Charlotte Brontë - Jane Eyre (1847)

I tend to think of my secondary education as having been fairly crap, but on the other hand we had an English teacher who made us read this so it clearly had something going for it. On average I read Jane Eyre roughly every ten years, not as part of some long term schedule but simply because it works out that way. If it's a fairly straightforward, linear story, the level of detail and description is of such complexity as to yield fresh revelations with each reading, and this latest engagement has been no exception.

Jane Eyre, as you should probably know, is the story of Jane, participant in a partially autobiographical existence, who endures childhood misery, harsh schooling, crushing expectations, and the one man she would consider marrying harbouring a deranged wife in the attic of his stately home. It's about female agency, to some extent, as the tale of a woman who resists the expectations of nineteenth century society, forging her own path despite forces which might promise a quiet life at the expense of autonomy. I suppose, by extension, one might almost say it's a novel about the nineteenth century, the age in which truths held previously unassailable began to look a bit crumbly around the edges - notably with the death of God and the notion of progress and change as desirable or even necessary. Jane lives in a world dependent on certain truisms being taken for granted, notably those of sex and class, but her society is illusory - a spectacle in the sense of that which Debord describes in The Society of the Spectacle - demanding that she makes her way by critical means, basing decisions on that which is demonstrably true or at least ethically correct.

This isn't what makes Jane Eyre a great book so much as the poetry of how it undertakes to dissect nineteenth century society and to highlight wrongs in realistic and compassionate terms without the occasionally cloying sentiment of, for one roughly contemporary example, Dickens. With few of the book's demonstrable real world details adding up to a consistent chronology or year, Jane Eyre has been described as a fairy story, and certainly it can't be deemed a realistic novel in the conventional sense despite concerning itself with the real world. Aside from the ubiquitous atmospheric effects continuing the legacy of the Romantic era, it's a book full of implied spirits, spectres, and otherworldly influences - even though the only plausibly supernatural occurrence is a brief moment of long-distance telepathy between Jane and Rochester near the end. The brilliance of the book is, I would say, rooted in the apparent contradiction of what it does, namely that it uses the language and imagery of the haunted, the spooky, and the ethereal in presenting an argument in support of realism, critical thought and not just doing something because that's what everyone else is doing and that's how it's always been innit. Even the fearful mad woman in the attic is never quite reduced to just a symbol of the kind used by authors to hammer some black and white point all the way home.

However, it does much more than just the above, and describing some of the mechanism as I have done, does little to convey the true complexity, elegance, or beauty of this novel. I don't know if it's truly the greatest novel in the English language, but it surely has to be a contender.

The Lost Girl

D.H. Lawrence The Lost Girl (1920)
The Lost Girl was written around the same time as The Rainbow, then rewritten for publication in 1920, presumably incorporating semiautobiographical details of much which had occurred within Lawrence's world since the first draft. It's difficult to gauge the extent of the revisions, but there are points at which the tone switches so dramatically as to leave the whole feeling a little like two different books, albeit both telling the same story. The first chapter, focusing upon the father of Alvina, our Lost Girl - herself loosely based on Frieda, Lawrence's wife - makes numerous references to nineteenth century novelists - George McDonald, Dickens, Wilkie Collins and others - whilst betraying an influence of the same, strongly suggesting the possibility of having survived the 1920 rewrite more or less unchanged.

By contrast, the second chapter introduces Alvina in an unusually light, jocular tone very much contradicting the received wisdom of Lawrence lacking a sense of humour, particularly once we meet the theatrical sideshow performers who catalyse the action of the novel, specifically Alvina's escape from both a stifling home environment and then England itself. The performers, clownish and exaggerated, are described with sardonic indulgence rather than sentiment or anything so dismissive as the frowning misanthropy we are supposed to expect of Lawrence. He didn't much like the vulgarity of the modern world, but clearly shared the working class love of spectacle and garish folk tradition. The flamboyant Natcha-Kee-Tawara theatre troupe, for example, perform dubious Red Indian scenes at the newly opened cinema - James Houghton's latest doomed venture; and if Lawrence regards them as brash, describing their performance in anthropological terms as he would later describe actual Taos Indian rituals, he is sympathetic, seemingly regarding the noise as more honest than the moving pictures of Houghton's cinema and so more in tune with his class.

The introduction of the Natcha-Kee-Tawara additionally seems to suspend reality in some vaguely Shakespearean sense, allowing for the derailment of narrative conventions and for occurrences of the chance and unexpected, notably Alvina encountering Cicio with whom she eventually flees to Italy, as did Lawrence and Frieda.

Unfortunately, the general tone changes once again from this point on, reverting to Lawrence's more familiar landscape of emotional tumult and psychological undercurrents which, given the contrast with the first half, suggests either indecision, a lack of direction, or simply that The Lost Girl needed a little more work prior to publication. As it stands, the transition from relative whimsy to the cloying Dickensian sentiment describing the death of James Houghton and the subsequent fate of his daughter is jarring, giving an impression of certain passages having been subject to much greater revision than others. We almost have two books here, at least in terms of tone, and while one is certainly respectable and consistent with the author's reputation, the other one could have been great.

The Sex Shops of Sherman Oaks

SJXSJC The Sex Shops of Sherman Oaks (2021)
To kick off at something of a tangent, back when I was a self-involved teenager and my mother was doing a literature degree of some description at Warwick University, she often dropped me off at the university's expansive library so as to keep me occupied for an hour or so. I expect she hoped I'd discover Dickens but I usually ended up browsing the William Burroughs shelf. I'd just discovered his writing and the university kept original hardbacks of all the obscure out of print books, a few of which I hadn't seen before and have never encountered since. A couple of these were illustrated with collages by Burroughs himself, or Brion Gysin, or somebody else - stark black and white things, often jarring cut-up images very much belonging to the same lineage of juxtaposition and dissent as Steven Purtill's illustrations for The Sex Shops of Sherman Oaks, which similarly reminds me of that initial thrill of discovering Burroughs for the first time. This one comes from Amphetamine Sulphate's science-fiction imprint. As may be obvious, it's more Burroughs than Asimov and as such falls under the heading of things which approximately continue the experimental thrust of Moorcock's New Worlds.

That being said, while I presume the influence of Burroughs may figure in there somewhere, and the occasional passage suggests something of his voice, this is nevertheless something new, or at least new to me. The narrative is delivered in short, functional sentences, sometimes without verbs, and with an overpowering tendency towards what may initially seem like the sort of random digression which results from cut-up texts. There's a fairly high degree of repetition, and while some of it may indeed be derived from the cut-up technique, the whole seems quite carefully directed towards specific effects and is therefore a long way from comprising random phrases plucked out of a top hat.

Human as alien as animal as transformative substance. My gills again. My lungs left behind. The anti-intro that discusses mutations only. New genes discovered in the side streets of North Inglewood. My personal mental fitness … a direct agency to despair. Psychedelic mathematics … the double helix … organisms occur as new species … desirous selection.

