Robert Heinlein - Methuselah's Children (1958)

 

I guess Bob had taken to thinking about his own mortality, or at least about his no longer qualifying as a spring chicken, whatever that is. I know the feeling. Methuselah's children are a group of extraordinarily long lived humans whose socially awkward longevity has brought them all together as a secretive subgroup inhabiting the fringes of human society. They're not a secret society in that they don't, as a group, have any particular collective influence on anything, and - unusually for golden age science-fiction - neither are they anything so obvious as homo superior or the coming race. They're simply people who live longer than the rest of us for reasons no-one quite understands. Anyway, fearing discovery and the possibility of dissection in order to glean the secret of longevity when even they have no idea what that secret could be, they band together and flee the planet, going off in search of a world where they can all live their lives without having to forge a new birth certificate every seventy years or so.

Whether by accident or design, Stephen Baxter would eventually revisit a few of these ideas in the Destiny's Children books, because they're worth revisiting, and Heinlein threw out some weird and fascinating ideas in this one. The problem is that we're two thirds of the way through the novel before anything interesting happens. I can barely remember what occurred during the first hundred pages. There seemed to be a lot of yacking, page after page of dialogue and not much else, and most of it the sort of snappy content-free repartee which made Stranger in a Strange Land such a fucking chore; so it's a relief when they steal the spaceship and flee the solar system because things happen, and Bob gets to play with science and relativity and the rest, which is where he excels. I also enjoyed the fact of this final third of the novel having the almost haphazard cadence of Simak or even A.E. van Vogt, eschewing the usual brilliant minds with elaborate scientific plans and the need to explain them at length. The long lived hundred or so thousand just sort of sneak onto the conveniently unoccupied New Frontiers - as the galaxy spanning craft is named - assuming there will be something to eat, places to sleep and so on; and one of the gang has conveniently come up with a revolutionary new star drive.

'It looks to me, son, about time to try out your gadget.' He poked a thumb at Libby's uncouth-looking space drive. 'You say that all you have to do is to hook up that one connection?'

'That is what is intended. Attach that one lead to any portion of the mass to be affected. Of course, I don't really know that it will work,' Libby admitted. 'There is no way to test it.'

'Suppose it doesn't?'

Luckily it works, and we're off. The two extraterrestrial civilisation they eventually encounter are both friendly but very odd, and the crew of the New Frontiers decide to head back to Earth after all, because this isn't one of those novels about seeking out new life, new civilisations, or boldly going anywhere in particular. It's mostly about mortality, specifically that of the author.

'I propose to hang onto this life as long as I can and learn as much as I can. Maybe wisdom and understanding are reserved for a later existence and maybe they aren't for us at all, ever. Either way, I'm satisfied to be living and enjoying it.'

I've had trouble reading later Heinlein, and you can tell the preoccupations which informed his less agreeable works were creeping in here, but he's still making the effort, still mostly at the top of his game, and still delivering much more than is promised by the summary on the back cover.

pStan Batcow - The Sleeping Party (2025)

 

Veterans of the weirdy tape and/or mail art scene may recall former Ceramic Hob pStan Batcow as the prime mover behind Howl in the Typewriter and Pumf Records. He's been at it since the eighties, and not only has he failed to slow down a bit, as many of us have done, but if anything he appears to be accelerating. This is his first novel, although it doesn't read like a first novel having arguably spent at least four decades in the making with many of the texts found herein originating as Stanzines, as he deemed them - short zines of Batcow fiction or simple rumination periodically produced by the man seemingly because he just couldn't stop himself. I had a couple here and there, notably This Bleeding Heart which doesn't seem to have made it into the novel and which I remember as noteworthy. So the prose and general composition are confident and accomplished as the work of a man who found his voice - as the saying has it - many years before. This ain't his first rodeo.

The premise has a group of people monitored as they sleep, their dreams recorded herein towards ambiguous ends. It's structured pretty much as a loose tangle of unrelated lengths of super-8mm film edited together into a single continuous strand, and it would be fair to call it an experimental novel; although unlike a few experimental novels I've encountered of late, this experiment is undertaken by someone who has some idea of what the fuck he's doing. We meet our cast as the book opens, learn what they're about to do, and the rest is one individual testimony after another - either unrelated, or related by means which aren't immediately obvious. Former Stanzines appear as Rachel dreams about reading them in a library, which is cheeky as fuck in compositional terms but the material blends beautifully into the whole regardless. We alternate autobiographical musings with surrealism and punky philosophy and somehow it all hangs together as a sort of social realist Naked Lunch written under the influence of Lewis Carroll, amongst others. It kicks against the pricks while remaining generally humanist and refreshingly low on the kind of cynicism to which the Batcow might be entitled given a few of the more obviously autobiographical details. Themes emerging may depend on where the reader is sat, and I found something generally positive with a firm grounding in reality amounting to we're all in this together so let's not be arseholes, as proposed by our narrator's thoughts as he observes a couple of rats.

