Charles Bukowski - South of No North (1973)

 

Just when I assume I've read all that Bukowski had published as prose - as distinct from poetry, despite the admittedly fine line - another one I've never heard of pops out of the woodwork. South of No North collects short stories, mostly four to six pages in length and reprinted from obscure sources, plus a couple of longer efforts which originally appeared as chapbooks. As you would expect, it's mostly autobiographical and remains approximately so even when swinging wildly off into adjacent genres, notably Stop Staring at My Tits, Mister - a Rabelaisian western which could have been lifted from the pages of Malcolm Bennett and Aidan Hughes' BRUTE! magazine - and The Devil Was Hot wherein our guy encounters Satan himself, currently inconvenienced as a sideshow attraction.

Whatever objections you may already have to the man's work - should you have any - are unlikely to be assuaged herein; and if you're one of those pricks who somehow dispute that the man could write, then you've mistaken something else for writing and your argument doesn't apply; and if you're overly fond of the term transgressive—well, that doesn't wash either given the complete irrelevance of whatever you believe he transgressed from.

Like anybody can tell you. I am not a very nice man. I don't know the word. I have always admired the villain, the outlaw, the son of a bitch. I don't like the clean-shaven boy with the necktie and the good job. I like desperate men, men with broken teeth and broken minds and broken ways. They interest me. They are full of surprises and explosions. I also like vile women, drunk cursing bitches with loose stockings and sloppy mascara faces. I'm more interested in perverts than saints. I can relax with bums because I am a bum. I don't like laws, morals, religions, rules. I don't like to be shaped by society.

This is why he was great, and why his writing will most likely endure. It has a purity which resists all attempts to co-opt or to colonise, demanding that the reader take it entirely on its own terms and offering no concessions to whatever bullshit he, she or it may have been duped into buying this week; and if you can't appreciate that, then you can't appreciate nuffink.

Ed Pinsent - Henrietta (1995)

 

Subtitled The Pirate of Love, I'll admit I picked this up because of the adults only warning on the cover supplemented by a list of transgressive acts depicted within. Whatever I imagined didn't seem like the sort of thing Ed Pinsent would have drawn and so I was naturally curious. Thankfully Henrietta isn't like anything I imagined and the adults only tag seems mainly precautionary, given our living in an age of persons deeply traumatised by exposure to anything they didn't want to see. Rather than following in the lineage of Oh Wicked Wanda!, the book's more potentially contentious elements are probably closer to the spirit of Rabelais and are, in any case, details rather than the driving force of the enterprise.

Just as aspects of quantum mechanics appear to crumble under the weight of their own description, I feel Ed Pinsent's strips work best as read because attempts to describe what he does will usually unwittingly hammer the narrative into a shape which is mostly in the eye of the beholder, so I'll keep this minimal: Henrietta is a tempestuously libidinous redheaded woman who visits a certain bull in his dreams and who additionally spends time as the captain of a pirate ship. At one point she has sex with an octopus, which is conducted with more charm than anything else you're likely to find at the end of such an ill-advised Google search.

Pinsent's art inhabits what may as well be its own cosmology, with tales told therein relating to mainstream equivalents at much the same kind of tangent as did the Residents to the rest of the music industry in the seventies. It isn't weird as such, or at least no more weird than the art of Edwards Ardizzone, Gorey, or Campbell with whom it shares a similarly whispy quality, as though its reality could be carried away on a sharp gust of wind. It could probably be dismissed as streaky marks on paper but for this ephemeral or hallucinatory quality pinned down with surprising gravity by the strength of its own conviction, by its consistency of vision and belief in whatever it happens to be saying; and the effect is even more powerful in full colour, as is Henrietta.

So we have a sort of myth, or something mythic which follows its own logic with an almost classical sensibility informing its prevalently nautical atmosphere. It's funny and often moving without anything reading too much like a performance, and startles with occasional asides which seem like they should break the spell but never do. I felt as though I could hear waves and the sound of someone honking away on an accordion as I read, and was left with a sensation of having learned something touching and profound which probably wouldn't translate into words, hence the pictures; and crucially, I would suggest that this tale couldn't be told in any other way than what you have here, for adaptation would only result in a different animal altogether, which - if you ask me - is the measure of true art.

Thar she blows!

Judge Dredd: the Complete Case Files 05 (1982)

I was a 2000AD regular up until 1980, by which point I'd turned fifteen and had to make a choice between Sounds music paper or the comic book which was then bringing me regular instalments of Meltdown Man and The Mean Arena, both of which were garbage. It wasn't a difficult choice. I hopped back on board a couple of years later. My friend Nick gave me his collection*, of which the earliest issue was, by sheer coincidence, the first prog I hadn't bothered to buy. His collection was patchy with substantial gaps, meaning I could at least tell that it hadn't suddenly returned to greatness immediately after I'd jumped ship, although it seemed to be back on track a couple of years down the line; and one of the strips which had served to remind me why I'd bought the thing in the first place was, of course, Judge Dredd.

Back in the Mean Arena days, Dredd had succumbed to whatever was happening to the other strips - one single episode after another reading very much as though they'd run out of things for him to do; but now that I was back on board I discovered the twenty-five part Apocalypse War, albeit with gaps which I was able to fill when Quality's colourised US reprints started to turn up in the local newsagent.

Thirty or so years later and I don't have any of those old progs. They all went back to the comic shop, one way or another, driven by a need for space and a fear of spending my entire life collecting a weekly comic which would still occasionally reward my dedication with crap such as The Secret Diary of Adrian Cockroach Age 13½ Months, or Really and Truly, or whatever else had presumably made the cut thanks to a deadline; and yet…

It was either this or back issues of the Quality reprint, and this big fat assemblage of no less than sixty-two consecutive issues seemed like better value. Being a chronological assemblage rather than a greatest hits this means about half of those strips included serve to remind me why I stopped buying, and so we have The Mega-Rackets which ran for what felt like five-hundred or more issues - actually just fifteen - a series of one or two part stories exploring the theme of what organised crime would look like in Mega City One, and mostly it looked like Chicago in the 1940s but with futuristic fins glued to the mobsters' trilbys, and men named Fingers or Lefty zipping through the skies in flying cars bearing a wearying resemblance to the Ford Model 18. To be fair, this sort of tale is fine in weekly instalments, but try reading a whole bunch in one sitting and—Jesus fucking Christ!

Of course, I considered the possibility that it might be just me, and that the somewhat murky reproduction of the original pages wasn't helping; but the contrast is astonishing once you get to the five-part Judge Death Lives wherein the lad responds to the invitation to gaze into the face of fear with:

It's probably one of the greatest single panels of almost any comic book ever, and as such represents the Judge Dredd strip at its very best so far as I'm concerned.

