to a post-technological society vaguely resembling our Renaissance but with magic, all occurring in the improbably distant future, at which point the sun routinely blinks out like aging strip lighting, hence the name. It was a significant influence on Moorcock's Dancers at the End of Time. I could probably leave the review there, but I won't.

Cugel the Clever is discovered attempting to steal certain valuable mystic items from Iucounu the Laughing Magician. Iucounu wraps an extraterrestrial squid around the thief's liver and obliges him to travel to the far north to procure the eyes of the overworld. The eyes of the overworld allow one to see the higher reality, transforming conventional perception of our world of rancid paupers screwing and pooing in stinking hovels into a reality of Disney princesses daintily wafting from one sparkling palace to another. The novel is a quest with a spell or enchantment resolving pretty much every scrape and episodic dilemma strung along its familiar path - and with no greater sense of consequence than in any other magically driven narrative - and yet Vance proves that it really is all in the telling. His fiction is heavily stylised, erudite almost to the point of shameless ostentation, and feels fresh and lively - more so than anything involving wizards surely has the right to be. I'd be surprised if he hadn't influenced Pratchett to some extent - although his wit is possibly sharper and less obviously satirical - and he assails the reader with a disorientating barrage of peculiar ideas and images to incredibly surreal effect - somewhat like Cordwainer Smith, but - frankly, better done. I don't know if The Eyes of the Overworld exactly says anything, but then it doesn't have to. Sometimes the mood, spectacle, and delightful confusion can be enough by itself.

Studies in Classic American Literature

D.H. Lawrence Studies in Classic American Literature (1924)
I approached this with some trepidation assuming it would be fairly dry, being Dave's thoughts on a stack of novels I've never read - excepting Moby Dick - and which I can't see me reading at any point in the near future. Happily, at least for me, Studies reads almost like a dry run for Apocalypse, or at least limbering up in preparation for The Plumed Serpent. It was begun in 1917, then revised and completed after the Lawrences moved to the States in 1922, and D.H. naturally had a few things to say on the subject of the country in which he'd made his home.

Studies in Classic American Literature gets the last couple of centuries worth of American society up onto the psychiatrist's couch and pulls them apart to see what's happening under the hood - if you'll pardon the mixed metaphor - an inspection made through the medium of its writing, what the land of the hypothetically free has had to say about itself.

This is something I've pondered myself, having moved here back in 2011 and been struck by the contradictions, and how it really isn't just Europe with different stuff. America makes a big deal out of having thrown off the yoke of hereditary monarchy, and so being a country where no-one is held back through having been born to the wrong parents - which is patently false. It's all about freedom, liberty, and other intangibles; and yet America's dedication to tradition, ceremony, speechifying, awards, more ceremonies, ionic columns, tradition, marble statues, medals for everyone, capes, salutes, honour, proclamations, ceremonies commemorating the previous ceremonies, pomp, circumstance, processions, and so on, is such as to make your average Euro-coronation seem like a fund raising piss-up at an anarchist collective. It's the messy divorce wherein one of those formerly wed spends the rest of his or her life telling you how great it is being divorced.

They came largely to get away - that most simple of motives. To get away. Away from what? In the long run, away from themselves. Away from everything. That's why most people have come to America, and still do come. To get away from everything they are and have been.

'Henceforth be masterless.'

Which is all very well, but it isn't freedom. Rather the reverse. A hopeless sort of constraint. It is never freedom till you find something you really positively want to be. And people in America have always been shouting about the things they are not. Unless of course, they are millionaires, made or in the making.

Lawrence being Lawrence, much of the argument strays into philosophical, even pseudo-mystical territory, although not without  justification so it's never entirely self-indulgent; and pretty much everything he's said remains approximately true today, a full century later.

As discourse, Studies tends to freewheel, to follow a train of thought like a dog sniffing its way around an unfamiliar field; so it's a monologue which makes coherent observations in an order which mostly makes sense, as distinct from a rigorously mathematical  analysis - a form which would, in any case, contradict Lawrence's most fundamental arguments. It hasn't left me with the desire to read Hawthorne, Fenimore Cooper or Poe - whose writing I already know I dislike in the latter case - but then that isn't really the point, and for a title which may look somewhat peripheral next to the others, it's one of the breezier and more clearly expressed introductions to Lawrence's view of the universe and our place therein.

Starshine

Theodore Sturgeon Starshine (1966)
This collection of six short stories is possibly the first Sturgeon I've read since having noticed that Kurt Vonnegut's recurring Kilgore Trout character was based on Sturgeon. Given that Vonnegut tended to write Trout as cranky at best, and otherwise something of a loser, I've found it hard to avoid this notion tainting my impression of Sturgeon's fiction, although in this case, the parallels seem to exist independent of my imagination. However, it should probably be remembered that Vonnegut and Sturgeon were friends, and that the genesis of Trout was as much to do with Kurt being amused by the idea of someone having a fish for a surname. I really don't think Kilgore Trout was intended as a criticism of Sturgeon, even though it's difficult to get away from the possibility.

Kilgore Trout was more or less invented by a friend of mine, Knox Burger, who was my editor in the early days. He did not suggest that I do this, but he said, you know, the problem with science-fiction? It's much more fun to hear someone tell the story of the book than to read the story itself. And it's true: If you paraphrase a science-fiction story, it comes out as a very elegant joke, and it's over in a minute or so. It's a tedious business to read all the surrounding material. So I started summarizing, and I suppose I've now summarized fifty novels I will never have to write, and spared people the reading of them.

