Genesis 0

Isabelle Nicou Genesis 0 (2007)
Back in March, I opined that Nicou's Paresis wasn't likely to be Amphetamine Sulphate's chart smashing hit single for all that it constitutes an astonishing debut. Genesis 0, on the other hand - Nicou's second novel to be translated from the French - may be another thing entirely. It demonstrates the same forensic level of attention to existential and biological detail - so beautifully realised that it almost hurts - and yet its purpose is driven and absolutely clear, and to the point of reminding me - because apparently I'd forgotten - that this was what proper novels used to look like before everything expanded to five-hundred page bloaters with the author's name in raised silver type. This is the sort of thing Penguin should be publishing now rather than whatever the fuck it is they actually do publish these days.

Genesis 0 - and that's zero rather than the fifteenth letter of the alphabet - inhabits pregnancy and in doing so explores territory I only seem able to recall having encountered in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and, to a much lesser extent, The Abortion by Richard Brautigan. Given where we all came from, without exception, this seems a ridiculous oversight on the part of world literature, so possibly it's just me. Obviously, I've never found myself with child, but I'm particularly close to someone who has, so a lot of Genesis 0 seems painfully familiar in its documentation of the fundamental changes to one's existence which occur when the periods shut down; and it's nice to find the subject approached without any of the customarily sappy shite about ribbons.

I don't know if we're still bothering to use the term transgressive fiction here, but if so, Genesis 0 proves it to be a redundant label risen above the waves only because the alleged mainstream of literature has devolved so far from doing what it should do. It's by no means an easy read and it demands that you pay attention, but masterpiece honestly doesn't seem too great an accolade.

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning

Alan Sillitoe Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958)
I first read this for my English 'O' level exam back in the eighties, then bought my own copy of the novel shortly after, having been so impressed by it. Coming back to it in 2019, I now have to wonder whether the influence of this book runs deeper than I realised, and that attitudes and opinions I regarded as having come from a combination of parental influence, punk rock, and general common sense first achieved form when reading this.

Saturday Night is the story of Arthur, a young working class man employed on a factory assembly line, who drinks a lot, enjoys a fight, and prefers to shag married women because the secretive nature of the arrangement allows him the freedom to spread it about. He's selfish, vindictive, and his entire existence is founded upon a web of lies. He's a complete wanker, and yet really he's not, because he's funny, intelligent, hard to dislike, and there's a refreshing honesty to his nihilism. The novel is a straightforward allegory about growing up, a coming of age deal, I suppose, as Arthur achieves conditional enlightenment through having all of his wife-shagging, arse-kicking chickens come home to roost. It's literally the alcohol-fuelled night club punch-up of Saturday leading into the reflective hangover and recovery of Sunday morning.

The success of the book is in the portrayal of the working class as sympathetic, complex characters without recourse to sentiment, but rather celebrating the devious ingenuity of those obliged to get by with limited means. I've known a few Arthurs, even worked and lived in similar conditions, and Sillitoe really nails it, articulating the spirit of working class resistance and not letting the bastards grind you down like few others. The fidelity of Sillitoe's attention to detail is most capably demonstrated with the appearance of Sam and Chumley towards the end, respectively African and Indian, and neither entirely at home within the environment of white working class Nottingham in the fifties. Whilst both are treated as curiosities, there's no ill will because everyone has enough on their own plate without getting too upset about anyone else's business, painting what I would suggest is a generally more accurate picture of the attitude of the British working class to race than the one more commonly communicated by the media towards political ends.

At least since I first discovered the internet, more and more I've come to wonder at the herd mentality of my fellow citizens and the eagerness with which we will guzzle down whatever shit the media happen to be telling us this week. I'm not talking fake news or whatever mirage the architects of the current regime may be invoking to deflect from the fact of their having been caught with their pants down yet again. I'm talking about the many heads nodding and bleating innit terrible to whichever contemporary demon Rupert Murdoch, Jeremy Kyle, or whoever else happens to be waving in our faces in the name of scaring us into voting for Adolf fucking Hitler this week. Somehow I recall growing up with the idea that authority was not necessarily to be trusted, and that claims made by the media, particularly of the politically loaded variety, should be taken with a pinch of salt. This message seemed to be communicated by more or less everything which caught my attention from the Bash Street Kids onwards, and yet it's beginning to feel as though I grew up in some sort of bubble beyond which rock and roll - for example - was only ever about entertainment, and the version you'll see played out on America's Got Talent is probably as good as anything else you're likely to find for the same price. The squares and the head boys and the good little soldiers seem to be inheriting the earth.

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning is therefore a powerful memorial to a world we've left behind, to attitudes which should not be forgotten because while we're still fighting, it means we're alive; and being alive should be fun.