It's all like this, nearly two-hundred pages, and the cumulative effect is akin to a wall of noise with little variation in tone. Nevertheless the reader will begin to notice patterns emerging from the static, not unlike images seen flickering within flames, and after a short time it feels as though you're reading something with a conventional, if not exactly traditional, narrative hidden within the information overload. Much of the content contradicts and even skewers attempts to make sense of what may or may not be happening, not least occasional half-glimpses of cyborgs and flying saucers intruding on whatever reality our narrator occupies, and yet the suggestion that we're reading something more structured persists.

I'm not sure what to make of this, but I suppose it could be viewed as narrative which gives equal emphasis to experienced reality, stray thoughts and memories, and even alternatives occurring somewhere within the many realms of possibility. Our narrator is involved with someone named Madhab, or maybe he's Madhab, but the perspectives remain fluid to the point of even gender drifting back and forth. They or he or she or whoever move around from place to place, brains fried by chemicals, engaging in auto-erotic asphyxiation amongst other pastimes. It might almost be a road movie with the first few Chrome albums on heavy rotation, but one where that which is described represents a mere fraction of the greater reality as though we experience only the sharp peaks of something otherwise too vast to operate as text in a meaningful way.

As will hopefully be clear from the above - keeping in mind that this is just my interpretation - The Sex Shops of Sherman Oaks really isn't much like Burroughs aside from the short-circuiting of consensus reality which it effects; and surprisingly, it's not even a difficult novel once the reader has dispensed with any of the usual expectations. I remain confused but am nevertheless violently impressed.

Silas Marner

George Eliot Silas Marner (1861)
...talking of Feminism, whilst I'm not saying that women haven't ever been airbrushed from history, or even that it hasn't been fairly common practice, but the dialogue wherein it is written that all women are amazing and all of their great works have been suppressed by the phallocrats, is bollocks. If you're unsure about this one, ask yourself which names are best remembered as giants of the nineteeth century novel. My admittedly Anglocentric answer would be Charlotte Brontë, Jane Austen, George Eliot, then maybe Dickens, then, I suppose, a load of other guys and assorted worthy but unreadables. Therefore great bolshy yarblockos to thee and thine.

Anyway, we read Silas Marner in school, except as I now realise it was a heavily abridged version excluding all of the bits which weren't directly concerned with Silas himself; which is pretty weird given that it's already a surprisingly slim and breezy volume by nineteenth century standards, and which probably explains why I don't remember anything much about it. A casual remark about George Eliot made by D.H. Lawrence brought me here, along with the revelation that not only was Mary Anne Evans (who wrote as George Eliot so as to evade detection by the penisoid phallocrat man-censors) from my general neck of the woods, but the village of Raveloe - in which Marner resides - seems to have been based on Bulkington, Warwickshire, which is where my dad lived for a while. I spent one of the shittiest Christmasses ever in Bulkington, and have got pissed in the pub upon which I presume the Rainbow in the novel may have been based.

Take that, Alan Moore*.

Silas Marner is a little more Victorian than I usually enjoy, being the pseudo-folkloric tale of a miser whose frozen heart is restored by an orphan with just deserts served to any bad 'uns who happen to be in the vicinity, but Eliot maintains an amazing balance for the duration, never quite allowing anything to slip over into sentiment for the sake of it, therefore allowing her message to unfurl, clear and undeniably righteous, without anyone ending up diabetic.

Eliot's Raveloe is actually Georgian and profoundly rural, seemingly so as to emphasise the onset of change - social and technological - by means of an environment traditionally resistant to the same, where few ever travel to neighbouring villages and everyone is firmly rooted into the soil. The novel was written during the decades which saw the rise of Darwinian thought, social reform, and an accordingly profound shift in the relationship between God and man; so that's what it's about.

In old days there were angels who came and took men by the hand and led them away from the city of destruction. We see no white-winged angels now. But yet men are led away from their threatening destruction; a hand is put into theirs, which leads them forth gently towards a calm and bright land, so that they look no more backward; and the hand may be a little child's.

Marner is done a great wrong, for which those responsible eventually pay so that it all works out very well for our boy by the end of the book, and all by the agency of what we may as well refer to as karma, but which amounts to cause and effect rather than the usual rewards dished out in recognition of piety. Eliot's initial religious faith was very much open to debate by the time she wrote Silas Marner, and this is reflected in the generally agnostic thrust of the narrative; that is, that she sees the use of religious instinct as morality, but feels no need to dwell on the mechanism - a potentially shocking message for at least some of her contemporaries, and one Eliot seemingly wishes to diffuse by emphasising morality as a constant.

The gods of the hearth exist for us still; and let all new faith be tolerant of that fetishism, lest it bruise its own roots.

Because nothing is permanent but change, as Heraclitus apparently wrote, and change would have been a daunting prospect in nineteenth century England at least for the great body of the population. Silas Marner therefore serves as a sort of reassurance, affirming that change, no matter how scary, can be for the better.

'Yes, my dear, yes,' said Mr. Lammeter; 'one feels that as one gets older. Things look dim to old folks: they'd need have some young eyes about 'em, to let 'em know the world's the same as it used to be.'

The beauty of Silas Marner is that it presents this argument with subtleties and shade, no recourse to shorthand or the sledghammer pathos of much Victoriana, and is written in a hand which grips firmly, despite the complexity of those long, long sentences. This is a truly great book.

*: This possibly confusing comment refers to Moore's bloody awful Jerusalem which seems to place its author at the cultural centre of everything ever based on a series of spurious - and not even entirely accurate - coincidences associating various significant historical events and people with Northampton.

Fallen Angels

Jo Duffy Fallen Angels (1987)
Here's another children's comic book to which I turned, having found my brain ill-equipped to cope with D.H. Lawrence after ten in the evening, another children's comic book which I flogged back in the eighties then recently repurchased in a flurry of nostalgia fueled by the realisation that I'm getting rid of this because I'm a big boy now is an essentially childish position. Fallen Angels was an eight-issue series which fell some considerable way short of classic, but was nevertheless readable, and which remains readable thirty years after the sell-by date.

Fallen Angels applies mutants to whatever you would call that trope wherein a bunch of orphans buddy together as a lightly criminal gang for scrapes and japes, as seen in various Dickens things and probably more recently in Marvel's Runaways, except I've neither read the comic nor seen the TV show and am probably unlikely to do either at any point soon. The art is efficient, if a little uneven in places, and would almost certainly have worked better in black and white. The writing is occasionally hokey, explains a bit too much in places, and the routine of reintroducing the characters anew every single issue becomes quickly annoying; and yet the enterprise, once you get past noticing that the furniture wouldn't have seemed out of place in a Michael J. Fox vehicle, is essentially fucking mental, and endearingly so.

Sunspot and Warlock of the New Mutants join a gang which seems suspiciously reminiscent of the Double Deckers, or even the Banana Splits, other members including a pair of super-powered lobsters and Devil Dinosaur, who is an actual dinosaur. The gang has been brought together by Ariel - who reputedly gave Shakespeare the inspiration for the character of the same name in The Tempest - a native of the Coconut Grove, which seems to be an alien place rather than specifically a planet. Being an alien place, the Coconut Grove is stereotypically cool by terms which made sense in 1987 - somewhere between jheri curls and the first Madonna album; and lessons about being who you are, true to your friends and all that shit are inevitably delivered before we get to the final page, none of which is so trite as to detract from this being Morrison era-Doom Patrol or even Umbrella Academy, albeit with the sleeves of its jacket rolled up to the elbows like that twat in Miami Vice; which is why it's a lot of fun and I enjoyed reading it. That's all there is to it.

