Kilgore Trout - Venus on the Half Shell (1974)

 

Kilgore Trout is a recurring character in the work of Kurt Vonnegut. He's a pulp science-fiction writer and occasional bum providing support to a myriad of satirical points while additionally allowing Vonnegut to season his narrative with ideas which might prove otherwise too laborious.

If you paraphrase a science-fiction story, it comes out as a very elegant joke, and it's over in a minute or so. It's a tedious business to read all the surrounding material. So I started summarizing, and I suppose I've now summarized fifty novels I will never have to write, and spared people the reading of them.

Venus on the Half Shell was first referenced as one of Trout's many, many novels in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, eventually to be fully realised by Philip José Farmer writing as Kilgore Trout, so it's essentially Vonnegut fan fiction and I gather that despite some initial enthusiasm, Kurt wasn't entirely amused by the time it saw print. It's not difficult to understand why given that, for the most part, Venus reads like fan fiction, imposing linearity on an approximation of Vonnegut's freewheeling narratives, leaving us with a less annoying precursor to Douglas Adams particularly in its fixation with the meaning of life, here serving mainly as a hook for the sake of structure; but the tone is wrong, offering shrugs and impersonations where Vonnegut would at least have said something worth saying. The lesson we take from the creatures of the No Smoking Planet, for one example, seems to be the usual mumbling about polyamory, which is at least at home amongst other parables drawn from clichés of the seventies counter culture.

If falling short of that from which it takes inspiration, Venus is mostly readable, not actively annoying, and seems to develop its own personality once we land on the Prison Planet in chapter nineteen and the author gets around to saying something of more universal import than his initial long-haired preoccupations. The novel as a whole is Swiftian, as is much Vonnegut, in comprising a conveyor belt of absurdist allegories in illustration of this and that, which is underscored by the doubtless inevitable books within the book credited to Jonathan Swift Somers III. Aside from the above reservations and the slightly tiring emphasis on sex, Venus on the Half Shell is honestly a better book than it deserves to be, which may or may not be to do with the quality of the ground upon which its tent is pitched. It's not a bad read, just not an amazing one.

Norman Spinrad - Child of Fortune (1975)

 

It's a good job I try to avoid judging books by their covers because the cover of this one may be the worst I've ever seen - so bad it could be something by Douglas Adams. Thankfully I judge Child of Fortune by its author and so picked it up on the grounds of Bug Jack Barron having been exceptional. Child of Fortune probably isn't quite so stellar but is clearly the work of the same guy, thus presenting what may be the widest ever gulf between the greatness of a novel and the shittiness of its cover in publishing history. I see this cover and the only questions I have are 1) why? and 2) what happened to her legwarmers? Glowing praise from Timothy Leary just inside the front cover doesn't seem like much of a recommendation either, but let us have no further distraction.

Child of Fortune squares with Spinrad's observation that science-fiction as a genre could use some futures in which we're better than we are in the present day rather than worse, although his idea of what might constitute better is rooted in sixties counterculture for what that may be worth. It's the tale of a young woman going off on a voyage of self-discovery equivalent to the medieval wanderjahre, hippy pilgrimage, Native American visionquest, or Elizabeth Gilbert going to India to find herself. Being rooted in sixties counterculture, this entails quite a lot of sex and drugs, with the former being of the tantric variety, naturally. On the face of it, this isn't my sort of book at all, and yet excepting that it's possibly about fifty pages too long, I enjoyed it greatly. Child of Fortune is written in a locquacious and ornate prose which never quite overdoes itself so much as to challenge the attention span. With the spacefaring interplanetary setting and the societies encountered by our girl, it actually put me in mind of Peter F. Hamilton but with the influence of Cordwainer Smith supplanting the Jeremy Clarkson factor, so it's a ripping read even given the hallucinogenic pace, overload of images, and endless succession of people off their tits on some futuristic high.

It's about the evolution of its initially naive main character, but Child of Fortune works because it's also an allegory for the death of the dream of sixties counterculture - or at least what became of that dream if you prefer. For all the pleasure taken in a libertine pursuit of pleasure for its own sake, Spinrad never gets entirely swept up in the drippy evangelism of your Terrance McKenna types, presenting an evenly balanced view of the pseudo-spiritual realm it inhabits which, taking an objective stance, offers a significantly more positive statement about what happened in the sixties than anyone mooing amaaaaaaazing with their head stuck inside a bong ever managed.

I gather critics of the day hated this one, but frankly they can fuck off. It's funny, genuinely weird, beautifully written, strangely gripping, and is sort of about everything if you look at it from a certain angle.

John Scalzi - Starter Villain (2023)

 

The story here features a substitute teacher inheriting a secret base on a remote volcanic island from his uncle, who happened to be a supervillain in the vein of all those guys who gave James Bond such a hard time. He also inherits his uncle's role and is thus inducted into a world of sentient cats who communicate by typing on a keyboard, with a team of trained dolphins as minions. It's a nice idea which works well for the first third of the novel, even suggesting Scalzi might have a career as the Terry Pratchett of science-fiction, with none of the smirking which rendered Douglas Adams so unreadably pleased with itself. This initial promise seems bolstered when we realise that these aren't exactly Bond villains in the traditional sense but real villains more in line with Martin Shkreli or Bernie Madoff, but without being caught. Then by the time we get to the Bellagio Gathering, a clandestine conference of billionaires and industrialists, it falls apart during chapter after chapter of global economics and the loopholes therein discussed in the form of long, long conversations.

This was the point at which I could no longer ignore just how much of Starter Villain reads somewhat like a script with one eye firmly on the screen adaptation. This was a significant disappointment because I like Jon Scalzi, or at least I liked Old Man's War, and I once asked him whether he would contribute to a short story anthology. The anthology never happened but I was impressed that he took the trouble to respond with a short but chatty email by way of polite refusal. The problem is that Starter Villain reads like a lot of contemporary science-fiction or fantasy in that it reads as though written for people who don't read but identify as nerds because they think it's cute and makes them more like Velma in Scooby-Doo. Tee hee. It's mostly page after page of dialogue and the references are all Millennial friendly and therefore awesome. Here we have Tolkien, The Princess Bride, and:

Dobrev smiled. 'You ever see the ending of Raiders of the Lost Ark?'

'Yes.'

'It's like that.'