Judge Dredd - which, for what it may be worth, arguably represents the very essence of 2000AD comic in its purest form - is anything but straightforward, regardless of roots sunk deep into the British comics tradition of square-jawed just deserts. He's a cop who dishes out prison sentences for littering, who judges then carries out routine executions. He's been called a fascist, which implies an agenda bearing no relation to the character unless you consider all forms of authority inherently fascist. He's authoritarian for sure, but more like a law of nature and he is as such impartial - pitiless on one hand but above personal bias on the other. He's objectively harsh but fair - extremely unfair in humanist terms, but then life is unfair, as is most of the universe. This is why the strip has lasted four decades and has thus far resisted attempts to adapt it for the big screen, although at least the Stallone version kept some of the humour.

The humour is the element of contrast which sharply defines Dredd as anything but a superhero, and certainly not just Batman with a gun and a crash helmet. It's the traditional gallows humour of the British working class - if anyone remembers them - the sarcasm of English punk rock which informed those very first strips even when aimed at denizens of the junior school. I'd say the strip is Swiftian, even Rabelaisian - which it is - and is therefore probably not to be taken literally, except that feels like a bit of a slippery slope at the end of which I'd take to describing things as iconic, a sure sign of having disappeared up my own arse. Dredd operates more or less entirely on its own terms, which is probably why it feels so flat when the stories are reduced to answering the question, who do we have him fighting this week?

Anyway, I bought this for the Apocalypse War, which I recall as being amazing, and it turns out that I remember correctly. Carlos Ezquerra - the greatest Dredd artist in my view - illustrates the whole thing, maintaining the consistency with heavy, brutal lines which seem carved as much as drawn, and the story is so relentlessly bleak as to approach exhausting - despite the ever-present element of sarcasm and the peculiar intrusion of comic relief from Walter the Wobot and Maria, Dredd's landlady - who seems to follow in the tradition of the women to whom Tony Hancock once paid rent. How this single tale can pull in so many conflicting directions and still work is a marvel, never mind that it works so well - like standing in the blast of a jet engine for twenty-five issues.

*: They had been ruined when his house flooded and he was going to chuck them out. I took them home and dried them out two pages at a time on an oil-filled radiator.

Side Effects

Woody Allen Side Effects (1980)
In reference to the usual objections, please refer back to this review. Otherwise, I'm afraid this is still mostly very funny, and funny beyond simply cracking jokes or overloading the reader with non-sequiteurs.

Our project is coming to a close—unsuccessfully, I am sorry to say. Funding has been cut off, our foundation board having decided that the remaining money might be more profitably spent on some joy-buzzers.

The Kugelmass Episode, for one example, allows the aforementioned Kugelmass to enter literary classics and get busy with the great female characters of fiction, and so feels oddly like a Borges homage albeit with sex and wisecracks. Being the work of Woody Allen - even without referring to more recent transgressions - we begin with an understanding of this collection being maybe one step up from Mad magazine or whatever, because humour is generally regarded as a low form unless dignified by age, as is the case with Rabelais, Voltaire and those guys; but Allen's satire was often both literate and pointed, and would surely deserve to be held in higher regard had he not allegedly pissed on his chips.

That said, of the three collections I've read, this has been the first to hint at anything we probably would have rather not discovered, specifically in Retribution which strikes a peculiar note in describing a man who seduces his girlfriend's mother and, in doing so, becomes suddenly irresistible to the former girlfriend who tries to rekindle the original relationship:

 

'Marrying Mom has made you my father.' She kissed me again and just before returning to the festivities said, 'Don't worry, Dad, there'll be plenty of opportunities.'

Which gets a great big prudish ewww from me, not least because the story's near twenty pages seem curiously lacking in the usual zingers; so it's quite difficult to separate the art from the artist with that one. Of course, it should be remembered that Allen was never convicted of anything, and no evidence of abuse was found; but it's hard to avoid being reminded of the whole shitshow when reading Retribution in particular.

Never mind.

Antic Hay

Aldous Huxley Antic Hay (1923)
In The Plumed Serpent of 1926, Huxley's pal, D.H. Lawrence wrote:

She thought again of going back to Europe. But what was the good? She knew it! It was all politics or jazzing or slushy mysticism or sordid spiritualism. And the magic had gone. The younger generation, so smart and interesting, but so without any mystery, any background. The younger the generation, the flatter and more jazzy, more and more devoid of wonder.

If it's about anything, Antic Hay specifically concerns itself with the jazzing of this younger generation, although Huxley spends less time sighing and rolling his eyes than Lawrence. Although billed as the exploits of the supposedly Rabelaisian Theodore Gumbril, Antic Hay flits amongst various members of his circle as they strive for purpose in the wake of the first world war, the death of God, and the advent of modernism. In many senses it's almost a rewrite of Huxley's first novel, although Crome Yellow is arguably funnier and more scathing for its somewhat tighter focus. Antic Hay may possibly represent attempts at a new form of narrative, something presenting themes as part of an overall texture rather than anything you could call a story - Oscar Wilde doing a Burroughs but without the actual cut-up technique, I suppose you might say. For the sake of argument, we may as well assume Huxley had been thinking about Dadaism, this being the cumulative effect of all the interpersonal relationships arbitrarily mixed in with the likes of Gumbril's inflatable trousers and the peculiar twenty-second chapter.

As with Crome Yellow, certain elements foreshadow Brave New World - notably the eugenically directed vivisection, which is thankfully lacking in detail - but it only really scrapes by as a novel in its own right, at least compared to Huxley's hits. Gumbril and pals are building a new world, having done away with the old one, but find themselves floundering without the foundation of tradition upon which to build; which is mostly entertaining, but as I say, covers familiar ground to lesser effect.

American Victim

Meg McCarville American Victim (2023)
There was a bit of a commotion on social media when Amphetamine Sulphate published Four Circles, McCarville's previous volcanic eruption of righteous bile. I couldn't tell what had happened and felt disinclined to ask nosey questions, but the fallout seemed to be that Amphetamine Sulphate weren't going to be publishing this one which, as it so happens, provides substantial insight into the shit show which ultimately led to its publication by someone else, namely Ric Royer's Model City Books.

By her own testimony, Meg McCarville is a woman with issues who tends to find herself in unfortunate situations. The unfortunate situation was, in this instance, finding herself stalked by a nutcase who, amongst other things, dibbed her in to the FBI for alleged acts of terrorism which were obviously nothing of the sort, and all because he cared. He's identified in American Victim as Max Cady on Wheels, which seems fair, and whilst many of us will have met people like him, this goes a lot further than some disgruntled twat making a few prank phone calls. In fact it's terrifying, and even more terrifying than the aggressive-aggressive acts of sabotage dispensed by our boy is the fact that he gets to keep on keeping on, because while American law enforcement agencies excel in certain areas, not least of these being the dispensation of traffic citations, they're mostly fucking useless unless you're being menaced by an African-American with one of those candy bars that looks a bit like a firearm. If law enforcement did the job it purports to do, American Victim would have been a five-page pamphlet.

