Jorge Luis Borges - The Book of Imaginary Beings (1967)

 

One of those books which became part of my personal reference library as a kid was the Piccolo paperback Dictionary of Monsters and Mysterious Beasts by Carey Miller, which I treasured for both its inclusion of obscure monsters I'd never heard of and the evocative black and white line illustrations by Mary I. French. Online research reveals that Miller made a career from books which terrified and fascinated the children of my generation, another one I owned being the beautifully painted hardback Mysteries of the Unknown: Monsters, Ghosts & UFOs from 1977 which only now do I realise was by the same author. This may all seem obtuse as preamble to my writing about Borges, an Argentinian author whose works have, as Wikipedia puts it, contributed to philosophical literature and the fantasy genre, and have had a major influence on the magic realist movement in twentieth century Latin American literature; but with hindsight it's difficult to believe Carey Miller wasn't cherry-picking from this earlier compendium when compiling her own dictionary given the quota of mythical monsters I've never seen mentioned outside of these two books - the Kujata, the Squonk and the Nasnas, to name just three. This isn't an accusation of plagiarism so much as one of influence given the differences. Miller's purpose being to give kids goosebumps, she includes dinosaurs and Frankenstein's monster.

I'm not sure Borges' intention was at variance but for a slight shift of focus, and we're in roughly the same territory as his short stories, here with narrative boiled down to its essence of time, place, character and so on, delivering equivalent observations and ideas in alphabetical order and without any of it being pinned to the customary progression of regular fiction. Where Miller's scope was sufficiently broad as to include Mary Shelley's hit single, Borges similarly draws in creatures from the writing of both Poe and Kafka whilst himself employing considerable artistic license in relating established mythological figures, and even creating one of his own - the Peryton, a half deer and half bird chimera which somehow casts the shadow of a man. This, I would assume, is because a rigorously scientific bestiary of mythical beasts arguably misses the point of that which it purports to describe, and because the larger world is often mapped from the seclusion of daily existence by fictions or truisms at best; and The Book of Imaginary Beings seems to provide a more informative account of the historical human experience as related to our environment than whichever facts or statistics might apply, even where the facts and statistics are more accurate in material terms.

This distinction is probably something we should try to keep track of, not least in recognising that there is a distinction which doesn't detract from the world described herein by Borges being a wonderful place.

Studies in Classic American Literature

D.H. Lawrence Studies in Classic American Literature (1924)
I approached this with some trepidation assuming it would be fairly dry, being Dave's thoughts on a stack of novels I've never read - excepting Moby Dick - and which I can't see me reading at any point in the near future. Happily, at least for me, Studies reads almost like a dry run for Apocalypse, or at least limbering up in preparation for The Plumed Serpent. It was begun in 1917, then revised and completed after the Lawrences moved to the States in 1922, and D.H. naturally had a few things to say on the subject of the country in which he'd made his home.

Studies in Classic American Literature gets the last couple of centuries worth of American society up onto the psychiatrist's couch and pulls them apart to see what's happening under the hood - if you'll pardon the mixed metaphor - an inspection made through the medium of its writing, what the land of the hypothetically free has had to say about itself.

This is something I've pondered myself, having moved here back in 2011 and been struck by the contradictions, and how it really isn't just Europe with different stuff. America makes a big deal out of having thrown off the yoke of hereditary monarchy, and so being a country where no-one is held back through having been born to the wrong parents - which is patently false. It's all about freedom, liberty, and other intangibles; and yet America's dedication to tradition, ceremony, speechifying, awards, more ceremonies, ionic columns, tradition, marble statues, medals for everyone, capes, salutes, honour, proclamations, ceremonies commemorating the previous ceremonies, pomp, circumstance, processions, and so on, is such as to make your average Euro-coronation seem like a fund raising piss-up at an anarchist collective. It's the messy divorce wherein one of those formerly wed spends the rest of his or her life telling you how great it is being divorced.

They came largely to get away - that most simple of motives. To get away. Away from what? In the long run, away from themselves. Away from everything. That's why most people have come to America, and still do come. To get away from everything they are and have been.

'Henceforth be masterless.'

Which is all very well, but it isn't freedom. Rather the reverse. A hopeless sort of constraint. It is never freedom till you find something you really positively want to be. And people in America have always been shouting about the things they are not. Unless of course, they are millionaires, made or in the making.

Lawrence being Lawrence, much of the argument strays into philosophical, even pseudo-mystical territory, although not without  justification so it's never entirely self-indulgent; and pretty much everything he's said remains approximately true today, a full century later.