I didn't see Raiders of the Lost Ark or any of the Indiana Jones movies and have no particular interest in doing so, so this reads like Comicon-pleasing gibberish to me. It's not quite so painful as Randy Henderson's Bigfootloose and Finn Fancy Free - also published by Tor, curiously enough - which drops a Star Wars zinger on nearly every other page in lieu of the author developing actual writing skills, but then nothing is quite so painful as Bigfootloose and Finn Fancy Free, and this is massively disappointing. Also, it refers to a cis woman on page 138, which I find tiresome.

The Importance of Being Earnest

 

Oscar Wilde The Importance of Being Earnest (1895)
It was The Spider's Web by Philip Purser-Hallard, a Sherlock Holmes novel borrowing a few of Wilde's characters, which shamed me into acknowledging that I actually know bugger all about Oscar - despite it having been my nickname at work. The realisation unfortunately obliged me to acknowledge myself as equivalent to a fan of The Confessions of Dorian Gray, a series of seemingly pointless Big Finish audio things wherein Wilde's celebrated creation has spooky yet thought provoking adventures in time and space just like Doctor Who! Brilliant! They're reviewed on Goodreads despite not actually being books, with at least a few of those reviews focussing on what a sexy voice the guy playing Dorian apparently has, which seems to me like another clue as to whether or not said Confessions should be considered books, or are perhaps something else altogether - something which isn't a fucking book, you sad c***s.

Anyway…

It seemed like time I gave the lad a go, so to speak. I found Earnest initially impenetrable, if you'll pardon the expression, and concluded that the time simply wasn't right. Six months later, I come back to the thing and it clicks immediately. Plays were written to be performed and experienced in real time, and I've never found reading them entirely satisfactory, which is presumably why it took me a while to get around to this one; because, just like those Big Finish CDs or downloads or whatever the hell they are, The Importance of Being Earnest isn't really a book.

Nevertheless, trying to read it as a book, I'm struck by both the absurdity of the characters and the powerfully artificial cadence of their discourse and the situations into which they launch themselves. It's hugely entertaining and, in one respect, arguably a precursor to Hancock's Half Hour, amongst many, many others which have made use of this sort of contrarian wit. However, Earnest is significant in striving to avoid realism, instead pursuing an aesthetic of the artificial, and of the ornate social construct as an end in itself as part of the decadent tendency then sweeping Europe; and foreshadowing the exaggeration and absurdity of Jarry's Ubu Roi as performed in Paris just one year later. It's all surface, which is entirely the point, namely that the medium is the message, or at least a demonstration thereof. It's serious about failing to take itself seriously, hence the gag barely concealed by the title.

Above all, The Importance of Being Earnest is still very, very funny, with a voice so distinctive as to inspire me to a certain loathing for those attempting to duplicate the humour whilst inevitably getting it wrong, having reduced the wit to a mathematical formula - looking at you, Douglas Adams.

I think I probably need to see this on a stage.

Revelation of the Daleks

Eric Saward Revelation of the Daleks (2019)
As you may recall, Doctor Who was a children's science-fiction serial on the telly back before the advent of the video recorder, meaning that if you wanted to catch up on older episodes, you had to buy the novelisation published by Target. Happily, at least for persons such as myself who require everything to exist within the context of a neatly ordered set, Target eventually novelised everything seen on the box, even a few which would have been on the box but weren't due to the lazy, work-shy BBC sponge-monkeys being on strike that year because the tea served in the staff canteen was the wrong colour.

Anyone still reading?

Never mind.

Anyway, by the time Target went tits up, they had published all but five of the Who serials seen on the television, notably two by Eric Saward who supposedly didn't want anyone else adapting his work - although I may have remembered that wrong. It could have been something to do with the estate of Terry Nation, but really - who gives a fuck? Revelation of the Daleks was unofficially novelised by Jon Preddle back in 1992 as part of the New Zealand Doctor Who Fan Club's campaign to fill in those five terrifying gaps in our collections. I didn't know of this until many years later, by which point, copies of Preddle's version were impossible to find unless you count eBooks, which I don't.

Well, I'm nearly fifty-fucking-seven, older, probably wiser in some poorly defined capacity, and with a general suspicion* regarding almost everything sprung forth from Who since he came back on the telly played by an Easter Island statue in 2005; and yet my devotion was once so deeply ingrained that, even now, I still feel the need to fill those five gaps in a collection of books I may never read again because I'm no longer thirteen.

Revelation of the Daleks was an odd story, although one for which I recall some affection. I think I may have watched a VHS copy at some point back in the nineties, but I'm otherwise so unfamilar with whatever it did as for this to be an almost new thing, now that Eric has finally found time to write it.

Saward seems to be regarded as one of those problematic Who writers, probably meaning he wasn't afraid to point out when some sacred fan cow was actually a pile of shite, or at least that's how it usually works. For my money, he wrote some decent stories and did a good job of keeping things interesting during his time as script editor on the show. I've seen him criticised as a Douglas Adams knock off, which I don't quite see given the lesser level of annoying self-conscious whimsy.

Converted to prose, Revelation of the Daleks serves as a strong reminder of Who having been developed back when television was still pretty much theatre with cameras pointed at the actors. Everything here occurs within what may as well be a couple of rooms with a cast of eight or nine chasing each other from one set to the next; and if it's not exactly Shakespearean, it's closer to being a twentieth century Billy than it is to either Star Wars or Asimov's Foundation. Revelation reads very much as a telly script novelised for the benefit of thirteen-year olds or younger, which doesn't mean that it's bad so much as that certain narrative weaknesses seem amplified and they're difficult to overlook.

The strengths of the original story were arguably its big ideas regarding what's really going on at Tranquil Repose, but here - even without the Dalek connection already spunked away by the title - everything is signposted from almost the very beginning with clues so fucking obvious as to what's coming that the eventual revelation of what's really going on feels redundant. All the running around therefore seems designed to keep us busy as we wait for certain discoveries to be made - even though we've already guessed what they're going to be - and accordingly lacks drama. This leaves us with just the humour, which I assume would be the DJ, played on the box by Alexei Sayle, and which could have worked as a linking device in the vein of Lynne Thigpen's DJ in The Warriors, but didn't because the whole thing may as well have been an episode of fucking Rentaghost; and Dave Lee Travis in space is not an inherently funny idea if you've actually mistaken Dave Lee Travis for anything genuinely cool; and in case you've forgotten and were wondering, the DJ's weapon by which he blasts his foes with - sigh - concentrated rock'n'roll is also corny as fuck on the printed page, and not even in an entertainingly ironic sense, as it might have been had Saward specified that, for example, such and such a Dalek had been obliterated by the mighty force of that fucking terrible I Like It song by Gerry & the Pacemakers.