The White Peacock

D.H. Lawrence The White Peacock (1911)
This was his first novel, rewritten three times prior to publication but never quite shaking off that first novel quality of meandering whilst simultaneously trying just a bit too hard. Prior to this effort, he mainly wrote poetry which shows in so far as that the opening chapters read very much like an accumulation of poetic material - florid descriptions of the natural world, landscape and so on - in which an indeterminate number of characters are embedded like raisins in a currant bun. These characters are naive, vaguely middle-class, and slightly unworldly - possibly for the sake of contrast with the violence of their environment, which itself is rooted in nature red in tooth and claw with the occasional brusque intrusion of earthier, seemingly more substantial working class persons whom, it might be argued, serve as extensions of the environment. Not a page seems to go by without either a rabbit strangling, mention of a sheep killing dog, or some other reminder that the refinement of our civilised lives is an anomaly in the great scheme of things, at least not until we come to the awful, sugar coated sub-Dickensian Christmas celebrations at the close of the first of the three parts into which the novel is divided; and even the festivity is itself briefly punctuated by:

There was a great fall of snow, multiplying the cold morning light, startling the slow-footed twilight. The lake was black like the open eyes of a corpse; the woods were black like the beard on the face of a corpse.

...then right back into the Quality Street choccy box for another couple of dozen pages.

My first guess would be that Lawrence didn't want to take too many chances with his first novel, and maybe thought the swearing coal miners of his own upbringing would alienate potential readers, so he gave us Dickens-lite and so much so that I found myself waiting for some comic misunderstanding based on a pair of gloves having been left on the drawing room table rather than in the parlour as would ordinarily have been the case. The problem is that it's difficult to care about these characters one way or the other, and the first person narrative only serves to muddy their definition - I only realised his name was Cyril after a hundred or so pages. Cyril and his friends seem slight in their wispy thoughts and passions although, as I say, it seems to be on purpose, as this exchange perhaps suggests.

I laughed to see her so enthusiastic in her admiration of my sister. Marie is such a gentle, serious little soul. She went to the window. I kissed her, and pulled two berries off the mistletoe. I made her a nest in the heavy curtains, and she sat there looking out at the snow.

'It is lovely,' she said reflectively. 'People must be ill when they write like Maxim Gorky.'

'They live in town,' said I.

'Yes — but then look at Hardy — life seems so terrible — it isn't, is it?'

'If you don't feel it, it isn't — if you don't see it. I don't see it for myself.'

'It's lovely enough for heaven.'

The point eventually becomes clear, this being the tragedy of the disparity between the dreams and aspirations of these four young people, and how the world actually works; but the absence of forward thrust results in a narrative which more closely resembles music, and probably ambient music at that, so it's only once we reach the last hundred or so pages that anything really begins to feel as though it's saying something, and the way in which all has been kept isolated from the intrusion of the twentieth century at last makes sense.

One of our boys settles into respectable nineteenth century conservatism where the other embraces modernity and the rights of the working man, with Lawrence himself more concerned with what drives their impulses than where those impulses lead.

Of course, I am in sympathy with the socialists, but I cannot narrow my eyes till I see one thing only.

So, I suppose you might say it's a nineteenth century novel waking up to the harsh industrialised daylight of the twentieth century, this being its subject as much as it might be considered a description. Most of Lawrence's major themes are already there, not least the casual homoeroticism and the pagan undercurrent, here most visibly expressed as the death of Annable, the gamekeeper and a sort of Green Man holding out against the encroachment of Christianity; but The Trespasser does at least some of this in half the page count, and without suggesting that the writer has gone into a room looking for something but is now unable to remember what it was.

There was a gap between to-day and tomorrow, a dreary gap, where one sat and looked at the dreary comedy of yesterdays, and the grey tragedies of dawning tomorrows, vacantly, missing the poignancy of an actual to-day.

See, that probably boils the whole thing down to a single sentence, or at least as I understood it; so it's a mostly decent novel, and particularly so for a debut, but mainly in the context of Lawrence's back catalogue.

The Return of the Native

Thomas Hardy The Return of the Native (1878)
I've had several run ups to Pohl and Kornbluth's allegedly classic Gladiator-at-Law, and whilst I can see that it's well written in terms of elegant sentences, I just can't seem to give a fuck about anything happening within the narrative. Now on my second or third attempt, I make it to chapter eleven and notice that I have no idea what's happening to who or why; then somehow I find myself reading this instead, a big fat Victorian novel of such volume that copies could be used to weight sacks containing stool pigeons destined for large rivers or other bodies of water. No sentence is less than two-hundred words long, typically describing the moral import of some minor feature of someone's face, and nothing happens for the first quarter of the book, or what felt like it - just a bunch of people stood around a bonfire gossiping about some woman being no better than she ought to be, amongst other things; and yet unlike Gladiator-at-Yawn, it's positively gripping.

The story is spun around the doomed marriages of two couples. Clym has been living in Paris but, having decided it was all a bit too fancy, now returns to his beloved and rustic Egdon Heath to marry Eustacia, who only marries him because she hates Egdon Heath and assumes he'll change his mind and will take her to live in Paris. Naturally it all ends in tears, ultimately concluding with lessons learned.

Derwent May's introduction seems to spend a lot of time refuting D.H. Lawrence's assertion that the main character of The Return of the Native is the landscape itself, as described in his Study of Thomas Hardy. Without actually having read Lawrence's Study of Thomas Hardy, I'd say he seems to have a point.

The first part of the book serves to define its cast as ephemerals within a much larger and essentially mysterious landscape across which bonfires are lit from one hilltop to the next in this pre-technological era, itself only a moment in the depths of geological time, with references to arrowheads, bronze age tribes, and Biblical times provided for the sake of scale.

The instincts of merry England lingered on here with exceptional vitality, and the symbolic customs which tradition has attached to each season of the year were yet a reality on Egdon. Indeed, the impulses of all such outlandish hamlets are pagan still: in these spots homage to nature, self-adoration, frantic gaieties, fragments of Teutonic rites to divinities whose names are forgotten, seem in some way or other to have survived mediaeval doctrine.

Being a Victorian novel, Native pays the same laborious attention to detail as any Pre-Raphaelite painting and is similarly loaded with meaning and allegory - possibly even to the point of the term native - here referring to Clym Yeobright - being a single letter removed from naive. Whilst the principal characters of the novel are not without depth, they are primarily described in terms of how they relate to their environment to the point that we may as well regard them as expressions of the same. Clym's defining characteristic is that he left the heath and has, as Hardy sees it, come to his senses, and it seems significant that we learn hardly anything about his time in Paris beyond that he'd had enough. Here we find this kinship expressed as the one time scholar is reborn back on his home turf as a common labourer who goes accordingly unrecognised by his own mother.

The silent being who thus occupied himself seemed to be of no more account in life than an insect. He appeared as a mere parasite of the heath, fretting its surface in his daily labour as a moth frets a garment, entirely engrossed with its products, having no knowledge of anything in the world but fern, furze, heath, lichens, and moss.