As discourse, Studies tends to freewheel, to follow a train of thought like a dog sniffing its way around an unfamiliar field; so it's a monologue which makes coherent observations in an order which mostly makes sense, as distinct from a rigorously mathematical  analysis - a form which would, in any case, contradict Lawrence's most fundamental arguments. It hasn't left me with the desire to read Hawthorne, Fenimore Cooper or Poe - whose writing I already know I dislike in the latter case - but then that isn't really the point, and for a title which may look somewhat peripheral next to the others, it's one of the breezier and more clearly expressed introductions to Lawrence's view of the universe and our place therein.

The Valley of Spiders

H.G. Wells The Valley of Spiders (1905)
I didn't do very well with my last collection of Herbie's short stories, finding them generally patchy and of uneven quality amounting to things which might seem nice ideas as the mind wanders while doing the dishes, but which don't quite add up to a tale. It's hard to miss that a couple of these follow certain narrative conventions favoured by my fifteen-year old stepson, specifically that by which he came up with the saga of the raccoons with rainsticks.

He was back from a weekend at the ranch, and there had been rattlesnakes under the house. 'I called them raccoons with rainsticks,' he informed me, barely able to contain the pleasure taken in his own wit.

'Tell him how you came up with that,' my wife prompted.

'Well,' he began, figuratively taking a thoughtful puff on an imaginary cigar, 'we were in the bedroom and we could hear rattlesnakes under the house, and Courtlandt asked what it was, and I said it was raccoons with rainsticks!'

'What a great story,' I dutifully exclaimed.

Anyway, Wells employs more or less the same composition technique with tales centred upon the appearance of a weird and unusual thing, entailing the discovery of a thing which seems both weird and unusual, with the weird and unusual thing additionally named in the title of the story - The Moth or The Inexperienced Ghost being two examples. Despite being the father - or perhaps uncle - of modern science-fiction, there's not actually a whole lot of science here; although significantly, there's nothing traditionally supernatural, and that which falls outside the realm of anything sciencey should probably be termed either unexplained or just plain weird. These tales have the rhythm and mood of Poe - or what I vaguely remember of Poe - without quite invoking dark forces as anything much beyond a product of human imagination. I suppose therefore that this was supernatural horror catching up with the enlightenment, the death of God, and the industrial revolution.

Yet for whatever reason, I enjoyed this a whole lot more than the collection based around The Time Machine - or Poe for that matter. The stories were written between 1894 and 1905, roughly the decade from which Wells' better novels came, and so most of these are reasonably tight without too much of the whimsy or jabbering which characterised his less successful efforts. The Red Room succeeds as a ghost story in a universe which doesn't really allow for the existence of ghosts; Pollock and the Porroh Man achieves the same but with a more visceral mood which almost foreshadows Lovecraft; and The Crystal Egg serves as an intriguing pendant to War of the Worlds. As seems to be generally true of Wells' short stories, there's nothing here to match the likes of the hits, but it's nevertheless a decent collection in its own right.

Science Fiction through the Ages

I.O. Evans (editor) Science Fiction through the Ages volume one (1966)
Idrisyn Oliver Evans, to give him his full name, wrote a ton of those Observer's Book of Nuggets style publications for bespectacled boys and undertook the translation of a number of Jules Verne novels - which is interesting because I understand there to be some piss-poor Verne translations out there. I actually fucking hated Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, although it turns out that the version I read had been anglicised by Mercier Lewis, which at least lets Idrisyn - if that was really his name - off the hook on one count.

It's hard to fault the choices made in this prehistory of science-fiction, excerpts from the writings of Plato, Johannes Kepler, Voltaire, Lucian of Samosata, Verne, Mary Shelley, and others. Unfortunately, few of the works quoted really yield satisfying extracts, and I'd suggest that at least Frankenstein and Gulliver's Travels should be read in their entirety. Isolated snippets reveal a nifty turn of phrase but not a whole lot else. Unfortunately the excerpts from things I haven't read aren't generally much better and left me mostly unmoved, and certainly unlikely to wonder any further about Walter Scott's Count Robert of Paris or Robert Paltock's Peter Wilkins. Edgar Allen Poe's The Balloon Hoax is reprinted in full, and I couldn't actually read beyond the first two pages, such was my dislike for how it was written.

On the other hand, I enjoyed the excerpt from what I take to be I.O.'s own translation of Twenty Thousand Leagues a great deal more than the one that I read; and Patrick Moore's account of Johannes Kepler's then untranslated Somnium is reasonably terrific; and the bigger picture afforded of the history of science-fiction as a genre is greatly more thought provoking than at least a few of these individual parts. Brian Aldiss identifies Frankenstein as the first true science-fiction novel, although much of his criteria seems contradictory. Frankenstein, he declares, may be termed science-fiction by virtue of references to technological developments of the day, galvanism and the like, whilst earlier efforts such as those of Swift or Lucian are deemed purely allegorical. This would be fine but for the remainder of Trillion Year Spree greatly favouring the allegorical over the technological - Philip K. Dick rather than Hugo Gernsback - as the truest form of the genre. Evans' book at least proves the futility of drawing such sharply defined lines by showing how the science Aldiss recognises in Frankenstein is only science as seen from a twentieth century perspective, and that it probably isn't fair to dismiss earlier more alchemical forms just for the sake of an argument.