As ever, it's both a fucking tough read, and yet one which gets its hooks into you almost immediately because even at her absolute lowest ebb, Meg McCarville is very, very funny, wielding the kind of sarcasm which could have an eye out. It's Bukowksi with tits jammed on eleven, Lydia Lunch admitting she digs Kiss and rocking out, all directed by John Waters at his furthest remove from polite society and the closest I've come to writing with the face-punching intensity of an MOP album; and these aren't even necessarily its greatest strength, that being the words of truth spoken in dark, dark jest - truths that leave bruises.

I've gone through phases of surrounding myself with junkies and nobodies and ex-cons, but never in my life had I felt like I really fell in with the worst crowd until I found myself surrounded by phony progressive anarcho-feminist cunts and dopey woke boys (who really just pounded their politics so they can pound some psycho feminist pussy) who got into more of an uproar about someone getting misgendered even though they changed their pronoun every other week.

Honestly, this is one of the most powerful extended rants I've read in a long time, and anyone whose gag response has started kicking off would do well to remember that Voltaire, Swift, Rabelais and all those other sarcastic fuckers of yesteryear likewise delivered their testimonials with lashings of piss, vinegar, and castor oil. If you really want to understand the modern world, it's all here.

The Ubu Plays

Alfred Jarry The Ubu Plays (1900)
1968 translation by Cyril Connolly & Simon Watson Taylor
It's hard to know where to start with Ubu. I started while taking drama 'O' level when I was seventeen or possibly eighteen, and it made a huge impression on me. It seems fair to say that Ubu made a huge impression on twentieth century culture in general, and if anything can be credited as the singularity from which modernism was born, it's probably Ubu. It's difficult to imagine there having been Dada or Surrealism without that formative kick up the arse provided when Firmin Gémier greeted his theatrical first night audience with a hearty cry of Merdre! back in 1896. Ubu Roi was hardly the first instance of artists thumbing noses at punters, but not even Rabelais did it with quite such riotous enthusiasm, using outrage almost as an end in itself.

Ubu Roi began life as a puppet theatre by which Jarry and his juvenile pals took the Victorian piss out of a hated school teacher, so any parallels one may happen to notice with Viz comic and the like are entirely pertinent. Jarry himself matured whilst ensuring that the scatological purity of his characters remained inviolate even as they moved from puppet theatre to the actual stage, by which point Ubu's focus had expanded to take the piss out of the entire Belle Époque and everything it held dear, not least its ruthless optimism. Pere Ubu achieves this by conquering Poland in the first play, then debasing himself in a peculiarly enthusiastic quest to become the lowliest of slaves in Ubu Enchaîné, the final tale. None of it really makes any fucking sense whatsoever, and that's sort of the point. I may have got more out of these plays had I been armed with a more thorough understanding of European history of the time - and I assume the treatment dished out to the Polish is supposed to be insulting for a reason - but the jokes still work so maybe it doesn't matter.

That being said, this book assembles the three Ubu plays, and although they're mostly entertaining, they work better on stage, as the author intended.

Seaton Point

Robert Dellar, Ted Curtis, Rob Colson etc.
Seaton Point (1998)
This is a collaborative novel cooked up between seven different authors, each presumably contributing a passage here, a passage there, editing each other's work and so on. The process of its creation hasn't exactly made for a smooth narrative, but then that's the whole point, relating more to oral traditions of storytelling because it is forgotten that the modern novel of single authorship came into being only in the modern era, as we are told in the introduction.

I thought it might be stranger than it was to read this now. Robert Dellar, who instigated this enterprise, was a good friend who recently passed on at the age of fifty-two, someone I've known for decades. It was odd to realise that I'd never read this book while he was alive, and when we last spoke and the subject came up he was surprised that he'd never got around to slipping me a copy. I think it was simply that my attention had been elsewhere when the thing saw print. I knew of it mainly through the involvement of Rob Colson, with whom I travelled to Mexico in 2005, and I've known all but two of the other writers in a social context at various points of our respective lives. So I suppose there has always been the worry that I might hate the thing for whatever reason.

Roughly speaking, Seaton Point captures the psychological landscape in which a few of us were living for much of the eighties, nineties, and beyond. I was never quite part of a gang, but a lot of my friends seemed to be people who had fallen into the orbit of the Brougham Road squatting community in Hackney, London - loosely coalesced around bands such as the Apostles and the Assassins of Hope and numerous fanzines. They were, I suppose, my Andy Warhol's Factory crowd, my beat poets, my Bromley contingent - but hopefully without too many of the wankier associations summoned by any of those references - so, even in 2017 with me living on a different side of the planet, these are probably my people in so much as I ever had people. Andy of the Apostles would have called us the dispossessed, which seems as good a term as any; and so Seaton Point is inhabited by those left behind, the horrible fuckers who couldn't fit in if they tried, those rejected as lacking redeeming or interesting artistic qualities even by those making arts council funded punk documentaries, the working class as we were known in less aspirational times, the nutters, the weirdos, the alkies, the transexual vampires...

The narrative lurches in and out of reality, much in the same way as reality itself tends to do if you're paying attention, and so we have drugs, sex, violence, toilet humour, and psychogeography drafted in to tell of an ancient demon imprisoned in the basement of a tower block, a man trapped in an elevator in the same surviving on mystic yoghurt dispensed from a spigot, and their bid for freedom. With seven authors at the wheel, there are a lot of characters flying around, not all of them entirely likeable and it's easy to get lost, but I'm not sure it matters whether or not one is able to keep track of every last name, because the point still works despite the confusion.

Blokey sat in flat 67, his earplugs partly protecting him from the onslaught of industrial electronic bollocks about fascist barbarian armies rolling across the icy wastes of Northern Europe. As one million decibels of tripe by Coil vomited mercilessly from the speakers, the dice man stroked the sawn-off shotgun lying across his lap as if it were a furry animal.

That's my favourite paragraph, and I suspect it came from Dellar given his generally poor regard of industrial electronic bollocks. I've  read a few things by Ted Curtis, notably the exceptional Darkening Light, as well as Rob Colson's brilliant - at least from what I can remember - Descent of a Man, which he really needs to get into print one of these days; so I recognise occasional elements which remind me of specific contributors, but the focus remains, as ever, on the story which may be taken as an explanation as to why everything is shit, if you like, or if you don't like, then there are plenty of chuckles, albeit often unusually dark chuckles. My first thought was that this is Rachel Redhead rewriting Lawrence Miles' This Town Will Never Let Us Go as a sequel to Trainspotting, which as a recommendation should probably be taken all three ways, assuming you can appreciate that as a recommendation. Martin Amis is invoked in the introduction, although not in particularly glowing terms. I haven't actually read any Martin Amis, but I've read plenty of Will Self and I'm told it's the same thing; so if you like, this is Will Self with less public school and more diarrhoea blah blah Rabelais blah blah Hogarth blah blah Reader's Wives - I'm sure it can't be too hard to work out what I'm saying here; and it has the greatest closing sentence of any novel I've ever read, which I won't give away for obvious reasons.

