Michel Houellebecq - H.P. Lovecraft - Against the World, Against Life (1991)

 

The initial reason for my reading Michel Houellebecq is the general serving suggestion of my supposed peers that I shouldn't read him; and I'm reading him regardless on the understanding that he and I may not agree on absolutely everything, and may even violently disagree on a couple of things. If you're unable to tell the difference between Houellebecq and Nigel Farage appearing on primetime national television to complain about having been silenced, then not only is that hardly my problem but you're a fucking idiot.

Anyway, this lengthy essay almost counts as a debut novel of sorts, and is among the few things I've read about Lovecraft which isn't revisionary bollocks. Of course, the aspect of Howie which has been most subject to revision has been his racism which tends to be downgraded to him being a man of his time, and anyway he grew out of it - which as a view is probably sustainable if you've never read, just off the top of my head, every single paragraph of The Dunwich Horror; and that was one of the good ones. Houellebecq's thesis is that most of what Lovecraft wrote reads as it does for reasons beyond his being a recluse, or technically naive, specifically that the great texts - and it should be easy enough to work out which of the stories he refers to by that term - are supposed to be that way. Lovecraft's characters tend to be generic because they're there entirely to carry the narrative and because Lovecraft was a misanthrope. His values inform what he wrote, regardless of any consideration of who might be reading or even paying for the privilege.

The value of a human being today is measured in terms of his economic efficiency and his erotic potential - that is to say, in terms of the two things that Lovecraft most despised.

It's a very convincing argument, and one that would seem to increase one's appreciation of all those squelchy tales of the super spooky space octopus in so much as that it's consistent with what we know - unlike the proposition that Howard had pretty much transformed into Ben Elton by the end of his life.

More shaky is the notion of there being such a thing as a philosophy of the Cthulhu Mythos - if we're to call it that - which works if you don't understand what is meant by the term philosophy, but here refers to an undifferentiated blast of nihilism as the negation of philosophy. In other words, Lovecraft at his best might be deemed the literary equivalent of listening to Ramleh at full volume; which I can see.

In support of this alleged philosophical quality, Houellebecq also offers the continuation of the Cthulhu Mythos by other authors which, if roughly spontaneous and undertaken purely for the sake of the art, I can't really see as being significantly different to kids growing up with the hope of one day writing the Spider-Man comic and so contributing to that universe; or to Perry Rhodan, Sherlock Holmes, Sexton Blake, Judge Dredd or whoever else. More likely, it strikes me that the significance and enduring appeal of the Cthulhu Mythos is its presenting a consistent cast of collectible characters rendered in primary colours as a ready-made playbox in which persons who like to make lists of things can indulge themselves, and notably the sort of persons who really, really need their content providers to be on their right side of history.

This edition also reproduces in full both The Call of Cthulhu and The Whisperer in Darkness presumably for the sake of comparison; but which unfortunately undermine some of what Houellebecq has written, at least for me. I don't think I've ever been convinced by the telling of The Call of Cthulhu despite that it supports Houellebecq's argument about Lovecraft's structural preferences; and although I found The Whisperer in Darkness effective and reasonably enjoyable, I really have to wonder at my being completely unable to recall having read it before whilst knowing that I read and apparently enjoyed it back in May, 2015. Given that Houellebecq will have read both in French, maybe something was gained in translation. That being suggested, his argument for the carefully directed precision of Lovecraft's narrative structure is surely cast into doubt by The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, produced the same year as Cthulhu and yet reading like the work of a ham-fisted adolescent

Regardless of anything, it's a pleasure and genuinely interesting to read about the man without having to make adjustments for some editorial bias attempting to paint himself as having been just a slightly scarier Lewis Carroll without the kiddy fiddling; and while I don't, for what it may be worth, agree with everything Houellebecq says, he nevertheless makes some fucking great points. In fact, I'm not sure Lovecraft did anything to deserve such a thoughtful and beautifully rendered biography.

Mosquito Blood Diaries

I wasnae gunna share this one, but fuck it...

Adam Gill Mosquito Blood Diaries (2011)
Well, it isn't the worst book I've ever read but is probably somewhere in the top two; although to be fair, as with Randy Henderson's Bigfootloose and Finn Fancy Free, I'm basing this assessment on the first fifty pages. I couldn't manage any more than that.

It was one of those out of the blue things, turning up in the mail without warning or explanation. Then a week later I heard from Peter Jones, with whom I briefly shared a house back in 1985, who said it had been written by his class mate at Dundee - presumably from some video post-production course or something of the kind. It was a nice gesture, possibly undertaken because I'd written a book which was likewise set in Mexico; but I have to say, the thing didn't exactly fill me with enthusiasm.

