Silas Marner

George Eliot Silas Marner (1861)
...talking of Feminism, whilst I'm not saying that women haven't ever been airbrushed from history, or even that it hasn't been fairly common practice, but the dialogue wherein it is written that all women are amazing and all of their great works have been suppressed by the phallocrats, is bollocks. If you're unsure about this one, ask yourself which names are best remembered as giants of the nineteeth century novel. My admittedly Anglocentric answer would be Charlotte Brontë, Jane Austen, George Eliot, then maybe Dickens, then, I suppose, a load of other guys and assorted worthy but unreadables. Therefore great bolshy yarblockos to thee and thine.

Anyway, we read Silas Marner in school, except as I now realise it was a heavily abridged version excluding all of the bits which weren't directly concerned with Silas himself; which is pretty weird given that it's already a surprisingly slim and breezy volume by nineteenth century standards, and which probably explains why I don't remember anything much about it. A casual remark about George Eliot made by D.H. Lawrence brought me here, along with the revelation that not only was Mary Anne Evans (who wrote as George Eliot so as to evade detection by the penisoid phallocrat man-censors) from my general neck of the woods, but the village of Raveloe - in which Marner resides - seems to have been based on Bulkington, Warwickshire, which is where my dad lived for a while. I spent one of the shittiest Christmasses ever in Bulkington, and have got pissed in the pub upon which I presume the Rainbow in the novel may have been based.

Take that, Alan Moore*.

Silas Marner is a little more Victorian than I usually enjoy, being the pseudo-folkloric tale of a miser whose frozen heart is restored by an orphan with just deserts served to any bad 'uns who happen to be in the vicinity, but Eliot maintains an amazing balance for the duration, never quite allowing anything to slip over into sentiment for the sake of it, therefore allowing her message to unfurl, clear and undeniably righteous, without anyone ending up diabetic.

Eliot's Raveloe is actually Georgian and profoundly rural, seemingly so as to emphasise the onset of change - social and technological - by means of an environment traditionally resistant to the same, where few ever travel to neighbouring villages and everyone is firmly rooted into the soil. The novel was written during the decades which saw the rise of Darwinian thought, social reform, and an accordingly profound shift in the relationship between God and man; so that's what it's about.

In old days there were angels who came and took men by the hand and led them away from the city of destruction. We see no white-winged angels now. But yet men are led away from their threatening destruction; a hand is put into theirs, which leads them forth gently towards a calm and bright land, so that they look no more backward; and the hand may be a little child's.

Marner is done a great wrong, for which those responsible eventually pay so that it all works out very well for our boy by the end of the book, and all by the agency of what we may as well refer to as karma, but which amounts to cause and effect rather than the usual rewards dished out in recognition of piety. Eliot's initial religious faith was very much open to debate by the time she wrote Silas Marner, and this is reflected in the generally agnostic thrust of the narrative; that is, that she sees the use of religious instinct as morality, but feels no need to dwell on the mechanism - a potentially shocking message for at least some of her contemporaries, and one Eliot seemingly wishes to diffuse by emphasising morality as a constant.

The gods of the hearth exist for us still; and let all new faith be tolerant of that fetishism, lest it bruise its own roots.

Because nothing is permanent but change, as Heraclitus apparently wrote, and change would have been a daunting prospect in nineteenth century England at least for the great body of the population. Silas Marner therefore serves as a sort of reassurance, affirming that change, no matter how scary, can be for the better.

'Yes, my dear, yes,' said Mr. Lammeter; 'one feels that as one gets older. Things look dim to old folks: they'd need have some young eyes about 'em, to let 'em know the world's the same as it used to be.'

The beauty of Silas Marner is that it presents this argument with subtleties and shade, no recourse to shorthand or the sledghammer pathos of much Victoriana, and is written in a hand which grips firmly, despite the complexity of those long, long sentences. This is a truly great book.

*: This possibly confusing comment refers to Moore's bloody awful Jerusalem which seems to place its author at the cultural centre of everything ever based on a series of spurious - and not even entirely accurate - coincidences associating various significant historical events and people with Northampton.

