Aldous Huxley - Ape and Essence (1948)

 

Aldous goes back to the future, this time inspired by the advent of atomic warfare, and it's a strange one even by his standards. We open with Hollywood types obsessing over a rejected movie script, then tracking down the author only to discover his having passed on. Next we switch to the script itself for the remainder of the text - which takes up the majority of the novel; except it's not written as a movie script despite the attribution of certain passages to a narrator, but is rendered present tense as an approximation of what we would see on the screen had it been filmed. This approach works very well and comes as a relief because the novel written as movie script is the laziest, most pointless bullshit I've encountered in book form. Given Huxley's interest in culture and its transmission, I half suspect this emphasis on the moving image may provide a commentary on the medium and notions of progress, although if so it's difficult to work out what he might be saying; and the form may primarily serve to foster the atmosphere of a fiction, so reducing the extremity of the story as it unfolds; for while the story delivers prophecy at least on par with that of Brave New World, in narrative terms it's more or less the written equivalent of a Hieronymus Bosch landscape, and certainly it borrows more from de Sade than just the satire.

American society has collapsed in the wake of atomic bombs dropped on California. Following a puzzling and incongruous preamble wherein baboons and other primates lead Albert Einstein around on a leash, we meet explorers from New Zealand, the one country to have weathered the fallout. American society has devolved to a feudal theocracy under a form of Satanism close to that described in mediaeval writings, with a parody of the ruling priesthood resigned to the earthly reign of Belial and the presence of evil as an unavoidable fact of existence. Everything rots. Nothing grows. Mutant babies are slaughtered in the ambiguous name of common good during rituals described in such appalling detail that I'm surprised certain passages weren't subject to censorship.

Honestly, Ape and Essence flies off in all directions at once and reads as though it kept changing its mind about how it was going to deliver the message, but as with much of Huxley's writing, the message is on point and chilling, and so much so that its chaotic delivery doesn't seem to matter.

Progress and Nationalism—those were the two great ideas He put into their heads. Progress—the theory that you can get something for nothing; the theory that you can gain in one field without paying for your gain in another; the theory that you alone understand the meaning of history; the theory that you know what's going to happen fifty years from now; the theory that, in the teeth of all experience, you can foresee all the consequences of your present actions; the theory that Utopia lies just ahead and that, since ideal ends justify the most abominable means, it is your privilege and duty to rob, swindle, torture, enslave and murder all those who, in your opinion (which is, by definition, infallible), obstruct the onward march to the earthly paradise.

As to where we are now and how we got here, I'd say that just about nails it, and that's just one paragraph of many.

Charles Bukowski - Hollywood (1989)

 

Here's another one I had no idea he'd written until I saw it in the store. You may recall Barfly, the 1987 movie based on Bukowski's life, or a segment of it, with Mickey Rourke playing the man himself. Bukowski wrote the screenplay and then wrote Hollywood about the process of writing the screenplay and getting it filmed. As usual it's fictionalised with the names changed but seems to be an otherwise straightforward account.

It takes some getting used to because while he delivers that which you probably expect him to deliver, he's older, more settled, happier, and the broken landscape of previous novels has become Hollywood screening rooms with celebrities drifting in and out of shot, with lengthy arguments about rights to the screenplay and payments promised in thousands of dollars. Bukowski's integrity remains undiminished given that he never promised anyone another book about hangovers and fighting, and his relationship with the film industry is about what you would expect - polite tolerance without illusions. I have little interest in the film industry, or television for that matter, and generally regard film buffs as people to be avoided. There have been some great movies in amongst all the unwatchable ones, but not many which lend themselves to droning discussions of subtext, or what some preening knob was trying to say when he was paid to dutifully read out the lines someone else had written, or any of that bollocks about movie magic peddled by TCM in between commercials for bottles of Citizen Kane or Some Like It Hot themed wine. Get a fucking grip.

Bukowski doesn't buy into any of it either, but by 1987 he was less inclined to settle arguments through brawling and I'm sure the money was appreciated. His observations and wit are as sharp as ever but the movie business gets in the way. It's just not that interesting, and while the names have been changed to reduce the distraction of Chinaski hanging out with celebrities, it doesn't take much to work out who Frances Ford Lopalla and Wenner Zerzog are supposed to be. I have to admit I enjoyed the confirmation of Mickey Rourke being something of a twerp, but this is one of those that really should have been better.