Clym's relationship to the land from which he was sprung is an instinctive rather than considered aspect of his psychology.

He already showed that thought is a disease of the flesh, and indirectly bore evidence that ideal physical beauty is incompatible with emotional development and a full recognition of the coil of things.

It's not difficult to see how this would have appealed to D.H. Lawrence, particularly as a forerunner of his own ideas about blood consciousness, as he termed it, as expressed by Don Ramón in The Plumed Serpent.

'Man is a column of blood, with a voice in it... And when the voice is still, and he is only a column of blood, he is better.'

Returning to the theme of how the characters serve as extensions of their environment, Eustacia is defined more or less entirely by her desire to escape from the heath; and then we have the Reddleman, Diggory Venn, an avatar of the land in the sense of Swamp Thing being an avatar of the bayou. Venn is coloured red from head to toe as a consequence of his work, extracting red ochre from the ground with which to mark sheep. Having no fixed abode, he comes and goes in the fashion of a wandering spirit, a parallel which is emphasised in the first part of the book by reference to a red ghost seen at large on the heath.

The lesson of The Return of the Native may, on the surface of it, seem typically Victorian and conservative - stick to what you know, stay home, honour thine parents, and so on and so forth. Clym shouldn't have gone to Paris in the first place, and his moderately unpleasant wife probably shouldn't make too many assumptions about the grass being greener over there; but I suspect this may be a misreading, or at least an unbalanced emphasis in so much as that it's not really the point of the book which seems too complex to be boiled down to any single, simple lesson. Some of it concerns fate, or what we understand to be fate, and the related dispensation of blame for the occasional shitty hand which we may be dealt.

'But you can't charge yourself with crimes in that way,' said Venn. 'You may as well say that the parents be the cause of a murder by the child, for without the parents the child would never have been begot.'

So, I guess it's about personal responsibility in the sense of suggesting that human agency plays a greater part in how our lives work out than any nebulous ideas of destiny, such as - for example - those which may seemingly root us to a specific patch of earth.

Human beings, in their generous endeavour to construct a hypothesis that shall not degrade a First Cause, have always hesitated to conceive a dominant power of lower moral quality than their own; and, even while they sit down and weep by the waters of Babylon, invent excuses for the oppression which prompts their tears.

The strength of The Return of the Native is not that any of this is necessarily spelled out, but that it allows us to piece these ideas together by whichever terms make most sense to the reader, avoiding the somewhat didactic qualities of, for example, Dickens, not to mention his cloying excess of sentiment.

We open with a sort of death, something coming out of the night, Thomasin returning stillborn to Egdon in the Reddleman's funereal conveyance as bonfires are lit in homage to the death of Guy Fawkes; then conclude with the Mayday rebirth of Spring, Diggory Venn who has scrubbed up fairly well and is no longer bright red, and Clym at last finding his calling as a preacher, but one who prefers not to simply spout doctrine or to go through motions determined by any external influence.

He left alone creeds and systems of philosophy, finding enough and more than enough to occupy his tongue in the opinions and actions common to all good men.

It's therefore about facing the future, I suppose, or something along those lines. It could have been shorter. I'm not sure I don't prefer the sound of the conclusion Hardy submitted for the earlier serialisation, wherein Venn remains a mysterious, borderline supernatural figure; but this 1912 iteration nevertheless holds together well, possibly excepting the laborious distended arse-ache of Diggory Venn and Thomasin Yeobright finally brought together by agency of a missing glove.

Notes from Underground

Fyodor Dostoyevsky Notes from Underground (1864)
I didn't really get on with Crime and Punishment, and I bought this on the grounds of having heard of it and that Dostoyevsky must have written something to deserve all that reputation. It turns out that Notes from Underground is actually pretty slim, so it's fairly common to find it collected with other material as is the case here, and which presented the additonal appeal of containing shorter and hopefully snappier examples of whatever the fuck he was trying to say.

I got a little more out of it than Crime and Punishment, but otherwise I think I've learned my lesson. Here we have four tales from different periods of Dostoyevsky's life serving to illustrate an almost autobiographical narrative. Specifically, Dostoyevsky was subjected to a mock execution by tsarist authorities who regarded him as a subversive in 1849, then sent off to the stripey hole for the next eight years, all of which somewhat soured his view of humanity and his own initial idealism. We are afforded insight into the views of the young Dostoyevsky in White Nights, then his time in prison in selections from the autobiographical The House of the Dead, then Notes itself, concluding with The Dream of a Ridiculous Man which charts his descent into something resembling misanthropy.

The excerpts from The House of the Dead seem the most illuminating, and I found the most interesting, mostly consisting of straightforward reportage of the lives and crimes of those with whom Dostoyevsky shared a prison lavatory. The accounts are conversational, sober, and the crimes detailed are allowed to speak for themselves without any wringing of hands or pulling of faces, which is what spoils the rest of this material for me. It's nothing like so cloying or sentimental as Dickens, and the narrative often seems to actively resist the possibility with its focus on ugliness, contradiction, and self-loathing, its continuous refutation of idealism; but in the absence of light relief, it all becomes a little exhausting after a while. I suppose our man may have been attempting to communicate some purity of vision, albeit through grey-tinted spectacles, in encouraging us to dislike him as much as he seemingly disliked himself, but I found the effect unconvincing. White Nights was written prior to the author's time in prison, before the disillusionment had properly settled in, and strives to build drama from simpering acquaintances who wouldst be lovers but for something dull to do with somebody's grandmama, or maybe a fancy cake or some purloined napkins, that kind of thing. Anyway, the point is that White Nights is excruciatingly precious and juvenile, and after reading it I couldn't keep myself from seeing Dostoyevsky as an overly earnest upper class art student who follows you around quoting William Blake or snatches of Jim Morrison lyrics whilst trying his hardest to smoulder in a generally meaningful way; which is a shame because The House of the Dead at least seems to be worth a look, judging by what we have here. As a collection, this is not without merit, but it's a little chewy in places, and Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea takes us to more or less the same destination in a much better book.

Funnily enough, perhaps in obediance to some obscure cosmic principle, last time I read Dostoyevsky I found myself toggling between Crime and Punishment and the first volume of Danny Baker's memoirs for the sake of light relief; and having picked up this one, the universe has somehow conspired to furnish me with a copy of Going Off Alarming (2014) just as I really needed to read something which wasn't a nineteenth century Russian bloke punching himself in the face for two-hundred pages. I only noticed the coincidence once I'd finished Notes. Maybe there is such a thing as the anti-Dostoyevsky and it's Danny Baker, a man who doesn't do dark and whom it may be useful to regard as the human analogy of Bugs Bunny, for the sake of argument. As with Going to Sea in a Sieve, Baker's narrative style is very much rooted in the spoken form, seeming occasionally uncomfortable on the printed page with infrequent swerves into footballer's autobiography territory when I opened the door and who should be stood there but my famous friend, Ray Reardon, the snooker champion…

 

Complaining about this would define me as an idiot, so I won't. The great strengths of Going Off Alarming - aside from it not being written by Dostoyevsky - are that it's erudite, funny as fuck, and stuffed with all manner of unexpected and peculiarly tender insights, notably those pertaining to Paul Gascoine - which probably say more about the human condition than anything in Notes. It also makes me quite nostalgic for Deptford and the company of dockyard types.