While I recall Sturgeon's More Than Human as astonishing, nothing since has done much to sustain that impression. Apparently I thought The Synthetic Man was great too, and yet I don't even remember reading it.

Anyway, the six stories collected as Starshine mostly represent sparky, original ideas, and Sturgeon's prose is jazzy and engaging, or should be engaging, bespeckled as it is with unexpected and often startling images; and yet I kept finding myself thinking that Vonnegut had a point, even though Vonnegut's point was never anything to do with the quality of what his friend wrote. The energetic style isn't really a problem and never quite becomes as irritating or yappy as Kornbluth could occasionally be after a major Sunny D jag, but the ideas at the heart of these tales somehow feel convoluted and unlikely for the sake of convoluted and unlikely, as though Sturgeon wrote to see whether he could pull it off, imposing what might at least seem like internal logic on this stuff; and I found it hard to care. For all that Sturgeon wrote well, I was left without any idea as to why he wrote these.

William and the Space Animal

 

Richmal Crompton William and the Space Animal (1956)
This is yet another book I had as a kid, and I'm pretty sure it had been one of my dad's books from when he was a kid which eventually found its way into my possession along with a stack of Eagle annuals; and yet I never actually read it, the words to illustrations ratio being incompatible with my attention span at the time even though it looked kind of interesting and I remember wondering what happened in the story - or the main story, William and the Space Animal being one of the five assembled herein. Remember kids, next time some shiny-eyed arsehole tells you how such and such a piece of garbage at least gets kids reading, this usually means the kids in question will try to read as much Doctor Who, Harry Potter, or Clifford the Big Red Dog as they can get their hands on. It doesn't inevitably lead to Crime and Punishment.

Anyway, I sought out a new copy because I felt I owed it to my five-year old self, the illiterate little bollix; and because the other William book I read was fucking great.

I don't do spoilers - as the youngsters call them - because if the pleasure you take in reading a book can be diminished by the revelation of its ending, then books probably aren't for you; so I'll reveal that the space animal is nothing of the sort. Nevertheless the narrative path leading to its discovery and ultimate explanation is a thing of ludicrous beauty and masterful wit, as I've come to expect from Crompton. The other stories are of equivalent standard, but the greatest is probably William the Tree-Dweller wherein our man returns to the wild, turning his back on civilisation through it having responded so poorly to his experiments with rocketry. The experiments in question, undertaken in hope of aiding the space program as was, entail lit fireworks launched by means of bow and arrow.

'Well, what I thought was that if we could get a specially strong firework an' fix it to the end of this new arrow of mine an' let it off—the firework, I mean—jus' when I'm shootin' off the arrow, it'd go up jolly high an' then when we'd got into the way of it we'd put another firework on an' then another an' then another an' so on till we'd got it strong enough to get there.'

German fireworks maker Johann Schmidlap invented the two-stage rocket back in 1591, proposing a system wherein a first stage projectile carries a smaller rocket to the heavens, so unfortunately we can't credit Crompton with that one; but as for rocketry in works of fiction, I'm pretty sure everyone else writing in 1956 was still thinking of rockets as boats which land on the moon then fly back, all in one piece - and this is merely the preliminary set-up to William the Tree-Dweller.

William comes fairly close to being a work of genius - improbable and riotously funny stories grounded firmly in a reality I just about recall from my own childhood, no button pushing, no condescension or assuming the reader is an idiot - even though I may well have been - and sharp as a razor blade. Had I managed to read this when I was a kid, I've a feeling my life would have been very different, and certainly not worse.

Notes of a Dirty Old Man

Charles Bukowski Notes of a Dirty Old Man (1969)
This fell into the shopping trolley not through some burning need to read it, but more because I knew I'd eventually wonder why I hadn't picked it up when I had the chance. The posthumous Mathematics of the Breath and the Way from 2018 was likewise an assemblage of odds and ends, newspaper columns and so on, and while there was much to recommend it, as a collection it felt a bit of a slog where a Bukowski usually passes through the reader like curry at the end of a night on the sauce, at least in my experience. Notes, on the other hand, was compiled back when Chuck was still mostly in the land of the living, deriving from weekly columns in Open City, an underground Los Angeles newspaper. I gather Open City were happy with Bukowski submitting whatever the hell he liked in a general spirit of literary freedom; so if there's an occasionally topical observation to remind us this was a newspaper column, it's otherwise a principally autobiographical novel, albeit one with column length chapters written in whatever order he felt like writing them. There's quite a lot of booze, gambling, a fair bit of screwing, general grumbling about writing and writers, and even a few amusing pot shots taken at perceived literary golden boys of the day, Burroughs and Ginsberg. Chuck didn't really do sacred cows, or indeed anything which he saw as getting in the way of the truth. I quote the following in full understanding of some readers being too fucking stupid to understand.

I laugh. he's comfortable and he's human. every man is afraid of being a queer. I get a little tired of it. maybe we should all become queers and relax. not belting Jack. he's good for a change. there are too many people afraid to speak against queers - intellectually, just as there are too many people afraid to speak against the left-wing - intellectually. I don't care which way it goes - I only know: there are too many people afraid.

Notes of a Dirty Old Man turns out to be the collection I was hoping for when I picked up The Mathematics of the Breath and the Way. Bukowski's observations regarding all which continues to render life such an uphill and often joyless slog are on point and sadly timeless. It's ugly, uncomfortable and it smells bad, but truth is always more beautiful than the alternative, and that's what we have here.