Thomas Moore - We'll Never Be Fragile Again (2025)

 

I haven't thus far found it easy describing what Thomas Moore writes and have tended to respond to the effect of his words without quite getting my head around what they describe. By contrast, We'll Never Be Fragile Again seems to demonstrate a tighter focus than previous novels, although I couldn't say for certain whether that's him or me. At the risk of either stating the obvious or coming across like a fucking idiot, I realise his writing reminds me of Genet but for the significant difference that I never really got much from Genet. Both seem to describe an emotional landscape with greater emphasis than the material underpinnings of events or encounters which have given it shape. Reading Moore, I find myself imagining that which happens between the covers as a surface whereupon memories are spun and time passes - relationships, regrets, reflection, drugs, sexual encounters which would under more basic circumstances be described as hardcore pornography - and we're reading what goes on in the depths beneath the surface. This is what, I would guess, gives his writing such power. He's dealing with the alphabet or the atoms or whatever you want to call the cognitive interactions and responses, and we've all had those regardless of whatever may be going on upstairs. Thus is Moore able to describe acts in which I'm unlikely to ever participate (involving numerous mens' cocks if you must know) as extremes of beauty in terms for which I have immediate and unconditional understanding. It's not that his writing transgresses barriers so much that it fails to recognise them, even given that language itself has a certain bias towards creating or reinforcing barriers. I wouldn't swear that this is anything more than just my reading, but I felt a certain twinge of recognition in the final pages:

I know that life reduces things to routine. That you can only feel something for the first time once. I've got too many emotional reference points to work through stuff now. I've been hardened. I've been desensitised. I know that these are all ultimately positives, but I miss that vulnerability, I miss that we'll never be fragile again, I miss that fear, I miss that uncertainty. We're trapped by this society that reduces life and reduces us. We must be controlled. We must be pinned down. Language is fooling people more than ever.

I could describe some of what Moore describes of his life, or I could describe his observations, but there wouldn't be a lot of point given that this isn't really one of those novels you can reduce to a summary. You simply have to read the thing, which is as it should be. All I can really add is that it's probably a masterpiece by any definitions that matter.

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. - Armageddon in Retrospect (2008)

 

Here's another posthumous collection, but this time without anything which has already seen print. It's short fiction, and I get the impression most of it must surely date from before Player Piano, or was at least written around the same time. Many of the stories are drawn from life to greater or lesser degrees, particularly Vonnegut's experience of the Second World War. As you may be aware, Vonnegut's experience of the Second World War was significantly coloured by his time in Dresden as the city was bombed into oblivion, which he returned to again and again and to greatest effect in Slaughterhouse Five; and much of this reads like preliminary explorations of the subject, circling around and chipping away to see whether it was even possible to write about something which made no sense. I guess he realised it wasn't, at least not in conventional terms, hence the non-linear blend of reality and surrealism that was Slaughterhouse Five. Nevertheless, he had a good go at it, and these shorter, more focused vignettes are rewarding if occasionally shocking, because even if the short form wasn't really his thing, he mastered it nonetheless. The Commandant's Desk and the almost novella which gives the collection its title both pack a punch, utilising a degree of satire but nothing at the strength with which we're familiar. The former narrows its martial focus to the tribulations of a Czech carpenter obliged to rework the desk he's been ordered to make for his invading Commandant, first from a swastika motif to the hammer and sickle, then to the American eagle. It's powerful, funny, and very depressing all at the same time and I'm astonished it didn't see print until the lad left us for the typewriter in the sky; but the collection is solid from start to finish.

Jack Kirby - The Eternals (1979)

 

I like to think this was the main inspiration behind the toe-tapper on the second Joy Division album, but had this been the case then it probably would have been a better song, or at least one which sounded less like Imagination's superior Just an Illusion. The Eternals represented Jack Kirby's return to Marvel Comics given more or less free reign to draw what he wanted to draw following the success of DC's Fourth World books, and so continuing his mythological fascination with yet another set of new Gods. Unfortunately, and possibly in the wake of Star Wars, it didn't go down too well, and these nineteen issues plus one annual seem to lack the focus of earlier efforts towards similar ends.

That said, it's still Kirby, with much to recommend it even beyond splash pages of such grandeur that they actually rewire your brain as you stare at them and try to work out what you're seeing. The Eternals, although working with superhero types, is closer to science-fiction than the traditional caped stuff. The premise is undoubtedly wonky, being inspired in part by Erich von Däniken with roughly the same casual regard for detail, but even with alleged Incas identified by unmistakably Nahuatl names, the sheer spectacle is such that it's hard to care about the ethnological bloopers. The story is that the Space Gods have returned as silent, inscrutable giants called Celestials who stride across the globe leaving the rest of us to wonder what they want and why they're here; except for the Eternals, an ancient Godlike offshoot of humanity created by the aforementioned Celestials last time they stopped by to inspire cave paintings and monolithic sculptures. The Eternals understand that the Celestials are here to judge our world, to discern the success or otherwise of their grand experiment, and to wipe us out should it seem like we've failed to live up to our potential. So far, so mythic, and undeniably startling in visual terms.

