Barefoot in the Head

Brian Aldiss Barefoot in the Head (1969)
This was probably a lousy choice immediately following Lanark, but never mind. Barefoot in the Head very much reflects its time in describing the aftermath of the Acid Wars, a sort of psychedelic apocalypse in which Colin Charteris - our main character, and yes, he named himself after the author of his favourite series of spy novels - undergoes a particularly weird hero journey to emerge as the new Messiah. Its composition suggests that Brian took his research very, very seriously.

'Breathing the old west dust and breathing out the old west dust. No. That old ethic-ethnic LSD has automated us two thousand years and now the fracture there's been a mislocation so let's jump it from the steamcross and say for ever farewell to that crazy nailedup propheteer. Look girl I don't refuse to go your way or refuse to go Laundrei's way or refuse to go Cass's way or refuse to go any way. I refuse to hit the worn-out Creased or anti-creased way. For me new tracks and stuff the old ding-dong the belfrey belt.'

At near three-hundred pages, it's not what you'd call light reading, but is rewarding providing you hold on really tight, allowing the narrative to form through association with what's on the page - which is far from being the random gibberish that often passes for experimental prose these days. That being said, this all depends on whether you feel inclined to make the effort. I managed for just long enough to detect what felt like genuine philosophical depth - despite the frequent references to Ouspensky and Gurdjieff - but it became a bit joyless after a while.

Barefoot in the Head seems to be the real thing - as distinct from the usual Austin Powers level approximations of that decade - and accordingly fixates on soap powder advertising as the harbinger of Ragnarok, but it's a demanding read and probably worked better in more easily digested instalments in New Worlds magazine.

Lanark

Alasdair Gray Lanark (1981)
Generally speaking, I've grown a little jaded with novels featuring characters who are aware of inhabiting a work of fiction, because the conceit seems to have become so ubiquitous of late as to suggest that shitheads are getting in on the action. It's one of those post-modern tricks that fucking everyone does because it's easy, and it suggests philosophical depth without the pesky requirement of actual groundwork undertaken, and anyone pointing out the emperor's lack of clothing will usually find themselves branded a thickie. Each new example of a character turning to the imaginary camera to directly address an audience now reminds me of my stepson assuming he'll blow our minds by explaining how Deadpool, a Marvel superhero from the nineties, breaks the fourth wall. I wouldn't mind but he hasn't even read the comics, just watched some green haired YouTube gamer twat opining about them.

For anyone who didn't get the memo, or who may still be buzzing from the euphoria of this amazing discovery and the attendant honour of getting to tell the rest of us about it, fictional or metafictional characters who don't occasionally address the reader - or wink at the camera or otherwise comment on the story in which they have become involved - have been with us since before the novel was even a thing. It might even be suggested that characters who remain unaware of someone else writing their lives are the more recent anomaly in terms of literary history. I assume that at least one of you will have heard of William Shakespeare…

Anyway, I'd been wondering about all this after Lance Parkin wrote about what he termed - by his own admission, for the sake of convenience - the Gray Tradition, a genre encompassing writers such as Philip K. Dick, Alan Moore, Grant Morrison and others known to turn up within their own narratives. Of course, terming it the Gray Tradition might seem akin to proposing that Don Quixote belongs to the Deadpool Tradition but, as Parkin explained, he was mostly just thinking aloud, and his model arguably incorporates more than just the basic furniture of Menippean satire, hence his efforts to map it out, whatever it is.

Lanark figures here for a number of reasons, not least being the chapter wherein Lanark meets the author who then describes some of what he's been trying to do with this book. Lanark is himself also a pseudo-autobiographical stand-in for the author. His story, one which spans from youth to old age, takes place in the city of Unthank, which may or may not be an afterlife of sorts. Lanark, hardly likely to miss the suspension of normal laws of cause, effect, and common sense, speculates that Unthank may even be Hell - although it seems to bear closer resemblance to the frozen underworld of many pre-Christian cultures, albeit with a generous helping of Kafka - but the precise nature of Unthank isn't so important as what it says about our own world.