Dead Souls

Nikolai Gogol Dead Souls (1842)
Here's another one picked up as part of a vague ongoing effort to edumacate myself with regard to literature 'n' shit, the hook in this instance being that I'd heard of it because Joy Division had a song presumably named after it, albeit a song which Nine Inch Nails did better. Interestingly enough, there doesn't seem to be much common ground between Gogol and Ian Curtis pleading for these dreams to be taken away, specifically the dreams which point him to another day. Indeed, the work of Joy Division seems at quite a remove to Gogol's dark yet amiable chortlefest. So as not to appear completely superficial, I would additionally like it to be taken into consideration that the chap on the cover of this edition vaguely resembles my friend Andrew, and that seemed like another good reason to read the thing.

In case it isn't obvious, my understanding of literary history is sketchy at best, and particularly sketchy when it comes to nineteenth century Russians. I read Crime and Punishment but I didn't like it much. Thankfully Dead Souls is written with a lighter touch, despite what might be anticipated from the title. Key to understanding what is going on here is the setting of rural serfdom in Tsarist Russia, a system in which commoners were regarded as part and parcel of the land upon which they lived, and therefore property of the landowner. Said landowners were required to pay tax upon their incumbent serfs, with the numbers being based on the most recent census figures, regardless of how many listed on the most recent census remain amongst the living. Our man Chichikov discovers there are economic advantages to ownership of a large quota of serfs, and so travels the countryside buying the deeds to those who have snuffed it, but whose deaths have not yet been taken into account by the most recent census. In other words, it begins as a satire on economics and the capitalist systems which allow for this kind of absurdist number crunching, expanding gradually into a farcical critique of class, privilege, and society built on the flimsiest of mutually observed concepts. In fact, it's almost Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle with better jokes and founded on the basic suggestion that we, as readers, might like to consider waking the fuck up every once in a while.

Thus these two citizens lived off by themselves until, now, toward the end of our story, they've popped up like faces in a window, and they've popped up like that to help me answer, in all modesty, the accusations of ardent patriots who, up until now, have been occupied in philosophical speculation or in the accumulation of money at the expense of the mother country they love so dearly. They don't give a damn whether or not their actions are harmful to the country; the only thing that worries them is that someone might say they're harming it.

No, it's neither patriotism nor even honest emotion that lies at the root of their accusations. Something else is concealed here. Why beat about the bush? Who's going to tell the truth if not the writer? So here goes: You're all afraid of a probing eye, afraid of looking thoughtfully into anything; all of you prefer to let your blank stare skim the surface of things.

The great success of Dead Souls is in its bumbling and overly fussy thrust, with Gogol - if we assume this to be a generally faithful translation - utilising the rambling tone of a folk tale strewn with absurdist tangents, obsessive conversational detail, and authorial interjections mulling over the actual telling of the story; so even when we're not quite sure what's happening - because Chichikov's motivation often seems obscure - we don't mind too much because there's plenty of other stuff to consider.

In some respects I suppose you might say it's like Dickens but without the cloying sentiment, although Dead Souls has sentiment of its own, presumably informed by Gogol having written the novel in Italy, flavouring his narrative with an exile's regard for his homeland which is both affectionate and faintly acerbic.

Legend has it that Gogol wrote a follow up to this, his best selling hit single, but this time incorporating characters with redeeming features; then destroyed the thing in a fit of self-recrimination. Personally I'd say the allegorically dead souls of the book do their respective jobs very well and have no more need of redeeming features than the novel ever required a sequel. Would that the Joy Division version had been so witty.

Fashion Beast

Alan Moore, Antony Johnson & Facundo Percio
Fashion Beast (2013)
I had no idea this even existed until I saw it in the used book store, it being something Malcolm McLaren requested from Moore presumably in an effort to hitch his wagon to yet another rising cultural star, having probably read an article entitled Pow! The Comic Grows Up in Time Out. It was supposed to be a film, but I didn't realise it had ever gone further than a conversation, never mind anything of substance sufficient for transformation into a comic book. I'm not sure quite how to take this, given that its worth seems predicated on the popular image of McLaren as a lovable inventive rogue, as opposed to just a bit of a cunt; and even Moore seems to buy into this in his introduction, which if nothing else is at least consistent with his own clueless sub-Russ Abbott take on punk rock in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Moore describes his meeting McLaren just as gingerbollocks was posing for Sun photographers in the wake of having lost his court case against the surviving Sex Pistols, and he speaks of the man in the terms with which we've all become roughly familiar always with a touch of the uproarious English pantomime tradition... Aladdin's uncle proffering new lamps for old, which for me sort of loses sight of why the fucker was in court in the first place, specifically for ripping people off, for his habit of making a parasitic living off those doing the actual work; not unlike DC Comics farming out Watchmen to persons other than Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons in some respects.

Never mind.

I'm sure he was a lovely bloke in person.

Fashion Beast was therefore a script for a film, written by Alan Moore and based on something or other by McLaren - I suspect no more than the fucking title and a reference to Beauty and the Beast as worth ripping off given his usual methodology; it could just as easily have been Monkey Tennis or Youth Hostelling with Chris Eubank. Anyway, Fashion Beast reads mostly as Alan Moore with flashes of McLaren's distinctively repetitive brand of complete cobblers showing through every once in a while: blah blah Dickensian urchins blah blah fashion blah blah sex blah blah young kids on the street blah blah London fashion blah blah blah playful and subversive etc. etc. Antony Johnson has clearly done as much as he can to turn this into something for page rather than screen, and while it's better than it probably has a right to be, and holds some historical interest in the context of Moore's career, in essence it remains nevertheless a mostly unpolishable turd.

The sexual ambiguity of the principal characters work very well, and there are some snappy lines of dialogue as you would expect, and there's a great speech about the medium being the message around the halfway mark; but otherwise it's a bit of a mess. The art is of promising fanzine standard at best, too many scratchy lines, figure work developed whilst reading comic books rather than attending a life-drawing class, and characters all wearing one of just three available facial expressions - regular pout, pissed off, or surprised. The beast turns out to be quite hunky - a real dreamboat in fact - which kind of misses at least some of the point I would have thought, and the fashions as illustrated suggest no actual research undertaken regarding the fashion industry or its history, even without taking into account that no-one sane or interesting ever gave two shits about the fashion industry or considered it in any sense important. Had they got, for example, Duke Mighten to draw this, they might just have had something, but they didn't, so here it is. I suppose at least they held back from giving Rob Liefeld a call.

Fashion Beast is true to McLaren's oeuvre in so much as he trots out the usual boggle-eyed observations about Dickensian London and Situationism, and then gets someone else to do the work; which isn't something I'd offer as a recommendation.