The Female Man

Joanna Russ The Female Man (1975)
Feminist science-fiction, so I am reliably informed, and one for which I was on the lookout on the grounds of Joanna Russ giving good account of herself in Charles Platt's Dream Makers, and The Female Man being listed amongst the ten greatest science-fiction novels of all time by someone or other, and because it sounded interesting; and yet I'm underwhelmed, doubtless - as some might suggest - because I have a penis and should have stuck to Robert Heinlein writing about mighty men piloting phallic rocket ships.

The Female Man seems to feature four versions of the author meeting up and comparing notes. One of them is from Whileaway, a supposedly far future Feminist utopia. I think my problem stems in part from certain themes having a didactic cadence, where Russ herself has stated that this was not her intention. As a general non-linear and arguably subjective fist shaken at useless arseholes and persons who make life unpleasant, it mostly works, or is artistically valid and at least as much so as the occasional descent into misogyny by Burroughs or Bukowski - here assuming that Whileaway represents a critique of Feminist utopia rather than something to which we might necessarily aspire. Most men are indeed useless sacks of shit, so I don't have a problem with this being pointed out, particularly as Russ seems to take a dim view of nearly everyone. The problem is that whilst certain passages suggest there might be a lot more humour here than is obvious from first glance, it's mostly lost amongst all the grousing and whining, and this muddying of the waters is further exacerbated by the random modernist structure of the narrative - another author doing the Burroughs thing but never quite striking the right balance. The problem, to really break it down, is that The Female Man is a little boring - the rigged matches against sad, saggy, priapic men get a bit obvious and repetitive, and the cubist progression of one scene to the next becomes a chore. I can't disagree with anything she says, but the telling gets in the way. I have no idea how it could have made the top ten anything.

The Vanishing Man

Philip Purser-Hallard The Vanishing Man (2019)
I loved the films with Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce when I was a teenager, and so much so that I have a vague memory of checking one of the Conan Doyle novels out from my local library, but otherwise I couldn't really care less about Sherlock Holmes. This is one of an ongoing contemporary series relating further adventures of the great detective which is distinguished through having been written by Philip Purser-Hallard, who is great, so here I am with what may be the first book I've bought new rather than second hand this year.

The last Conan Doyle I read was The Lost World which I actively hated, so I'm not sure whether Purser-Hallard gets Holmes right to the standard a Holmes purist would expect, but it feels right to me. My only raised eyebrow was hoisted during a few of the more dialogue heavy chapters, page after page of exposition which is something I've never liked because it always feels as though the author would rather be working on a television series; but on the other hand, I suspect this may simply be part of the Holmesian territory, so it's not a problem.

Most appealing of all from my point of view is that this is definitively a Purser-Hallard novel, as such returning to themes which run through his previous works, notably those of transcendence and spiritual evolution, even to the point of bringing Gideon Beech, the playwright modelled on George Bernard Shaw, back from Peculiar Lives of 2003.

It's not difficult to see why this one held such appeal for Purser-Hallard given the setting of an era during which a number of his thematic preoccupations were in the ascendant - the birth of science-fiction from nineteenth century spiritualism, new ideas about God and humanity and our place in the universe, and a chance to play around with all of this in The Vanishing Man; so we additionally get a stand-in for Madame Blavatsky, proposals hinting at the cosmology of C.S. Lewis' cosmic trilogy, passing references to Hy-Brasil, and an occult detective named Constantine - although patently not the one famed for hanging out with Swamp Thing. Purser-Hallard accordingly stretches the limit of Holmes' universe as far as it will go in the general direction of the fantastic without quite jumping the shark, then bursts the bubble, returning us all to Earth in elegant fashion and no pandering either to expectations of steampunk cliché or any other attempt to jazz things up by turning it into something else entirely.

I'm still not convinced we need new Sherlock Homes in 2019 - although I'll concede there's no harm in it - but if we really must, then I'm very happy to have Philip Purser-Hallard writing it.

Fallen Angels

Jo Duffy Fallen Angels (1987)
Here's another children's comic book to which I turned, having found my brain ill-equipped to cope with D.H. Lawrence after ten in the evening, another children's comic book which I flogged back in the eighties then recently repurchased in a flurry of nostalgia fueled by the realisation that I'm getting rid of this because I'm a big boy now is an essentially childish position. Fallen Angels was an eight-issue series which fell some considerable way short of classic, but was nevertheless readable, and which remains readable thirty years after the sell-by date.