Seaton Point is both horrible and brilliant, and arguably a record of an era of human experience presently getting airbrushed from history as the nostalgia industry grows and grows, replacing more and more of what actually happened with Stewart Maconie chortling away over how they changed the name of Opal Fruits to Starburst. In this sense it's probably also an important book, but you wouldn't want to say it to its face.

Trips to the Moon

Lucian of Samosata Trips to the Moon (160AD)
Just to get the moaning over and done with, I think this is the fourth book I've bought from Ron Miller's Black Cat Press and the high quota of typos is beginning to annoy. Whilst it's fucking great to be able to get one's mitts on the kind of obscure and peculiar historical material in which Black Cat specialise, you would think someone might have bothered proof reading the things before loading the files up to Lulu. Hugo Gernsback's Ralph 124C41+ had presumably been prod-uced by sub-mitting an old copy of the book through some sort of op-tical character recognition soft-ware resulting in weirdly hyphenated words occurring mid-sentence all the way through, former page numbers popping up mid-paragraph, and so on. In addition to this, I gather that whatever files were submitted to Lulu were almost certainly some Microsoft abomination - as opposed to a proper PDF - which can always be relied upon to change its mind about formatting at last minute when submitted to print on demand publishers, meaning

shitloads of

wonky paragraph breaks. It's not a massive problem, and doesn't really have to detract from the text or the pleasure of reading it, but it's kind of irritating, as is the fact of the footnotes to True History beginning at number seventeen and then even missing out a few of the associated explanations.

Lucian's True History, as reproduced herein, is reputedly the oldest surviving text which can be termed science-fiction by some definition, that definition being that it describes, amongst other things, a voyage to the moon made by a sailing boat full of philosophical types swept up in that general direction by the wind. Brian Aldiss discounts this as science-fiction due to the absence of anything pretending to be scientific even by second century terms, but Jesus - I'm not convinced it's really worth having the argument given the entirely unscientific science-fiction which has been written over the years, some of it by Brian Aldiss. I realise Frankenstein qualifies by virtue of medical details, but technology was never really the point of that story any more than it is of True History.

The point of True History is revealed in Lucian's Instructions for Writing History which is also handily reproduced herein.

In history, nothing fabulous can be agreeable; and flattery is disgusting to all readers, except the very dregs of the people; good judges look with the eyes of Argus on every part, reject everything that is false and adulterated, and will admit nothing but what is true, clear, and well expressed.

I get the impression that by this juncture Lucian had sat through one too many accounts of mighty warriors kebabing a hundred enemies with the single toss of a spear, and thinking something akin to fuck it, but in Greek or possibly Syrian, wrote True History thus inventing sarcasm. Absurdity is piled high, one ludicrous development after another, and so our lunar voyage is followed by excursions to an island made of cheese and inside a whale in which the ship finds itself trapped. It's comical, presumably intended to shame historians of the day into behaving themselves, and is a lot of fun even with my scant understanding of the philosophical giants out of whom Lucian seems to be taking the piss in the closing pages.

Also included is Lucian's Icaro-Menippus - a Dialogue in which Menippus takes to the air by the same means as Icarus, meets the Gods, and hears how they apparently regard most of the philosophers and theologians who follow them as a bunch of clowns. I'm not quite sure why Lucian specifically recruited the satirist who unwittingly lent his name to the genre of Mennipean satire for his tale, at least not beyond his quite obviously being a fan, but it places True History firmly in a tradition which led to Gargantua and Pantagruel, Gulliver's Travels, and others - in case that much wasn't obvious. In other words, it more or less does what science-fiction is supposed to do, even by the terms of Brian Aldiss; and it's a thumping good read, in case I haven't made that clear.

Le Roi en Jaune

Thomas de Castigne (translated by Simon Bucher-Jones)
Le Roi en Jaune (1893)
Once again I find myself somewhat in the position of Homer Simpson required to present a dissertation on Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment which, it should be noted, probably wouldn't be significantly more ham-fisted than my own fumbling analysis of Crime and Punishment some months ago.

Le Roi en Jaune or The King in Yellow is a lost play, one which has been alluded to in the works of a number of writers, principally Robert W. Chambers, an author of weird or supernatural fiction with whom I am entirely unfamiliar. It's a lost play through the stigma of having become a forbidden play, one which has the reputation of driving its audience to utter despair or even madness, a promise which rarely ever seems to have much success at getting bums on seats in box office terms. That said, it should probably be remembered that whilst H.P. Lovecraft chalked up a fair old word count in discussion of that which must not be named, he dedicated at least some of that text to quite specifically naming that which must not be named, presumably so as to avoid confusion leading to anyone naming that which must not be named by accident through not knowing its name on account of it being that which must not be named. Jocularity aside, Lovecraft is of some minor relevance here given that he winks at Le Roi en Jaune in a couple of his own stories, it being the source from which Hastur is derived, later reinvented as an unspeakable elder God by Lovecraft and then Derleth to varying degrees.

Another more familiar name would be that of the servant Ubu, popularised by Alfred Jarry and remembered as having been the Sex Pistols of his day in terms of faintly scatological wit in the tradition of Rabelais, some sexual swearwords, having the plugs figuratively pulled halfway through the performance, and the play's brief spark of admittedly lurid genius becoming a formative influence on all which followed - meaning here Futurism, Dadaism and much twentieth century art rather than Sham 69 and the Exploited. The name Ubu is popularly believed to have derived from Henri Morin, Jarry's school classmate who had written a satire called Les Polonais in which Monsieur Hébert, his unfortunate physics teacher, was lampooned as Père Ebé; but Ubu is identified here as a diminutive of ubiquité or ubiquity, a representative of the common man:

I am a man. And as such are found,
Everywhere alike, I needs must be common.

These words are met by the Y'htill character asking Ubu if he has not perhaps been known as Falstaff under other circumstances; and it is possibly significant that Jarry's Ubu - essentially closer in spirit to Shakespeare's comically boorish knight - first appears in print in 1893 within fragments of an early version of Ubu Cocu reproduced in a literary review - not to horrify theatre goers for another three years, by which point his credentials as a modern Falstaff seemed more firmly established.

Anyway, the significant detail here is not so much the possible influence on Jarry as the play being aware of its being a play - as suggested by the reference to a character from another play - and of characters achieving an insight into the future given that the events of Le Roi en Jaune are purported to occur in ancient times, at least prior to the Biblical flood.

