The Best of Lester Del Rey (1978)

 

It's taken me a little while, but Del Rey finally makes it into my own personal top tier, and I take back any disappointed noises I may have made on the grounds that van Vogt has fired off at least a couple of duds, and even Simak managed one. Of Del Rey's novels, most that I've read have been juvies - those being what I tend to find in second hand book stores for some reason - and although they've been good or even great, it's difficult to get the measure of a writer keeping at least some of his schtick reigned in for the sake of a particular audience; and then there's Day of the Giants which is fantastic, and Nerves which isn't. The Best of mostly comprises short stories which first appeared in Astounding, Galaxy, Unknown Worlds and the like, and this seems to be where he really shines.

It may be the ideas, which often pack a genuine punch of astonishment even after a half century of fucking everything having a twist ending; or it could be the telling, which is fresh, and engaging, and didn't seem loaded with reminders of having been written prior to the invention of teenagers - Superstition, for one example, reminded me of Stephen Baxter on more than one occasion. Whatever it may be, Del Rey does it with a lightness of touch that makes it seem easy and compels you to keep reading in much the same way as did Philip K. Dick, where the poetry is shaped in what is described rather than given as description in its own right.

This being said, I encountered a lull around half way through which picked up with the aforementioned Superstition, although this may have been down to me and my daily circumstances rather than to anything Lester wrote. However, focusing on his strengths, he seems at his best when jamming something which shouldn't work into the middle of an otherwise traditional story, then forcing everything else into line. If this sounds familiar, I suspect Superstition's apparent reference to the similarly awkward A.E. van Vogt may not have occurred just in my imagination:

'This story sounds like something from those papers of Aevan's we found. A fine mathematician from before the Collapse, but superstitious like you. He actually believed in mind-reading, clairvoyance, and teleportation!'

The story - some unknown force instantaneously throwing a number of spacecraft across two-hundred thousand light years - actually sounds like the work of A.E. van Vogt, here presumably rendered as A.E. van, then just plain Aevan in case that wasn't obvious; and what follows slaps the reader about the face with the similarly inexplicable whilst simultaneously pondering on religious models of reality with the sort of conviction that Dick managed in a few of his later books. Related themes of theology and morality are revisited in For I Am a Jealous People, The Seat of Judgment and Vengeance is Mine, each of novella length and as such extremely satisfying. I was mostly expecting well-executed tales of robots and rockets, but Lester Del Rey obliges you to consider what you're reading.

This comes just after some online observation made about how he could be a bit of a twat in real life, but the same has been said of Harlan Ellison - one of Del Rey's proteges - so I don't really care.

Dave Ball - Electronic Boy (2020)

Soft Cell were fairly important to me and continue to be so by some definition, so this seemed like essential reading; and sure enough, much of it is fascinating, particularly Ball's account of the early years. Additional points might be dispensed for Electronic Boy being a rock star autobiography free of the telltale as told to Lippy Scrungebucket or whoever in tiny letters beneath the name of the author, except I feel this one may have benefited from a more hands-on editor, or at least somebody with a strongly expressed second opinion. This isn't so much a complaint about anything bad as a feeling that it could have been better with just a little more fine tuning here and there.

Dave Ball has an amiable, conversational tone, and most of his book is engaging, although one's mileage may vary with the lists of various synths and effects boxes. A certain quota of clichés are committed, which is probably inevitable - observations in the immortal words of such and such, or the occasional sentence describing how I opened the door and who should be stood there but my famous friend Ray Reardon, the snooker champion*. However, Dave Ball is primarily a musician, and an exceptional one for what it may be worth, so it would be churlish to criticise him for failing to replace Shakespeare as our number one English language word doer, particularly where the whole is so entertaining. The problem seems to be one of focus - plenty of it for the years up to Soft Cell falling apart in the wake of their third album, after which it gets very uneven, zipping through the last couple of decades as though skipping through a DVD in search of a particular scene. I could have stood a little more detail with English Boy on the Love Ranch, the Grid, and other post-Cell endeavors; and when we come to 2002's Cruelty Without Beauty, we're half way through the account before it's even clear that they're not only back on speaking terms but have actually reformed. On this score, there's an entire chapter reproducing Dave's diary entries from crossing the Atlantic in a boat, and we don't actually discover why he was crossing the Atlantic in a boat until the following chapter. So it's a bit like having a conversation with someone who keeps playing with their phone - gems scattered here and there, but somehow it should have held together better.

It's still a great book though.

*: To be fair, this example is actually from the Cosey Fanni Tutti book.

J.D. Salinger - The Catcher in the Rye (1951)

 

I read this mainly because it had begun to feel a bit weird that I hadn't, given the shadow it casts across various stretches of popular culture. Having been found in the pocket of the bloke who murdered John Lennon, and then again in the fictional narrative of Margaret Thatcher's aspiring assassin in Grant Morrison's St. Swithin's Day, I'd always assumed Catcher to be about a neurotic outsider who flips and consequently pops an innocent with a firearm - the blueprint for all those school shootings. Thankfully it isn't anything quite so obvious and the general concept of both teenagers and their inherent disgruntlement was still very much in development back in 1951.

So Holden Caulfield isn't the tidily modular rebel who rejects whatever you've got on principle, but rather is someone who has failed to connect with aspects of his own existence - like a more freewheeling version of Roquentin from Sartre's Nausea, the first English translation of which had appeared just two years earlier, it might be noted. My own stepson had a couple of years at one of those supposedly prestigious military academies to which Americans with too much money send their offspring, and so I recognise Caulfield's environment, finding it both reassuring and depressing that someone else identified the exact same problems with such places over seventy years ago. Caulfield isn't a bad student, or a kid with any  psychological issues which would today be medicated to drooling oblivion. It's simply that he's just smart enough to recognise bullshit when he sees it and struggles to reconcile himself to what is expected of him, most of which is predicated on the existence of a noble world full of grand achievements, aspirations, and fine men delivering speeches in front of marble columns, as distinct from a world made entirely of bullshit. He's been taught to hold truth as among the highest of virtues and so cannot help but revolt against that which it reveals. In practical terms, this amounts to his dropping out of school and vanishing off into the wild, blue yonder over the course of a weekend, as told in rambling first person with endless digressions and passing distractions in Caulfield's own distinctive if occasionally limited turn of phrase. You might argue the case for it being a more populist Nausea with Caulfield, lacking Roquentin's philosophical rhetoric, obliged to define his disconnection in more familiar terms, or terms with which I was more familiar at least.

It isn't a literary precursor to Ill Bill's Anatomy of a School Shooting, despite the reputation, being concerned with cause more than dramatic effect, and I doubt it would have endured so well were that the case.