A Tale of Two Cities

Charles Dickens A Tale of Two Cities (1859)
If I might briefly wax psychogeographically, seeing as I'm about the only fucker left who has yet to twist that particular baseball cap around backwards in a pitiful attempt to get down with the kids - I have a friend who used to live in Dickens' old house, or specifically in one of the houses in which Dickens grew up in Chatham, Kent. This is Glenn Wallis of the group Konstruktivists, authors of the album Psykho Genetika which remains one of the most psychologically disturbing slabs of abstract noise you're ever likely to hear. I didn't exactly know Glenn at the time, but had been writing to him for a year or so and was slightly in awe of him. He'd hung out with Throbbing Gristle, and as such seemed to be a peripheral figure on a weird and engrossingly dark musical scene. When Throbbing Gristle were denounced as Fascist in the NME - or whichever worthless rag it was - owing to the cited Nazi salute given by a black clad supporter, it had actually been Glenn, not saluting but reaching up to retrieve his pint from where he'd left it on top of a speaker; and now he had invited me over for a cup of tea, and there was a blue plaque on the house as testimony to Dickens previous residence.

Inside fell some way short of what you might expect of such a hypothetically prestigious dwelling, being as it had somehow been converted into distinctly crappy flats by a slum landlord who occasionally threatened to kill people's pets. The basement served as communal kitchen and lounge, but was used mainly for the consumption of heroin, judging by all the needles. Into this environment Glenn and his new wife had just brought their newborn baby, a daughter they named Jade. They were trying to move out, because it was a seriously crappy situation.

Of all the grim places in which I've ever seen friends endeavour to exist, Dickens' old gaff remains one of the worst; and it wasn't just the squalor or the lack of room or sharing with junkies, the place was saturated with the kind of ingrained darkness which H.P. Lovecraft would have denounced as overwritten - The Exorcist meets Trainspotting or something in that general direction. I still have no idea how anyone could have spent a night under that roof.

Now I realise this was simply the spirit of Dickens Past causing me to shit myself in vindictive pre-emptive payment  - precompense, if you will - of that which I must set to digital paper.

Okay. So I remember enjoying A Christmas Carol as a kid - read inevitably when I was at school - but that's been it. Something has always put me off Dickens, and here I am, nearly fifty and still to tackle a second helping from the greatest writer who ever lived aside from that Shakespeare. At least I'm told he's the greatest writer who ever lived, time and time again, and A Tale of Two Cities is the biggermost selling novel in history, so maybe it's just me.

It's the names which put me off.

I beseech you, Mr. Whimplestropper, for all the goodness which may gladly reside in thine over-generous heart, cast ye not that hamburger into the road where it may provide succour only to stray dogs, instead let it nourish my charge, young Barnaby Tugspangle.

Oh piss off.

Admittedly this impression derives from four million Dickens-based costume dramas every bastard Sunday teatime when I was growing up, as opposed to my actually - you know - reading the fucking things; so I was hoping I might be proven wrong; and I went for A Tale of Two Cities having encountered the French revolution in a few other places of late, plus word on the street was that Chuck had eased off on the funnies with this one, so...

Okay. I can see the craft and accordingly the appeal. Mr. Dickens does indeed bake an exceedingly fine sentence, set a deliciously fulsome, near tactile scene, and upon these he doth build many intriguing and well-rounded characters; and in theory he weaves a wonderful story, delivering chuckles as well as sound moral principles unto an age which really needed a lot more going on in that department. Dickens speaks up on the behalf of the poor, the downtrodden, the starving, and even the just plain useless back in an era when such were routinely regarded as one social stratum above talented pets which had learnt to walk on their hind legs; and A Tale of Two Cities concerns itself with the hysteria of the mob and those injustices which may be perpetrated in its name, a topic which seems now more relevant than ever...

I tried and I tried and I tried but I just couldn't do it. I made it to page two-hundred and still found myself entirely unable to give a shit about anyone. I even looked on Wikipedia, studying the synopsis in order to reassure myself that I hadn't missed anything, and unfortunately I hadn't, but still it went on and on and on - blah blah some sort of legal shit blah blah blah soppy woman getting married without giving me any idea as to why I'm supposed to care yap yap yap yap yap yet another tosser with a silly name, and each time anyone asks a fucking question, what could have been a yes or no answer turns into why indubitably I would do you the honour of gifting something by way of confirmation, and so it becomes my very great pleasure to admit to you, my very dear friend, that the situation is indeed in exact accord with your summation just as you have described it rhubarb rhubarb rhubarb rhubarb...
 

It's like being stuck in a lift with my cousin Paul.

I really don't like to give up on a book, particularly as I even managed to finish Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land - albeit skimming the final hundred pages - which has to be one of the worst things ever written, but Dickens was really kicking my ass here, and it's not as though I'm a stranger to fiction of this era. I'm sure A Tale of Two Cities has many wonderful qualities, but I found myself entirely unable to appreciate any of them, and I just couldn't face another couple of hundred pages of this droning bollocks. I always knew I probably wouldn't enjoy Dickens, and so in future I will endeavour to exercise more faith in my own uninformed prejudices, which is probably the exact opposite of what the author intended, which is ironic.

Perdido Street Station

China Miéville Perdido Street Station (2000)
I'd heard good things about China Miéville, and it seemed like time to give him a shot, encouraged somewhat by those less favourable online reviews promising an author who liked to show off with all those big, fancy words what you can't understand and you have to like look them up in a dictionary because he thinks he's all lush and that with his long words but he don't know nuffink; and so on and so forth - such thickie-alienating criticism usually being indicative of somebody getting something right.

Perdido Street Station begins well with vivid and engrossing descriptions of the world it inhabits, a world Warren James describes - in the selection of quotations from reviews serving for preface - as a cross between Blade Runner and the London of Charles Dickens, which I only mention because I'm astonished that someone may actually have been paid to write such a sentence. Along similar lines I've also noticed Perdido Street Station cropping up in steampunk lists, because apparently anything not actually featuring the Starship Enterprise or lasers is now steampunk, thus increasing the aggregate quota of cultural reference points for anyone wishing to saddle up their velocipede and join in the blinking steampunk fun, what?

Huzzah!

Thankfully Perdido Street Station is none of the above. Rather it inhabits its own world, as much fantasy as science-fiction and populated by all manner of vaguely-but-not-quite-familiar biological oddities, the most extreme of which would be the scarab headed khepri, the females of which have a human body with a scarab head - not a beetle's head you understand, but an entire beetle complete with legs and wings as a head. Elsewhere, the laws of physics aren't quite the same as anything with which we are familiar, with mysterious forces adhering to a logic which seems to be of dreamlike or even overtly Surrealist intent; and it's all kind of disgusting with orifices dripping vaguely sexual effluvia onto mildewed Victorian brickwork left, right, centre, up, down, inside, and out. My Warren James description would be a Human Centipede version of Terry Pratchett but without the jokes.