This collection really should have been better given the sources, but then it wasn't so much bad as simply a little on the dry side; and on the other hand, I now really want to read Kepler's Somnium, so that probably counts for something.

Ten Great Mysteries

Edgar Allan Poe Ten Great Mysteries (1845)

I suppose Ten Stories of Which a Certain Portion Might Be Deemed Adequately Mysterious would have seemed cumbersome, and I think it was The Black Cat which tipped it for me, representing the point at which I noticed I was once again straining to find the value in something old, undeniably worthy, hugely influential and generally hailed as a copper-bottomed classic when truthfully I'm bored absolutely shitless.

I'm prepared to acknowledge that Poe was a major talent and an important figure in the history of literature providing anyone supporting that position with any degree of fervour is prepared to acknowledge the possibility that his alleged strengths are very poorly represented in this collection. The Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar, and The Pit and the Pendulum are all readable, as I suppose is The Black Cat on a purely technical level. At his best, Poe works up a thoroughly convincing atmosphere and there's an undeniable poetry to his words - as you might reasonably expect. The two stories featuring C. Auguste Dupin are of particular interest in providing obvious inspiration for Sherlock Holmes, but also in being more than simple detective tales, but tales about the mechanics of perception and understanding as explored by means of a pipe-smoking detective seeking clues. Elsewhere Poe cooks up powerfully claustrophobic first person narratives which I would imagine almost certainly inspired H.P. Lovecraft, and also - quite unexpectedly - A.E. van Vogt.

Beyond this, we have short stories which doubtless worked better for the less-jaded readers of the time than they do for me in 2016. The main problem is that nothing much happens in any of these, and most seem to amount to single extended scenarios intended to induce a sense of unease; and also that a few of them felt like I was reading a long, long letter from a fucking solicitor. My attention could just not be kept upon the page, no matter what. You might suppose it serves me right for all those hours spent playing Super Mario Kart, but I've read shitloads from the 1840s or thereabouts, and shitloads from the 1840s or thereabouts which hasn't bored me to tears quite like this bunch. Even Fitz-James O'Brien wrote a better yarn if you can ignore the routine anti-Semitism.

Some of the stories were okay, if hardly serving to justify Poe's stellar reputation; others were simply dull, just as all those other stories by Robert Louis Stevenson were dull; and then there's The Black Cat which effects a reaction with descriptions of its protagonist torturing and then killing his pet cat. I'm sure no real cats were harmed but I really dislike this sort of lazy revulsion-response button pushing associated with certain strands of horror fiction and certain realms of the internet. Whilst shock is as valid a tool as any in the creation of art, it requires skilled application rather than just shoving it in our faces whilst making a lurid, gurgling noise. The Black Cat is simply vile and ham-fisted, the just deserts conclusion justifying the means with all the conviction of your average busted kiddy fiddler protesting that those photographs were purely for research purposes. I guess Poe was hoping to get a reaction, and he succeeded in so much as my reaction is that he can fuck off, and that I've cancelled any plans I had to read any more of his yawnsome shite ever again. I'm glad his name has been posthumously associated with pisspots.

Recollection of a Six Days' Journey in the Moon

Recollection of a Six Days' Journey in the Moon (1844)
Like one of those political cartoons from a 1930s Punch Magazine - Head Chef Neville Chamberlain carrying a massive Mussolini faced pie to an oven upon which is written fiscal compromise whilst a cat wearing a Union Jack waistcoat says it will be interesting to see how this turns out - it's roughly possible to appreciate the wit of this tale without having the faintest idea what it refers to. Recollection of a Six Days' Journey in the Moon was originally published in two parts in the July and August 1844 issues of The Southern Literary Messenger, a monthly periodical based in Virginia and possibly best known for Edgar Allan Poe having been its most famous editor and contributor. The identity of the author of this tale, anonymously attributed to an Aerio-Nautical Man, appears to have been lost, but never mind. At a mere twenty-two pages, it's a slim volume, but nevertheless has more than enough going on to justify this reprint by Ron Miller's consistently wonderful Black Cat imprint.

Satirical tales of fantastic trips to the moon and the inevitably comedic accounts of the people living there have been around at least since Lucian of Samosata's True History of the second century, and the narrator of this one effects his incredible journey by means of a hitherto unknown science, called Aeriotism, or the faculty of self-suspension in the air. This he achieves by basking in the admiration of his fellows to such a degree as to cause his head to expand and become lighter than air, as you do, and without too much faffing about with the sort of details he doesn't seem to think would interest us, there he is on the moon.