So, I'd say I'm too old to get much from this adaptation, except I routinely read all sorts of juvenile shite, most of which works just fine for me; and it's really, really difficult to work out just who it's aimed at, given that I found it in the science-fiction section at Barnes & Noble, as distinct from the children's section. It's a shame because some of it works, and a quick peak at other Sawards suggests he may simply have rushed this one to get it over and done with. An even greater shame is that a quick peak at Jon Preddle's unofficial online version leads me to suspect that he probably did a better job.

*: I say general suspicion but I actually mean uncompromising hatred.

The Clash

David Quantick The Clash (2000)
I never really got the Clash in quite the same way as at least a few of my contemporaries, but they were a fantastic singles band prior to the execrable Hitsville UK, and the rest I just don't think about. I should probably track down that first album, but their songs divide into either amazing or fucking terrible for me and I can't even tell what distinguishes one from the other, so an entire album - even a reputedly good one - sounds like a bit of a minefield. I stick to the singles, and I really, really, really, needed a copy of the Cost of Living EP so I tracked it down on Discogs and the bloke included this book as a freebie, which was nice.

Prior to reading, I had this vague impression of David Quantick as either readable or at least not entirely lacking in wit, apparently due to association with On the Hour. Closer inspection reveals him to be a former NME scribe who has subsequently generated the kind of CV I associate with Hopeful Herberts of a type I customarily avoid - a few biographies of Mojo magazine cover stars, genial yet slightly acerbic whimsy with a nod to Douglas bleeding Adams, Neil Gaiman was very nice about something or other, and the fucker has even written a Big Finish Who drama.

Well never mind, because I don't know much about the Clash beyond Joe Strummer having been fifth in line to the throne - just behind Will Self - and a string of face-punchingly great singles, so this should be interesting on some level, I decided.

It is interesting, mainly because the story of the Clash is interesting, and I'm reasonably familiar with the territory and most of the other bands who were stood around in the background. My general opinion of the Clash as people is left slightly elevated by Quantick's account, if anything, although Strummer's pretending to be Andy Capp has come to seem increasingly ludicrous over the years, and probably doesn't actually matter. Quantick's book is part of a series called Kill Your Idols which supposedly attempts to biographise the influence of certain difficult to quantify artists, and the Clash count because no-one knows who they were, where they came from, or what they did.

The problem is that Kill Your Idols seems to have been targeted at a young audience, and a young American audience, if this one is any indication. It does that thing with adjectives that YA material always seems to do, apparently having assumed itself to be in competition with either a smartphone or a gameboy, so we have specifically famous friends and bawdy singer Judge Dread; and it panders, twisting its baseball cap to the back and being your homie with references you'll recognise. The relationship between Malcolm McLaren and Bernie Rhodes was, for example, kinda like how Pearl Jam were to the Stone Temple Pilots. Sham 69, the Jam, the Ruts and others are dismissed as lumpen copyists while praise is dispensed unto No Doubt, Green Day, the Mighty Mighty Bosstones and related unlistenables.

The Clash brought hip-hop and reggae to millions of white people, many of whom refused to listen until the well-rehearsed moronism of the Beastie Boys made it all right to like black music if no actual black people were involved in making it.

Jesus Christ. If all was silence before the Beastie Boys made it okay, then how the fucking fuck did Saint Joe manage to bring the music to millions of white people before they were actually listening to it? The irony of an author failing to understand the Beastie Boys - who were never that complicated a phenomenon - in a book written about the fucking Clash is staggering. Most aggravating of all, Quantick repeatedly takes that populist angle which I seem to recall as having been a particular problem with music journalism in the nineties. If you haven't heard of them, they were most likely really saaaaaaad and can't have been much good, the property of the cool kids, but the new Madonna album is the genuine cool and far more subversive than all your miserable Crass clones etc. Nobody listens to Crass.

Also strange is that something written at more or less the level of an underwhelming fanzine spawned of a media studies course should get an alphabeticised index. In Quantick's favour, his introduction directs the reader towards a couple of other books about the Clash which sound more substantial.

All that you probably need to know about the Clash is to be found amongst the aforementioned string of face-punchingly great singles, and I don't know if the rest matters.

The Third Policeman

 

Flann O'Brien The Third Policeman (1940)

I've been aware of this one for a while but couldn't quite get past descriptions promising a comedy set in Ireland involving policemen. I've already read Puckoon and it wasn't that great.

Thankfully it turns out to be a comedy in the sense of Gulliver's Travels rather than Are You Being Served? and is both fairly dark and massively fucking strange. More than anything, I'd describe it as a surrealist novel given the peculiar, slightly disturbing atmosphere derived from our man inhabiting a world where the laws of physics work by the logic of dreams. Specifically, if you've ever had one of those dreams wherein you realise you know how to fly or to work some otherwise superhuman power, but you know it's a dream so you have to tell yourself to remember exactly what to do so that you'll be able to do it when you wake up - and of course you always forget - well, The Third Policeman feels very much like one of those; so I suppose we're talking the general vicinity of Beckett.

Additionally, The Third Policeman approximately constitutes Menippean satire, and although it thankfully never quite becomes fully aware of its being a novel - which has become something of an overused trope, I feel - most other signifiers of the form are here, notably the book within the book - in this case the works of de Selby, a pseudo-philosopher who believes that, amongst other things, night is caused by an accumulation of dark air rather than the occlusion of sunlight. Quite a page count is used up in discussion of de Selby's crackpot ideas, many of which seem to echo those of Charles Fort, funnily enough, to the point of later chapters being squeezed up to the top of the page by lengthy footnotes concerning the man's imaginary works. The point of this specific focus is oblique but works because it seems to describe the nightmarish world inhabited by our unnamed narrator. Among de Selby's ideas we find, for example, that a person who rides a bicycle every day will eventually become part bicycle due to an exchange of atomic material between rider and transport, and so the bicycle itself will become partially human; which is explained with a straight face and thus maintains the integrity of the novel as a whole, as distinct from turning it into some awful Douglas Adams gag-fest. So it's funny, but you don't have to laugh if it seems inappropriate, as it most probably will.

The scene was real and incontrovertible and at variance with the talk of the Sergeant, but I knew that the Sergeant was talking the truth and if it was a question of taking my choice, it was possible that I would have to forego the reality of all the simple things my eyes were looking at.