The crouching rat hadn't moved, but he sensed that it was very aware of his presence. It was plainly terrified, but resisting its natural instinct to flee. In a bizarre moment of empathy, he realised that these rats were mates, and the one lying dead was being watched over, protected posthumously by its loyal and mourning consort.

It was a touching tableau, sorrowful yet a somehow uplifting scenario. He was witnessing something that seemed to mirror what should be the very meaning of existence - something that should be duplicated in spirit as the blueprint for a perfect world.

It's a weird one, as might be expected of such an assemblage, but it holds together beautifully even if it isn't always obvious why, effortlessly drawing the reader though to the point at which it ceases to feel like random images.

Buy as many copies as you can afford here.

Khaled Hosseini - The Kite Runner (2003)

 

I'm backtracking from A Thousand Splendid Suns which I read a year ago and which is honestly a masterpiece, but also from the movie adaptation of The Kite Runner. This was Hosseini's first, the one which sealed his reputation, and which I expected would be amazing. To be fair, the accolades heaped upon it have been mostly justified, and yet something isn't quite clicking. As you will possibly be aware, the tale is told against the backdrop of Afghanistan, specifically Kabul before and during the reign of the Taliban. Our focus is on the relationship of Amir, our narrator, and his friend, Hassan, towards whom he experiences an unendurable guilt parallel to the survivor's guilt which both character and author feel regarding Afghanistan and the Taliban. We also focus on Amir's ambiguous relationship with his own somewhat imperfect father, which he comes to understand better as he commits the same mistakes. As I suppose you might imagine, given the presence of authoritarian figures with firearms, much of what transpires is harrowing without ever quite being allowed to eclipse anything else the book might have to say; and it's beautifully written and communicated, particularly given how much of this is unfamiliar territory to me.

So what gives?

It's a minor detail, and possibly something I might not have noticed had I not already been so completely blown away by A Thousand Splendid Suns, but it's something in the tone, or elements of the tone of how the whole is bound together - something which, I might argue, distinguishes The Kite Runner as a debut novel. The narrative is respectfully conversational and carried with such a strong voice as to read like autobiography, which can prove deceptive because despite a wealth of autobiographical detail, it's very much a novel, arguably allegorical, and even a saga at least as much as the tale of Rostam and Sohrab from the Shahnameh, which Amir reads to Hassan at one point; and because it's a saga, it makes use of happenstance and repetition, thus Assef who terrorises the boys in their youth, turns up as the sociopath directing the public executions when Amir returns to Kabul as an adult - and in spite of the visceral realism of the telling, it feels a little like Darth Vader revealed as Luke's dad. So it's not so much the bricks of the novel as the mortar, the conspicuously tidy connections, segues, and patterns which somehow undermine the otherwise powerful realism. It isn't a huge problem, because The Kite Runner is nevertheless a tremendous and sobering read, but it feels like a first novel and there was better to come.

D.H. Lawrence - Apocalypse (1932)

 

Lawrence wrote Apocalypse, his highly personal interpretation of the Book of Revelation, on his death bed. It was his last great piece of writing and he made every word count, more or less reducing what he'd been getting at over previous decades to its clearest, most concentrated essence. You could call it religion or philosophy, although both are arguably misleading in this case. This is how Lawrence saw the world, or more precisely what he thought was meant by the term.

As an analysis of Revelation, Apocalypse somewhat reveals what might be deemed the contradiction at the heart of Lawrence's view of the world, specifically his shunning the methodical, scientific approach in favour of the intuitive. This might seem to foreshadow today's internet pundits with their apparent belief that facts may often complicate or unduly bias an issue. Lawrence, however, insists on there being two essentially incompatible ways of seeing, and he favoured the materialist approach, giving precedence to that which is seen, felt, or experienced over abstract rationalisation after the fact. Therefore, as with Etruscan Places in which he writes about Italian civilisation before the Romans through aesthetic consideration of their art and architecture, Apocalypse deals in what might be deemed poetic truth rather than the purely historical. While this might seem akin to Erich von Däniken finding flying saucers in Ezekiel's wheels - a proposal facilitated by conveniently ignoring existing interpretations of the symbolism - Lawrence's intuitive method is itself a refusal to impose established patterns or methods of understanding upon the material - in other words an attempt to unravel Revelation entirely on its own terms. This approach is validated, I would argue, by its refusal to view the texts as the poorly formulated mumbling of primitives - actually the opposite of Erich's methodology, such as it is - and is additionally validated by the clarity and conviction of his testimony. For what it may be worth, his testimony here also reminds me a little of A.E. van Vogt, who wrote about rockets and mutants but took a similarly intuitive approach.

