Michel Houellebecq - H.P. Lovecraft - Against the World, Against Life (1991)

 

The initial reason for my reading Michel Houellebecq is the general serving suggestion of my supposed peers that I shouldn't read him; and I'm reading him regardless on the understanding that he and I may not agree on absolutely everything, and may even violently disagree on a couple of things. If you're unable to tell the difference between Houellebecq and Nigel Farage appearing on primetime national television to complain about having been silenced, then not only is that hardly my problem but you're a fucking idiot.

Anyway, this lengthy essay almost counts as a debut novel of sorts, and is among the few things I've read about Lovecraft which isn't revisionary bollocks. Of course, the aspect of Howie which has been most subject to revision has been his racism which tends to be downgraded to him being a man of his time, and anyway he grew out of it - which as a view is probably sustainable if you've never read, just off the top of my head, every single paragraph of The Dunwich Horror; and that was one of the good ones. Houellebecq's thesis is that most of what Lovecraft wrote reads as it does for reasons beyond his being a recluse, or technically naive, specifically that the great texts - and it should be easy enough to work out which of the stories he refers to by that term - are supposed to be that way. Lovecraft's characters tend to be generic because they're there entirely to carry the narrative and because Lovecraft was a misanthrope. His values inform what he wrote, regardless of any consideration of who might be reading or even paying for the privilege.

The value of a human being today is measured in terms of his economic efficiency and his erotic potential - that is to say, in terms of the two things that Lovecraft most despised.

It's a very convincing argument, and one that would seem to increase one's appreciation of all those squelchy tales of the super spooky space octopus in so much as that it's consistent with what we know - unlike the proposition that Howard had pretty much transformed into Ben Elton by the end of his life.

More shaky is the notion of there being such a thing as a philosophy of the Cthulhu Mythos - if we're to call it that - which works if you don't understand what is meant by the term philosophy, but here refers to an undifferentiated blast of nihilism as the negation of philosophy. In other words, Lovecraft at his best might be deemed the literary equivalent of listening to Ramleh at full volume; which I can see.

In support of this alleged philosophical quality, Houellebecq also offers the continuation of the Cthulhu Mythos by other authors which, if roughly spontaneous and undertaken purely for the sake of the art, I can't really see as being significantly different to kids growing up with the hope of one day writing the Spider-Man comic and so contributing to that universe; or to Perry Rhodan, Sherlock Holmes, Sexton Blake, Judge Dredd or whoever else. More likely, it strikes me that the significance and enduring appeal of the Cthulhu Mythos is its presenting a consistent cast of collectible characters rendered in primary colours as a ready-made playbox in which persons who like to make lists of things can indulge themselves, and notably the sort of persons who really, really need their content providers to be on their right side of history.

This edition also reproduces in full both The Call of Cthulhu and The Whisperer in Darkness presumably for the sake of comparison; but which unfortunately undermine some of what Houellebecq has written, at least for me. I don't think I've ever been convinced by the telling of The Call of Cthulhu despite that it supports Houellebecq's argument about Lovecraft's structural preferences; and although I found The Whisperer in Darkness effective and reasonably enjoyable, I really have to wonder at my being completely unable to recall having read it before whilst knowing that I read and apparently enjoyed it back in May, 2015. Given that Houellebecq will have read both in French, maybe something was gained in translation. That being suggested, his argument for the carefully directed precision of Lovecraft's narrative structure is surely cast into doubt by The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, produced the same year as Cthulhu and yet reading like the work of a ham-fisted adolescent

Regardless of anything, it's a pleasure and genuinely interesting to read about the man without having to make adjustments for some editorial bias attempting to paint himself as having been just a slightly scarier Lewis Carroll without the kiddy fiddling; and while I don't, for what it may be worth, agree with everything Houellebecq says, he nevertheless makes some fucking great points. In fact, I'm not sure Lovecraft did anything to deserve such a thoughtful and beautifully rendered biography.

A. Merritt - The Fox Woman & Other Stories (1949)

Just for the sake of a recap in the event of your having forgotten who he was - which is understandable given that most of us apparently have - if you're into the weird stuff, then Merritt was probably your favourite author's favourite author. He collaborated with Lovecraft and was a legend in his own lifetime, but a legend which faded with surprising haste, possibly due to the popularity of the sort of thing he wrote having likewise faded. It was fantasy, often drawing on myth and legend but from a twentieth century perspective, and with the influence of H. Rider Haggard very much in evidence. Merritt made a name for himself in the genre with unusually baroque prose which might have verged on the purple had he not applied it with such elegance.