Our own world, or at least Alasdair Gray's experience of the same, is detailed in the two central books of this four-ish part novel as the life of Duncan Thaw, a young Glaswegian who attended art school in the late fifties. Thaw paints murals - as did Gray - but finds himself at odds with his tutors, his contemporaries, and much of his social environment; and his life culminates in his painting the book of Genesis across the interior of a church scheduled for demolition. Thus, much like humanity born in the Biblical garden, the great work is doomed before it's even started.

Very few men are as nasty to their children as you are to yours. Why didn't you give me a railway station to decorate? It would have been easy painting to the glory of Stevenson, Telford, Brunel and a quarter million Irish navvies. But here I am, illustrating your discredited first chapter through an obsolete art form on a threatened building in a poor province of a collapsing empire.

Thaw's mural seems to echo both the history of Glasgow, and by association the history of human civilisation, and the writing of the novel itself; and this was the point at which I noticed just how much Lanark foreshadows Alan Moore's Jerusalem - which now strikes me as amounting to Lanark rewritten with more ornate guitar solos and very little of the actual heart or soul.

As to what Lanark is about, it's about everything, or is at least about more than can be summarised in a single paragraph; but if there's truly any overarching theme, its constitution is touched upon when Lanark argues with Ozenfant in the final chapter.

'You are a liar!' cried Lanark. 'We have no nature. Our nations are not built instinctively by our bodies, like beehives; they are works of art, like ships, carpets, and gardens. The possible shapes of them are endless. It is bad habits, not bad nature, which makes us repeat the dull old shapes of poverty and war. Only greedy people who profit by these things believe they are natural.'

It's a long book - nearly six-hundred pages - because it's about everything, stated in organic, evolving terms rather than just ticking all the salient points one by one from a list, Alan. Much of it is frankly fucking peculiar, but it's all familiar. Some of it drags, just as real life occasionally drags, but it's all part of the process, making Lanark as much of an essential read as anything can be described as an essential read; and even if whatever conclusions we draw may seem pessimistic or depressing, there's a great joy in embracing something which is at least truthful.

Kingdom Come

Mark Waid & Alex Ross Kingdom Come (1996)
I'd stopped reading the caped stuff when this was first published and only found out about it a couple of weeks ago. The reason I stopped reading the caped stuff was due to the entire mainstream comics biz having taken to impersonating Rob Liefeld, or at least Todd McFarlane, and it had all begun to look like a massive pile of wank from where I was stood. Nearly three decades later I realise I wasn't the only one to feel that way, and Kingdom Come features a host of established DC superpersons who, having reached retirement age, find themselves significantly bemused at the younger generation of bloodthirsty cyborg assassins wielding shuriken swords and way too much angry crosshatching. It's a weird one because it's approximately an epic war between, on one side, the traditionally wholesome and brightly coloured comic book heroes of the fifties - hence the non-ironic cameo by Krypto the Super Dog - and all that fucking awful shite inspired by Liefeld and his buddies; so on at least one level it's pitched firmly against not so much the comic book growing up (which it sort of didn't in any case) as what it grew into, told by both means and medium far removed from the newsstands and legitimately juvenile audience whose legacy it directly represents. So it's Miller's Dark Knight flipped to more positive and progressive aspirations - or possibly where Alan Moore would have gone with 1963 had he finished the thing.

In caped terms, I didn't always get DC, generally preferring Marvel and usually rolling my eyes during streamed documentaries identifying the difference as being that DC deals in legends, man; but now having read and re-read a few of the various Crisis books - and re-reading is essential because they are otherwise often incomprehensible - I think I understand the distinction. Marvel superheroes tend to be Gods and monsters which also happen to be ourselves with all of our baggage and characteristic failings. DC superheroes are, for the most part, more remote, something to which I suppose we aspire rather than which we become. There are numerous exceptions to this generalisation, but that's what I take from Multiversity, Infinite Crisis, and now this; and it's why, I would suggest, those Marvel movies have generally been more watchable than the DC jobs, because everything looks epic if you throw enough CGI at it, so movie-epic isn't that impressive in and of itself.