Fallen Angels applies mutants to whatever you would call that trope wherein a bunch of orphans buddy together as a lightly criminal gang for scrapes and japes, as seen in various Dickens things and probably more recently in Marvel's Runaways, except I've neither read the comic nor seen the TV show and am probably unlikely to do either at any point soon. The art is efficient, if a little uneven in places, and would almost certainly have worked better in black and white. The writing is occasionally hokey, explains a bit too much in places, and the routine of reintroducing the characters anew every single issue becomes quickly annoying; and yet the enterprise, once you get past noticing that the furniture wouldn't have seemed out of place in a Michael J. Fox vehicle, is essentially fucking mental, and endearingly so.

Sunspot and Warlock of the New Mutants join a gang which seems suspiciously reminiscent of the Double Deckers, or even the Banana Splits, other members including a pair of super-powered lobsters and Devil Dinosaur, who is an actual dinosaur. The gang has been brought together by Ariel - who reputedly gave Shakespeare the inspiration for the character of the same name in The Tempest - a native of the Coconut Grove, which seems to be an alien place rather than specifically a planet. Being an alien place, the Coconut Grove is stereotypically cool by terms which made sense in 1987 - somewhere between jheri curls and the first Madonna album; and lessons about being who you are, true to your friends and all that shit are inevitably delivered before we get to the final page, none of which is so trite as to detract from this being Morrison era-Doom Patrol or even Umbrella Academy, albeit with the sleeves of its jacket rolled up to the elbows like that twat in Miami Vice; which is why it's a lot of fun and I enjoyed reading it. That's all there is to it.

The White Peacock

D.H. Lawrence The White Peacock (1911)
This was his first novel, rewritten three times prior to publication but never quite shaking off that first novel quality of meandering whilst simultaneously trying just a bit too hard. Prior to this effort, he mainly wrote poetry which shows in so far as that the opening chapters read very much like an accumulation of poetic material - florid descriptions of the natural world, landscape and so on - in which an indeterminate number of characters are embedded like raisins in a currant bun. These characters are naive, vaguely middle-class, and slightly unworldly - possibly for the sake of contrast with the violence of their environment, which itself is rooted in nature red in tooth and claw with the occasional brusque intrusion of earthier, seemingly more substantial working class persons whom, it might be argued, serve as extensions of the environment. Not a page seems to go by without either a rabbit strangling, mention of a sheep killing dog, or some other reminder that the refinement of our civilised lives is an anomaly in the great scheme of things, at least not until we come to the awful, sugar coated sub-Dickensian Christmas celebrations at the close of the first of the three parts into which the novel is divided; and even the festivity is itself briefly punctuated by:

There was a great fall of snow, multiplying the cold morning light, startling the slow-footed twilight. The lake was black like the open eyes of a corpse; the woods were black like the beard on the face of a corpse.

...then right back into the Quality Street choccy box for another couple of dozen pages.

My first guess would be that Lawrence didn't want to take too many chances with his first novel, and maybe thought the swearing coal miners of his own upbringing would alienate potential readers, so he gave us Dickens-lite and so much so that I found myself waiting for some comic misunderstanding based on a pair of gloves having been left on the drawing room table rather than in the parlour as would ordinarily have been the case. The problem is that it's difficult to care about these characters one way or the other, and the first person narrative only serves to muddy their definition - I only realised his name was Cyril after a hundred or so pages. Cyril and his friends seem slight in their wispy thoughts and passions although, as I say, it seems to be on purpose, as this exchange perhaps suggests.

I laughed to see her so enthusiastic in her admiration of my sister. Marie is such a gentle, serious little soul. She went to the window. I kissed her, and pulled two berries off the mistletoe. I made her a nest in the heavy curtains, and she sat there looking out at the snow.

'It is lovely,' she said reflectively. 'People must be ill when they write like Maxim Gorky.'

'They live in town,' said I.

'Yes — but then look at Hardy — life seems so terrible — it isn't, is it?'

'If you don't feel it, it isn't — if you don't see it. I don't see it for myself.'

'It's lovely enough for heaven.'

The point eventually becomes clear, this being the tragedy of the disparity between the dreams and aspirations of these four young people, and how the world actually works; but the absence of forward thrust results in a narrative which more closely resembles music, and probably ambient music at that, so it's only once we reach the last hundred or so pages that anything really begins to feel as though it's saying something, and the way in which all has been kept isolated from the intrusion of the twentieth century at last makes sense.