As for what Lawrence actually says, the whole point of the book is that the discourse loses definition and even meaning when summarised or broken down into symbols, but the main theme is that pre-Christian religion was not religion as we understand it today, and because of this we have lost our way as a people. He sets out a convincing and coherent argument for this view as well, but - as with Point Counterpoint - you really need to read the thing to appreciate it.

All of this being said, Apocalypse remains very much a personal view - although Lawrence resisted the idea that any of his pronouncements should ever be taken as the final word on anything - so additionally revealing his blind spots; and it seems particularly sad given that he spent so much time in Mexico, engaging with adherents to a pre-Christian belief system very much in line with much of what is described in Apocalypse.

Even to the early scientists or philosophers, 'the cold', 'the moist', 'the hot', 'the dry' were things in themselves, realities, gods, theoi. And they did things.

Yet, little if anything of this makes it into The Plumed Serpent with its fallen Indians performing a heavily befeathered summary of an actual living religion filtered through the grimmer aspects of Lawrence's Methodist upbringing. It was staring him in the face and somehow he missed it.

Nevertheless, for all the flaws one might find in Apocalypse, the strength of the main argument eclipses them to the point of irrelevance, and this was one hell of a swan song.

Aldous Huxley - Point Counterpoint (1928)

 

This is the fairly chewy looking Aldous Huxley novel to which I referred a couple of weeks ago. I took another shot at it, and while I'd say chewy remains as good a description as ever, I got through it and even enjoyed it for the most part. Again we have a variation on previous Huxley novels such as Crome Yellow and Antic Hay amounting to a non-linear essay on the state of the world communicated through the dialogue of a large and thus occasionally confusing cast. However, this one is distinguished by at least a few of those characters being based on persons either of Huxley's acquaintance or otherwise of cultural significance around the turn of the century - notably D.H. Lawrence, Augustus John, Baudelaire, and John Hargrave, advocate of the Social Credit movement which, although Utopian and authoritarian was vocally opposed to Fascism and later fought the BUF in the streets - which I mention mainly because Huxley's Everard Webley is often wrongly identified as having been based on Oswald Mosely.

Huxley appears in Point Counterpoint as Philip Quarle, himself a writer, and so the book approaches the fourth wall without quite breaking through in the form of notes and letters written by Philip Quarle referring to his own novel in progress:

The musicalisation of fiction. Not in the symbolist way, by subordinating sense to sound (Pleuvent les bleus baisers des astres taciturnes. Mere glossolalia) But on a large scale, in the construction. Meditate on Beethoven.  The changes of moods, the abrupt transitions. (Majesty alternating with a joke, for example, in the first movement of the B flat major Quartet. Comedy suddenly hinting at prodigious and tragic solemnities in the scherzo of the C sharp minor Quartet.) More interesting still, the modulations, not merely from one key to another, but from mood to mood. A theme is stated, then developed, pushed out of shape, imperceptibly deformed, until, though still recognizably the same, it has become quite different. In sets of variations the process is carried a step further. Those incredible Diabelli variations, for example. The whole range of thought and feeling, yet all in organic relation to a ridiculous little waltz tune. Get this into a novel. How? The abrupt transitions are easy enough. All you need is a sufficiency of characters and parallel, contrapuntal plots. While Jones is murdering a wife, Smith is wheeling the perambulator in the park. You alternate the themes. More interesting, the modulations and variations are also more difficult. A novelist modulates by reduplicating situations and characters. He shows several people falling in love, or dying, or praying in different ways—dissimilars solving the same problem. Or, vice versa, similar people confronted with dissimilar problems.

Of course, on the surface of it this means we have four-hundred pages of people talking about stuff, with the stuff being the point of the novel and that which is communicated with the most vigour. It could have gone tits up but Huxley was always exceptionally good at this sort of thing, delivering complex arguments and observations, even those built up on layers of nuance with pinpoint, near scientific accuracy - as distinct from Lawrence's more impressionist, intuitive approach to narratives of equivalent purpose.