Roughly speaking, we seem once again to be mapping the space between objective and subjective reality, which is possibly why so many of de Selby's peculiar ruminations seem to hint at the weirder findings of quantum theory - unless it's just me - as well as the aforementioned Fort. I can perhaps see why O'Brien claimed to have lost the manuscript when it failed to find a publisher back in the forties being as it sags a little in the middle, apparently spending an eternity in the police station - although that may well have been the point - but its growing reputation seems otherwise deserved.

Oh No It Isn't!

Paul Cornell Oh No It Isn't! (1997)
I realise this is the third Who related thing I've read this month, which is a bit depressing. Having spent much of the last decade wrestling with a to be read pile the size of the Empire State, I've avoided stocking up on too many new books this year, intending instead to read all those I've had for at least a decade which I either never got around to reading, or at least read so long ago that they may as well be new books. Practically speaking, this means that when I come to the end of one thing and suddenly decide I feel like reading something in the general direction of science-fiction, ruling out anything read in the last decade leaves me with either a back issue of some digest magazine or one of four-million Who tie-ins; and yes, it is a bit depressing, because despite the magic of Who being that it can tell any kind of story, it rarely has much to say outside a few very specific kinds of story, with one of the main ones being where reality has gone wonky and we need to spend a couple of hundred pages working out how to get it back to normal - which I state in full knowledge of having done this myself.

Anyway, so as to save the usual preamble, let's just assume this is Doc Savage or some other piece of serial fiction. It's Who, but one of the Virgin Who novels after the point at which the BBC reclaimed all of their copyrighted material, the stuff they decided might still yield a few shekels if they could just squeeze hard enough; so it's Who without Who, if you will, sort of like:

Bernice Summerfield is Emma Thompson as an archaeologist who has adventures in outer space, but generally more entertaining than that may sound depending on who was writing. At worst, her books tended towards generic Douglas Adams impersonations based on the sort of boffo larks we all had at uni, unfortunately predicated on the notion that the word bonking was still funny; but occasionally someone got it right with a whole greater than the sum of its parts. Paul Cornell always seemed like one of those authors with more to offer than just further Who, which I guess you could say has turned out to be the case. Here he does that thing where reality has gone wonky and we need to spend a couple of hundred pages working out how to get it back to normal, but it works because the premise is so deeply fucking ludicrous as to defy expectation, namely that reality has come to resemble pantomime. Professor Summerfield is granted access to an archaeological dig upon an alien planet just as a species called the Grel show up in argumentative spirit and suddenly we're in a world of glass slippers, princesses, and shoddy scenery.

'We have not escaped from a show!' exclaimed Moody. 'we work in our mine, and sell the rubies and diamonds that we find there in the village market.'

Bernice frowned. 'Is there much of a market for precious stones in a small agrarian community?'

The dwarves all looked at her blankly.

Truthfully, it all gets a bit knotted up at the end with far too many characters chasing around for reasons I couldn't quite follow, but it doesn't really matter. This sort of thing could have fallen flat on its arse, but is otherwise actually as great as one might hope, and genuinely funny without digging the reader in the ribs and smirking the whole fucking time. In this respect it reads a little like Terry Pratchett with the post-modernism turned up a notch or two, notably while self-consciously posing for the cover art.

She put her hands on her hips and inspected the room, a rueful expression on her face.

Wolsey looked around the cave to his right, leaning his weight on his right front paw, holding the gun in his other hand.

They stood like that for a moment.

Somehow, there also seems to be a point to all of this beyond the basic requirement of scrapes and chuckles, namely that this sort of thing is essentially absurd at the best of times even without the pantomime, so why the fuck not?

One might easily view Oh No It Isn't! as heir to Simak's Out of Their Minds or even Philip K. Dick's Eye in the Sky, at least more so than to The Underwater Menace or even Cornell's Love and War. As with the best of the line, it counts as a respectable effort in its own right.

City of Death

Douglas Adams & James Goss City of Death (2018)
This is one of those which Target never got around to novelising - something to do with the rights being held by Douglas Adams and it was tricky because, as you know, Douglas Adams is the greatest writer who ever lived.

Anyway, here at last is City of Death for the sake of filling in a gap, now published as a mass market paperback as nature intended so as to facilitate its being sat nicely on the shelf in between Destiny of the Daleks and The Creature from the Pit. I never bothered with the hardback editions, which probably indicates how important these things are to me; and I've actually had this one over a year. When it came in the post I turned to the first page and read:

If you'd asked him about the Jagaroth a mere, say, twenty soneds ago, he'd have shrugged and told you they were a savage and warlike race and that if you weren't happy about that, you should meet the other guys.

I initially put it back on the shelf, having decided to leave it for a bit and read something which didn't seem likely to spend its entire page count winking, smirking and digging me in the ribs with an elbow, because I don't actually regard Adams as having been a comic genius, or even a particularly notable author once we move beyond either screen or speaker. I'm not even sure how much of City of Death was his, given that it supposedly constitutes something written by David Fisher, heavily revised by Douglas Adams and Graham Williams, now novelised by James Goss.

Goss seems to be one of those Who regulars presently churning out some tie-in thing every few months - here's the Torchwood novel, here's the umpteenth Doctor novel, here's the spin-off novel starring the Trinny and Susannah robots from whatever the fuck that piece of shit was called - which would seem to bode ill; but on a positive note, the guy is clearly serious about making a living and doing a decent job, so at least City of Death doesn't read like fan fiction - aside from maybe a few slightly jarring conflations of dialogue and thought here and there; and on a very positive note, once past the first page, I find he's not actually engaging in the Douglas Adams impersonation I had anticipated. He keeps the story well-grounded and solid, and peppered with a much more gentle wit than Adams ever managed, keeping it light without getting in the way. In fact, you could almost say he's saved City of Death from the guy who wrote it in all senses which count.

It's not great literature, but neither is it terrible, and City of Death is a very satisfying way to spend the best part of an afternoon. Internet research reveals that the version we saw on the telly was much reviled as a farce at the time of broadcast, but a quick glance at the names behind the reviling more or less underscores the worth of such views, or the lack thereof. I was fourteen at the time and I thought it was fucking great, and I thought the same when I saw it on VHS - whenever that was - and now James Goss has delivered a more rounded and satisfying interpretation of the same thing. My expectations weren't high, so consider me genuinely impressed.

The Mote in God's Eye

Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle The Mote in God's Eye (1974)
This may have been the most boring novel I've ever attempted to read. It's less hateful than Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, but that's hardly a recommendation. I'd promised myself no more Niven because whilst he has some great ideas, they are often the only thing going for an otherwise irritating novel; but Pournelle seemed kind of interesting when I read about him in Charles Platt's second Dream Makers book the other month, and I suppose I must have wondered about the title at some point.