The narrative describes the coming of seven Princes of which one will be wed to the Princess Cassilda, just as soon as she's made up her mind which of their number is the least disappointing. Unfortunately everything goes tits up, the Princes all perish before the meeting can transpire, and reality itself seems to break down. Cassilda becomes her mother, the Queen, and the Queen is now to be wed to one of the Princes, and time appears to flow in reverse, not only as mother becomes daughter but as the child Thomas is directed to walk backwards across the stage, all seemingly returning to the notional point of Original Sin so that it may be undone - although there's a fair chance I'm getting my wires crossed here, Cassilda's line reputedly having descended from Abell and Aclima, the line which in Hebrew legend endures without the stigma of the murdering Cain. In addition to this, certain characters appear to revive from the dead, or else are experienced prior to death in scenes occurring later. The nature of the play was further exposed by the final scenes of the second act being staged in differing orders on different performances, regardless of the inevitable contradictions and loss of narrative cohesion. It sounds like a nightmare in production terms, but peculiarly I can see that it may have worked at least in so much as the written form isn't significantly weirder than, for example, the plays of Tristan Tzara which it doubtless inspired.

The confusion of the non-linear narrative not only emphasises the artificial nature of the performance, but also the artificial nature of the reality it describes, not least once the suggestion is made that the direction in which time flows doesn't seem to matter that much. One might take as a similar example Lovecraft's fabled Necronomicon, a book with no existence outside the lad's fiction, and the fiction he ultimately inspired, and yet which has come to take on such a profoundly convincing life of its own that the detail of its origin and historical legitimacy has been reduced to a vestigial irrelevance. So too is Le Roi en Jaune a play which generates its own existence in so much as it seems to reverse the traditional primacy of words and that which they describe, relegating reality to a creation of its own description; so no wonder it freaked everyone out back in 1893.

This is a slightly bewildering work, although partially because I'm somewhat out of my depth with this kind of thing, but it greatly rewards all effort put in. I've now read the thing twice, and it becomes more and more engrossingly peculiar each time. Simon Bucher-Jones has done a tremendous job of translation and annotation, and in case anyone cares, I can see how this may have fed into The Brakespeare Voyage, even to the point that it seems to be where Captain No-one came from.

Buy it here.

Micronauts

Steve Lyons Micronauts (2002)
I find it kind of depressing that for all the hypothetically good work I've undertaken in the expansion of my own literary horizons, reading Rabelais and Cervantes and Plato and all of those guys as signified by my intermittent sneering along the lines of this or that novel being significantly less sophisticated than the writings of Schopenhauer - despite that I've never actually read the writings of Schopenhauer; for all of this, all it apparently takes is for someone to write a novel about some toy I had as a kid, and I may as well be drooling in line for One Direction tickets.

As a rule I try to avoid tie-in novels on the grounds that they're probably mostly crap, and no-one has yet given me sufficient reason to care about whether or not this is an unnecessarily dismissive position to take. I've done my time. I read four-million Doctor Who novels, and there were a handful I might conceivably read again at some point; but on principal I would prefer to avoid any book that wishes it were a television show, a film, or - God forbid - a fucking console game. Whilst this may seem an unforgivably high-handed attitude, considering all the millions upon millions of books out there which you've never read, and may never find time to read even if you live to be two-hundred, why settle for something which secretly wishes it had been made in another medium? If you don't really enjoy books as books - I dunno - why bother reading at all? Just watch the fucking telly instead. Do what you like.

Nevertheless, here I am because I loved the absolute shit out of my Micronaut action figures and related toys when I was a kid, and because this was written by Steve Lyons. I seems to recall Steve Lyons having chugged out a couple of the better Doctor Who novels - at least amongst the aforementioned few I would consider re-reading at some point - as well as a couple of reasonably side-splitting volumes of something called The Completely Useless Encyclopedia. Sadly, lifting up the internet and having a look inside I notice Lyons has also written Sapphire & Steel audio dramas and novels based on something called Warhammer 40,000, which I assume to be one of those children's computer games, but never mind. Given that my previous review was of a Superman comic, I'm probably in no position to start getting sniffy on the grounds of Micronauts being a lesser work than Schopenhauer's Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung.

Mego's Micronaut toys were originally fictionalised as stars of their own Marvel comic by Bill Mantlo and Michael Golden, and spectacularly so until Michael Golden stopped turning up and the title went somewhat down the toilet. Then someone revived the comic in 2002, or maybe before, probably with everyone drawn looking as though they need to take a shit and with at least one major character raped in him batty by his own dad in issue two, but I never saw the revived version; and then there was this, the first of a trilogy of novels.

The story carries some resemblance to that which appeared in the original Marvel run - specifically some teenager with a scientist father discovering a rift in the fabric of reality through which tiny Micronauts spew forth, followed by generic adventures of the kind involving rebel leaders and evil emperors. This version of the tale has the diminutive explorers from another universe arriving in the town of Angel's Gift, which capitalises on their tourist potential by featuring them as both carnival attraction and inspiration for a series of action figures. This goes some way towards smoothing over the discomfort of anyone who, like myself, feels a little self-conscious as a fully grown man reading a novel about toys I played with as a kid; some way, but maybe not all of the way.

'How? There'll be guards on the door—both sides!'

'The same way I got in here. The obvious way.' I look at him blankly, until he grins and says: 'Don't you have any story books on your world? In the fiction of my galaxy, buildings like this always, always have handy air-conditioning ducts!'

Oh yes. Here we are running down a corridor as though we were on some shit TV show whilst drawing attention to the fact of our running down a corridor. Ha ha.

You see, comedic asides pointing out clichés work better when the narrative doesn't keep on committing said clichés over and over, because this reduces the asides to an excuse for not bothering to tell a proper story.

The Harriers catch me, and I look up into Nova's face as she moves in, her energy wings flaring behind her. I haven't seen her up close before, and I'm surprised at how young she looks. Young and beautiful. Her eyebrows arc gracefully beneath her sprouting purple hair, and her slender nose has an attractive curve—but her eyes are cold, and a cruel sneer twists her pursed lips.

As opposed to an amiable or kindly sneer, I suppose, and young and beautiful is not in itself sufficient for a fucking sentence. I really wish people would stop doing that, splattering around fullstops regardless of syntax in the belief that the resulting pause - which would work just as well with an altogether more grammatical comma - gives whatever is said the gravity of an Orson Welles voice-over, when it actually furthers the impression that the author would rather be writing something other than a novel.

Ice cream fandango. Typewriter summer's day Charlie. Bob. Stegosaurus on heat. And Bob again.

Those aren't fucking sentences either.

To be fair, aside from all of the above, Steve Lyons does a decent job, such as it is. The story is told as a reasonably engaging first person present tense narrative, and there's plenty of evidence of Lyon's ability to hold a sentence together, and to write something which at least does more than simply help you to imagine what it would look like if it were on the telly. The problem is that Lyons' telling seems to be significantly superior to that which is told, which is roughly the usual story of a plucky teenager and tiny aliens running along corridors, and with the local mayor's greed drawing them all into a war which no-one can win, and no amount of references to it all feeling a bit like an episode of Quantum Leap can save the turd from toiletdom. This one really feels like a decent writer struggling to make good with a story he's been given by a committee.