Point Counterpoint is about the modern world, as it was in 1928, and about where we were going wrong, and where we continue to go wrong. It's about notions of progress in the wake of Darwin and the industrial revolution, and the infusion of such ideas into the realms of art, literature, politics, religion, and society; and, as usual, the Hux was right about fucking everything, here demonstrated through the mouthpiece of his impressively faithful D.H. Lawrence stand-in

'Our truth, the relevant human truth, is something you discover by living—living completely, with the whole man. The results of your amusements, Philip, all these famous theories about the cosmos and their practical applications—they've got nothing whatever to do with the only truth that matters. And the non-human truth isn't merely irrelevant; it's dangerous. It distracts people's attention from the important human truth. It makes them falsify their experience in order that lived reality may fit in with abstract theory.'

If it's chewy - which it is - then Point Counterpoint is justifiably chewy, its subject being that old chestnut everything ever, and it isn't difficult to see why some regard it as Huxley's greatest. I feel I should probably go into greater detail but it would be easier if you just read the thing.

D.H. Lawrence - Selected Letters (1950)

 

Well, it turns out that he did write his autobiography after all, albeit without intending to. Lawrence, it seems, was the self-involved trans-activist let loose on TikTok of his day in terms of correspondence, firing off letters to anyone and everyone, left, right and center, and usually in such entertaining spirit that even those who thought he was a bit of a dick kept his missives for posterity. If it's any indication of the sheer word count we're talking here, I also have the second of the two volume set of collected letters, covering the years 1921 to 1930, a period during which the lad apparently wasn't making so much use of the postal system as had once been the case. It's six-hundred pages of small type, which is why I went for this one on this occasion, spanning as it does Lawrence's entire life in just under two-hundred pages; and it's rivetting. Just about any accusation you could pitch against the man and his work is either refuted or otherwise undermined in this selection of correspondence, which is lively, funny, insightful, touching, and explains why he could be such an awkward bugger when the mood took him. If you feel you have yet to truly get to grips with the man and his work, it's all here, and is as such a testament to the probability of his legitimately deserving the accolade of genius.

D.H. Lawrence - This Mortal Coil (1971)

 

My to be read pile has been dominated by D.H. Lawrence for much of the past year because I picked up a whole bunch of his during my first flourish of enthusiasm - back in the nineties, would you believe - then never got around to reading them, mainly because there were so many and very few with spaceships on the cover. Consequently, now that I've made some headway, excepting one fairly chewy looking Aldous Huxley novel, my to be read pile is all D.H. Lawrence; and I'm now onto those published posthumously.

This Mortal Coil is short stories, only one of which I recall having read before, and in a few cases collected for the first time for all I know. Lawrence never wrote a formal autobiography, possibly because his writing was already strongly autobiographical, which This Mortal Coil illustrates with short stories quite clearly drawn from his life reproduced in chronological sequence - from his youth in Nottingham, to Europe, and finally to his deathbed. Lawrence seems to have been a little embarrassed by a couple of these examples (hence my doubts about their having been published more than once while he was alive) presumably due to their juvenile quality - conversely meaning the earlier efforts are fairly breezy, predating the heavy fog of emotional symbolism in which he enveloped the later works. Of these earlier efforts, Adolf is particularly delightful as an account of his pet rabbit - so named before even the first world war should anyone be wondering. Indeed, the stories I enjoyed most were those recording details in the domestic lives of mining families around the turn of the century, these being short but substantial and benefiting from the kind of focus which suggests, at least to me, a sort of written analogy to the paintings of Walter Sickert, or other Post-Impressionists as Lawrence's fixation with flowering plants begins to make its presence felt.

'Your foggy weather of symbolism, as usual,' he said.

'The fog is not of symbols,' she replied, in her metallic voice of displeasure. 'It may be symbols are candles in a fog.'

'I prefer my fog without candles. I'm the fog, eh? Then I'll blow out your candle, and you'll see me better. Your candles of speech, symbols and so forth, only lead you more wrong. I'm going to wander blind, and go by instinct, like a moth that flies and settles on the wooden box his mate is shut up in.'

'Isn't it an ignis fatuus you are flying after, at that rate?' she said.

I've quoted this passage because I enjoy how it describes what Dave was trying to do with both his writing and his life, at least in the later years, while simultaneously presenting a criticism of the same; and which additionally accounts for why the last three or four in the collection are perhaps a little too chewy for their own good, at least in comparison with Adolf, Rex, The Miner at Home and others. Nevertheless, in sheer stylistic scope this may be the broadest collection of Lawrence's short stories that I've read, and accordingly one of the most satisfying.