That said, a little sometimes went a long way with Merritt, with the most loquacious application of bon mots suffocating the narrative in ebullient flourishes of topaz more languid than even the silken robes of Lao-Tzu as he rises to greet the crimson morn etc. etc., and his characters can be occasionally somewhat stereotypical. When everything's working as it should, this isn't a problem, but they can't all be classics. Actually, for all those of his books which I've read have going for them, I'm not convinced any of them are truly classics; and I'm not sure about this lot either.

The Fox Woman itself is a mostly elegant excursion into Chinese mythology which surely didn't need to be fifty pages; and perhaps may not have been in an ideal world, given that it's an unfinished piece published posthumously, along with a couple of other sketchy fragments featured here. Three Lines of Old French is one of those deals where some saucy bint you meet in a dream sends you a letter through the actual real world postal system, and it features a line describing military casualties as dregs of a score of carryings to the red-wine press of war, which is probably overdoing it a bit. Two of the stories are related by groups of chaps sat smoking cigars by the fireside, each consecutively out-doing the previous guy's tale of strange animal transformations, concluding with some bloke turning into a bee. You really get the impression that it was written in full confidence of this expression being welded firmly onto the reader's face for the duration.

In Merritt's favour, the ideas are nice and the imagery is often vivid even where they amount to less than the sum of the parts. Through the Dragon Glass and The Women of the Wood are decent, as is The Last Poet and the Robots which succeeds if only through the sheer force of its own weirdness, notably seeming very much a potential precursor to Michael Moorcock's Dancers at the End of Time. So that's a thumbs up even if I seem to be pulling a face.

Arkady & Boris Strugatsky - Roadside Picnic (1972)

 

I've spent the last forty years of my life avoiding Tarkovsky's Stalker - although it's actually more a case of not bothering with than actively avoiding. The reason for this is that it was shown by the film club when I was at art college, and somebody told me I really needed to see it because it was amazing and just the sort of film you love which, as usual, was pretty much the kiss of death for me. It wasn't that I even disliked the woman who told me this but, for all of her many wonderful qualities, I simply didn't trust her judgement on this occasion.

This unfortunate initial impression was cemented a couple of decades later when I found myself on the receiving end of one of my cousin's lectures, this time inspired by his having just got back from some Tarkovsky related event. As always, his lecture took the form of a leisurely paced droning monologue so delivered as to make it very difficult for anyone to interrupt, and composed with the apparent assumption of my never having heard of Tarkovsky, and possibly having no idea of what films are either. My cousin is five years younger than me but went to a much better school, you see, so has often felt duty bound to impart his greater wisdom.

I tried to explain that I hadn't seen the film and had reason to believe it might not be my sort of thing, but he took no notice. After about thirty fucking minutes of this, as he paused to draw breath, I took the opportunity to quip, 'Go on, then - push your glasses up your nose and say, as my producer said to me.' This was an allusion to Ronnie Corbett's shaggy dog stories from The Two Ronnies, and an attempt to reiterate my lack of interest in a light-hearted and humorous way so as not to give offence. He momentarily gave me the blackest of black looks, then continued for another twenty minutes, the condescending fucking cunt.

What eventually brought about my own personal Tarkovsky glasnost was my friend Carl telling me he'd been reading Roadside Picnic - on which Stalker is based and which I hadn't heard of because my cousin was apparently right about me being a massive thickie; but I tend to trust Carl's judgement on most things, so I took the plunge and finally watched it on Netflix or Hulu or one of those.

It was good, as I probably knew it would be, and it looked amazing, but then Blade Runner also looks amazing, and I don't know if Stalker was quite worth the forty year wait. It felt like it should do more than just look amazing whilst hanging about on the screen for far too long.

'It's based on a book that's supposed to be great, although I've never read it,' I told my wife as we sat down to watch. Then, after about seven hours, I added, 'You know, I don't think I'll bother with the book after all.'

I wasn't actually aware that she'd ordered me a copy from Amazon as we were watching because our birthday* was coming up. I'd assumed she was just fiddling with her phone as usual. Amazingly she didn't say anything.