Some of the background material is drawn from earlier comic book incarnations, which is in some way unfortunate because it means I had no idea who Azura Nova is supposed to be, and because it doesn't actually compare that well to the Mantlo and Golden version in which the bulk of clichés seemed better concealed and which was simply a more interesting tale, focussing as it did on the Micronauts and their universe rather than a generically plucky teenager who wishes his dad was less of a dick.

Yeah - I know, the Micronauts novel was probably aimed at teenagers or at least at the emotionally and developmentally teenage, but I still say it could have aimed just a little higher; and being as it didn't, it hasn't inspired me with any interest in reading the second or third part of the trilogy.

The Pilgrim's Progress

John Bunyan The Pilgrim's Progress (1684)
This book is among the greatest literary masterpieces in the world, writes Dr. Ronald Johnson of something called Accelerated Christian Education. Few books so captivate attention while provoking insight into Christian character.

Bunyan was an English puritan living in an age when it was pretty tough being an English puritan, and thus was he locked up for continuing to preach his beliefs. Whilst in the stripy hole he wrote principally so as to keep himself from going batty, to keep himself on the straight and narrow:

...but yet I do not think
To show all the world my pen and ink
In such a mode; I only thought to make
I knew not what: nor did I undertake
Thereby to please my neighbour: no, not I;
I did it my own self to gratify.

Neither did I but vacant seasons spend
In this my scribble; nor did I intend
But to divert myself in doing this
From worser thoughts which make me do amiss.

Amongst those works written during his years of porridge we find The Pilgrim's Progress, describing the allegorical journey of a Christian man travelling to the kingdom of Heaven with emphasis on that which might impede his getting there. The tone of The Pilgrim's Progress is determined by Bunyan's desire for absolute clarity of meaning. Whilst the work may well have been written entirely for his own pleasure, he left no room for misinterpretation by any third party:

Wouldst thou read riddles and their explanation?
Or else be drowned in thy contemplation?
Dost thou love picking meat? Or wouldst thou see
A man i' the clouds and hear him speak to thee?

Whilst this speaks well of Bunyan's desire to communicate, I'm really not sure what it does for the book as a supposed literary masterpiece, an honour which I would argue applies more to its cultural impact than to the actual content. The principal character of part one is named Christian, and those he encounters on his journey tend to be identified with a similarly heavy hand, and so much so that it's kind of on a level with a seventeenth century Dora the Explorer as our boy meets Boastful and Selfish and turns to the imaginary camera to ask, I wonder what sort of fellows these will be? Perhaps they shall be fine and generous companions who speak with much modesty, before blinking a couple of times and then repeating the sentence.

It's not that the story is in any sense badly written, but with every possible outcome of each interaction a foregone conclusion based upon the relative and well-advertised piety of those involved, you kind of know what's going to happen, which kind of sucks some of the fun out of reading. I appreciate that it was 1684, but I'm not a complete stranger to literature of that general period, and Cervantes, Aphra Behn, Rabelais, and Cyrano de Bergerac all managed considerably better, or at least gave their readers something to chew over with a bit more substance than that of a rusk. I know Gulliver's Travels came a couple of decades later, but the contrast between the two makes this one read as though written by an idiot.

Clearly it wasn't written by an idiot given that simplicity was Bunyan's stated intention, and it remains a fairly engaging read for something in which everything is spelled out in ten foot high block capitals. As for the insight into Christian character promised by the nice man from Accelerated Christian Education, the insight is mostly on the level of how a Christian man likes God, enjoys praying and being honest, but he certainly does not appreciate the devil, temptation, or telling lies.

'Do you like the devil?,' we might ask him.

'No sir, I do not!' he would probably reply in strident tones.

Who would have fucking thunk it, eh?

Then again, Accelerated Christian Education is an organisation of biblically literalist nutcases responsible for schoolbooks claiming that the Loch Ness monster can be explained by Noah having a few baby dinosaurs on the ark. It makes perfect sense that Bunyan's masterpiece should hold such appeal for fundamentalist types with their profound distrust of grey areas, complex arguments and facts.

Accordingly, our Christian leaves a wife and four children in order to seek God, and yet nowhere is it suggested that this abandonment of his family could signify any degree of negligence, vanity, or self-interest, because he's doing it for the right reasons.

'Indeed, Cain hated his brother, because his own works were evil, and his brother's righteous; and if thy wife and children have been offended with thee for this, they thereby show themselves to be implacable to good, and thou hast delivered thy soul from their blood.'

Well, that's all sorted then. As is typical of the fundamentalist, good deeds don't count for shit unless you're a fully paid-up club member and subscriber to the right periodicals. The nicest guy in the world is still going to hell if he fails to abase himself before the proper authorities for no reason given other than that it's all a joyous mystery and that this is simply the right way; and it's true because it's true, as Christian points out to the cunningly named Ignorance:

But thou camest not in at the Wicket-gate that is at the head of this way; thou camest in hither through that same crooked lane, and therefore I fear, however thou mayest think of thyself, when the reckoning day shall come, thou wilt have laid to thy charge that thou art a thief and a robber, instead of getting admittance into the city.

Christian arrives in God's city at the end of the first book - the allegory specifically being that his pilgrimage represents acceptance of Christ and all that good stuff. Christian's abandoned and presumably less righteous wife and four children get to redeem themselves in book two, which initially kicks off as a repeat of book one as they come to their senses and decide to follow in Christian's shoes. On the way they are joined by characters with names such as Mercy and Great-Heart, then are eventually relegated to non-speaking roles in their own tale as their manly companions and protectors stand around pontificating upon biblical lore and how it is easier for camels to pass through the eyes of needles. I suppose a more active role in the exchange of opinions might have interfered with said wife's admirable womanly meekness or something. I wouldn't say that failing the Bechdel test or unnecessary sneering at Catholics - as occurs in a couple of instances - determines a piece of fiction as necessarily worthless, but forgetting to include a fucking story really doesn't help.

John Bunyan's great talent as a writer can be found in the fact that he actually made a fairly engaging read of this tale for all its flaws, its repetitive and sanctimonious observations, and its seemingly regarding the reader as a simpleton. The Pilgrim's Progress is an historically important book, just not a very good one.

The Rover and other plays

Aphra Behn The Rover and other plays (1688)
I should probably admit to never having heard of Aphra Behn prior to her featuring in Daniel O'Mahony's superb Newtons Sleep, and even then I didn't initially realise she was an actual historical character, and significant for being amongst the first women in English history to make a living from writing; and duly informed, given my interest in early science-fiction, this collection proved too enticing to pass upon once I saw that it contained a play entitled The Emperor of the Moon.

However, I'm possibly at something of a disadvantage here. My American wife's knowledge of English history generally dwarfs my own, and whilst I saw plenty of Shakespeare performed around the time that I took drama O level, that was a while ago, and what pleasure I derived from the experience was not sufficient to instil me with a lifelong passion for theatre; so this is all a bit out of context for me, but let's give it a go anyway.