I started, then eventually decided I couldn't read another word at around page three-hundred. The next two things I tried reading both featured cats being killed - albeit accidentally in the case of Sid Vicious - which depressed me, inspiring a return to Mote on the grounds of feline destruction being one sin it seemed unlikely to commit; but after another couple of days with less than a hundred pages to go, I realised that it really was as dull as it had appeared during the previous sitting.

The story is set against a backdrop of humanity as a well-established galaxy spanning empire which encounters alien life for the first time and is thus obliged to have a bit of a rethink; and somehow they found a way to make it about as interesting as a sales report.

Niven's weird alien civilisation is kind of engaging up to the point at which it started to remind me of the cantina in Star Wars or something written by Douglas Adams, as always seems to happen; and no - I don't actually care whether or not he got there first and should thus be hailed as the father of smirking aliens who crack knob gags. The rest is your basic military science-fiction bearing a suspicious resemblance to sixties Star Trek:

'Commander Sinclair, have we enough energy for a report to Fleet?'

'Aye, Skipper, the engines hold verra well indeed. Yon object is nae so massive as we thought, and we've hydrogen to spare.'

Unless I imagined it, the great majority of the text seems to be taken up with important space navy types holding ponderous conversations about how such and such an alien discovery is likely to influence the political economy of such and such a colony world. This is savoured with military protocol and ensigns screaming sir, yes, sir. It gives the impression of an author enamoured with his own martial testimony, imagining that a military background has furnished him with an experience so much richer than the rest of us could begin to imagine, and now he's going to afford us a glimpse of the magic by describing nervous young recruits summoned to the offices of grizzled old warhorses covered in medals. What heady days those were!

Additionally, it's not particularly well written and every other page seems to throw in some element that doesn't make sense.

'We'll have to go through it,' Whitbread's Motie said. She twittered to Charlie for a moment. 'There are alarms and there'll be warriors on guard.'

'Can we go over it?'

'You'd pass through an x-ray laser, Horst.'

'God's teeth. What are they so afraid of?'

I've read that passage seven or eight times, and I still don't understand why Horst would pass through an x-ray laser. I can't tell whether it's a prediction or a facetious comment which says something or other about Horst, most likely suggesting that he lacks a due sense of caution, but even with this potentially being the case, the phrasing doesn't quite work; and there are similar weird semantic hiccups throughout.

While we're here, there's one human woman in the entire book, who is naturally married off to some military dude at the end. The sexism wouldn't ordinarily bother me, except it's clearly symptomatic of a wider problem. Stephen Baxter and even Peter F. Hamilton did this sort of thing so much better.

So yes, well done, lads - you've knocked Heinlein right off his throne with this one.

Mountainhead

New Juche Mountainhead (2016)
I had a feeling this one would be worth a look based on my already having been bowled over by Stupid Baby, but I've a hunch Mountainhead may even be the best thing I've ever read, if that can be considered a meaningful statement. New Juche is a man who likes big tits and masturbation. I like big tits and masturbation, but this guy really likes big tits and masturbation. He lives and works in south-east Asia, so you've probably already done the math even before we've reached the end of the sentence, and you would almost certainly be wrong.

The point at which I realised I didn't ever want to have conversations with western travellers again came months later, shortly before I moved to the mountain, when I told a female tourist in a bar about the experience with the Burmese woman. I was trying to be honest both for her benefit and perhaps to solicit some casual therapy, but she found me offensive, to a dangerous degree, and I immediately realised that all conversation was hopeless and deceitful. There is experience outside of language and ideas that you assume and allow for, if you're not a cunt.

Mountainhead communicates that experience, and if the words are familiar, the patterns they form may not be. The experience communicated might justifiably be termed shamanic and could certainly be reduced to getting in touch with nature, which is sort of funny given that those who traditionally respond to such tie-dyed phrases would probably be horrified by Mountainhead, and specifically they would be horrified by its honesty. In Westsiders: Stories of the Boys in the Hood, William Shaw wrote:

All music is about geography, in a way. It's either about the place in which it's made, or the place where the maker wants to be.

I'd extend this observation to art in general, and it's demonstrably true of Mountainhead which is at core an account of the author becoming part of his environment, something existing within the fabric rather than upon its surface.

I feel I'm being slowly gathered up by the fibres and essences of the forest, beckoned and cajoled by the leaves and scents, and chased by plagues sent to precede me and to show me the way. My own face looks down on me from the trunks of these dark trees, the moist branches I grab are my own sweaty cock and the fluids that splash on me are my own issue.

The qualities which distinguish this novel - mostly autobiographical so far as I'm able to tell, but allowing for visionary interludes - from all that other crap about finding oneself through shunning Hostess products in favour of some delicious nourishing kale and how we met this really amazing old guy half way up a mountain in Baja California, are the facts of it being more about losing oneself in merging with an environment, and the unflinching honesty by which all elements of that environment are described. All the sexual effluvia of spunk, saliva, blood, sweat, bacteria, all the smells fermenting within unsightly wrinkles are celebrated as part of the forest mulch from which everything here is grown, including even the misery, grinding poverty, and casual cruelty.

Sex, like religion and drinking and smoking, is tied profoundly to ideas about place. Sick animals who graduate to Asia for sex graduate at their own pace through a succession of categories and locations, with a very defensive certainty as to their current, particular category and location. There is cruelty in it from wherever you stand, I absolutely believe that.

As a whole, and particularly as one approaches the end, Mountainhead has an almost biblical rhythm, human sacrifice yielding an encounter with God - here manifest as a life size biro rendering of Hitler drawn in a toilet cubicle at a children's school, and you can tell he's a sacred Hitler due to the halo of dobbers around his head - leading to apotheosis either with or as the mountain, which is arguably the main character of the novel; and like all of the best writing, it manages to keep hold of its sense of humour without digging you in the ribs and grinning every five seconds like Douglas fucking Adams.

Of all the books I've read, Mountainhead most closely compares to T.J. Knab's similarly sweat drenched A War of Witches, which represents the same sort of environmental immersion but amongst rural Mexican witches rather than Thai prostitutes; and like Knab's book it leaves the reader subtly changed by an improved understanding of human existence. It probably isn't the best thing I've ever read, realistically speaking, but right now I'm having trouble thinking of anything which impressed me more.

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.

