Cities of the Red Night

William S. Burroughs Cities of the Red Night (1981)
The first Burroughs I read was Exterminator! back in June 1982. I was seventeen. I'd read another four by September, at which point I checked Cities of the Red Night out of the library in Stratford-upon-Avon. I remember reading it, but nothing of whatever impression it made, and this is the first time I've read it since, so far as I can tell. For some reason I actually thought I had a copy of my own.

I now realise Cities was fairly different to those I'd already read - all thematically and stylistically much closer in spirit to Exterminator! - and I probably spent much of the page count wrestling with the variant style whilst failing to get almost all of the references. Never mind.

While no-one could possibly describe Cities of the Red Night as a complete departure for Burroughs, it's almost a linear narrative, or as close as he came in later years, with cut-up text applying only indirectly as informing the dream logic of what occurs. It's still riddled with and divided by non-sequiteurs, not least the alarming leaps from eighteenth century to the present and back again, but it's held together by its own momentum, requiring only that the reader trust in there being reasons for elements failing to add up with quite the elegance you might expect of a more conventional piece of writing.

In Cities of the Red Night, Burroughs extrapolates a present founded on various pseudo-historical self-governing but short-lived Libertarian communities of the eighteenth century, creating a mythic precedent in the cities to which the title refers, situated in the Gobi Desert some hundred-thousand years before and in many respects echoing the present. It all adds up to something, approximately, or at least makes narrative sense if you squint a little; but it's the first half of the novel which really seems to represent Burroughs exploring new territory, and upon which its stellar reputation is presumably founded. Unfortunately, the second half - at least some of which visits the named ancient cities - returns to the familiar territory of guns, erect penises, and rollerskates, which is okay but for that it doesn't seem to add much; and while this time around I was equipped to pick up on all of the references to Uxmal, the Maya, Ix Chel and so on, it didn't really help and I experienced some zoning out here and there.

It's still a great book for all sorts of reasons, just not the masterpiece it could have been, so I'm not complaining.