As I say, Perdido Street Station begins well, but I was bored shitless by about page two-hundred - a third of the way in. The imagery is astonishing, but begins to get in the way of the book fairly quickly, and eventually the whole sags beneath the weight of description. Someone steps outside to scrape some poo off their boot and we're off again - another five fucking pages accounting for the life cycle of whatever produced the poo seemingly just for the sake of waving yet another fistful of suppurating tentacles in the readers' face. It may not be showing off, as claimed by some who probably shouldn't bother with books in the first place, and as for Miéville allegedly having a thesaurus stuck up his bottom, I didn't personally notice any unfamiliar words; but it does become a little boring after a while, as the narrative continually fails to get around to its own point, whatever that may be. I suspect there probably is a point, maybe something along the lines of Crime and Punishment with a higher quotient of dockyard oysters, but I stopped caring after a while. Chapter Thirty-Nine, for example, reveals certain characters to be under the influence of handlingers, which seem to be parasitic worms, each with a human hand for a head, specifically a human hand clasped around the neck of its host. Their introduction doesn't really serve to explain anything requiring explanation, and doesn't seem to do anything beyond adding further gratuitously sticky texture. Then four-million pages later we discover that the guy who had his wings cut off, the one who provides much of the forward motion for the rest of the cast, is a rapist and therefore a bad lad so we don't want to help the fucker after all, and that's the end of that. Maybe it's a subversion of the typical quest narrative and by association reader expectations, but by that point I'd ceased to care about any of it.

In terms of invention, style, and poetry, this is a great book, but it has no sense of humour, and doesn't actually appear to do anything besides stand in the corner trying hard to look interesting whilst outstaying its welcome by several weeks. Apparently he's written better, but after this, my curiosity is not what it could be.

Guardians of the Galaxy: Tomorrow's Avengers

Arnold Drake, Steve Gerber, Gene Colan & others
Guardians of the Galaxy: Tomorrow's Avengers (1977)
Neither talking raccoon nor pugilist tree anywhere to be seen, this collection being a reprint of the original version of the Guardians, as previously reprinted in the English Star Wars Weekly back when I was a boy of the age group for which these strips were written and drawn. I liked the film a lot, but for me the Guardians of the Galaxy will always be these guys - Charlie-27, Martinex, Vance Astro, and the others.

Naturally I sought this out during a fit of nostalgia not entirely unlike that which recently inspired me to shell out on collections of old Captain America and Warlock comics. Happily it too seems to have stood the test of time in so much as that whilst the strips are very clearly aimed at boys of about twelve and not much older, at least psychologically, they work well within such limitations and with no obvious pandering involved. In fact, given that this is essentially a really fat kid's comic book, I'm surprised at how many days it has taken me to read the thing. This is because Guardians of the Galaxy was first published when Marvel was at its most wordy, each panel surmounted by loquacious captionage describing the contents of said panel in a voice combining Williams Shatner and Shakespeare or thereabouts; but the writing is of such standard as to resist the quality of parody even thirty or more years later. It's not Tale of Two Cities by a long shot, and one should keep in mind that Marvel's understanding of science-fiction was essentially capes, superpowers, and men frowning and saying behold! against a Kirby inspired backdrop of planets and cosmic forces, but there's nevertheless sufficient scope for plenty of pleasantly weird ideas - not the full on acid trip of Jim Starlin's Warlock, but coming fairly close in places.

Furthermore, Arnold Drake and Gene Colan's Earth Shall Overcome!, as reprinted from a 1969 issue of Marvel Super-Heroes - the first appearance of the Guardians - probably ranks amongst the strangest comics Marvel has ever produced - van Vogt-style evolved supermen inhabiting a harshly lit expressionist world of angles and half-seen horrors. It seems significant that Arnold Drake is probably better remembered as the creator of the similarly freakish Doom Patrol. Despite the promising start, the Guardians, so it would seem, lay more or less fallow for almost another decade barring uninspiring appearances alongside the Thing in Marvel Two-in-One and later The Defenders - all gathered here - before really finding their feet with the material which was eventually reprinted in Star Wars Weekly; and for a kid's comic which still reads like a kid's comic - aside from it being difficult to process issues of The Defenders without being reminded of Daniel Clowes taking the piss out of that sort of thing - it has generally aged very well.

Mort

Terry Pratchett Mort (1987)

I read this whilst staying at my mother's house in England. There didn't seem much point in my taking books for the visit seeing as she has plenty and tends not to read rubbish, so there's always something worth a look, and she has eclectic tastes - everything from Sophocles to Dickens to Julian Barnes to Terry Pratchett. Actually, I was a little surprised to see Pratchett paperbacks amongst all her other stuff during my previous visit, myself having initially failed to get on with his writing, so I tried one and found I enjoyed it despite misgivings hatched some years before; and now it seemed like it might be time to have a shot at another.

The aforementioned misgivings are based on an assumption, itself based on the first ten pages of my initial attempt to read Guards! Guards!, specifically an assumption of Pratchett having been more or less Douglas Adams with wizards. I haven't read Douglas Adams in many years, and to be fair I may find that my impression of his writing has changed since I last read anything, but what I recall is of an excessive reliance on understated absurdity - that being as good a catch-all term for his style as any, I suppose; in other words, an emphasis on a fairly repetitive type of humour derived from the contrast between the muted tone of the description and that absurdity of that which is described, and in Adams' case described as though by an indignant rural English clergyman wishing not to appear overly demonstrative.

Pardon me, but I couldn't help noticing a spaceship made of fudge and piloted by hippos parked just behind the village hall. I wouldn't mind but the ladies of Mrs. Wiggins' coffee morning appear somewhat flustered.

Yes - ha ha, but it gets fucking exhausting after twenty or so pages, regardless of whatever else the story may be trying to do; or at least it does for me because it seems quite predictable and all a little obvious. Terry Pratchett tends to do roughly the same sort of thing, although when I finally got around to taking another shot at Guards! Guards! I realised that he does it a lot better. His prose is more poetic, feeling less forced, and less like something serving principally to deliver a series of gags, resulting in what feels a little more solid and satisfying as a story.

For all that, whilst I enjoyed Mort - in which the grim reaper takes on a gangly, feckless teenager as his apprentice with hilarious consequences - I didn't enjoy it anything like as much as I thought I would, and in places it really felt unfortunately like a better written Douglas Adams with wizards. The characters are pretty thin, which would be okay under the circumstances but for being just a little too thin for me to be able to remember or care who was who each time I returned to the book, and so it all became a chore, and sadly of less appeal than the small box of gentleman's interest publications I found in the spare room amongst the things which never made it into the boxes of my crap shipped when I moved to the States four years ago. Mort's understated absurdity expressed as a zinger more or less every other paragraph might have benefited from the contrast of improved scene setting, something to invoke a bit of atmosphere, but then again, it could be just me - reading in a no longer familiar environment, head spinning from jetlag, a recent minor illness, and meeting people I haven't seen for years on an almost daily basis. On the other hand, when comparing notes with my mother, it turned out that she hadn't much enjoyed Mort either; so whilst my impression of Pratchett as a fairly decent writer and possibly a national institution remains more or less undiminished, I guess this just wasn't one of the better ones.

172 Hours on the Moon

Johan Harsted 172 Hours on the Moon (2008)
About a mile from where I live is a little free library, as they're called. It's a large, brightly-painted wooden box with a glass door mounted on a pole where someone's garden borders the sidewalk. There are apparently a few of these around now, and not just in San Antonio. The idea is that you bring along some old book, leave it inside the box, and take one of the many from the shelf within. It's a neat idea, and means you get a book you might not ordinarily have picked had you seen it in a store. I suppose it's also a slightly twee idea, it could be argued, and each little free library tends to provide a window into the psychology of the neighbourhood in which it is situated. My nearest little free library, being bang in the middle of Alamo Heights, has one fuck of a lot of self-help books on offer, but this title looked interesting, so I took it and left another in its place.