Aphra Behn is noted for Restoration comedies, comic and occasionally provocative plays written in the wake of and in response to Puritanism and its eighteen year ban on stage performance. Whilst those collected here - The Rover, The Feigned Courtesans, The Lucky Chance and The Emperor of the Moon - aren't exactly so wild or broad humoured as to be termed Rabelaisian, they certainly represent more measured steps in that direction. Behn's farce seems mainly concerned with seventeenth century sexual politics, and governmental politics to a lesser degree, or at least to a degree that escapes my detection through general ignorance of the territory beyond appreciating that her sympathies lay with the Catholic Stuarts. The plays here therefore tend to focus on the subversion of traditional female roles - high born ladies becoming wanton or masquerading as courtesans, low born prostitutes revealed as being of greater moral constitution than the moneyed rakes enlisting their services, and young women deftly eluding the unpromising marriages that have been arranged for them. Almost everyone in these four plays seems to be afflicted with the raging horn - in comparison with the more reserved romantic themes I'm fairly sure I recall as present in Shakespeare - and so the sexual thrust of the narrative - if you'll pardon the expression - is surprisingly strong. The relatively light, comic tone further provides horrific contrast in The Rover with its numerous scenes of attempted rape, and specifically rape as punishment prefaced by lurid and yet jovial promises of what is to be done to the unfortunate Florinda. These scenes seem deliberately repulsive, and Behn was quite probably making her point by means of shock given the societal conventions against which she was pitted, as described here by Anita Pacheco in Rape and the Female Subject in Aphra Behn's The Rover:

The history of Early Modern rape law reveals a similarly uncertain transition from patriarchal to liberal attitudes towards women. While medieval rape law perceived rape as a crime against male-owned property, the legal focus shifted in the late sixteenth century from property to person. It was the female victim rather than her male relations who was the injured party in a case of rape, and the crime itself came to be seen not as a property violation but as the ravishment of a woman against her will.

However, when it came to the law's practical application, it appears that patriarchal definitions of rape continued to hold sway. The evidence, admittedly, is immensely difficult to interpret; but Nazife Bashar, in her study of the records of the home counties Assizes from 1558 to 1700, detects a pattern of few prosecutions and a tendency to convict only when the victim was a young girl.

The farce is heavy in these plays as characters disguise themselves as others, cross dress, identities are mistaken, and absurdity is piled upon absurdity, reaching what seemed to me its most pronounced expression in The Emperor of the Moon which comes closest to the Rabelaisian, not least with its anecdotal account of the blacksmith who, through drinking the urine of the God Vulcan, is able to produce his own iron which he extracts by holding a powerful magnet to his bumhole. Contrary to what I expected - a stage equivalent to the early lunar fantasies of Cyrano de Bergerac and others - The Emperor of the Moon further dismantles the gender conventions of Behn's day whilst taking the piss out of the fantastic voyage genre. On this occasion the unfortunate marriage is derailed by the promise of a visit from Lunar royalty, which is then faked for the benefit of the astrology-addled patriarch. I suppose it's almost A Midsummer Night's Dream for the age of Kepler and Galileo, if you squint a bit.

I must admit I found some of this collection tough going in terms of keeping track of the farce as it built up, layer on layer, but I suspect this may be partially due to my being out of the habit of reading seventeenth century plays, and that these almost certainly work better on a stage than a page, as was intended. That said, the strength of writing nevertheless survives my efforts to read it, and even aside from her growing status as feminist icon, it is abundantly clear why Aphra Behn deserves to be remembered and performed.

Tristram Shandy

Laurence Sterne Tristram Shandy (1767)
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman—to give the collection its full title—is a satirical—possibly depending upon one's—and yes, I am indeed aware that the habit of author's referring to one when they really mean I is itself satirised in the novel, which is perhaps ironic—unlike Alanis Morissette's hit single of that name, which is in itself ironic, it might be argued—definition of satire—novel by Laurence Sterne, published—if this doesn't seem too conspicuous a theft from Wikipedia—in nine volumes, the first two—and God forbid that anyone should suggest he might have done well to leave it at that—appearing in 1759 with the rest following over the next seven years; which is why I've stalled for the first time since Iain M. Banks' bloody awful The Algebraist back in 2008.

To start at the beginning, Sterne draws inspiration from both Cervantes and Rabelais, both of whom I've read and enjoyed very much without any significant problems. Following the general spirit of his predecessors, Sterne takes similarly satirical pot-shots at the institutions of his day, albeit with a gentler tone than that of at least Rabelais. Tristram Shandy is on occasion cited as one of the earliest metafictional novels, a story populated with characters who are aware of being in a story, and it was really this promise which drew my interest; but having made it so far as the fifth of the full nine volumes I really don't see it; or at least I really don't see how Tristram Shandy does anything which hadn't already been done by any sotto voiced Shakespeare character turning to the audience to explain that the bloke who just arrived on stage is a bit of a tosser. More significantly the novel's theme, and that which dictates its structure, is that its narrator is unable to explain anything without nesting his account in layer upon layer of digression, reason being that this is how life is:

Upon looking into my mother's marriage settlement, in order to satisfy myself and reader in a point necessary to be cleared up, before we could proceed any farther in this history;—I had the good fortune to pop upon the very thing I wanted before I had read a day and a half straight forwards,—it might have taken me up a month;—which shews plainly, that when a man sits down to write a history,—tho' it be but the history of Jack Hickathrift or Tom Thumb, he knows no more than his heels what lets and confounded hindrances he is to meet with in his way,—or what a dance he may be led, by one excursion or another, before all is over. Could a historiographer drive on his history, as a muleteer drives on his mule,—straight forward;—for instance, from Rome all the way to Loretto, without ever once turning his head aside, either to the right hand or to the left,—he might venture to foretell you to an hour when he should get to his journey's end;—but the thing is, morally speaking, impossible: For, if he is a man of the least spirit, he will have fifty deviations from a straight line to make with this or that party as he goes along, which he can no ways avoid. He will have views and prospects to himself perpetually soliciting his eye, which he can no more help standing still to look at than he can fly.

Fair enough and all highly entertaining, as are numerous asides to the reader suggesting we go back a chapter and read something again, or just that we imagine how a certain passage might read had the author got around to writing it, promises of forthcoming chapters on the subject of chambermaids, buttonholes or whatever, none of which ever arrive.

The first four parts are reasonably entertaining with their rambling account of events leading up to the birth of the narrator in volume four, and of what he is to be named, how long it is hoped his nose will be and so on. The trouble is that all these digressions really wear you down after a couple of hundred pages, particularly as there's a fair amount which would, I suspect, make a lot more sense to someone who had benefited from a slightly better education than I received, or at least a more thorough grounding in the classics - mine comprising about three books. I made it some of the way into volume five, then skipped ahead, and all I could see was another two-hundred pages—of paragraphs speckled—with these fucking—dashes, five—or—six to a—sentence, over—and over, and—I—knew I—just couldn't do—it. I skipped to the end, to Gerald Weales' afterword and found that even he considers the first four volumes to be the ones that matter. I decided that enough was enough. I conceded defeat.