The back cover promises something about the end of the world as predicted by the Mayan calendar for 2012, which is unfortunate because everything written about the end of the world as predicted by the Mayan calendar for 2012 has been complete bollocks*. Similarly depressing is that I find I have a signed copy, and that it has been embellished thus:

 

Aside from my experiencing a possibly irrational and classist disgust at the thought of anyone being named Jonty, this cheery message somewhat suggests the author would have preferred to have made a movie, and that's coincidentally what the fucker reads like - or at least the first fifty pages do - begging the question, if you didn't want to write a book, why do I have to read it?

Never mind.

Anyway, I tried. It didn't seem too horrible at first, although it felt a little as though boxes were being ticked as part of something learned during a writing class - here's the character, here's what they look like, where they are, followed by some routinely sardonic observation just so we know we're not reading Enid Blyton. After a little while I noticed how each female character is introduced in terms of how cute she is, but she's also fiesty so it's not sexist; and we meet Herbert Tidy, one of the main protagonists.

So, let's see. His Christian name is Herbert and his surname is Tidy, which seems ingeniously Dickensian, wouldn't you say? What sort of person might that be, do you think?

But generally such charitable thoughts occupied only a fraction of his consciousness, the rest of his introspective ponderings were taken up entirely by work and his growing collection of graphic novels, not comics mind you, graphic novels. They were perhaps the only thing that he was passionate about and organising and reorganising them took up most of his spare time.

Nerds! Ha ha!

Later we learn that Herbert has been spending most of his time cataloguing and cross referencing the characters in his graphic novels, which no-one in human history has ever done, no matter how sad, possibly excepting characters from the Big Bang Theory which is - as is hopefully fucking obvious - the sports meathead's idea of what people who read comics are like. Many years ago I tried to read a Ben Elton novel, and this thing reminds me why I failed.

Amazingly, it doesn't get better. I didn't make it so far as the chapters which I presume wheel out various Mayan supernaturals as yet another pantheon of blood hungry monsters jumping up and down whilst chanting oogah-boogah, and this was because the writing began to get in the way. More and more I felt as though I might be watching some wearyingly edgy BBC thriller with a fast car every five minutes and no question denied its due sardonic response, one eyebrow raised so we can see that gosh she really is a fiesty filly!

Naturally Gill succumbs to that thing they all do with the clipped inactive sentences impersonating a brooding voice-over, which people who can't write tend to do in hope of building so powerful a mood as to distract from their being otherwise unable to string a sentence together. Full-stops everywhere. Willy nilly. Like this. You're not. Fooling anybody. Sunshine.

Finally we come to this, whatever the fuck it's supposed to be.

'But that was beyond butchery. That was sacrificial slaughter.' Exclaimed the scientist.

Exclaimed the scientist, doesn't work as a sentence by itself, and yet there it is; and speech is attributed by this same peculiar grammatical tic throughout the book, hence a shitload of sentences beginning with a capitalised Said. Whilst I dispute that there's such a thing as a definitively correct way to write English, it helps to understand at least some of the rules before you start flushing them down the crapper; and persons such as myself who read more than three books a fucking year can nevertheless tell when you don't know what the hell you're doing, no matter. Where you put the fucking. Full-stop.

I looked at the guy's facebook page and felt sorry for him because he's almost certainly a lovely guy. I assume this was his only novel, presumably composed in the belief that writing a novel is simply a matter of method - just like constructing a cabinet - so anyone can do it. It gives me no pleasure to describe Mosquito Blood Diaries as garbage, just as it gave me no pleasure to struggle though the first fifty pages; but garbage is indeed what it would appear to be.

*: Even assuming the Maya indicated the termination of their calendar to be anything apocalyptic - which they didn't so far as I'm aware - the correlation of the big day with the Gregorian 21st of December, 2012 seems to depend upon which elements of the Mayan calendar one takes into account, particularly those details which allowed said calendar to compensate for its falling slightly short of the true solar year. Clearly the Maya employed a system equivalent to that of our own leap year, one which was not formally acknowledged as part of their calendar, yet which must have existed because otherwise their calendar would not have been so accurate as has demonstrably been the case. What this system could have been remains open to debate, and four different Gregorian dates can be seen to correspond with the termination point of the Mayan calendar depending upon what assumptions are made about this mysterious mechanism.