Aside from Twilight - which was excellent obviously - and a pile of Who books if you absolutely insist, I'm more or less a stranger to young adult fiction, and I'm not even sure I entirely understand why such a bracket needs to exist. I wasn't a big reader as a kid or as a teenager, but I coped well enough and even enjoyed all of the usual titles thrust our way at school - Jane Eyre, Graham Greene, Thomas Hardy, John Steinbeck, Dickens and so on and so forth. I didn't read these with the feeling that they were necessarily above my head, or that they failed to address my concerns as a teenager. By the time I'd left school I was reading Philip K. Dick and William Burroughs without having been told to do so; and on reflection, I was no child genius - in fact I was pretty fucking thick in most respects; and I tend to regard those who read Asimov, Crime and Punishment or even Plato whilst they were still at school with some degree of envy and admiration. So by contrast I take the impression that young adult fiction must therefore pander to some extent, otherwise there would surely be no need for such a distinction. Harsted himself writes that in his opinion, young adults are just as smart as a lot of grown-ups and can usually take whatever you throw at them.

Well anyway, 172 Hours on the Moon is a horror story set inside a science-fiction novel. Three teenagers are selected by means of a global lottery to go to the moon for the somewhat implausible reason of this getting everyone into the idea of going to the moon again, causing funding to thus flow freely because everyone loves teenagers or summink. So they go to the moon with some grown-ups who do all that flying the spaceship stuff, and it turns out that there's a secret abandoned NASA base up there, left over from the seventies and still working. The reason for the base being abandoned turns out to be scary moon ghosts resembling the very people they are causing to shit themselves, terrifying doppelgängers who bust airlocks, sabotage spacesuits, leave passive-aggressive messages on computers, and all the sort of stuff you would probably expect them to do unless you've never watched television or been to the cinema. Annoyingly we don't actually find out anything about the doppelgängers, beyond that they probably have something to do with 6EQUJ5, a genuinely mysterious signal picked up by SETI astronomers back in the seventies; so the novel is a few hundred pages of teenage whining which suddenly turns itself into Isaac Asimov for just long enough to remind you of the scary scenes in whichever CGI thriller you saw last, then ends with the revelation of the doppelgängers having arrived on Earth.

It's not a bad book, and it chugs along nicely once we're all acclimatised to the three main characters being more or less complete wankers, but it doesn't actually have a story, which is a problem. Everything it does is done so as to allow the narrative to hold a torch beneath its chin and go boo! in your face on page 244, and to then keep going boo! for the remaining hundred or so pages, and that's all it does so far as I could tell; and as for our heroes...

The windows were fogged up. The breath of eight people was creating condensation in the capsule, and Mia had to wipe the glass at regular intervals to be able to see out. Not that there was much to see. The stars that had so engrossed and transfixed her were starting to bore her. They weren't changing; nothing was changing.

Interstellar travel eh? Talk about booooooooring. I mean just shoot me now, except that won't happen 'cause you never let me do anything. I hate you. It's so unfair.

Characterisation consists of one of our crew being in a band and also a fan of the Talking Heads because they were like in her dad's record collection and like some of that old stuff from when the bloke who wrote the book was growing up is like really fetch.

Gretchen, stop trying to make fetch happen.

Okay, I didn't not enjoy this. It does what it does efficiently but suffers from a lack of ambition, as I would guess must be inevitable when an author presupposes his audience won't be interested unless they are specifically able to recognise themselves somewhere in there. Harsted is interviewed in the appendix, and he insists that he has not presupposed anything of the sort, but I have too say it sure reads a lot like he has. I suppose there may have been some subsidence during translation from the original Norwegian, although when Mia bemoans the death of her beloved iPod in response to learning that the team may be stranded on the moon for up to a year before a rescue mission can reach them, I have a feeling this isn't simply an interference pattern that's emerged from somewhere beyond the language barrier. I suppose that at forty-nine years I'm some way outside the age range of the target audience, although that didn't stop me enjoying Twilight and I don't even have ovaries.

Given that people who don't read books tend to be, almost without exception, thick fucking cunts, if whining teenagers are no longer able to read books told from any perspective other than that of whining teenagers, then we're screwed. Personally I don't really care as I'll be dead by the time we get to our first president who's never read a book but can ace all six levels of Pokémon: Omega Ruby; and 172 Hours on the Moon was free, which is still better than a kick up the arse, I suppose.

If I Were You

L. Ron Hubbard If I Were You (1941)
L. Ron Hubbard was the most important science-fiction author who ever lived, and so it is fitting that Galaxy Press should have endeavoured to rescue his many mighty works from pulp obscurity and return them at long last to print - and with this opening sentence I have at least saved you the trouble of reading Kevin J. Anderson's introduction. Galaxy Press seem to be financially although not necessarily ideologically associated with Scientology by some means, existing principally as a vehicle for Hubbard's work; so fair enough I guess. I still think they may have been trying too hard in certain respects given that I would have thought the majority of people picking up copies of these novellas will most likely already be well disposed towards the man. The glowing biographical summary of Hubbard's life in the rear of the book reads somewhat as though puddings may have been over-egged - I'm fairly certain the guy didn't actually invent either science-fiction or fantasy as genres; whilst Anderson smiles beatifically and points out that Shakespeare and Dickens were popular in their days, and that Hubbard's tales in the pulp magazines of the thirties and forties were popular in his day, so L. Ron Hubbard was therefore just like Shakespeare and Dickens for as history has shown, good stories are much more than fancy prose.

If nothing else, this does at least support my hunch that I don't really need to read anything written by Kevin J. Anderson. Oddly - and I realise I am here asking us all to pause and take another look at Hitler's paintings because some of them were quite nice really - I would say that all of this editorial reverence actually does Hubbard's fiction something of a disservice because - quite aside from what one may think of the man and his deeds - If I Were You is good enough to stand on its own merits. I'm not saying it's the greatest thing I've ever read, or that it necessarily represents a little known masterpiece, but Hubbard, if nothing else, was an accomplished writer within his field. Whilst it may be argued that his field was somewhat limited to romps and adventures of the kind which made names for Edgar Rice Burroughs and others, if his tales lack poetry, they were better told than those of many of his contemporaries. That is to say that If I Were You at least reads like the work of someone who knew exactly what he wanted to do and how to do it, and someone who couldn't really be described as a hack with any justification. True, it's the story of a circus midget swapping bodies with that of an unpleasant scheming ringmaster, with a splash of romance and just deserts duly served at the end, but it's an engaging read nevertheless; and I suppose you might also argue that certain themes prefigure the mythology Hubbard later expounded with the Church of Scientology, if you feel inclined to do so.

The Last Drop, the much shorter back up story follows the theme of size by shrinking its protagonists to gnomic proportions, and is less satisfying, but serves as an interesting snapshot of its era nonetheless.

While I'm sceptical of Hubbard's credentials as the neglected genius described in Kevin J. Anderson's introduction, it seems equally dubious to pretend that he never existed or to relegate his writing to a mere footnote in science-fiction history, because for the most part it seems to have been better than you might imagine.