A Mile Beyond the Moon

C.M. Kornbluth A Mile Beyond the Moon (1958)
I still intend to pick up The Space Merchants if I see a copy, but otherwise I'm done with this guy. Wolfbane and Search the Sky had their moments, as did a couple of the short stories I read in His Share of Glory; but on the other hand, His Share of Glory was about a million pages thick because it collected every short story he ever wrote, and my general verdict was that I might have enjoyed the shorts a bit more if there hadn't been so fucking many of them. Everything since has been picked up on the strength of the elusive Space Merchants sounding promising, and there hasn't actually been a whole lot that I've enjoyed; and at least two of those - this title included - have turned out to be collections of short stories, which I hadn't realised until I got home, and collections of short stories I've already read. Unfortunately, it also turns out that it doesn't really matter whether a Kornbluth collection contains seventy-thousand short stories, or just the eleven we have here, because the effect is the same, at least where I'm concerned.

In his favour, Kornbluth had a reasonably wild imagination, and he either writes well or has the potential to write well - eloquent, funky, jazzy, and even hilarious at times. It has been suggested that both The Marching Morons and The Little Black Bag - two of his most celebrated shorts - communicate a pro-eugenics message, both presenting a criticism of just how many stupid pig-ignorant fuckers there are presently clogging up the planet, and a prediction that it will only get worse. The Little Black Bag is arguably the one story worth reading in A Mile Beyond the Moon, and it's mostly just a wheeze, with some background detail suggesting that dummies will inherit the earth; and much as I've grown to dislike Kornbluth's writing, I still can't quite bring myself to read any of it as necessarily pro-eugenics, at least not so much as that it's just plain pissy about how many profoundly stupid people we have clogging up our cultural and political bandwidth, a proposition which I would suggest is very much supported by recent events here in America.

The problem with Kornbluth is that he jabbers, he digresses, and he gets carried away and lost in his love of both language and his own jokes, and in doing so he forgets to tell a story.

As an unimaginably glowing drift of crystalline, chiming creatures loped across the whispering grass of the bank, Kazam waved one hand in a gesture of farewell.

Very poetic, but how the fuck does anything glow unimaginably, and do we really need that many adjectives all at once? It wouldn't be so bad if this were just an occasional flurry of imagery, but it's all the fucking time, with Kornbluth winking at the reader every few sentences like Douglas Adams on an intravenous high fructose corn syrup drip. I've read all sorts of awkward post-grammatical and unreadable fuckers over the years, van Vogt, Burroughs, Robert Moore Williams and so on, and I've enjoyed most of them, but Kornbluth has defeated me. I skipped a whole five of the eleven, and just couldn't bring myself to care about the rest, excepting Little Black Bag. To paraphrase Henry Rollins, A Mile Beyond the Moon felt like watching molasses come out of a spigot.

The Colour of Magic

Terry Pratchett The Colour of Magic (1983)
Still wondering whether Peter F. Hamilton may have destroyed my love of reading, I picked this up. I wasn't really planning to read any more Pratchett but with The Colour of Magic being the first of the Discworld novels, it seemed a safe bet that it would at least be worth a chuckle. I would have preferred the edition which had the title spelled correctly and the more rustic cover - as opposed to this awful crap clearly designed to appeal to hipster Douglas Adams fans who might be put off by artwork reflecting the actual thrust of the story - but never mind.

Sure enough, it is worth a chuckle - a sort of Monty Python take on Lord of the Rings, or at least something in that genre; doing what Douglas Adams did but with wizards, dragons, spells, and a flat world balanced upon the backs of four elephants, and doing it better. On close examination, there's not a whole lot of story - slightly incompetent wizard is saddled with an amusingly hapless out-of-towner on a quest without any clear objective, so they're really just going from place to place and getting into trouble until it ends - but the key to the tale is its telling: wonderfully peculiar scenarios, big stupid ideas, and wit that never lets up. It takes the piss out of the genre and its conventions like nothing else, and yet does so without the slightest hint of sneering - possibly by virtue of the obvious affection Pratchett felt for his characters and their ridiculous lives, but also by means of pinning the reality of the Discworld to the logic of physics and specifically certain aspects of quantum theory, lending everything a sense of veracity which seems absent from most things involving dwarves, quests, and talking swords; and most important of all, it's very, very funny without feeling like it has to crack jokes all the bleeding time.

The only problem, at least for me, was that Terry Pratchett's detail is so rich, so beautifully written, and so convoluted in the service of its farce, that I found it hard to keep track of the story at certain points, of who was who and what they were up to this time. I think this may be more to do with my reading habits - an hour at breakfast and another before I go to sleep - than with the book. I kept coming back to it and finding myself lost, necessitating a skim of previous pages, so I think it may simply be that this sort of thing is better appreciated when read over fewer sittings, with longer periods of time spent on each occasion. I seem to recall the same thought having occurred to me when I read the others.

The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

Douglas Adams The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980)

I reviewed the first one about a month ago. In fact the main reason I hunted the first one down was because I found The Restaurant at the End of the Universe in a branch of Half-Price, and a copy with the proper cover no less, and it would have been weird reading book two once again without first reminding myself of its predecessor; and - as already stated - it was in part a journey of discovery, namely discovering whether I'd been wrong about Adams all these years; and if I'm to subject myself to something I know I'll probably dislike, I reasoned, then it's going to be with books sporting the proper covers or not at all - the proper covers being those dating from when I read this stuff first time round, as opposed to some of the self-consciously wacky crimes against design in which Adams has since been wrapped - cartoon comedy planets blowing raspberries just in case anyone mistakes this stuff for Stephen Baxter.

To recap, my problem with Adams is that he was never as funny as claimed, and whilst his writing was fine for radio or television, it's just not that great applied to a novel, or at least to these novels. I mean it's not actually terrible, but these books really don't belong in any of those balls-achingly predictable lists of fifty science-fiction classics you must read.

The Restaurant at the End of the Universe suffers from the same problems as the first part of the story, namely that it's a series of static scenes in which a bunch of guys stand around passing wry commentary upon some absurd aspect of their situation before a magic wand plot device whisks them off to the next set piece for more of the same. There are three women in the whole thing. Trillian doesn't get to say much, whilst the other two are introduced as love interest on the second to last page and are typically a bit dumb, which probably isn't too surprising given that the central part of the book all seems a bit Jeremy Clarkson with hindsight - chaps lusting after sporty spaceships in the restaurant parking lot followed by excessively loud rock band jokes, Led Zeppelin blowing up planets and so on and so forth; and all held together by a glue of purportedly witty observation which, as a number of people have since pointed out to me, is pretty much dollar store P.G. Wodehouse. I say, old chap, I hope you won't think me impolite but I can't help noticing that you appear to have parked your spacecraft atop my greenhouse, and I wouldn't mind but I was rather hoping to make the rounds with the jolly old flit gun at some point this afternoon blah blah blah...