Slavers of Space

John Brunner Slavers of Space (1960)
This was first published as the b-side to Dick's Dr. Futurity as part of an Ace Double. It's set in a universe wherein humanity is served by both robots and androids - the latter being biological servitors grown in a vat, approximately human but distinguished by their blue skin. You can probably tell where this is going, can't you?

This is my third Brunner of the sixties, and as with both Enigma From Tantalus and The Repairmen of Cyclops, something about either the tone, the pace, the situations, or the author's turn of phrase primes my mind's eye to visualise the narrative as Tom Baker era telly Who, albeit without Tom Baker; which is odd because Wikipedia mutters something about his fellow writers having considered him a little too heavily influenced by American science-fiction. Anyway, Slavers is paced oddly as though it wanted to be a big house novel in the vein of Jane Austen, with its main character belonging to a sort of futuristic plantation family, engaging in duels and Mardi Gras, then wandering off into space in hope of returning the wallet of a murdered man to his surviving relatives.

Those later Brunner novels I've read have been prone to a greater degree of soapboxery than I generally enjoy, because while it's nice when a book demonstrates a bit of a theme, even a social conscience, it's also nice when an author hasn't taken the readership to be the kind of morons who require everything spelled out in ten-foot high rainbow letters with Ben Elton stood to one side still cracking jokes about Thatcher. This one is about racism and inequality, you may be surprised to learn, but is problematic if we assume the blue-skinned androids to be a direct stand-in for Africans sold into slavery, which they clearly are. Our hero's curiosity is aroused when a human is murdered apparently while defending an android from a brutal assault. He accordingly develops a vague awareness of an android's lot being a perhaps less than happy one, then goes off into space in search of the murdered man's nearest and dearest, seemingly because he hasn't got anything better to do. Subsequent investigations reveal the uncomfortable possibility of certain androids being humans who've been dyed blue, brainwashed, and sold into slavery; and the big revelation at the end is that there's no such thing as an android, and the creatures we've been calling androids - and presumably have had wiping our arses for us all this time - are actually enslaved humans. So it's bad that we treated the androids like shit, but worse still that they're as human as we are.

Slavers of Space suffers for its fight against racism being waged with more than a faint whiff of Alan Partridge in the air, being mostly about our guy, lacking anything which engages directly with the minority with which Brunner seemingly expects us to sympathise, a minority which only eventually gets the benefit of empathy on our terms, namely just as soon as we've figured out that they're legitimately human. There are some nice images, and it's a long way from being anything you could describe as run of the mill, but still, there's something unsatisfying about this one, and I didn't much like the aftertaste.

The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13¾

Sue Townsend The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13¾ (1982)
I had the first two Adrian Mole books back when I was about the same age as the protagonist. I've now bought them again - my childhood copies having gone the way of my back issues of the Topper, amongst other things - initially so as to take the piss out of Alan Moore*, but also due to the inevitable burst of nostalgia which is apparently common amongst persons of my age. I was just going to read the thing. I couldn't see the point of writing the usual review, and yet here we are…

As I got older, I lost the desire to ever re-read Adrian Mole just as I lost the desire to revisit novels by Douglas Adams or Ben Elton. They seemed like books I'd read before I really read anything. It wasn't that I didn't read as a kid but, excepting stuff I was forced to read at school, it was rare that I read anything either lacking pictures or not directly tied into a TV show. It's therefore probably odd that I never really warmed to either the Mole television adaptation or all of those sequels, The Prostrate Years and so on, all of which seemed like a massive overegging of the pudding.

Coming back to this one now, I realise that not only was Adrian Mole the Harry Potter of my generation - and tellingly rooted in social realism rather than recycled nostalgia - but that he's aged extremely well, possibly because the book is so firmly rooted in its era, and specifically in the problems of its era; also because it's darkly amusing. Adrian's popularity after the fact has somehow given me cause to remember Mole as part of the same twee aspirationally middle-class chortleplex as the works of Jilly Cooper and Carla Lane, but it seems I was mistaken. Townsend, it turns out, had a hard, ordinary life, and most of Mole's troubles are drawn from direct, uncomfortable experience. What I somehow recalled as a series of zingers and not much more, is actually surprisingly gripping, poignant, and still, after all these years, very funny.

My own parents separated at some point not too long after I first read Mole, and with hindsight, the parallels border so much on the uncanny that I can't help wonder whether whoever gave me this for Christmas or my birthday - or whatever - felt it might somehow prepare me for things to come; and maybe it did.

*: The observations of Jake Butcher, as quoted here, are from the novel Adrian tries to write in Growing Pains - just in case anyone thought that was actually from Jerusalem.

