Jorge Luis Borges - The Book of Imaginary Beings (1967)

 

One of those books which became part of my personal reference library as a kid was the Piccolo paperback Dictionary of Monsters and Mysterious Beasts by Carey Miller, which I treasured for both its inclusion of obscure monsters I'd never heard of and the evocative black and white line illustrations by Mary I. French. Online research reveals that Miller made a career from books which terrified and fascinated the children of my generation, another one I owned being the beautifully painted hardback Mysteries of the Unknown: Monsters, Ghosts & UFOs from 1977 which only now do I realise was by the same author. This may all seem obtuse as preamble to my writing about Borges, an Argentinian author whose works have, as Wikipedia puts it, contributed to philosophical literature and the fantasy genre, and have had a major influence on the magic realist movement in twentieth century Latin American literature; but with hindsight it's difficult to believe Carey Miller wasn't cherry-picking from this earlier compendium when compiling her own dictionary given the quota of mythical monsters I've never seen mentioned outside of these two books - the Kujata, the Squonk and the Nasnas, to name just three. This isn't an accusation of plagiarism so much as one of influence given the differences. Miller's purpose being to give kids goosebumps, she includes dinosaurs and Frankenstein's monster.

I'm not sure Borges' intention was at variance but for a slight shift of focus, and we're in roughly the same territory as his short stories, here with narrative boiled down to its essence of time, place, character and so on, delivering equivalent observations and ideas in alphabetical order and without any of it being pinned to the customary progression of regular fiction. Where Miller's scope was sufficiently broad as to include Mary Shelley's hit single, Borges similarly draws in creatures from the writing of both Poe and Kafka whilst himself employing considerable artistic license in relating established mythological figures, and even creating one of his own - the Peryton, a half deer and half bird chimera which somehow casts the shadow of a man. This, I would assume, is because a rigorously scientific bestiary of mythical beasts arguably misses the point of that which it purports to describe, and because the larger world is often mapped from the seclusion of daily existence by fictions or truisms at best; and The Book of Imaginary Beings seems to provide a more informative account of the historical human experience as related to our environment than whichever facts or statistics might apply, even where the facts and statistics are more accurate in material terms.

This distinction is probably something we should try to keep track of, not least in recognising that there is a distinction which doesn't detract from the world described herein by Borges being a wonderful place.

Robert Moore Williams - The Chaos Fighters (1955)

 

It's been a shocking three years since I read my last Robert Moore Williams, a lull accounted for by nothing I hadn't already read showing up in the usual second hand places, before a day trip to Austin opened up an entirely new seam. So Austin is good for something beyond providing twats a point of focus for when they suddenly find themselves required to say something which isn't routinely insulting about Texas.

Happily, The Chaos Fighters has proven to be a good choice in terms of getting back in the saddle. As with much of his writing, it adheres to the unashamedly pulp sensibility of agents figuring things out, embellished with sensational dames but saved from the clichés and stock pieces by its sheer weirdness. Williams' writing has about it a strong touch of the A.E. van Vogt, although his own similarly dreamlike and unpredictable narratives are delivered in terms customarily more analogous to Edward Hopper than Edward Wadsworth, with occasionally a sentence so startling that it borders on Alan Partridge. Bright young things will characterise this as bad writing, which probably isn't an argument worth having; and neither does it matter whether or not Williams succeeds because the energy comes from the teeth gritting determination with which he attempts to wrestle that sucker to the ground. 

We open with our man Haldane entering a shop in pursuit of a mystery, just like the protagonist of van Vogt's Weapon Shops of Isher, which here seems to receive tribute on the very first page in the reference to other agents having vanished on Mars. The mystery stems from a sign in the shop window promising FOR SALE—Homo Sapiens, which is eventually revealed as the title of a book explaining the scientific and spiritual destiny of humanity in cosmic terms, as written by persons stood on the threshold of the same.

'We're human beings in the process of becoming something else. As we see history, the only law apparent in the universe is change. We human beings change too; we become something else, as a race and as individuals. What this something else is we don't know until we become it. Nor will we know what it is until we achieve it and find out what it is. But we are changing, we are evolving, we are moving in some direction.'

You may recognise the obsession with progress, human evolution, and supermen which gripped many science-fiction writers during the first half of the twentieth century, but what distinguishes Williams is how strongly he foreshadowed the utopian movements of the sixties, with whom he became briefly associated, seemingly as a benign guru figure to a commune. Unsurprisingly then, his science-fiction is decidedly fuzzy at the edges with the weird fiction of Abraham Merritt as a starting point, expanding to include all forms of mysticism, whatever seemed to fit, here presenting us with inventors who also summon the occasional mysterious force using incantations from ancient texts. Williams seems to have been a functioning schizophrenic in so much as that he held down jobs, was liked by his friends, and yet was prone to visions and voices in his head - translating to telepathy in The Chaos Fighters.

The voice paused. The spasm was passing in Haldane. He wondered about the voice. Who was speaking in there? In his mind was the thought that no person was in there, that no-one was speaking, that what he heard was a product of his own imagination.

This is illustrated in literal fashion when Haldane's psychic ability communicates with him directly in conversation.

His eyes, in direct contact with their own data, and not giving two hoots about the opinions of his conscious mind, screamed at him that they were not lying.

'We're reporting accurately,' his eyes yelled. 'Not only is the girl getting smaller but the street is stretching out like a rubber band and is growing larger. And the girl is only two feet tall now.'

Communicated as a populist thriller, The Chaos Fighters is therefore Williams' view of where humanity heads in the years to come as drawn and interpreted from his own mental idiosyncrasies. It's accordingly strewn with themes and images which reoccur throughout his fiction - the sound like a bell heard from across the universe, the subterranean tunnels (which we find on the moon in this case); and the hard-boiled familiarity of its settings and characters is offset by the unpredictably surreal twists which the narrative follows in circling and struggling to make its esoteric point. It hasn't predicted anything - at least not yet - but there's too much thought, albeit completely screwy thought, gone into the novel to dismiss it as rambling gibberish; but above all, it's a tremendous and tremendously strange read. It's also possibly the clearest, most overt illustration of the man's unique vision until 1970s pseudo-autobiographical Love is Forever - We Are for Tonight, at least of those I've read.

New Juche - Water Margin (2024)

 

Another chapbook, but as always he makes the words count with more to digest in these fifty or so pages than most writers manage in a lifetime. If you've read New Juche on previous occasions, you'll be familiar with the themes - although there's no sex in this one - but each piece of writing carries a different emphasis or approaches its subject from a new angle, so continuing to yield moments of intense clarity comparable to the proverbial ray of sunlight bursting from behind a storm cloud even given the often immersive degradation of the subject. Water Margin further explores the author's relation to his environment, how he's formed by his environment in certain respects, here with particular emphasis on water as the medium which binds all things almost in the sense meant by certain pre-Christian religions. We open at the Noi Na bathhouse, subterranean and characterised by extremes of temperature, amongst foreigners who no more belong to Thai culture than does New Juche himself yet seem to define him as an outsider. This contrasts with the longer account of our man's visceral struggle with his pond which also serves as a source of food and water, and which cements him firmly into his social landscape as friends, neighbours, or relatives muck in - literally - to help with the drainage, or cooking whatever they can find slopping about in the silt and mud.

It's a physical account which very much reminds me of whatever it was that D.H. Lawrence said about the value of labour and getting one's hands dirty as a more profound and even spiritual pursuit than anything born of intellect. It also represents a communion with nature on significantly more honest terms than those usually associated with such a cliché; and either I'm yet to read another author who has truly given us anything like this (which is admittedly a possibility), or he really is something new in literary history.