Yet, for all it's flaws and annoyances, I kind of enjoyed this one. It may simply be nostalgia for the first time I read it, but it seems less laboured than the previous instalment. Also, it has a fairly satisfyingly rounded conclusion, and so much so that it feels like these first two volumes really should be considered a single novel so as to allow the positives to cancel or at least balance out the worst of the clunk. Unless it really is my imagination, my guess is that Adams was simply a better writer by the time he sat down to pull this one together, so while it remains a radio script shoehorned between two covers, the shoehorning isn't so laboured, and there are passages without the author digging you in the ribs and asking if you get it every three seconds.

It's still some way short of being the classic everyone seems to think it is, and Terry Pratchett did this sort of thing so much better, and six times nine isn't forty-two last time I looked - unless that's Adams admitting that the cartoon philosophies bolted onto his narrative are genuinely meaningless - but The Restaurant at the End of the Universe is certainly readable. He really should have left it at just the two books.

The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy

Douglas Adams The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (1979)
I've had an aversion to the work of Douglas Adams roughly since I discovered the internet and the disproportionately gushing praise with which his legacy is regularly hosed down. I've seen this particular title turning up in predictably cantankerous lists of the fifty most important science-fiction novels of all time, and I've partaken in bulletin boards upon which more than half of the subscribers are named after Douglas Adams characters, more or less guaranteeing constant repetition of jokes which were admittedly very funny when I saw them on telly back in 1981. Nevertheless, the sheer effort of finding oneself loathing something for crimes of popularity can become wearisome and is at least as stupid as grounding one's love of some cultural phenomenon on how many other people think it's great, so I like to take a bite out of my own bullshit from time to time, just to see how it tastes.

The last time I suggested the guy was maybe not the greatest writer who ever lived, the response I got was hate for Douglas Adams - incredible, with a presumed incredulous shake of the head. We were actually on the mean streets of the South Bronx - the Caucasian Doctor Who webzine editor and I - so the faux-ebonic inference that I be hatin' on Douglas Adams like some trick-ass bitch was entirely in context, because how can you not love Douglas Adams unless you just be hating on him just 'cause you mad-doggin', yeah? Sheee-it, blood, you be flossin' like a motherfucker.

My first encounter with Hitchhikers was the television series, closely followed by a stage production put on by drama students at Warwick University in November 1981. I thought it was brilliant - which is the actual word I used to describe it in my diary - and so I bought the books as they came out. I thought they were brilliant too, because they faithfully reproduced the experience of watching something on telly, and that's what mattered to me when I was sixteen. Oddly though, I found the third book less brilliant than the first two, and I didn't enjoy So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish at all. It seemed ponderous and conspicuously lacking in jokes, and even as a fairly stupid nineteen-year old I could tell that the exploration of Arthur Dent's existential disassociation was a complete fucking waste of time. This was therefore a revelation for me, having previously held that where one brilliant thing can be identified by a logo promising the recurrence of characters and situations, then the recurrence of those characters and situations will therefore always be of equivalent brilliance; which is why all Doctor Who was brilliant, and all things with Doctor Who written on the cover were also brilliant, and anything to the contrary was impossible.

Eventually I grew up, at last taking on board the essential punk rock truism that all of your heroes are usually just lucky arseholes, and that, as Jimmy suggests, you should question everything:

Could you tell a wise man by the way he speaks or spells?
Is this more important than the stories that he tells?

Eventually I grew up, as I already said, or at least I changed - which is surely what you're supposed to do when you grow up. I still read kid's comics, and pretty much anything I want to read, but at the same time I've often found myself in opposition to a general tendency which reminds me painfully of my dumbfuck nineteen-year old self, and seemingly amounts to this thing featured in my childhood and must therefore be considered brilliant. It would be understandable were all those shows - because it's usually television we're talking about - of quality equivalent to, off the top of my head, Carnival of Monsters, but they never are and some bewilderingly average material has been getting itself reclassified as classic prior to sacred cowification because a fifty-something was able to remember it and hasn't really bothered to take an interest in anything outside whatever he experienced before the age of twenty. It's not so much that I worry about the fetishisation of Blake's fucking Seven crowding out anything more worthwhile, or at least slightly less generic; and it's not that I worry about the possibly inevitable end result of culture circle jerking itself into a formless mush of recycled commodity nostalgia; it's simply that I'm mystified as to how people can be satisfied with culture which simply isn't that good. I don't even mean stuff that's actually crap; I mean that which may indeed have done its job well enough thirty years ago, but probably shouldn't be held aloft as a beacon of excellence in the twenty-first century.

Douglas Adams was one of only two people outside of the usual six to write material for Monty Python's Flying Circus, and that was his background. He was a talented writer of comedy sketches performed on either stage, screen, or radio, and those were the fields in which he excelled, assuming for the sake of argument that you enjoy Adam's particular variation on Cambridge Footlights humour - Monty Python by way of Illuminatus! - seeing as I've now read the thing and can't help but notice its influence in more or less everything written since. As a novel, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy reads like a series of sketches strung together with thematic linking material woven back and forth so as to present an impression of narrative progress which never quite finds its feet. The problems result in part from too many magic wands waved in welding disparate elements together, and too much reliance on details which only really exist for the sake of the jokes. The infinite improbability drive, for example, is funny, but not that funny, and it's really the only thing connecting the joke about blowing up the Earth to the one about the two-headed dude and the giant computer.

None of this would matter were Adams a bit handier with his biro, but the prose reads too much like a script for a series of sketches padded out by someone who has never written a book but feels sure that it can't be too difficult; and the thing is, whilst this stuff may well have been pure spun gold in real time, nailed down to a page of text it reveals its weaknesses, how little is actually there, and how repetitive it is; and it's very, very repetitive - over and over, the indignant surprise of an otherwise polite English clergyman confronted by the improbable, surreal, or outrageous; and an otherwise polite English clergyman who uses the word rather in every fucking sentence.

'Ah,' said Arthur, 'er...' He had an odd feeling of being like a man in the act of adultery who is surprised when the woman's husband wanders into the room, changes his trousers, passes a few idle remarks about the weather and leaves again.