The Umbrella Academy: Apocalypse Suite

Gerard Way & Gabriel Bá
The Umbrella Academy: Apocalypse Suite (2008)
To cut to the chase I really enjoyed this, which I mention so as to save readers the effort of skipping down in search of the point at which I'm not slagging something off. However, a huge rant came to me just as I finished reading, inspired by but only indirectly relating to The Umbrella Academy - actually no more than an expansion upon themes found in my usual rant - and I really need to get it out of my system so here we go. We will return to The Umbrella Academy following the next couple of paragraphs.

There's a dominant aesthetic which has emerged from western culture at the end of the twentieth century which I'll refer to as Titterism for the sake of convenience, and Titterism because its lowest forms suggest a person tittering as they photoshop, for example, a robot riding a penny-farthing whilst somehow imagining themselves to be a font of creative wit. I could be wrong but I suspect it all started when the Cure, having recorded the excellent Seventeen Seconds and Faith, turned to shit, although this may simply be when I first began to notice. I suppose it might be dated to the time Robert Smith spent playing guitar for Siouxsie & the Banshees then presumably came back with the wrong end of their aesthetic stick to record shite like The Love Cats and The Caterpillar. Titterism seems to have been born through a recontextualisation of Lewis Carroll, and in the wake of Robert Smith's pioneering work found expression in the art of Vaughan Oliver who famously set Victorian typefaces across blurred photographs of someone's grandma using a mangle. This led thematically to Dave McKean using rusty screws purchased from an antique shop to fix dead leaves to the cover of Sandman comics, and arguably to the stories contained in those comics and written by Neil Gaiman; and then to everything else whipped up from some tastefully blurred aspect of Victoriana or its associated images of childhood - Harry Potter, Doctor Who, steampunk, Peaky fucking Blinders, Tim Burton, you name it...

Gadzooks, chaps - why methinks 'tis one of those computing engines so fashioned as to resemble a gentleman and - oh my - he's riding a jolly old boneshaker! By the Lord Harry, what a to-do! What will they think of next?*

The appeal of Titterism - as I will continue to call it until it feels right - is not difficult to appreciate. We respond for the same reason we still respond to Dada and Surrealism, art movements to which much Titterist work appears to aspire. It looks interesting because it seems incongruous in the age of computer-driven mass communication. It looks incongruous because it looks conspicuously hand crafted and hints at values with which we are no longer fully connected; so contrast is the key element - hence what you get when you google steampunk Dalek. It's a space age robotic alien from the future, and yet it's powered by - tee hee - cogs and flywheels, so let the titters commence. No creative ability is required, just the capacity for standing an object next to its thematic opposite. This is probably why this whole thing has come about now, scored to the rise of information technology which allows those without clearly quantified artistic vision to endlessly quote, cut, paste, and rearrange what has gone before. Dada and Surrealism did the same but in sharp contrast to still strongly defined aesthetics of craft and beauty which modernism had only just begun to address, so the act of collage was itself a statement even before we consider any philosophical dimensions invoked by Tristan Tzara, Max Ernst, André Breton and others. The collage served subversion rather than tittering novelty the appeal of which is that it looks funny innit! Like everything, the subversion has been stripped of content and commodified as Titterism. It's old and weird and it reminds us of that which had content beyond the basic aesthetic, which saves us the trouble of thinking about it for longer than it takes to read this sentence.

So that is why I dislike Titterism. For every individual who understands exactly what they're doing and is able to offer art of some intrinsic value beyond mere collectibility, there are a million other cunts busily dangling Bulldog Drummond from a dirigible and expecting to get paid for it. This is partially why I browsed The Umbrella Academy in the book store two or three times before actually buying it. It looked potentially intriguing, but it looked like Titterism, a bit Tim Burton in places. I've tried with My Chemical Romance but I never really understood that emotional children music - as it's called - and The Black Parade still sounds like a noisier, more whiny Bay City Rollers to my ears; so the appeal of a Titterist comic book written by their singer did not seem obvious; but, I'd still have bought the first issue of the new Doom Patrol comic a couple of weeks back had it been written by Ben fucking Elton, never mind Gerard Way; and it was good, so of course I just had to read this.