To get to the point at long last, I finally understand the reputation this thing has garnered over the years, and I suppose Stalker is an extension of that, although the movie is very much a remix of the novel rather than a faithful rendering. the premise is, as you may know, that aliens have visited our planet leaving behind all sorts of fascinating super-advanced garbage just as we might leave crisp packets and plastic forks behind following a roadside picnic, if we're louts. The visitation sites coincidentally foreshadow the exclusion zone around Chernobyl in so much as that you wouldn't want to live there and all sorts of weird and deadly effects apply, and so we have stalkers - as they are called - who brave the Zones and retrieve flying saucer detritus which they sell to the scientific community. Much of the detritus is bewildering or just plain deadly, but occasionally something will turn out to be a self-recharging battery, so here we have the ancestral form of all those shitty science-fiction shows about what secretive government departments do with all the stuff that falls from the sky; except Roadside Picnic is mostly wonderful, fairly close to being a masterpiece, and is also entirely believable and true to life, being about the people more than it's about the weirdness. As Ursula K. LeGuin writes in her introduction:

There are no superbrilliant intellects; people are commonplace. Red, the central figure, is ordinary to the point of being ornery, a hard-bitten man. Most of the characters are tough people leading degrading, discouraging lives, presented without sentimentality and without cynicism. Humanity is not flattered, but it's not cheapened. the authors' touch is tender, aware of vulnerability.

The use of ordinary people as the principal characters was fairly rare in science fiction when the book came out, and even now the genre slips easily into elitism—superbrilliant minds, extraordinary talents, officers not crew, the corridors of power not the working-class kitchen.

I punched the air when I read that, and the pages that follow live up to the promise of the introduction; although that said, I found I got a little lost around halfway, mainly because I was subconsciously trying to match the narrative to what I could recall of the movie, which wasn't actually a whole lot. Anyway, having recognised that the movie was only loosely related, I started again at the beginning which, oddly enough, was a pleasure more than it was a chore.

Roadside Picnic is about the people, how they relate to the unknown, and the fact of the aforementioned unknown being absolutely unknowable - which is a pleasure to find in a genre that has tended to be more concerned with figuring it all out. Because we all live with the unknowable, even if we're just talking about death, Roadside Picnic feels like real life in a way which can't be said of your Asimovs or your Heinleins; and so it can also be read as being about religion, or even about the Soviet state as was - without actually criticising the Soviet state in any direct sense for obvious reasons. If Roadside Picnic is about anything, then it's arguably about everything.

Suddenly, for no apparent reason, he felt a wave of despair. Everything was useless. Everything was pointless. My God, he thought, we can't do a thing! We can't stop it, we can't slow it down! No force in the world could contain this blight, he thought in horror. It's not because we do bad work. And it's not because they are more clever and cunning than we are. The world is just like that. Man is like that. If it wasn't the Visit, it would have been something else. Pigs can always find mud.

If anyone is still reading, sorry for taking so long getting to the point and so inadvertently summarising how long its taken me to recognise the brilliance of this novel in some form or another, but we all got there in the end. Whatever garbage you were about to read, read this instead.

*: We have the same birthday.

Judge Dredd: the Complete Case Files 05 (1982)

I was a 2000AD regular up until 1980, by which point I'd turned fifteen and had to make a choice between Sounds music paper or the comic book which was then bringing me regular instalments of Meltdown Man and The Mean Arena, both of which were garbage. It wasn't a difficult choice. I hopped back on board a couple of years later. My friend Nick gave me his collection*, of which the earliest issue was, by sheer coincidence, the first prog I hadn't bothered to buy. His collection was patchy with substantial gaps, meaning I could at least tell that it hadn't suddenly returned to greatness immediately after I'd jumped ship, although it seemed to be back on track a couple of years down the line; and one of the strips which had served to remind me why I'd bought the thing in the first place was, of course, Judge Dredd.

Back in the Mean Arena days, Dredd had succumbed to whatever was happening to the other strips - one single episode after another reading very much as though they'd run out of things for him to do; but now that I was back on board I discovered the twenty-five part Apocalypse War, albeit with gaps which I was able to fill when Quality's colourised US reprints started to turn up in the local newsagent.

Thirty or so years later and I don't have any of those old progs. They all went back to the comic shop, one way or another, driven by a need for space and a fear of spending my entire life collecting a weekly comic which would still occasionally reward my dedication with crap such as The Secret Diary of Adrian Cockroach Age 13½ Months, or Really and Truly, or whatever else had presumably made the cut thanks to a deadline; and yet…

It was either this or back issues of the Quality reprint, and this big fat assemblage of no less than sixty-two consecutive issues seemed like better value. Being a chronological assemblage rather than a greatest hits this means about half of those strips included serve to remind me why I stopped buying, and so we have The Mega-Rackets which ran for what felt like five-hundred or more issues - actually just fifteen - a series of one or two part stories exploring the theme of what organised crime would look like in Mega City One, and mostly it looked like Chicago in the 1940s but with futuristic fins glued to the mobsters' trilbys, and men named Fingers or Lefty zipping through the skies in flying cars bearing a wearying resemblance to the Ford Model 18. To be fair, this sort of tale is fine in weekly instalments, but try reading a whole bunch in one sitting and—Jesus fucking Christ!