Anyway, this works because although the story is probably not actually anything special, being masses of caped folks flying angrily at each other whilst shooting rays from their outstretched hands for two-hundred pages, the art is genuinely breathtaking; and so breathtaking that even the most ridiculous aspects of the genre are rendered with sublime grace and beauty as befits tales of the Gods and their kin. Accordingly Kingdom Come also demonstrates why it's mostly a waste of time trying to transfer this stuff to the big screen. The strapline about how you'll believe a man can fly never really worked for me because I could see it was just some guy in a leotard hanging from a near invisible wire, but Kingdom Come is, on the other hand, unusually persuasive.

The Most Beautiful Woman in Town

Charles Bukowski The Most Beautiful Woman in Town (1983)
Here's another after the fact assemblage of short stories Chuck fired off to assorted magazines of vaguely literary persuasion, possibly without remembering that he'd done so in a few cases. Most are probably autobiographical, but not all; and a couple of them could be counted as science-fiction if you felt inclined to do so, even if the speculative details of sex robots and Adolf Hitler mind-swapping with the president tend to be overshadowed by the familiar themes of booze, fucking, and hangovers. For someone who, according to his numbskull critics, only ever wrote one thing and wrote it over and over and over, there's a lot of variation here, and thankfully none of it in terms of quality - as has been the case with other, similar collections of the man's peripheral works. As usual, it's hardly pretty, and there are a couple of instances of surprising brutality, even for Bukowski, and yet everything is delivered with equal emphasis, no emotional bias, as the even drone of daily life in a hangover of existence, warts and all, and with the sort of pathos and even tenderness which few other writer's ever quite achieved. Each time you read Bukowski you learn something important, or if you don't learn it then you are reminded of it; and if you still don't get it, then you're probably doing it all wrong.

Stormbringer

Michael Moorcock Stormbringer (1965)
My general view of Moorcock's Elric books has been subject to a seemingly endless cycle of re-evaluation, as follows:

• Suspected that, being fantasy, they were probably shit.
• Read Moorcock and realised they might be all right after all.
• Was told Moorcock wrote them purely for the money, meaning they were probably shit.
• Read the first one anyway and realised that it was actually pretty decent, regardless of having possibly been written for the money.
• Read the next few, and sort of enjoyed them but nothing like so much as Moorcock's other novels. Ho hum.

Stormbringer is the final novel of the original six volume series. I get the impression it was intended to be the final Elric book, but the popularity of the series obliged a continuation. Of the first six, it's the one which reads like a proper novel rather than a series of short stories bolted together. Moorcock's brief introduction introduces it as his first attempt at a full-length book, then thanks David Britton for hanging onto the magazines in which it was originally serialised, and Wikipedia claims it was yet more short stories bolted together, so I guess the conclusion here is that nobody fucking knows.

Anyway, I suppose my problem with the Elric books - not that it kept me from reading these first six - is a certain absence of humour, possibly aside from the sort of humour which occasionally smashes wooden flagons of ale together with a hearty ha ha! Then again, I can see the sense in preserving the mythic thrust of these tales by avoiding knowing winks to camera, and they're all about the mythic. Stormbringer wraps everything up nicely by pushing its mythic agenda to the border of philosophy, or at least something deeper than routine chivalry and stuff about dragons. It draws back a little, at least compared to the others, to reveal the bigger and significantly weirder picture, and in doing so making Tolkien seem positively pedestrian. I now understand that Jack Vance's Dying Earth books may have been an influence, and this feels very much like a distant relative inhabiting the other end of human history, or prehistory to be specific.

So what I'm saying here is that, Stormbringer really is sort of mind-blowing by some definition, and if the previous four weren't quite so startling as the first, this grand finale rewards the effort of having read them. Even if Moorcock's principal motivation was paying off the mortgage, it doesn't really matter because this one justifies the hype.