One of our boys settles into respectable nineteenth century conservatism where the other embraces modernity and the rights of the working man, with Lawrence himself more concerned with what drives their impulses than where those impulses lead.

Of course, I am in sympathy with the socialists, but I cannot narrow my eyes till I see one thing only.

So, I suppose you might say it's a nineteenth century novel waking up to the harsh industrialised daylight of the twentieth century, this being its subject as much as it might be considered a description. Most of Lawrence's major themes are already there, not least the casual homoeroticism and the pagan undercurrent, here most visibly expressed as the death of Annable, the gamekeeper and a sort of Green Man holding out against the encroachment of Christianity; but The Trespasser does at least some of this in half the page count, and without suggesting that the writer has gone into a room looking for something but is now unable to remember what it was.

There was a gap between to-day and tomorrow, a dreary gap, where one sat and looked at the dreary comedy of yesterdays, and the grey tragedies of dawning tomorrows, vacantly, missing the poignancy of an actual to-day.

See, that probably boils the whole thing down to a single sentence, or at least as I understood it; so it's a mostly decent novel, and particularly so for a debut, but mainly in the context of Lawrence's back catalogue.

Sex Pistols - the Inside Story

Fred & Judy Vermorel Sex Pistols - the Inside Story (1981)
Here's an actual crappy 1970s paperback with airbrushed Sex Pistols on the cover, and probably not worth reviewing because it isn't like I have anything profound to say. D.H. Lawrence's White Peacock was getting a bit too chewy for bedtime reading so I took to dipping into this, the expanded edition of a book published soon after they split first time around. It's mostly excerpts from Sophie's diary - Sophie being McLaren's secretary, roughly speaking - coupled with verbatim transcripts of interviews with everyone involved, thus allowing the band to pretty much speak for themselves; which is great. The material which I gather has been added to form the expanded edition doesn't really do much, maybe even detracts from the first and otherwise snappier part of the book. The added interviews with record company types aren't particularly interesting, and there's Fred Vermorel's lengthy essay, When Malcolm Laughs, which is at least better than the usual bollocks people tend to write about Malcolm the Master Situationist, except that it never fully escapes from being the usual bollocks people tend to write about Malcolm the Master Situationist. Oh well. This book is still better than a lot of the stuff which has been written about this group.

The Twilight Man

Michael Moorcock The Twilight Man (1966)
A couple of years ago I spent about a month wracking my brains trying to remember some novel wherein the moon had fallen from the sky and was to be found in the middle of the ocean, which turned out to be Moorcock's The Shores of Death, which I read about a decade ago. By the time I noticed that this was Shores of Death retitled for America, I was already home; but then the book was probably overdue a re-read, so why not?

The Twilight Man harks back to those wonderful pre-Gernsbackian science-fiction tales taking their cues from poetry rather than the strict letter of any scientific law, and as such seems part of whatever tendency inspired all those ponderous, allegorical science-fiction movies of the early seventies before George Lucas decided there were still a few more drops to be squozen from the Flash Gordon cow.

It's the far future, the Earth no longer turns, the moon has fallen from the sky and is sat in the middle of the Pacific - like I said - and what little is left of humanity is pretty much sterile; so the future doesn't look too bright. On the positive side, humanity has settled into a vaguely Utopian existence - probably the most perfect in history, so it is written, anarchist and peaceful. Unfortunately, the gloom of extinction hangs heavy on our final descendants, giving birth to fear, and the Brotherhood of Guilt who take it upon themselves to destroy things in response to the fear; which in turn brings about an authoritarian movement, and thus does it all go tits up.

Our hero, the Twilight Man of the title, seeks a solution to all of this - without it feeling like anything so prosaic as a quest - leading him to the fallen moon wherein dwells Orlando Sharvis whose scientific knowledge is such that no problem is really beyond his ability to solve it. Sharvis might represent Satan in the Faustian sense, or at least some pre-moral version of the serpent bringing light or illumination at a cost without necessarily implying evil.

I'd prefer not to simply summarise the plot, so I'll leave it at that, but this one delivers a whole ton of mind-candy in the form of what may be one of the strangest tales you will ever read, something very much inhabiting the same space as all of those paintings by Ernst, De Chirico, Remedios Varo and others. Moorcock, as ever, is amazing.