The moon is of course populated by people who, like ourselves, sprang from the line of Adam and Eve and were almost certainly around during the construction of the Tower of Babel. Their societies - divided mainly into handily illustrative republics and monarchies, an old world and a new world - serve to hold a comic mirror to our own, or specifically to our own as of 1844. Unfortunately my understanding of American history is so limited as to render much of the detail thematically bewildering, although the narrative remains nevertheless entertaining for such devices as magnetically driven sailing ships, lunar provinces where citizens make their own money, and the Isle of Engines which seems to be an amusingly disparaging parody of England. Clearly much of this would make more sense had I a better grasp of nineteenth century politics, but then it's not entirely inscrutable with passages condemning the practice of slavery, and even predictions such as this one providing a fascinating insight into notions of progress as viewed at the time:

Every day some new science is discovered, which renders easy what was considered impossible before, and I have little doubt that if they continue on for half a century more in the same rapid pace, they will be able to dispense altogether with a Supreme being, and construct not only worlds, but people to live in them, on purely, scientific principles.

It would probably be an overstatement to term Recollection of a Six Days' Journey in the Moon a neglected classic, but it's pretty damn sparky, and at such brief length I can think of no good reason why anyone would want to pass on it.

Available from Lulu.

At the Mountains of Madness

H.P. Lovecraft
At the Mountains of Madness and other novels of terror (1964)
I was under the impression that I'd read all there was to be read by H.P. Lovecraft, albeit some time ago, but now realise that I was mistaken. The four Randolph Carter tales collected here have turned out to be familiar only by their titles, but anyway...

Opinions vary regarding the much debated talent of Howard Philips, some claiming him to be an unparalleled master of the macabre, others suggesting he was simply a hack who could barely form a sentence and didn't get out much. I think the problem may be that, very generally speaking, he was never quite a talent in the same sense as his friend and correspondent Clark Ashton Smith, and he only really had one story - namely that of the rationally minded individual inheriting a house, a book, or a packet of unspeakable Toffos from that shunned relative mentioned only in hushed tones, and then the expressed dismissal of superstition followed by a subsequent eating of words during the inevitable climatic encounter with tentacled foreigners from beyond time; or at least variations on that theme.

I'm not even sure it's fair to call Lovecraft's fiction stories in the traditional sense, most of their purpose being the contrast of a regular guy obliged to admit the existence of that which is revealed as real and squelchy on the final page. His narratives serve simply to compound the contrast, to keep things going long enough to allow for a build up of suspense, none of which should necessarily be taken as indicative of a failing on the part of the author. Whilst H.P. Lovecraft may only have told one story, he often told it with such expertise as to circumnavigate the problems of repetition; indeed, by the time he came to write At the Mountains of Madness, his mastery can surely no longer be subject to question.

By the 1930s, Lovecraft's seemingly increased interest in the sciences had rooted his best tales in solid empirical foundations, serving to provide a more startling and effective contrast with his subject than is found in earlier tales more obviously inspired by Poe or Lord Dunsany. At the Mountains of Madness, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, and The Dreams in the Witch-House all work exceptionally well in this respect, framing nameless horror in a context of archaeological, genealogical, or mathematical discourse, a great improvement on juvenile efforts which would spend the first half of the story telling you how scared you were going to be. The three examples named above were amongst his longest works, and even if it really was all just one story, these tales are a testament to Lovecraft's descriptive powers, specifically in that these three sustain the reader's interest at such a page count with hardly any narrative action.

On the other hand, whilst the Randolph Carter stories may suggest that Lovecraft actually did have other tales to tell, they also support the conclusion that he never quite worked out how to tell them. The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, despite entertaining digressions with talking cats and a voyage to the moon, rambles and bores with its endless sentences piling one self-consciously grandiose image upon another and then another, page after page after page without ever going anywhere of consequence. It may be one of the most laboured, indigestible pieces of writing I've ever struggled to finish. Through the Gates of the Silver Key, written much later and in collaboration with E. Hoffman Price is an improvement, greatly benefiting from the sort of cosmic and pseudo-scientific musings which informed The Dreams in the Witch-House and others; but is still unsatisfying, reading like a transitional piece or work unfinished.

Everyone is entitled to a stack of unreadable shite in their portfolio, and it's possibly only because Lovecraft left such a relative dearth of material that his more comical efforts are so well remembered. At the Mountains of Madness is at least deserving the accolade of masterpiece - the work of an author who had at last found his voice, and it seems such a terrible shame that we will never know where his fiction would have gone had he survived 1937.