Slabs from Paradise

Jason Williamson Slabs from Paradise (2017)
This is the third I've read from Amphetamine Sulphate - arguably the star turn in so much as that it's the work of himself of international hitmakers, the Sleaford Mods, but feeling strangely mainstream after Captagon and Creepshots. Both books felt as though there was a lot going on just behind the narrative, whereas Paradise is very much up front and direct by comparison. In fact, these five short tales - although I'm not sure tales is quite the word given its invocation of something cosy experienced whilst drinking cocoa - these five short tales would be kitchen sink drama in the tradition of Sillitoe were it not for the coke and dogging.

It probably won't come as much of a surprise that these stories exude the same gleeful desperation as you hear on any Sleaford Mods record, and only the emphasis is slightly different. There's a lot more sex, a bit more violence - at least spiritually - and roughly the same quota of slate grey romance. Williamson expertly captures those aspects of working class existence which resist shoehorning into tastefully distressed high definition television shows - the stench, the endless disappointment, and having to get on with it despite daily punches in the face. Not for the first time, his writing reminds me of several decades spent working for Royal Mail and Parcel Force - which wasn't so much fun as you might think - minus the coke and dogging in my case. Slabs from Paradise speeds up all the misery and the futile wanking to breakneck pace, which isn't pretty, but probably needs to be recorded for the sake of posterity so that future generations looking back don't end up with the impression that it was all probably a bit like one of those shows which tries too hard on Channel 4. It's painful and intense, and very much in your face, which is probably why it's a good thing that these Amphetamine Sulphate books are all so short. Any more would be too much.

The Midwich Cuckoos

John Wyndham The Midwich Cuckoos (1957)
Our house seemed to be full of John Wyndham novels when I was growing up, so I'm not quite sure why I've only now begun to get around to reading the things. Part of the reason may be a reluctance to buy any edition of a novel other than the one with which I am roughly familiar from childhood, having grown up with the thing even if this didn't actually entail my reading it. The Midwich Cuckoos with any cover other than the classic Harry Willock design, for example, just seems stupid and pointless to me; although given my now living in Texas, I don't suppose it makes much difference seeing as I don't really encounter much second hand Wyndham around our way. Conversely, my recent trip back to the old country included visits to second hand book stores - or shops, I suppose I mean - the shelves of which were positively groaning with Wyndhams; and as I approach fifty it has come to seem increasingly ridiculous that I haven't yet got around to reading some of these.

The story will probably be roughly familiar to most people of a certain vintage as having inspired Village of the Damned, and by association, much of Jon Pertwee's run on the TV show which shall not be named: a rural village experiences a blackout during which time it is entirely isolated from the outside world, something resembling a flying saucer seems to be responsible, and when normal service is resumed it transpires that all the woman of the village are abruptly with child, including the virgins. Sixty-one children are born, all with the same distinctive unearthly appearance - blonde hair and golden eyes - and all telepathically conjoined as a gestalt entity.

For what is a relatively simple story, Wyndham gets a hell of a lot done with this one. On one level it seems to address our shifting view of the world, or at least human civilisation, specifically the view which had recently shifted from a belief in the global conflict of 1914 to 1918 as having been the war to end all wars, to a new understanding of there perhaps being no discrete limit to the horrors which might be visited upon us. Additionally The Midwich Cuckoos explores the notion of the superman or coming race as invoked by both the Nazis and numerous science-fiction writers who probably should have known better, and so here we are rudely presented with the possibility that superman might not want to be our friend, even that the thing which defines him as superman is the very fact of his being our enemy in Darwinian terms. As with the best science-fiction, all of this adds up to an examination of ourselves, and one which must have seemed particularly pertinent during the first decade after the end of the second world war - the question being whether we can afford ethics in opposition to absolute evil, the evil being that which must cause our own extinction in this case.

Oddly, much of this novel reminds me of certain supposedly classic alien abduction cases, and it certainly ticks a lot of the boxes - mysterious energy fields, missing time, extraterrestrial miscegenation and so on; although the earliest archetypal report of its general kind, reputedly occurring to Brazilian farmer Antônio Vilas Boas, wasn't really known until February 1958. This probably isn't significant as the fleeting presence of a saucer in The Midwich Cuckoos suggests that Wyndham at least had one ear sporadically attuned to phenomena of the sort.

The Midwich Cuckoos, for all of its wonderful ideas delivered with the minimum of fuss, nevertheless doesn't score so well as either The Day of the Triffids or The Kraken Wakes. The politely middle-class tone of the narrative may have aggravated Brian Aldiss, but there really wouldn't have been much point trying to tell this story as a variation on Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. The only real problem is that it sags somewhat in the middle, with one chapter after another related in conversation between our narrator and whoever happened to see something or else has some new idea about the children of the village. Still, one passes through the lull and the end wraps itself up with enough strength of character to leave an impression formed by the novel's more memorable passages, of which there are plenty; so jolly good show and everything.