Unfortunately, either Jack's initial enthusiasm wore thin, or else he felt restricted by editorial pressures given how the book doesn't quite connect with the rest of the Marvel universe and may even have been intended as its own unique entity, at least initially. A couple of generic SHIELD types turn up early on with little consequence, there's a reference to Ben Grimm, and when the Hulk turns up in issue #14, he's a robot version built by a couple of students - which sort of preserves the integrity of the saga at the expense of war breaking out on the letters page from readers who presumably wanted to know who would win in a fight between Ikaris and Paste Pot Pete. There's also the deal with the Eternals having provided inspiration for established mythological figures, with Zuras obviously representing Zeus, despite Hercules' dear old dad having made regular appearances in previous Marvel titles. Maybe it all became a bit of a headache with Jack wrapping it up before anyone decided we really need to know whether Galactus could knacker Arishem the Judge.

The collection develops a bit of a limp as we near the end, then just stops leaving the rest of us to consult the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe in order to find out what kind of judgement the Celestials passed on us, or even whether they just got bored and went home. Yet even Kirby with a bit of a limp pretty much shits over anything else which has tried for such scale, and it still makes more sense than the movie. I think by this point we've pretty much established that whatever they were paying Kirby, it wasn't enough, and even this arguably lesser work is more evidence of the same.

Thomas M. Disch - Camp Concentration (1968)

 

It's a classic, they all said, and I'm not going to argue with Ursula LeGuin whose glowing praise is reproduced on the back cover. If you read it, she promises, you will be changed, and true enough I have indeed been transformed from a person who hadn't read Camp Concentration by Thomas M. Disch into a person who has. It's one of those science-fiction novels which doubles up as literary fiction and which can therefore be mentioned in polite circles without it seeming like you've asked Brian Sewell about his favourite Star Wars sequel.

It's all allegory, arguably satirical, as implied by the lengthy quote from The Pilgrim's Progress at the beginning. It's the diary of a man imprisoned and pumped full of Pallidine, a variant form of syphillis which dramatically increases the subject's intelligence to genius level while reducing life expectancy to something under a year. The allegory seems to amount to look how intelligent we've become, and yet we've used our intelligence to build nuclear weapons, but can be further distilled to a variant on that whole Garden of Eden deal with the snake and the apple. It's fair enough as messages go and not without value, but the novel doesn't seem to do a whole lot else, or even a whole lot of anything so far as I was able to follow. That said, snowed under with doubtless clever references to Thomas Aquinas, Heidegger, and others, I found much of it difficult to follow in so far as that there didn't seem to be any good reason to do so. It may be redundant to describe Camp Concentration as self-indulgent given Disch having freely admitted to writing for his own pleasure, and self-indulgence doesn't usually bother me, being preferable to the cynical button pushing of bland populism; but God this was joyless and so fucking boring.

Pat Mills, Tony Skinner & Duke Mighten - Brats Bizarre (1994)

Brats Bizarre originally ran in Toxic!, the relatively short-lived British weekly aiming to recapture some of the magic which had gone missing from 2000AD, and which remained unfortunately incomplete once the comic vanished from the shelves. I had no idea those responsible took the strip to Epic Comics for a four-issue series, and only made this discovery about a month ago.

Following the similarly acidic Marshall Law, Brats Bizarre finds Pat Mills squeezing further poison from the superhero spot and somehow without repeating himself. It's horrible and it's supposed to be horrible, and was perfectly suited to Duke Mighten's arrestingly stylised Art Deco graphics providing insight into how it might have been had Aubrey Beardsley been born half a century later and ended up working for DC or Marvel, should any of us have been pondering that one. In the generically dystopian near future of muscular super-powered cops in capes enforcing the status quo, the Brats Bizarre are amoral super-powered outcasts, freaks in the truest sense of the term, degenerates, and proud examples of any other pejorative you care to invoke. Unlike the traditional Marvel outcast who reads books and is therefore unpopular at school, Brats Bizarre were the weird and perverse children of a literary tradition which probably owes more to de Sade or Burroughs than to Siegel and Shuster, and was honestly one of the best strips to have appeared in Toxic!

So of course it was exciting to discover it had been expanded upon, continued and all wrapped up, and in terms of the story it's done fairly well for the most part, although the ending wherein the Brats are revealed as at least morally consistent, ultimately becoming role models for the corporate super-schills who have been trying to kill them - it feels a bit Breakfast Club and strikes an odd note. Unfortunately, none of this quite works without Duke Mighten, whom I gather was probably either busy or not interested when the reboot came up. He draws the first issue, which starts again from scratch rather than simply reprinting the Toxic! material, his work embellished by Anthony Adhikary, Colin Fawcett, and Paul Scott, the three of whom then illustrate the remaining three issues under their own steam. Working with Mighten, their contributions seemed a little fussy but work as a faux-Giraud embellishment of Mighten's art, if a poor second to the elegant simplicity of what he drew and painted for Toxic!; but without his contribution, the art is - sorry - mostly fucking abysmal requiring particular focus on the writing as a distraction from its raging ineptitude, except somehow the writing doesn't quite work without Duke Mighten.

What a fucker.

Apparently this either inspired or at least foreshadowed The Boys, although even in this state it was many times better from what I've seen of both the Garth Ennis book and its inevitable Netflix adaptation. This could have been a beautiful thing, but never mind.