The Umbrella Academy is a group of seven, slightly bizarre super-powered children, and whilst it skates close to the edge, occasionally threatening to slide over into a full blown Titterfest of monocles, penny-farthing bicycles, and Christmas puddings with sixpences in the middle - it has enough momentum and weird invention to get away with it, and ultimately to succeed with flying colours. On the surface of it, it's almost a homage to Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol - and if you enjoyed that you'll almost certainly enjoy this - but maintains its own distinctive voice through, oddly enough, a seemingly more pronounced European aesthetic, or enough so as to imply that Way has sat through more than his fair share of bewildering black and white films with English subtitles. So it manages to feel significantly less mainstream than Morrison's Doom Patrol, thanks in part to Gabriel Bá's wonderful artwork falling somewhere between Tintin and Ted McKeever.

Aside from some muted wibbling noises about shitty parenting, it admittedly doesn't actually do a whole lot beyond looking amazing, but that doesn't have to be a problem, and it does more than just titter. If you really need it, The Umbrella Academy's surrealist short-circuiting of expectation might quite easily be taken as an end in itself. It throws interesting shapes, and is at heart deeply fucking stupid, but then all the best comic books usually are.

*: I could churn out this shit all day if anyone's interested: five cents a word but all reasonable offers will be considered.

Riotous Assembly

Tom Sharpe Riotous Assembly (1971)
More steps retraced, and this time to a book originally borrowed from the same kid who lent me John Keel's Strange Creatures from Time and Space. I can't have been much older than thirteen, and he insisted I read the thing because it was funny; so Riotous Assembly being neither a Doctor Who tie-in, nor anything I'd been obliged to read by my English teachers at school - not that they made much effort in that direction - it might be argued that this was the first proper book I ever read, at least in terms of fiction and things with literary aspirations.

Amazingly, it's as funny as I remember it being, although I'm reading it with very different eyes this time around. The era of its origin is now a foreign land, as is particularly clear from the other titles you might enjoy described in the last couple of pages:

His Lordship was what the girls in a posh boarding school called William their handsome tennis coach. They laid traps for him. They teased him. They were very fond of him. Very fond. That is why William is in a prison cell when the story opens...

His Lordship by Leslie Thomas is about a girls' school that makes St. Trinians sound like a nunnery, according to some guy from The Listener, which means they probably suck his dick and rub their tits in his face and all that. Cor!!!

Then there's Paul Sample's wonderful cover art featuring, I could hardly fail to notice, black African tribesmen depicted as cartoonists tended to depict black African tribesmen in the seventies, and for a moment I had a horrible feeling I might be about to re-engage with something which would turn out to be a bit more Jim Davidson than I like these days, what with it being set during South Africa's Apartheid regime and all.

Thankfully my fears were unfounded.

The incredible thing about this novel - and a debut novel no less - is that it amounts to juggling a series of near impossible contradictions equivalent to a situation comedy set in a Nazi concentration camp. It's a satire of Apartheid at the expense of those who benefitted from the regime, and yet it's told from their point of view. There's very little to like about Kommandant van Heerden and his officers, and in many ways they are monstrous without quite being written as such, meaning neither their unpleasant views nor terrible deeds get in the way of the story; and yet the story is a vast, absurdist Heironymous Bosch spectacular with no punches pulled when it comes to murder, disembowelment, hangings, and white cops indescriminately treating black people as animals. In fact, being told from the viewpoint of Kommandant van Heerden and his officers we too experience his victims as faintly comic innocents routinely mown down whilst fleeing from a government sanctioned psychopath with an elephant gun.

It's not that the novel is without sympathetic characters so much as that they appear only as furniture, something for Konstabel Els to shoot. Yet this is nothing like a defence of Apartheid, the racism of the South African state, nor even anything so repulsive as more innocent times when you were allowed to tell jokes about shooting black people because it was all in fun. There are no Ben Elton style slogans or statements of the obvious because once you've read the thing, it really doesn't need spelling out.

The book closes with an historical re-enactment of the history of South Africa performed by the inmates of a lunatic asylum.

'You would think they'd get tired of lying down and getting up and lying down again,' the Mayor said when the Zulus had gone through their death agonies for the umpteenth time. 'Must keep them physically fit, I suppose.'

'So long as the bastards don't win, I'm happy,' said the Kommandant.

'I think they do have a moment of triumph in the finale,' said Dr. Herzog. 'It's the battle of Isandhlwana. The British ran out of ammunition and were massacred.'

'Do you mean to tell me,' said the Kommandant, 'that you have allowed white men to be defeated by blacks? It's insane. What's more it's illegal. You are encouraging racial hatred.'

It's a funny book, but the humour is about as dark as it gets, even though it may take the reader a while to notice this, filtered as it is through the blandly utilitarian perspective of its monsters. This is an incredible novel, all things considered.