Oh my sides. The references are characteristically middle-class and comically understated, the sort of thing you might reasonably expect from someone who hasn't really experienced much beyond the walls of the jolly old Uni, and who still regards the notion of students attending parties and getting drunk as essentially side-splitting. There are some decent theoretical physics gags, but nothing quite strong enough to dispel the faint aroma of dormitory japes, somewhat underscored by the presence of just a single female character in the entire book - and she's Zaphod's bird, someone whom Arthur might have jolly well bonked were it not for jolly old slings and arrows of outrageous jolly old misfortune. I wouldn't ordinarily give two shits about equal representation or points scored on the Bechdel test, but here it seems aggravatingly symptomatic of all that's wrong with this novelisation.

The thing is, none of this is inherently terrible, but if you're still pissing your pants at the idea of forty-two as the answer to life, the universe, and everything in 2016, then I'd say you really need to broaden your horizons. The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy was a great radio show and television programme, but it makes for an underwhelming and clunky book of a kind which Terry Pratchett wrote about a million times better. As a novel, its stature would seem to rest on brand loyalty and what else you haven't read. It's readable, and Douglas Adams was not without talent, but The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy falls a long, long way short of being Asimov wearing a red nose and big yellow shoes.

Unfortunately, I was really hoping to be wrong about this one; and as for anyone reading the above while insisting that I am wrong, be happy in the knowledge that every other stupid fucker in the known universe agrees with you.

Excession

Iain M. Banks Excession (1996)
I've had occasion to give up on Iain Banks in the past, notably with The Algebraist which just seemed too shit to carry on with at the two-hundred page mark - something which should, by rights, be impossible with the work of someone who writes so well. I didn't give up on this one, instead making it right through to the last page, but - Jesus - there were times when it was a struggle to remember why I was bothering.

I suppose for all its faults, Excession does plenty of the sort of thing which Iain Banks did well with the powerful prose, reasonable depth of character, mind-blowing weirdness, and casual wit - the kind of stuff Douglas Adams might have achieved had he written a book which didn't spend the entirety of its page count winking and digging you in the ribs whilst asking whether you get it; on which count I particularly enjoyed the presence of a warship named the Frank Exchange of Views. Even reading with no fucking clue as to what's supposed to be happening, generally this one can be read with the assurance that the less interesting passages will usually give way to something a bit more engaging - if not necessarily comprehensible - within the next ten minutes or so.

I get the impression there may have been some mythological allusion in characters who change sex, become heavy with child, and then change sex again, all in the presence of a talking bird; but I may just be imagining that. Elsewhere in the story there's some kind of ethical debate possibly amounting to whether or not we're truly liberal if we tolerate the presence of Fascism in our society, or the other way around; in any case I'm not sure any conclusion was reached. So we have an agent of some description doing something or other in relation to a reality-warping intrusion from another universe, none of which seems to bear any strong resemblance to the blurb on the back cover, unless I sleep-read a couple of chapters without realising. There are a million characters, or so it seems, and it's difficult to be absolutely clear on what any of them are up to at any given time or what their motives could be. One particularly bewildering sequence in the life of Genar-Hoefen, for example, is muddled by flashback sequences alternating with contemporary narrative, and nothing much to indicate that these are separate episodes in the life of a single individual. I read about a hundred pages assuming I'd missed some crucial distinction back at the start, wondering if the two of them were supposed to be related.

So yeah - beautifully written and all that, but it was kind of a big pile of bollocks really, despite a few nice images. So that's another five days during which I could have been reading something else.

Great.

God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1985)
I've just noticed how my favourite Vonnegut is the first one I read and I've enjoyed each successive title a little less than its predecessor, which seems unfortunate and is probably more to do with my noticing a pattern than whatever qualities the books may have. The pattern I've noticed is how we're introduced to a character - let's call him Gary for the sake of argument - and then we have a few pages of Gary pottering about in the tool shed; he picks up a spanner which was given to him by his father, so we have a few pages about Gary's father, famed inventor of something we'll call the Splunge, then we see Gary's father getting into a Splunge-related argument with Doris at the patent office, then how Doris always wanted to write poetry but was dissuaded from doing so by her dentist, then cut to the guy who would be well and truly screwed if there was a Splunge in every home...

Vonnegut always seems to meander in this way - at least based on those I've read - and whilst it can be entertaining in isolation, it's begun to irritate me after six or seven novels. It may allow for some pleasantly amusing digressions but can distract one from getting to grips with the point of the book. I actually read the first sixty pages of this and then started again, having realised I was lost and with no idea of who these people were supposed to be. As formulas go, it's nothing like so irritating as Douglas Adams, but it gets in the way a bit. Vonnegut being Vonnegut, the material strung along this meandering train of thought is generally wonderful, but keeping track of it can be a pain in the arse. His stories rely on cause and effect more than those foggy narratives from which an impression is all you really need - as with William Burroughs - so when the story is obscured by its own telling, there's a problem.

This is a shame because God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater is otherwise a great book, so far as I can see. The Mr. Rosewater of the title is one of America's richest men but is painfully aware of his privilege, and takes greater pleasure from work as a volunteer fire fighter. This distinguishes him as clinically insane in the eyes of those for whom wealth is an end in itself, specifically those with a vested interest in Mr. Rosewater behaving according to his fortune. This has quite some resonance for me as relative by marriage to a Texas oil tycoon who himself prefers the company of hillbillies and was once a volunteer fireman.

What gets me most about these people, Daddy, isn't how ignorant they are, or how much they drink. It's the way they have of thinking that everything nice in the world is a gift to the poor people from them or their ancestors. The first afternoon I was here, Mrs. Buntline made me come out on the back porch and look at the sunset. So I did, and I said I liked it very much, but she kept waiting for me to say something else. I couldn't think of what else I was supposed to say, so I said what seemed like a dumb thing. 'Thank you very much,' I said. That was exactly what she was waiting for. 'You're entirely welcome,' she said. I have since thanked her for the ocean, the moon, the stars in the sky, and the United States Constitution.

I read that passage out loud to my wife and she immediately knew who I'd been reminded of. Anyway, the novel is a fairly straightforward argument against the dehumanising influence of excessive wonga.

'No more apologies! So we're poor! All right, we're poor! This is America! And America is one place in this sorry world where people shouldn't have to apologise for being poor. The question in America should be, 'Is this guy a good citizen? Is he honest? Does he pull his own weight?' '

It's a good argument and it's well stated in entertaining terms, with some pleasantly ludicrous asides to the work of the Vonnegut's fictitious science-fiction author, Kilgore Trout; but at the risk of sounding ungrateful, I just think the whole thing could have been tighter.