Of course, I considered the possibility that it might be just me, and that the somewhat murky reproduction of the original pages wasn't helping; but the contrast is astonishing once you get to the five-part Judge Death Lives wherein the lad responds to the invitation to gaze into the face of fear with:

It's probably one of the greatest single panels of almost any comic book ever, and as such represents the Judge Dredd strip at its very best so far as I'm concerned.

Judge Dredd - which, for what it may be worth, arguably represents the very essence of 2000AD comic in its purest form - is anything but straightforward, regardless of roots sunk deep into the British comics tradition of square-jawed just deserts. He's a cop who dishes out prison sentences for littering, who judges then carries out routine executions. He's been called a fascist, which implies an agenda bearing no relation to the character unless you consider all forms of authority inherently fascist. He's authoritarian for sure, but more like a law of nature and he is as such impartial - pitiless on one hand but above personal bias on the other. He's objectively harsh but fair - extremely unfair in humanist terms, but then life is unfair, as is most of the universe. This is why the strip has lasted four decades and has thus far resisted attempts to adapt it for the big screen, although at least the Stallone version kept some of the humour.

The humour is the element of contrast which sharply defines Dredd as anything but a superhero, and certainly not just Batman with a gun and a crash helmet. It's the traditional gallows humour of the British working class - if anyone remembers them - the sarcasm of English punk rock which informed those very first strips even when aimed at denizens of the junior school. I'd say the strip is Swiftian, even Rabelaisian - which it is - and is therefore probably not to be taken literally, except that feels like a bit of a slippery slope at the end of which I'd take to describing things as iconic, a sure sign of having disappeared up my own arse. Dredd operates more or less entirely on its own terms, which is probably why it feels so flat when the stories are reduced to answering the question, who do we have him fighting this week?

Anyway, I bought this for the Apocalypse War, which I recall as being amazing, and it turns out that I remember correctly. Carlos Ezquerra - the greatest Dredd artist in my view - illustrates the whole thing, maintaining the consistency with heavy, brutal lines which seem carved as much as drawn, and the story is so relentlessly bleak as to approach exhausting - despite the ever-present element of sarcasm and the peculiar intrusion of comic relief from Walter the Wobot and Maria, Dredd's landlady - who seems to follow in the tradition of the women to whom Tony Hancock once paid rent. How this single tale can pull in so many conflicting directions and still work is a marvel, never mind that it works so well - like standing in the blast of a jet engine for twenty-five issues.

*: They had been ruined when his house flooded and he was going to chuck them out. I took them home and dried them out two pages at a time on an oil-filled radiator.

August Derleth (editor) - The Other Side of the Moon (1948)

 

This was originally a hardback collection, of which - due to the limitations of bookbinding at the time - it was possible to fit only half the stories in the paperback version, which is what I have here. So I'm missing material from H.G. Wells, Lord Dunsany, Frank Belknap Long, Clark Ashton Smith, H.P. Lovecraft, and Ray Bradbury amongst others, although mostly stuff I've read elsewhere from what I can tell. Those selections which made the cut seem to have been less established names at the time of publication, but Derleth knew what he was doing and there's no particularly weak link in the resulting chain.

That said, this is golden age science-fiction as distinct from any modern variant, so there's not much point getting pissy over the absence of lengthy discussions about the properties of photons. The genre was still evolving, John W. Campbell was just beginning to make a name for himself, and even if everyone was familiar with Wells, Gernsback, and the rest, a lot of what we have here is more or less weird fiction with a few sciencey touches stirred in for flavour, and Donald Wandrei's Something from Above typifies the form as a marginally less purple Lovecraft-style yarn about flying saucers; and where contributions may not quite tick all the recognised weird fiction boxes, they're fucking weird nonetheless.

A.E. van Vogt's Resurrection, for example, teaches us that human beings brought back to life by aliens following the extinction of the human race will have superpowers for no adequately explained reason. The lad was firing on all four cylinders with that one. Elsewhere we find Original Sin in which S. Fowler Wright predicts that philosophy will eventually advance to such a degree as to inspire the entire human race to commit to a surprisingly cheery form of mass suicide, because the purpose of life is the evolution of its own destruction or summink; and Eric Frank Russell's Spiro recruits a shape-shifting alien refugee to the London music hall of the day thus allowing us to imagine what a Tommy Trinder version of Campbell's Who Goes There? might look like.

The rest are mostly cut from the same strange cloth; which you might call dated, but I'd prefer to regard as simply consistent with a particular style and mood associated with the forties, blending deco stylings with post-bomb paranoia and all of our ideas about supermen beginning to look a bit shaky; and, as ever, Derleth brought us the cream of the crop.