I'd distinguish Tristram Shandy quite clearly from other novels I've abandoned. The Algebraist was just unbelievably dull, and Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land - the last hundred or so pages skimmed in about thirty minutes - was simply utter shite. Tristram Shandy is justifiably regarded as an important novel, and taken one paragraph at a time, it's erudite, wonderfully written, and very funny, but as a whole, it's five-hundred fucking pages of Ronnie Corbett telling one of those as my producer said to me jokes.

Twilight

Stephenie Meyer Twilight (2005)
A poorly plotted and so-badly-written-it-could-be-Dan-Brown abstinence porn version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer minus the jokes for self-harming teenage girls wherein a personality-free human doormat gushes over the discovery that vampires are not only real, but are also cute boys, so cute in fact as to resemble pouting tousle-haired members of boy bands...

Well, the half of the movie adaptation I managed to squirm through before I'd had enough seemed to confirm most of the above, so I approached the book with certain expectations; kind of difficult not to when the thing is fucking everywhere. Whilst Twilight the novel may not necessarily be the greatest story ever told, much to the general enghastment of my flabber, most of that which has been said of it appears to be bollocks, and I would say it is of sufficient quality as to cast its harshest critic in the role of miserable old fucker crucifying a romance primarily written for teenage girls on the grounds of it being a romance primarily written for teenage girls.

So, to address that which should probably be addressed. Twilight is first and foremost a romance. The entire point is gushing teenage obsession - something it conveys very well with a language which whilst economical compared to, for example, Voltaire, nevertheless tells its story with due flair. Harsh words have been written regarding the main character - Bella if you've been living on Mars these last few years - and her supposedly repetitive drooling over the statuesque Edward the vampire, and again most of it seems to miss a whole lot of points. Bella serves as an everywoman into which the reader may project herself without any overly specific quirk that would obstruct identification - a love of pork pies and gangsta rap for example: she's neither blank slate nor doormat. Her taste for Jane Austen and Debussy remains understated, complementing the story whilst remaining otherwise neutral; and her supposed passivity seems something of a misreading, perhaps mistaking simple realism for the unfortunately fashionable conceit that if your female character hasn't shot someone by page ten then she may as well be Strawberry Shortcake; and for the record, Twilight does have a sense of humour, and to suggest otherwise seems to say more about the expectations of individual readers.

The vampires themselves, specifically Edward, are frequently described in overwrought terms providing constant reminders of their unearthly beauty. Whilst some critics seemingly found this repetitive, Meyer's creatures quite intentionally border on the alien, something absolutely inhuman and belonging to a world other than our own. To this end, it's also a nice touch that the creatures are written as some bizarre evolutionary quirk from which popular vampire legends are derived and to some extent misconstrued. Furthermore, even if you didn't get this, Bella's take on Edward's alleged perfection does a pretty good job of reminding us what it's like to be a seventeen year old girl and in love to the point of nausea; and as I've never actually been a seventeen year old girl, not even when I was seventeen, that's impressive.

Then there's the accusation of it being abstinence porn, which I'm not sure is really even worth addressing, and the poor plotting perceived by Stephen King, the man who brought us the terrible clown-spider-thing of It so ingeniously defeated when some kids pulled off its legs. These criticisms overlook Twilight being first and foremost a romance, something concerned primarily with emotion and love-that-cannot-be and which wouldn't greatly benefit from descriptions of a big stiff vampire hampton going in and out of a human fanny; and which doesn't require a labyrinthine Alan Moore Rubik's Cube of a plot in order to work.

Twilight is engaging, well written, and does what it sets out to do extremely well. The fact that it worked for me, a fat old geezer who also reads Will Self and Rabelais, must surely count for something. Having read plenty of truly horrendous Doctor Who novels in my time, I know bad writing when I see it, and Stephenie Meyer, at least with this one, succeeds.

The Histories of Gargantua and Pantagruel

François Rabelais The Histories of Gargantua and Pantagruel (1553)
A pedant might point out that the satirical writings of sixteenth century Franciscan monk François Rabelais might not really qualify as science-fiction in quite the same way as, for example, an episode of Blake's 7; but persons bringing Blake's 7 to the table have already betrayed themselves as simpletons and forfeited their stake in the argument so far as I'm concerned. Blake's 7 was bollocks even at the time, and Gargantua and Pantagruel features both giants and toilet humour, which is good enough for me. Some might say that's an unfair or even ludicrous comparison, but they're wrong.

No-one seems quite able to agree on the identity of the first modern novel, and the works of both Cervantes and Swift have been suggested as candidates presumably on the grounds of their having some sort of narrative progression. Whatever the case may be, it probably wasn't Gargantua and Pantagruel, the collected tales of a giant and his son belonging firmly in the tradition of early novels wherein people have long conversations about stuff. True, our heroes - mainly the giant Pantagruel and his human sidekick, Panurge - embark upon a series of adventures, visiting islands populated by the sort of beings which kept sixteenth century monks awake at night, notably a giant who eats windmills - but the ensuing japes and scrapes remain secondary to the discourse they inspire, representing a subtle difference of emphasis to the somewhat more dynamic Gulliver's Travels. This isn't a criticism. Simply an acknowledgement of this being an earlier work reflecting the efforts of an entirely different author.

Like Swift, Rabelais found endless entertainment in jokes about things plopping out of arses and landing upon human heads. Thus do we have the term Rabelaisian which may be applied equally well to both Gulliver's Travels and Viz comic, or at least Viz comic when it was funny. This was all something of a revelation for me, my previous experience of sixteenth century monks (which is more extensive than you might suspect) very much typecasting them as pious sorts with an abiding love for both Jesus and the Pope. Rabelais spends a lot of time chuckling over turds thrown as missiles, people drowning in lakes of piss, couples rubbing their bacon together, as he calls it, and taking the St. Michael out of God's alleged Earthly representative. He also spends a great deal of time discussing human concerns, society, morality and so on, and with an insight that seems refreshingly honest and open considering the writing of at least some of his contemporaries. I'm looking at you here, Fr. Sahagún.

Gargantua and Pantagruel is alternately both gripping and hilarious whilst at other times being somewhat repetitive and lacking in the energy which made Swift so engrossing, although in all fairness I  suspect this may be down to my being something of a thickie where the classics are concerned, so jokes about Pythagoras or Roman emperors tend to be wasted on me. As a satirical novel, it's pleasantly devoid of the misanthropy which infects the later books of Gulliver's Travels and is probably funnier in places, but despite all there may be in its favour, sadly it just hasn't aged as well.